The 2024 presidential election could depend on which of the two well-known candidates can present themselves as the new contender to voters hungry for change.
The Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is the incumbent Vice President. Her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, was in the White House until early 2021.
Both must argue that they could, in some way, represent a break with the status quo in an election that could bring about change.
On paper, Harris appears to have the tougher case. She is the second-highest-ranking official in President Joe Biden’s administration. Biden trailed for months before a debate heightened concerns about his age and forced him to drop out of the presidential race later than any major-party candidate before.
Unlike Biden, Harris is not 81. But the president’s age was only one of his problems. Voters were largely dissatisfied with the current administration’s performance on a variety of issues, including the economy, immigration and foreign policy. Harris had a hand in some of these measures. Almost 65% believe the country is on the wrong path, according to the RealClearPolitics On average, however, only 26% of respondents believe that the economy is moving in the right direction.
Yet from the moment Harris entered the race as Biden’s surrogate, there was a concerted effort throughout the four-day Democratic convention in Chicago to portray Harris as the new president. Unlike Trump or Biden, she has never been president. The vice president’s influence has always been limited, and so, some voters say, she should be held accountable for what happened under Biden.
Speakers at the Democratic convention also reminded us that Harris represents historical and demographic change. She would be the first woman and only the second non-white president. The campaign certainly feels new since she succeeded Biden, a joy after the president’s increasingly maudlin and seemingly futile re-election campaign.
This is a version of Harris, the Democrats’ most coveted celebrity endorser. Given an electorate fed up with Trump’s nine years on the national stage and Biden’s 52 years, this version could well work.
Polls are now suggesting a reassessment of Trump’s turbulent first term. He will be remembered more for his pre-pandemic prosperity than for his nadir in 2020. Inflation, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, pro-Hamas protests on campuses – all of these were largely non-issues during his presidency.
That may pass as nostalgia. But Trump has indicated that he may want to represent a bigger change from the Democratic administration than he did in 2017. One example is his choice of Senator JD Vance (R-OH) as his running mate. Vance is both the youngest candidate on either ticket and a doubling down on populism, not a bridge to the pre-Trump Republican Party like former Vice President Mike Pence and other key first-term figures. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are out; in their place are other members of the MAGA family like Donald Trump Jr. and Lara Trump.
In other words, Donald Trump wants to enact changes in the Republican Party that will make it more closely aligned with the working class. These voters are notoriously difficult to mobilize or even get to follow the polls. But Trump and Vance may be able to pull it off this year. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent race for the White House enters its final stages, there is an opportunity to consolidate the least engaged voters.
Harris has gained in the polls, expanded the electoral map to win battleground Sunbelt states that seemed lost to Biden and reignited enthusiasm among Democrats. Still, even after an extended honeymoon period for Harris that stretched nearly a month from Biden’s exit to the end of the convention in Chicago, the race is still within the margin of error both nationally and in key swing states.
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Donald Trump and his allies must do everything they can to connect Harris to the events since Biden took office and remind voters how they have felt over the past few years. They must also highlight Harris’ own past progressive positions, which she has held in public, in her own words and on camera, but which her behind-the-scenes staff have mostly revised to the press.
If the vibrations do not prevail, Harris may be limited to defending Richard Pryor: “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying vibrations?”
