Presidential campaigns follow a rhythm. The candidates are generally known by late spring. They are nominated at conventions over the summer. The fall campaign kicks off on Labor Day, at which point the public’s attention turns to the candidates who have spent months preparing for the next eight weeks.
Not this time.
The sudden elevation of Kamala Harris to replace President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has transformed what had been a long slog between Biden and former President Donald Trump into a 100-day sprint to Election Day. This campaign is now playing out in fast forward, with a vice-presidential pick, convention, the debate on debates, the production of television advertisements and the crafting of strategy, all taking place in the crunch of weeks rather than months.
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Voters will begin casting ballots in Pennsylvania, one of the critical battleground states, as soon as mid-September.
Analysts from both parties said that timeline is likely to benefit Harris. Her campaign is looking to ride a burst of momentum, hoping to coast past some of the scrutiny and detailed policy debates that candidates usually experience on the path to the nomination — and leaving Trump casting about to adjust to a very different opponent.
“A shorter campaign gives significant advantage to Harris,” said Matthew Dowd, who was chief campaign strategist for President George W. Bush in 2004. He noted that Republicans had spent years “relentlessly attacking” Biden, and before him, Hillary Clinton, so that “by the time the Labor Day comes, the nominee is solidly defined.”
“Not so with Harris,” he said.
The shortened campaign timeline has already forced the Trump campaign to discard months of preparation and recalibrate for a far different opponent, an energetic 59-year-old Black and South Asian woman whose candidacy has clearly stirred interest from a once dispirited Democratic base.
After months in which Trump mocked Biden as old and befuddled, he found himself last week quarreling with Black journalists on a public stage about Harris’ racial identity. He kept it up at a rally at Atlanta on Saturday night, calling her a “radical left freak,” belittling her intelligence and her first name, lingering on each symbol of “Kamala” as he shouted it out to the crowd.
“Kamala,” Trump said “You know there’s about 19 different ways of saying it. She only likes three.”
The warp-speed campaign seems almost designed for this era of the attenuated attention span, fueled by the barrage of posts on social media sites such as Truth Social and X. Over the past three weeks, Trump was shot at a rally, and Biden quit the race, but that seems almost forgotten as attention shifts to the new candidate on the block.
Short campaigns are nothing new in much of the world. Keir Starmer was elected the Prime Minister of Britain last month after a campaign that was, by law, limited to about six weeks. By contrast, U.S. presidential contests are a model of bloat; the first sprouts of a campaign can now be found in states like New Hampshire and Iowa weeks after a president is inaugurated. Trump never stopped running after he lost in 2020; Biden announced he was seeking reelection in April 2023.
Trump is searching to define his new opponent, in part, because Harris was spared a primary. As a result, she has not undergone the months of attacks from fellow Democrats that could have highlighted her vulnerabilities. And Harris has yet to agree to any major media interviews since becoming her party’s presumptive nominee.
“She’s not had to endure a long primary season with people questioning her motivations for running or fretting about whether or not a woman is electable,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who was director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016, and just joined the Harris campaign as a senior adviser to Harris’ spouse, Doug Emhoff. “She’s been presented to voters as a solution to a problem.”
But the accelerated campaign poses risks to the new and relatively untested Democratic presidential candidate as well. Skipping a contested primary means she did not have a chance to test, or hone, her campaign skills. When Harris ran for president in 2020, in a large and contested field that included Biden, she dropped out before the first primary vote.
And more immediately, the short calendar does not give her much time to rewrite the script and sell herself to a public that polls show looks unfavorably on Biden, Harris, and the state of the nation under their leadership. It also gives her relatively little running room to recover from the mistakes that even the most experienced campaigner can make.
“People shouldn’t forget that even before the infamous debate, the country wanted to fire the Biden-Harris team, over age concerns and equally, the economy,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant, referring to Biden’s faltering debate with Trump. “So there is still plenty of danger out there for Harris.”
Depending on how events unfold, August could largely belong to Harris. She is about to pick a running mate, which promises a run of large rallies drawing attention from the media and the public. The Democratic convention begins on Aug. 19 in Chicago, a gathering that party officials had once feared could turn into a display of division and despair, but now provides a chance, at least, for a four-day celebration by a unified party.
Harris saw a significant shift in the public’s assessment of her in polls taken after Biden dropped out: A New York Times/Sienna college poll found her favorable rating jumped from 36% in February to 46% in July. (That same poll, taken less than two weeks after Trump survived an assassination attempt, found the former president’s favorable rating rose to 48%, the highest level in any Times/Siena College poll.)
“Since Harris is not that well known, her favorable has shot up,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic consultant, referring to her favorability rating among voters. “She’s new today. And she will be new on Nov. 5. The shortness of it means that affect won’t go away.”
“On the other hand, if there’s a mistake, the mistake becomes magnified,” he said. “There’s less time to get around it.”
Most Americans think the nation is heading in the wrong direction under Biden and Harris. The Trump campaign has the financial wherewithal and, in Trump, the messenger, to tie her to Biden’s record on issues like immigration and the economy; Trump has an advantage over Biden on both of those overriding issues. (Case in point: Trump was quick to blame Harris and Biden after the stock market crashed Monday morning.) And initial polling found that while Harris is faring better than Biden against Trump, she remains roughly tied with the former president.
Still, said Murphy, who is a critic of Trump, “net-net she helps the Democrats compared to the mess they were in with Biden.”
“It forces Trump to have a new plan, rather than the easy trot against Biden,” he said. “She now has the gift of running a campaign about the future, painting Trump as the awkward remnant of yesterday’s America. That’s a powerful place to be in.”
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