The telephone line was a little fuzzy, and the voice on the end gravelly from several days of Covid isolation. Yet the poignancy of the message, and the moment itself, could not have been clearer: “I’m watching you, kid. I love you,” the speaker said.
Joe Biden’s warmhearted call to his vice-president, Kamala Harris, at the Democratic party’s campaign headquarters in Delaware on Monday marked a generational shift in US politics, a symbolic passing of the torch from parent to progeny.
In terms of the 2024 presidential election race it was also a defining moment. Harris, a former prosecutor, state attorney general, California senator, and for three and a half years the 81-year-old Biden’s White House understudy, was appearing for the first time as her party’s preferred new candidate, less than 24 hours after her boss’s stunning announcement that he would not seek a second term of office sent a seismic shock across the country.
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There followed what by any metric could be called a whirlwind week on the campaign trail in an extraordinary month in American history already notable for the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump, the Republican party’s candidate for the 5 November election.
By Wednesday, Harris was addressing an historically Black sorority in Indianapolis as the Democratic presumptive nominee, having secured the support of enough delegates at the party’s national convention in Chicago next month to clinch the nomination.
It was the same day as Biden gave an emotional, nationally televised address from the White House explaining his decision to step aside “in defense of democracy”.
“I revere this office, but I love my country more,” he said, urging the country to stand behind Harris.
One by one, other heavyweight Democratic figures had stepped up to endorse her, culminating on Friday with the outsized backing of Barack Obama. The former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, all 23 of the party’s state governors, and elected officials from the most junior Congress members to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, respectively the House minority leader and Senate majority leader, also gave their approval.
“We are not playing around,” Harris told supporters at the sorority gathering in Indiana on Wednesday.
“There is so much at stake in this moment. Our nation, as it always has, is counting on you to energize, to organize, and to mobilize; to register folks to vote, to get them to the polls; and to continue to fight for the future our nation and her people deserve.
“We know when we organize, mountains move. When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”
It was a rousing speech from a politician who only three days previously was still in a supporting role, despite weeks of swirling speculation about Biden’s future following his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June.
But things moved swiftly once the president’s decision to step aside was announced on Sunday afternoon. The Biden campaign apparatus, and election war chest of almost $100m (£77.6m), became the property of a new entity called Harris for President (Republicans have vowed to challenge the funds transfer in court).
And staff hastily drew up a new travel schedule for the vice-president, which saw her crisscrossing the country, including the Wilmington, Delaware, appearance on Monday, at which she acknowledged the “rollercoaster” of the previous 24 hours.
On Tuesday, she was rallying in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with the campaign message: “We’re not going back” to the “chaos” of the Trump years.
On Wednesday, to Black women in Indianapolis, Indiana, she said: “We face a choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past.”
On Thursday, she told teachers in Houston, Texas: “In our vision, we see a place where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead.”
Also on Thursday came her first meeting with a foreign leader – Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – in her own right as a presidential candidate, not in a joint summit as vice-president. In a White House statement issued in her name, not Biden’s, Harris condemned violence at Wednesday’s anti-Netanyahu protest in Washington DC and the burning of the US flag.
In forceful public remarks following the meeting , she also went further than Biden ever had to criticize civilian suffering in Gaza. “I will not be silent,” she said.
“Israel has a right to defend itself … [but] we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.”
Activities behind the scenes, meanwhile, progressed every bit as quickly as Harris’s front-of-house appearances.
Fundraising operations cranked up, pulling in an all-time record $81m for any 24-hour period in presidential campaign history, a windfall for the newly branded Harris Victory Fund that surpassed $130m, mostly from small or first-time donors, by Thursday night.
Seizing on enthusiasm from younger voters that polling found was conspicuously absent for Biden, or the 78-year-old Trump, Harris’s team also released to social media its first campaign video. Beyoncé’s 2016 hit Freedom, the unofficial anthem of Harris for President, provided the soundtrack for a message countering what it says was Trump’s “chaos, fear and hate” vision for the country.
Harris has enormous appeal with generation Z, noted by backing from numerous youth organizations, including March for Our Lives, the student activist group formed in the aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
There could have been no better illustration than the declaration on X/Twitter by the British singer Charli xcx that “kamala IS brat”. Viewed by more than 53 million people, the simple message encapsulating a pop culture lifestyle delighted the younger generation and confounded their elders in equal measure. “You just got to go listen to that Charli xcx album and then you’ll understand it,” Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first gen Z member of Congress, told CNN.
“Whether it’s coconut trees or talking about brat or whatever, the message is getting across to tens of millions of young people across the entire country, and across the entire world, and that’s really inspiring.”
Wrongfooted by Biden’s abrupt exit, and alarmed by polls showing Harris gaining ground or even surpassing Trump in popularity, the former president’s campaign scrambled to find attack lines for their new opponent.
At a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Trump tested insults including calling Harris a “radical left lunatic” and “the most incompetent and far-left vice-president in American history”. Republican party acolytes have also been busy with racist attacks, accusing Harris, who has Black and Asian heritage, of being “a DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hire” or “unqualified” for the presidency.
Experts warn to expect an all-out attack of misogyny and racism on Harris as the election approaches.
This week, however, while Harris’s fledgling campaign took its first steps, it was sharpening its own knives. Framing the upcoming campaign as “the prosecutor versus the felon”, it took swipes at Trump’s 34 felony convictions on fraud charges, and in a searing missive on Thursday mocked the former president’s rambling anti-Harris diatribe on a rightwing news channel by issuing a “statement on a 78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance”. The gloves are off.
Now, with the first full, buoyant week of Harris’s presidential challenge about to be in the history books, the question is whether the initial enthusiasm and momentum can be maintained through the gruelling 101 days left until the election.
Harris and her team are confident it can. Contradicting the statement by the liberal British politician Joseph Chamberlain more than a century ago that “in politics, there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight”, they have their sights set not only on November’s election, but the eight years beyond it.
