It’s just over a week since president Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race transformed the American political landscape and energised the Democratic Party. During that time a smiling and engaged Kamala Harris, supported by her husband Doug Emhoff, has contrasted starkly with a disgruntled and narcissistic Donald Trump only rarely seen with his wife Melania. Harris’s campaign staff has kicked into action, effectively targeting Trump’s falsehoods and erratic behaviour. And the enthusiasm of Democratic politicians and voters — along with the party’s fundraising — has skyrocketed.
All the Republican’s post-convention euphoria has evaporated. Trump, once the news media’s main focus, is now the irrational old man of this campaign. His vice-presidential choice, J.D. Vance, has been shown up as callow and inexperienced. The Republican National Committee and Trump’s campaign staff are racing to rework their campaign strategy.
Recent polls reflect these changes. New figures this week from the New York Times/Siena College, the Wall Street Journal and CNN all show a tightening from the six-point lead Trump had after the debate with Biden, putting Trump’s current lead over Harris within the margin of error. A just-out poll from Bloomberg/ Morning Consult shows Harris has wiped out Trump’s lead in seven battleground states.
Importantly, Harris appears to be bringing back young voters and Black and Latino voters while holding the older and white voters who had stuck with Biden. As she shifts the electorate, Harris is creating more potential pathways to the White House and bringing states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina back into play.
The continuation of Harris’s honeymoon will depend in no small part on who she chooses as her vice-presidential running mate. This announcement is expected to come ahead of the Democrats’ virtual delegate vote for their presidential candidate, which could be as soon as tomorrow. Well-placed sources indicate that Harris plans to tour battleground states next week with her vice-presidential pick.
We can be certain that Harris will not repeat Trump’s mistake when he chose Vance. By seeking to cement the future of the MAGA movement, he ignored the fact that Vance, who was poorly vetted by Trump insiders, is in no way qualified to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
As a fit and energetic fifty-nine-year-old, Harris can afford to focus less on who could step into her presidential role and more on someone who has the experience to be an effective running-mate from day one while, of course, sharing her values. She also needs someone who will balance the ticket by offsetting her disadvantages (she has repeatedly been labelled a “San Francisco liberal” by Trump), building on her advantages (in tackling women’s reproductive freedom, for example) and maximising the Democratic vote in battleground states.
It’s implicitly accepted that the vice-presidential candidate should be — arguably must be — a White male. To quote Washington Post correspondents Ashley Parker and Dylan Wells, “the degree and speed with which the conventional wisdom took hold — that if she wants to win, Harris must choose a White man as her vice president — reflects, at its most cynical, that the nation will tolerate only so much deviation from its White male founding, even as the overall political world is more diverse than ever.”
The names now mentioned most often are Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear. Others once on the list — including Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, California governor Gavin Newsom and North Carolina governor Roy Cooper — have withdrawn their names. There is one other possibility: secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who may be the Democrats’ best communicator. Alas, as a gay man he faces that same lack of tolerance highlighted by Parker and Wells.
All the possible candidates, including Buttigieg and those who have withdrawn, have supported Harris in the days since she assumed the Democrats’ presidential mantle. They serve to highlight the party’s depth of talent — which in turn highlights how imperative it was for Biden to heed the call to make way for the next generation.
In recent days the media has focused on the sixty-year-old Walz, who served twelve years in Congress representing a Republican-leaning, mostly rural Minnesota district. According to one insider, he has “the Midwest grit, the Midwest sensibility and that appeal goes beyond the Midwest.” He speaks well to rural America while maintaining a progressive record in a state that trends Democratic.
Walz is skilled at pushing back hard against labels such as “big government liberal.” “There’s nothing extreme about feeding kids,” he told Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, defending his school lunch program. “There’s nothing extreme about women making their own healthcare decisions. There’s nothing extreme about saying don’t demonise these trans children. Just make a place for them. We’ll all be okay.”
In fact, plain speaking seems to be common to all the likely candidates. “You’ve got to show up everywhere, and you’ve got to speak to everyone, and you’ve got to speak in plain language and in practical terms,” Shapiro says. What has been described as the “lacerating force of Buttigieg’s relentlessly unflappable delivery” has been much in evidence as he has taken on Fox News and spoken out against Trump and Vance.
While less known for his oratory skills, Kelly — a former Navy pilot and astronaut — is seen as a strong contender on the strength of both his personal and his strategic appeal to Harris and her team. He could be vital in helping to deal with Harris’s weakness on border issues and immigration — a weakness countered somewhat by the slew of Arizona border-town mayors, some of them Republicans, who have endorsed Harris in recent days. An added asset, and a force in her own right, is Kelly’s wife, former representative Gabby Giffords, who has been a leader of the movement to end gun violence since she survived an assassination attempt in 2011.
Regardless of who she ultimately chooses, Harris has a whole team already working on her behalf. Zoom fundraisers by Black women, White women, Latinas, gay men and even White Dudes for Harris have triggered a dormant Democratic base, galvanised volunteers and raised millions of dollars. Evidence already suggests that the Democrats’ tying of Trump’s campaign to the unpopular Project 2025 agenda has angered Trump and forced the Heritage Foundation to consider ceasing or downgrading that work.
Election day is still more than ninety days away, and much can and will happen during that time. Debates between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates are no certainty. The vitriol we have seen to date from the Trump team will continue, although clever Democratic efforts to turn criticisms into positives (such as the attacks on Harris’s laugh) seem to be having an impact and the dismissal of Trump and Vance as “weird” is helping defang the Republicans’ campaign of fear. Inevitably, though, slip-ups, errors and maybe even disastrous moves will need to be managed by the Harris team.
Harris has a lot to do in a short time; she must build and consolidate a team, introduce herself to the country, listen to voters’ concerns and indicate how she will deal with them, push back on Trump’s MAGA agenda, and turn this election to the issues that matter to Americans and will preserve their freedoms and the nation’s democracy. First stop: her choice of running mate. •
