People who went on summer vacation the day of the last presidential debate might not believe their eyes when they watch the next one.
Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is the culmination of 75 days of utter and unprecedented campaign chaos — and the beginning of a 55-day race to Election Day through equally uncharted waters.
“It’s like running a 5K after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl: The world is spinning and you have to quickly figure out which end is up,” said Democratic strategist Jared Leopold.
In the 2½ months since Trump and President Joe Biden faced off in late June, some foundational aspects of the race have flipped upside down, as one of the candidates was replaced and the other was nearly assassinated.
The parties made new national figures out of a pair of vice presidential running mates: Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Trump’s criminal trials, expected to dominate the homestretch of the campaign, are out of the picture, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling during the week of July 4.
The best-polling third-party candidate in a generation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saw his numbers collapse, and he is out of the race and supporting Trump.
The sides even flipped on the debate rules, with the Harris campaign (unsuccessfully) pushing for open microphones during the whole debate after Biden’s team favored turning candidates’ mics off when it is not their turn.
Craig Snyder, a Philadelphia-based political operative and the author of a new presidential campaign novel titled “Guile,” said fiction writers could not get away with anything as unexpected as the reality of this year’s election.
“The facts of the 2024 campaign so far probably wouldn’t be greenlit as fiction. It just wouldn’t seem credible that so many unprecedented events could happen, one after the other,” said Snyder, a Republican who runs Haley Voters for Harris, a group of Nikki Haley supporters who back Harris. “But with all the unlikely plot twists, here we are on the day of what could well be among the most significant political debates in American history — perhaps second only to the last one — and yet it’s a race that’s back to where it started more than a year ago — tied!”
And now, in the homestretch of the campaign, after the conventions and with early voting about to begin in some states, the real campaign between the two candidates actually facing off in the general election finally begins in earnest — raising the stakes Tuesday for the first and potentially only debate between two people who have never met in person.
“What happens during these nights lives on. Just ask Joe Biden,” Republican strategist Matt Gorman said. “Kamala wants to come out of here with a rallying cry. Expect the Harris campaign to inject something into the campaign or start a narrative they hope to carry forward for weeks on end.”
Now, Democrats now have the younger candidate with the fundraising advantage and the large crowds — a complete inversion from a few months ago — while Trump has remained Trump, even though some allies insisted he was a changed man in the days immediately after the attempt on his life at a mid-July rally in Pennsylvania.
“This debate is essentially a funhouse mirror reflection of the first debate: Trump is still the same, but now that Harris is lined up against him, he looks significantly older, sounds more incoherent and comes across as dramatically more out of touch,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist.
And, Legacki said, Harris can now speak about abortion — Democrats’ top issue — more effectively than Biden ever could, given his personal discomfort with the issue.
With the actual incumbent out, the former president and the current vice president are each pseudo-incumbents trying to run as change agents while also holding up accomplishments from their time in the White House.
That dynamic has muddied the policy agenda for both candidates, who have failed to provide details for critical policy areas and have issued contradictory or least ambiguous pronouncements about old positions.
At times, Trump seems to be reeling from his change of opponent, from initially insisting (hoping?) that Biden would return to making occasional Freudian slips by referring to his opponent as Biden.
Democrats, meanwhile, have awakened from their Biden-era torpor — but they have had their own growing pains under new management.
After a near-month wallowing in despair while Biden’s poll numbers cratered in the wake of his disastrous June 27 debate, Biden announced on social media that he was stepping aside and giving Harris his endorsement and the $96 million his campaign had in the bank.
The news, posted while Biden was recovering from Covid-19 at his beach house, brought ecstasy and good “vibes” for Harris through July and August, as she clinched the nomination, picked Walz and rallied the party at its national convention. But there’s some evidence the momentum began to ebb heading into the debate, as she faces growing criticism for avoiding reporters and offering scant details of her policy agenda.
Harris’ campaign put a policy page on her website only on Monday. And the platform her party adopted at the convention last month was written before Biden withdrew, and it was left unedited to avoid reopening messy issues like Israel’s war in Gaza.
And despite the vibes and improved numbers, Harris tells supporters she is still an “underdog” against Trump, with surveys usually showing results within the margin of error and all signs pointing to an extremely close election.
“Any way you look at this race, it’s a tossup,” pollster Richard Czuba, founder of the Lansing-based Glengariff Group, said of a recent Detroit News-WDIV-TV poll of Michigan voters, echoing what virtually every other pollster has said in virtually every other poll.
For making it through the past 75 days of chaos, America now gets 55 days of unpredictability with little precedent in modern history.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
