Kamala Harris may prove a bigger challenge to Donald Trump than the Republican nominee realises

Kamala Harris is likely to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Picture: AFP

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election,” Republican presidential aspirant Nikki Haley declared in January, as she was embroiled in a bitter primary contest with ­Donald Trump.

They are words that might yet come back to haunt the Republican Party, which has succeeded too well in destroying Joe Biden’s candidacy after months of attacks on his policies and increasingly ­obvious mental decline.

History is yet to judge whether they committed the biggest political own goal in history, but there’s little doubt Kamala Harris, or whomever the Democratic Party ultimately settles on, has a better chance of winning in November than Biden.

Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt blunted the Democrats’ core line of political attack against him, compelling them to tone down language that had cast the former president as an existential threat that must be stopped “at any cost”.

Now Biden has returned the favour, up-ending Trump’s re-election strategy less than four months out from polling day. The Weekend at Bernie’s jokes were fun while they lasted.

Trump himself didn’t even mention Harris in his series of angry social media posts in the wake of Biden’s decision, where he accused the Democratic Party of fraud for switching leaders and ­demanded reimbursement for wasted advertising expenditure. “Now we have to start all over again,” he complained.

To be sure, Republicans will ­urgently seek to tie Harris to Biden’s alleged policy failings, centred around out-of-control immigration, high inflation and a perception the Biden administration has been responsible for the outbreak of wars in Europe and the Middle East. But these attacks can’t be fully effective, as Harris wasn’t the president and can credibly argue she would have done things differently if she’d been commander in chief.

Democrat donors at least were enthusiastic about her chances, pouring $US46.7m ($70m) into Harris’s campaign in its first few hours, including $US27.5m ($41.2m) from small donors, ­according to ActBlu, a left-wing political action committee, in what was the biggest single day of fundraising of the 2024 presidential cycle.

Donald Trump doesn’t poll well with women. Picture: Getty Images

Even before the Democratic Party machine and aligned mainstream media gets behind Harris, she has polled better than Biden in a hypothetical match-up with Trump. She trails the former president by around two percentage points, 48 per cent to 46 per cent, according to most national polls, well within the margin of error.

A campaign against Harris poses unique challenges for ­Republicans, who would like to slam her as the nation’s first ­“Diversity Equity and Inclusion” candidate, but might that put off black voters and Hispanic voters?

Similarly, they must be careful not to alienate women, a group among whom Trump polls particularly badly, by the appearance of judging her more harshly than they would a man.

Much of the American electorate has been crying out for generational change in the White House, as Haley implied, but they didn’t have a choice. Now they do.

Republicans must now be hoping for an open Democratic convention that pits Harris publicly against other would be candidates, fracturing the party and potentially providing a string of criticism that the GOP could use in campaign advertisements.

But as the overwhelming bulk of Democratic Party grandees backed Harris on Sunday (Monday AEST) in the interests of political unity, that prospect seems ever more unlikely.