A little over a month and 150 kilometres of distance have separated this year’s conventions of the two major American parties. A shower of confetti and the release of tens of thousands of balloons in the colours of the American flag – red, white and blue – marked the end of the party in two interchangeable scenes, if it were not for the enormous golden balloons (Donald Trump’s favourite colour) with which the Republicans have innovated. In addition to the staging, both conventions have shared a mood. Hailed as a semi-divine hero who had survived an attack a few days earlier and with a rival – Joe Biden – on the ropes, Trump left Milwaukee convinced that his victory in the presidential elections on 5 November was inevitable. In a campaign full of dramatic plot twists, the coronation of Kamala Harris as candidate a month later brought enthusiasm to the Democratic ranks in Chicago and threw the former president off balance. After two triumphant conventions, just two and a half months of campaigning will decide Biden’s replacement in the White House, with the debate on September 10 as the next big event.
Whoever wins will make history in the first election since 1976 in which the surnames Bush, Clinton or Biden are not on the ballot. Either Harris becomes the first woman to occupy the Oval Office, or Trump becomes the first president in more than a century to regain office after losing it. The election is seen as a test of candidates in which character, personal stories and big ideas take center stage to the detriment of specific programmatic proposals.
The Democrats have not even bothered to update their so-called platform, presenting a document in Chicago that talks over and over again about what they would do in Biden’s “second term.” Trump, for his part, rejects the elaborate and ultra-conservative Project 2025, a kind of action guide for his hypothetical second presidency drawn up by people close to him, which has become a favorite target of the Democrats. In 2016, Hillary Clinton presented herself with detailed proposals and succumbed to a Trump with a one-sentence program: Make America Great Again. [Hacer que Estados Unidos vuelva a ser grande].
For better or worse, Trump is one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Harris, by contrast, has spent four years in Biden’s shadow. “The bad thing about vice presidents is that nobody knows who you are. The good thing about vice presidents is that nobody knows who you are,” David Axelrod, who was Barack Obama’s chief strategist, said this week in a statement reported by AP. Patrick Gaspard, president of the Center for American Progress, interprets this in a positive light: “She has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we have never seen before in our politics. She is both the incumbent, but also a candidate for change,” he said at an event this week in Chicago on the sidelines of the convention.
Harris, 59, used her closing remarks to do three things: attack Trump, appeal for unity (“I will be a president for all Americans”) and introduce herself. She recounted her family history, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant and an Indian mother who met at the University of Berkeley and grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. She reviewed her career as a prosecutor, working “for the people.” Before that, her grandnieces taught her how to pronounce the word correctly. (comma-la)its proparoxytone name.
A test for Harris
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Harris’s scrutiny has only just begun. She has not yet given a press conference or in-depth interview – she has promised one for next week – to face questions about her management of these years, her future plans and her changes of opinion. She has, for example, abandoned her opposition to the frackingand her proposal for universal health coverage, her flagship measures when she ran in the primaries in 2019, in her attempt to present herself as a pragmatic and trustworthy leader.
For the moment, the vice president has not felt the need to submit to media interrogation. She is benefiting from the wave of popularity and enthusiasm that she has aroused in just five weeks, a honeymoon with voters that has boosted her popularity and put her in the lead in voting intentions.
Polls, however, underestimated Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the Democrat’s margin is smaller than that enjoyed by both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden at this point in the campaign. “We’ve seen more than one election slip away when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by false issues or got overconfident,” Bill Clinton said this week in what seemed to be a reference to his wife’s defeat in 2016. “This is a brutal, tough business. I want you to be happy. One of the reasons future President Harris is doing so well is that we’re all so happy. But you should never underestimate your opponent,” she added. Michelle Obama issued a similar warning: “No matter how good we feel tonight or tomorrow or the day after, this is going to be an uphill battle.”
“It’s going to be one of the closest elections in history,” says Democratic strategist Juan Verde, who has been involved in every campaign since 1992. “No candidate can claim victory. There is a technical tie and I think the uncertainty will continue until the last moment,” he adds, recalling that it is not the popular vote that decides the winner, but the Electoral College, which benefits the Republicans. According to Verde, the key for Harris in the final stretch of the campaign is to maintain the level of enthusiasm and energy that has been generated in the last five weeks. That depends, he adds, on consolidating a movement similar to the one that brought Obama to the presidency in 2008, so that the message is multiplied through young people, the media and social networks.
Trump’s response
Trump can’t stand being out of the spotlight and this week he has tried to counter-program the Democratic convention with several rallies that the media has not paid much attention to, with the exception of this Friday’s in Glendale (Arizona). The independent Robert F. Kennedy, propagator of hoaxes and conspiracy theories, appeared to support him after withdrawing his own candidacy, forming an odd couple. Although the impact of John F. Kennedy’s nephew is marginal, these elections could be decided by a minimal difference.
Trump tweeted compulsively on his social network, Truth, while Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and Harris herself were giving their convention speeches. On the day of his rival’s speech, he spontaneously called the conservative Fox News channel, whose presenters ended up cutting off his somewhat incoherent words, accompanied by small beeps that seemed to indicate that Trump was inadvertently pressing keys on his phone with his cheek.
The Democratic baton pass after Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate has thrown Trump off balance, and he doesn’t seem to find the keys to attack his new rival. He can’t even decide on a nickname, as he usually does with his rivals (“Corrupt Hillary,” “Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Little Marco”) [Rubio]”, “Rum [DeSantis] the prude”, “Nikki Haley scatterbrain” and a long etcetera that has earned a page on Wikipedia). Of course, he has tried several: “crazy”, “cackler”, “Comrade Kamala”, because he baselessly accuses her of being a communist, or “Kamabla”, apparently for dismissing her speech as blah, blah, blah.
Although his advisers have advised him to stick to proposals rather than personal attacks, Trump is still a natural. He has questioned Harris’s racial identity and called her “lazy,” among many other niceties. At one of this week’s rallies in Asheboro, North Carolina, he sought the endorsement of the audience by asking them if he should get personal, and he overwhelmingly won. “My advisers… are fired,” he joked, using the phrase that launched him to television fame.
Among his campaign arguments, Trump attacks immigration (“they come from the prisons of the Congo,” he said this Friday in Glendale in one of his ramblings). A mass deportation, the execution of which he has not detailed, is one of his star proposals (which is feared by millions of immigrants who are applying for asylum or residency). Harris defends herself by accusing her rival of boycotting a law that would have served to secure the border.
The Democrat uses abortion as a stiletto, which Republicans avoided mentioning in Milwaukee and which Democrats kept talking about in Chicago. Trump knows that it hurts him and has tweeted that his presidency will be good for women’s “reproductive rights,” the terminology used by pro-choice activists.
The two are facing off on the economy, with the Republican accusing Harris of being a communist and Harris attacking his rival for only benefiting billionaires like him.
The real duel, however, is in their personal attributes and their vision of the United States. Harris appeals to joy and optimism, while Trump paints an apocalyptic picture and resorts to the weapon of fear and anger. The Republicans portray Harris as a dangerous and incompetent leftist. The Democrats present the former president as a self-centered egoist who only cares about himself and is a threat to democracy. In addition, they have found a new line of attack by presenting both Trump and his vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, as “weird” guys and mocking them, getting down in the mud and delivering some low blows (evoking the lie that Vance told in his memoirs that he had sex with a couch is their favorite).
The elections are decided in six or seven key states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and, since Harris’ arrival, North Carolina), which is where the two parties will concentrate their campaign efforts in the two and a half months remaining until the elections (less, if we take into account voting by mail, which in North Carolina begins on September 6, or early voting, which in Pennsylvania, the most important state in dispute, begins on the 16th.
Path to debate
Next up is the Sept. 10 debate, which both have begun preparing for. The Republican has turned to Trump convert Tulsi Gabbard, who drove Harris crazy in a 2019 Democratic primary debate. As Biden knows well, the duel can drastically change the campaign dynamic, and it remains to be seen whether it will be the only one between the two.
Harris and Trump have never met in person. The debate will be the first time they have been together in the same space, with the exception of the State of the Union speeches when Trump was president and the now vice president attended the chamber as a senator. Harris, a prosecutor accustomed to convincing juries, debated Mike Pence in 2020 and since then, people have been particularly reminded of the way she prevented her rival for the vice presidency from interrupting her: “I’m talking.” Trump is more experienced and has just knocked out Biden (or rather, he knocked himself out).
Trump believed that he had won the election with that debate, but it may end up being the moment in which he lost it, by facilitating the Democratic change. As he said goodbye to Chicago, after assuring that he held no resentment, shortly before boarding Air Force One to go on a two-week vacation with his family to Santa Ynez (California) and Rehoboth Beach (Delaware), Biden was asked if he still believed that he could have defeated Trump in November: “You always think that you could have won,” he replied. We will never know.
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