'A dogfight': Harris and Trump enter the final election stretch after Labor Day
An unprecedented summer has turned the presidential race on its head with two months to go until Election Day, showing a dead heat in key states between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump as both candidates gear up for a final blitz after the Labor Day holiday weekend.
A race that was slipping away from President Joe Biden is competitive again after he withdrew July 21 and passed the baton to his vice president, who has captured support from key groups that had soured on him, most notably young and Black voters.
Harris, 59, has turned the issue of age from a potentially fatal liability to an asset for Democrats against the 78-year-old Trump. The former president, who was running with confidence against Biden, has appeared rattled at times by Harris, launching personal and racial attacks against a rival who would be the first woman and the first Indian American to be president. She has brushed them off.
“It’s a toss-up race,” Republican strategist Brad Todd said, cautioning that the GOP's fortunes are not as bright as they were when the Democratic nominee was the 81-year-old Biden.
Todd urged Trump to stay focused on defining Harris as a “far-left candidate” by highlighting the smorgasbord of positions she took during her 2020 campaign — on health care, energy, immigration and more. Harris has since sought to pivot to the center, while saying that her “values haven’t changed” in the last five years.
“To win, Donald Trump has to hold her accountable for the things she said she believes,” he said. “But thus far, he’s not shown a lot of interest in that.”
The summer of 2024 has delivered a sequence of events unseen in modern times, including an unusually early debate that proved fatal for Biden’s already fading re-election hopes, an assassination attempt on Trump and a GOP convention that came across as a Trump victory party. Biden turned the race on its head by dropping out, passing the buck to Harris who quickly locked up the nomination — and rapidly surged in the polls to a dead heat. The late-August Democratic convention revealed a jubilant and rejuvenated party, just before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his independent bid and endorsed Trump. Harris and Trump are slated for their first one-on-one debate next week on Sept. 10.
'Fundamentally a dogfight'
Despite their momentum, Democrats say the race is far from over.
“I still think it’s fundamentally a dogfight,” said Bill Burton, a political consultant who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, praising Harris for running a “perfect” campaign so far.
Burton said it’s difficult to imagine this level of Democratic excitement if Biden was still the candidate. “She has peaked at the exact right moment,” he said. “As long as she keeps her rudder steady, I think that she’s going to do well.”
Harris leads Trump by 4 points in a USA Today/Suffolk poll and by 2 points in a Wall Street Journal survey. Recent polls of key states that Biden narrowly won in 2020 — including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — show a close race with a narrow Harris edge. In addition to being competitive in those “blue wall” states, Harris has put the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, which were falling away from Biden, back in play.
In a memo Sunday, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote: “[M]ake no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs. Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020.”
Burton said Harris still has work to do in bringing home key constituencies, most notably Black voters, as Trump seeks to peel off a slice of younger Black men.
“I think some of the support with white voters” that’s showing up in the polls today “is going to be a little superficial, and she’ll have to make up for it,” Burton said.
“Watch Black voters,” he said. “That is the place where I think there’s the most opportunity and most concern.”
Both candidates are seeking to reduce their vulnerabilities by reversing their unpopular positions from the past. Harris has disavowed left-wing ideas she backed in 2019, such as Medicare for All and decriminalizing migration. Trump, while bragging about his anti-abortion record, is backtracking on his support for federal abortion restrictions and suggesting he won’t try to repeal “Obamacare” after fighting to do so as president.
