How it could quickly go wrong for Kamala Harris

After months in which Trump mocked Biden as old and befuddled, he found himself last week quarrelling 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 syllable 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, fuelled 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, US presidential contests are a model of bloat; the first sprouts of a campaign can now be found in states such as 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.

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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 unfavourably 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 August 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 favourable rating jumped from 36 per cent in February to 46 per cent in July. (That same poll, taken less than two weeks after Trump survived an assassination attempt, found the former president’s favourable rating rose to 48 per cent, the highest level in any Times/Siena College poll.)

“Since Harris is not that well known, her favorability 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 November 5. The shortness of it means that effect won’t go away.”

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“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’s sharp decline Monday.) 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.”