Jannatul Fardous
The 100-day countdown to the US election began Wednesday, the concluding act of a campaign marked by an assassination attempt and President Joe Biden’s surprise withdrawal.
After weeks of infighting and despair over Biden’s campaign, Democrats have generally rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris, dramatically changing a contest that was quickly becoming Republican nominee Donald Trump’s to lose.
According to Republican strategist Matt Terrill, Harris’s unification of the Democrats assured a photo finish on November 5, a ballot that will be determined mostly by around 100,000 swing voters in a few of battleground states.
“It comes down to those independent, undecided voters. Inflation, immigration, the economy and crime — those are the issues they care about,” he told BBC News.
While American election campaigns typically last almost two years, the 2024 edition has effectively been reset, making it unofficially the shortest in modern history.
The Democratic convention in mid-August is expected to be a jubilant celebration of the party’s new standard-bearer Harris, who is enjoying record fundraising, growing grassroots support and an early boost in polling.
It all seemed so different only a month ago.
Dogged by voters’ concerns about his age and mental acuity, the 81-year-old Biden was a long shot in the first presidential rerun since Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1956.
Biden’s depressing performance in the June 27 debate set up a five-alarm inferno among his party.
The unsuccessful attempt to kill the former president at a rally in Pennsylvania a few days prior served as the catalyst for the perfect display of solidarity around the 78-year-old Trump at the Republican National Convention.
Following an early outburst of resistance, Biden succumbed to the inevitable and pulled out last weekend.
At the age of 59, Harris was a generation younger than the other candidate, but she nonetheless made a bold and unexpected entrance into the race that had been a dull race between two unpopular, elderly, white male candidates.
The former Biden-Harris ticket, now simply the Harris campaign, had its largest-ever rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday and has raised more than $120 million in recent days, with dissatisfied supporters returning to the cause.
Trump’s prior three-point national advantage in polling averages has been nearly halved in a week, and the race has become a margin-of-error stalemate in the majority of critical swing states that decide elections.
But Democrats enjoying the sugar high of the last week have been cautioned by party elders to sober up, with Harris still facing an uphill battle to beat the oldest major party nominee in history.
Trump, who has seen his favorability ratings tick upward since the July 13 attempt on his life and the successful Republican convention, will rally this weekend in the traditionally Democratic state of Minnesota.
Harris, meanwhile, heads to Massachusetts for a fundraising event and will send her surrogates — including some favorites in the contest to be her running mate — out across battleground states.
