Campaigns rip up their plans after Biden’s exit from presidential race
Donald Trump allies are already pouring millions into anti-Kamala Harris ads, while Democrats hope a new ticket will add a better contrast with the GOP nominee.
Voters have been saying for months that they don’t like their choices for president this year. Now, the campaign for the White House turns in large part on whether they reward the Democratic Party for giving them a new option.
The Trump campaign had built its strategy around Biden as its opponent and hoped that the President, his political standing deteriorating, would remain in the race. But the campaign and its allies pivoted as Biden ended his candidacy and Vice President Kamala Harris quickly won broad support among Democratic officials to replace him, emerging on Monday as the near-inevitable nominee.
On Sunday, Trump allies posted an ad attacking her immediately after Biden withdrew from the race. On Monday, Trump’s newly announced running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, used his first solo campaign appearance to accuse Harris of masking Biden’s compromised health condition and Democrats of undermining democracy by pushing Biden from the race after he had easily swept through the party’s primary elections.
The main super political-action committee supporting former president Donald Trump, MAGA Inc., said it would spend $US11 million ($16.5m) in the next two weeks on the anti-Harris ad, which attempts to transfer Biden’s low approval ratings on inflation and immigration on to Harris. The ad, which began appearing Sunday evening on broadcast TV in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, also says Harris helped mask Biden’s “obvious mental decline.”
Trump took to social media Sunday evening to complain about the curveball Democrats had thrown. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again, ” he wrote.
Among Democrats, momentum quickly grew around Harris as she drew endorsements from many officials who might have challenged her for the nomination or are possible picks to be her running mate. They included the governors of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky and North Carolina. In a capstone endorsement, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Monday that she supported Harris, following other senior party leaders, among them former President Bill Clinton and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Harris’s fledgling campaign announced that it had raised a formidable $US81 million in 24 hours in donations to the campaign, the party and related committees. The sum suggested that Democrats, many of them depressed by Biden’s declining prospects as a candidate, felt new optimism about the election.
Any new nominee gives Democrats a chance to shed the liability of Biden’s age and declining mental acuity, which was on display as the 81-year-old president suffered cognitive lapses during his debate against Trump last month. Harris, 59, presents a very different contrast with Trump, 78, than did Biden.
Biden’s withdrawal also strengthens his party’s ability to shift the spotlight from the President’s weaknesses and refocus voter attention on Trump’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade (he installed a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court that eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion), his recent criminal conviction, his attempts to retain power after the 2020 election and record of breaking democratic norms – issues the party believes voters will reject if their nominee can make them salient.
“Biden’s advanced age and diminished abilities were the blinders that didn’t allow voters to focus on the Democrats’ record of accomplishments and the depraved MAGA Republican platform Trump is offering,” said Fernand Amandi, a Florida-based Democratic pollster.
With Harris already amassing many of the delegates needed to secure the nomination at next month’s national convention, attention turned to her selection of a running mate. The pick could alter voter perceptions of their choice between Harris and the GOP ticket of Trump and Vance. Possible ticket mates for Harris include Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, as well as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
Both parties will now try to reintroduce Harris to the public. The daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, she is the country’s first Black Vice President and the first of South Asian descent. Democrats hope she will revive support from Black, Latino and young voters who normally lean Democratic but weren’t committing to Biden as strongly as in 2020.
At the same time, voters in recent polling didn’t hold a more positive view of Harris than they did of Biden, who has drawn the lowest job-approval ratings of any president at this point in his tenure dating to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gallup polling has found. In a Wall Street Journal survey this month, both Harris and Biden were viewed favourably by about 35 per cent of voters and unfavourably by about 56 per cent.
Chuck Rocha, a veteran Democratic strategist and pollster, said Harris would be the party’s best choice of nominee because of her biography and ability to inherit Biden’s campaign cash and infrastructure, both of which would be difficult to transfer to another candidate. “The historic value of her nomination – the first woman of colour, the first Asian – in our party, that means a lot,” he said.
More broadly, he said, the party now gets “a new burst of energy. Since the debate, it has been the life bleeding out of our party.” Harris, he said, “puts us back in the game.” Trump’s allies had already started looking at Harris’s record as a prosecutor – she was California’s attorney general for six years – for material to be used against her. The Trump campaign was preparing ads focused on her, according to a person familiar with the planning, and aides were highlighting some of her older positions.
Party officials said they would meet this week to discuss the process for formally selecting a nominee.
If a challenger to Harris of significant stature emerged, and the party allowed an open competition for delegates, the result could be the first time a party entered its convention without knowing its nominee in advance since 1976, when then-president Gerald Ford bested Ronald Reagan in securing the final delegates he needed at the Republican nominating conference that year.
Several prominent Democrats said Sunday they would back Harris, including Biden, former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee. Notably, former President Barack Obama issued a statement praising Biden but without endorsing Harris, and the Democratic House and Senate leaders didn’t weigh in on a replacement for Biden.
The Trump campaign issued a memo highlighting its strategy of attaching Biden’s policies to Harris. “Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two,” read a statement from Trump senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.
Immigration, in particular, will be a focus for the Trump campaign. Biden asked Harris to tackle the “root causes” that caused people to leave Central America for the US., such as poverty, violence and lack of opportunity for women. But she struggled to distance herself from the politics of migrant surges at the border, which wasn’t part of her mandate. The Trump campaign will nonetheless work to fault her for problems at the border, an issue that has proven potent in the election, polling shows.
The Trump campaign is also combing through opposition research files on other potential candidates. Trump is scheduled to hold a rally on Wednesday in Charlotte, N.C., a battleground state.
James Blair, political director of the Trump campaign, pushed back on the discussion that the Trump campaign would face new challenges, given how much it had focused on Biden. “Our organisation is built for our candidate, not our opposition,” he wrote, adding: “The other side now has to shove a new candidate into a team & organisation built for someone else. Best of luck.”
Republicans aligned with Trump said there were discussions about initiating legal challenges to a move Biden’s campaign made Sunday to rename three of its fundraising entities, placing them in Harris’s name. Those three, a campaign committee now called Harris for President and two joint fundraising committees, had more than $US159 million in cash at the end of June, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Others said Harris could legally use the money. Harris and her running mate “can continue using the campaign’s existing funds for the general election if she is on the Democratic ticket as either the presidential or vice-presidential nominee,” said Trevor Potter, president of Campaign Legal Center.
Polling has shown that while Republicans were more enthusiastic about Trump than Democrats were about Biden, voters overall were unhappy that the election was a rematch between two men in their 70s and 80s.
In the Journal survey this month, both men were viewed more unfavourably than favourably. Nearly half of voters said they would replace both candidates with new choices if they could, and an additional 26 per cent said they would replace one candidate or the other; 22 per cent said they would keep both men on the ballot.
While the campaign has publicly dismissed Harris’s ability to defeat Trump, some officials privately said they aren’t taking their current lead in the polls for granted, acknowledging that Harris could pull in women and minority voters whom the Trump campaign has been courting.
Trump warned against complacency during a rally Saturday in Grand Rapids, Mich., saying the next four months was “like an eternity.”
Though Trump has railed against early voting, he asked supporters to vote any way possible, and video screens directed people to a website called Swamp the Vote. Trump went after Harris during the rally.
“I call her laffin’ Kamala,” he said. “You can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy. She’s nuts.”
Harris has been criticising Trump on abortion and other issues on a near-daily basis. On Sunday, shortly after Biden’s announcement, she said on X that she would do everything in her power to unite the party to defeat Trump’s “extreme” agenda and asked donors to pitch in.
– Anthony DeBarros and John McCormick contributed to this article.
WSJ
