US President Joe Biden’s mumbling and stumbling debate performance in June prompted a panicked Democratic Party to elevate Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.

At the time, the polls suggested that Donald Trump was on track to pull off a second coming to the White House. His refusal to accept the 2020 election result, his stoking of the January 6 Capitol riot, and his various court cases were supposed to have rendered him unelectable. In normal times, perhaps. But US politics remains far from normal in the age of Trump.