As of July 30 there are less than 100 days until Election Day. Buckle up your seatbelts.
Earlier than any presidential election in recent memory, Democratic and Republican primaries determined the parties’ presumptive presidential nominees. Large percentages of voters, however, responded to polls saying they did not want either candidate. There was even a term coined for such voters: double haters – people looking for an alternative or planning to stay home on Election Day with two old men carrying (with difficulty) various baggage. (The number of double haters has dropped significantly in the past ten days.)
The June 27th debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden brought things to a head. Trump did nothing to distinguish himself but Biden’s performance was a disaster. Calls began among Democrats asking Biden to leave the race and allow another candidate to carry the party banner.
A near tragedy was averted when an assassin’s bullet struck Trump’s ear.
The Republicans held their convention serving up the traditional offering of red meat. Senator J.D. Vance was selected for Vice President. Trump gave a meandering 93-minute speech that started out trying to be civil but soon reverted to a standard Trump speech full of his usual litany of grievances and lies.
Biden resisted leaving the race but then all of a sudden reversed course and dropped out, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the ticket. Within 48 hours Harris began her campaign; raised more than $200 million in just one week; and secured enough support from the former Biden-committed delegates to the Democratic Convention in August to become the new presumptive nominee. A high level of Democratic enthusiasm for her developed immediately.
And so a new campaign began with just one struggling old man in the race. At Harris’s first campaign appearance at a rally in Wisconsin she told the country that she would use her skills as a former district attorney and state attorney general to prosecute the case for defeating Donald Trump.
Trump responded with his usual name calling. Various Republican members of Congress began to talk about Harris in misogynist and racist tones. Speaker Mike Johnson’s office even had to advise his members to drop that line of attack!
Harris will soon name her vice-presidential running mate, who will likely be Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona; or Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; or Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. They all can improve the possibilities of carrying battleground states.
Trump’s choice of Vance was apparently made on the assumption that Vance can assist in carrying mid-west states. Vance’s only election was in 2022 when he was elected to the Senate from Ohio. He ran hundreds of thousands of votes behind other Republicans on the state ticket and had to be rescued from defeat by his big-money friends. Vance’s positions on some issues such as women’s rights and freedoms will require his party to do lots of explaining. Although he has an ivy league law degree he seems to make Sarah Palin look like a Rhodes Scholar in comparison.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal weighed in this past weekend about Vance:
Referring to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments, the WSJ called them “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.” They continued: “this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one,” and concluded “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.”
Enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy among Democrats almost immediately brought her up to being slightly ahead of or within the margin of error in a variety of polls comparing her with Trump. Polls at this stage of the campaign, of course, are somewhat iffy.
The election will come down to the six to eight battleground states that have come to decide most every recent presidential election. The other 42 to 44 states, including New York, will assume their usual position of watching it all play out on television and in social media while in some cases deciding to send money or volunteer to help the cause.
As the election now begins to focus on Trump and Harris and the things begin to tighten, Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein will begin to fade. While those three are mostly in it for ego-gratification they nonetheless could muck up things in the battleground states.
I would not hazard a guess at this time about how this all works out but there are some matters coming into focus that will likely point to the eventual result:
- Trump is now the only old man in the race and many folks question his cognitive abilities. Harris is well positioned to take advantage of an issue that has been seen as major negative in this year’s presidential candidates.
- Republicans will try to “Willy Horton” Harris for her record as the district attorney and state attorney general. Border issues will be in the forefront. The Harris team, I would assume, knows that is coming and are planning to deal with it.
- She has begun to contrast her prosecutorial record against the record of a convicted felon in a fraud case who has also been found to have committed sexual assault. She will highlight an economy that is much improved over Trump’s last year in office and speak often about the infrastructure programs now underway that the previous administration only talked about.
- Vance is a relatively inexperienced campaigner with a history of comments that will haunt him, offering up much ammunition to the Democrats. His previous anti-Trump commentaries will be highlighted. The potential Democratic VP candidates are all campaign veterans who are better prepared for a major election effort.
- There is a debate scheduled for September that Trump is now trying to rearrange or maybe even dodge. Moving it to Fox News, as he is now demanding, won’t make it any easier for him to perform well.
- The enthusiasm level in both camps is incredibly high. Sustaining that support is critical. So is voter turnout. At the end of the day, it will all come down to turnout, turnout, turnout.
Stay tuned.
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