What appeared to be a simple route to victory for Donald Trump’s campaign when the former president took the stage at the Republican convention in Milwaukee has been shattered by a 17-day period with few historical analogies.
At that very moment, the Republican Party had come together to support Trump following his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt. President Joe Biden, his opponent, was dealing with an upsurge of intraparty worries about his own viability, slow fundraising, and falling poll numbers.
Suddenly, everything changed in the 2024 presidential contest.
During his Thursday night speech to closing the GOP convention, Trump strayed from his script and launched into an attack mode, making extremely political comments that undermined the earlier appeals for unity. Biden withdrew from the campaign three days later. Vice President Kamala Harris had practically secured the nomination by that Monday evening, when the Democrats had swiftly rallied around her, and she was on track to break fundraising records.
Despite Democrats’ renewed support, Trump’s campaign was under unwanted criticism for remarks made by Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who was campaigning with him, in which he disparaged “childless cat ladies.”
It was Wednesday’s speech by Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago that summed up the campaign’s struggle to establish a consistent line of attack against Harris.
Claiming that Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, now “wants to be known as Black” after years of “only promoting Indian heritage,” the former president spewed falsehoods about Harris’ racial heritage, igniting controversy and seemingly abandoning any pretense of a disciplined message. Later on, his campaign persisted in making the same unfounded accusations.
The 2024 race is currently unpredictable. The funding and polling advantages that Trump had against Biden have been eliminated by Harris. Whether or not the former president can succeed in reducing the Democratic majority among Latinos and Blacks is an open question. It is unclear how the electorate will respond to Trump’s assaults, which are evocative of those from 2016.
According to Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin, who appeared on AWN’s “Inside Politics” on Friday, “There’s a shift in the race going on right now.”
He predicted that Trump “will win on the issues” but appeared to realize that the focus had moved on from any differences in policy.
We don’t want to talk about the same things that you do, McLaughlin remarked. “Alright, then. We’ll give the people a chance to decide.”
Optimism has suddenly washed over Democrats after a depressing few weeks of campaigning, while Republicans are wondering if the unity they felt earlier will return in the last stretch of the race and are hoping that Trump and his supporters can shift their attention to a new and different challenge.
A Republican adviser to Trump’s campaign stated, “People need to stop talking about coups,” meaning that Republicans should stop criticizing the way Democrats replaced Biden with Harris. “Now that we’ve won that race, we need to get back in the saddle and win another race.”
Harper West, a devoted Democrat from Oakland County, Michigan, who has gone door-to-door canvassing for months with unimpressive results, can feel the surge of excitement. According to her, everything changed when Biden publicly supported Harris for president.
About fifty years ago, I began canvassing. West remarked, “We’ve never changed candidates this late in the game.” She paused as she walked out of Harris’s campaign office with a fresh packet of door-knocking goodies. When it comes to Vice President Harris, there is a great deal of enthusiasm. This is very unusual for me. Lots of folks are incredibly enthused.
‘The campaign appears to be unconcerned.’
To Trump’s inner circle, it seemed for months that he could not lose.
Following his felony conviction in New York, his aides were taken aback by the meteoric rise in his fundraising figures. A crisis at the Georgia prosecutor’s office and a triumph in the Supreme Court only made his legal troubles worse elsewhere. And Biden, in an earlier-than-usual debate, was completely unconvincing.
Two days prior to the commencement of the Republican convention, Trump was targeted during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where an assassination attempt narrowly missed him.
Then Biden withdrew his support, Democrats united around Harris, and Trump found himself in an entirely new contest.
Trump’s team had spent the previous two years meticulously plotting their attack on Biden, an unpopular 81-year-old incumbent, and had invested tens of millions of dollars into data, modeling, and advertisements targeted directly at Biden.
An internal paper from May lays out possibilities that would result in an open convention and another Democratic standard-bearer, according to Trump’s aides, who claim that the campaign was prepared for a possible replacement at the top of the ticket even before Biden formally dropped out.
They stated that they started gathering opposition information centered on Harris because they thought the Democrats wouldn’t ignore the first Black woman to hold the role of vice president. Still, Trump’s campaign hasn’t settled on a unified stance about the vice president, no matter how much it prepares.
“We have to work hard to define her,” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Atlanta. “Defining her is something I’d rather not undertake. I only wish to identify her. She’s terrifying. Our nation will be destroyed by her.
In private, Trump’s advisors have admitted that they are still trying to figure out how to characterize his new rival. Trump has personally used his rally speeches and interviews to practice a number of assaults.
However, he might not get the chance to personally launch those assaults. Following Trump and Biden’s agreement to participate in the ABC-hosted debate on September 10, Harris has also stated her intention to do so. On the other hand, the ex-president is adamant about having one presented by Fox News. He threatened to “not see her at all” unless he debated her on September 4 on the conservative network, which is loyal to Trump.
Harris countered by bringing up Trump’s May pledge to participate in the ABC debate.
Just like he promised, I will be present on September 10th. On Saturday, she expressed her optimism on social media that he would be present.
If Trump were to run against Harris, his senior advisors maintain that the same concerns that were used to criticize Biden—inflation, crime, and immigration—would be front and center. They claim that Biden was instrumental in determining how the Trump administration handled these issues.
The lack of a plan for the increasingly competitive race is a source of concern for Trump’s supporters outside of the campaign.
“The campaign seems complacent,” remarked a Trump associate speaking to AWN.
“No ground game that we can see – no media operation,” another person added.
According to many Trump insiders who spoke with AWN, these outside allies were increasingly pushing for a campaign shake-up, with some citing the need to bring back more of Trump’s original 2016 supporters as an excuse.
