A 17-day stretch with few parallels in American history has upended what looked to Donald Trump’s campaign like a clear path to victory when the former president stepped on the Republican convention stage in Milwaukee.
In that moment, a unified Republican Party had rallied around Trump after he survived an assassination attempt. His opponent, President Joe Biden, faced sagging poll numbers, sluggish fundraising and intraparty concerns over his own viability that were reaching a fever pitch.
And then the 2024 presidential race was turned on its head.
Trump went off-script and into attack mode in his Thursday night speech to close the GOP convention, delivering sharply partisan remarks that undercut the calls for unity that had preceded him. Three days later, Biden exited the race. By that Monday evening, Democrats had so quickly coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris that she had effectively cemented the nomination – and was well on her way to shattering fundraising records.
Amid the newfound enthusiasm among Democrats, Trump’s campaign found itself grappling with unwelcome scrutiny over past comments his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, had made disparaging “childless cat ladies.”
At the same time, Trump’s campaign was struggling to find a consistent line of attack against Harris – a challenge that culminated with Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago on Wednesday.
The former president seemed to abandon any pretense of a disciplined message and ignited controversy by spouting falsehoods about Harris’ racial heritage, claiming that the vice president – the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica – now “wants to be known as Black” after years of “only promoting Indian heritage.” His campaign then dug in and repeated those false attacks.
Now, the 2024 race is in flux. Harris has erased Trump’s polling and fundraising advantage over Biden. The former president’s hopes of narrowing the Democratic advantage among Black and Latino voters are in question. And how voters will react to the Trump attacks reminiscent of 2016 is uncertain.
“There’s a shift in the race going on right now,” Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin said Friday on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
He said Trump “will win on the issues” but also seemed to acknowledge that attention had shifted far away from any policy contrast.
“What you want to talk about is different from what we want to talk about,” McLaughlin said. “And that’s fine, we’ll let the voters sort it out.”
The campaign whirlwind of the past two weeks has left Democrats who had been dejected suddenly feeling a fresh sense of optimism, while Republicans wonder whether the unity from weeks ago will return in the closing chapter of the race – and hope that Trump and his allies can refocus on what’s now a much different challenge.
“People need to stop talking about coups,” said a Republican consultant close to Trump’s campaign, urging the party to quit complaining about the process by which Democrats switched Biden for Harris. “We won that race, and now we have to suit back up and win another race.”
The wave of enthusiasm is apparent to loyal Democrats like Harper West of Oakland County, Michigan, who has been going door to door for months with lackluster levels of interest. All of that changed, she said, the moment Biden bowed out and endorsed Harris for president.
“I’ve been canvassing for about 50 years. We’ve never in my lifetime changed candidates this late in the game,” West said, pausing as she left a Harris campaign office to pick up a new packet of door-knocking materials. “There is a lot of excitement around Vice President Harris, actually. I’m not used to that. A lot of people are very fired up.”
His fundraising numbers skyrocketed, surprising his advisers, after his felony conviction in New York. His legal woes elsewhere were aided by a scandal in the Georgia prosecutor’s office and a Supreme Court victory. And Biden, in a debate that occurred much earlier than usual, delivered a dismal performance.
Then, Trump’s ear was grazed in an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two days before the Republican convention was set to kick off.
Then, Biden called it quits, Democrats rallied around Harris, and Trump was thrust into a much different race.
Trump’s campaign had spent the past two years carefully crafting a playbook designed to go after an unpopular 81-year-old incumbent, including pouring tens of millions of dollars into data, modeling and ads aimed squarely at Biden.
