With the conventions over, Harris and Trump begin the final sprint to Election
By Eric Bradner, Jeff Zeleny, Kevin Liptak, Kit Maher and Camila DeChalus, CNN
An unsettled and unpredictable 2024 presidential race is entering its final stretch, with Vice President Kamala Harris looking to build on the momentum of this week’s Democratic National Convention and former President Donald Trump honing his lines of attack.
The former president’s early-summer polling and fundraising advantages were wiped out in an unprecedented five weeks that saw Trump survive an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden drop his reelection bid and Harris ascend to the top of the Democratic ticket and inject new enthusiasm into the party. Now Democrats are on offense, eyeing an expanded battleground map that could include new paths through the Sun Belt to 270 electoral college votes.
Trump reclaimed the spotlight on Friday as he campaigned in Arizona alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The independent candidate had suspended his presidential campaign hours earlier and said he was pulling his name from the ballot in key swing states to avoid being a spoiler.
“Don’t you want a president who’s going to get us out of the wars and who’s going to rebuild the middle class in this country?” Kennedy said of Trump in Glendale.
Kennedy’s departure from the fringes completes the reset of the 2024 race as a two-person contest between Trump and Harris, eliminating one wild card.
With the conventions over, the next race-defining moment on the calendar is their September 10 debate hosted by ABC. The campaigns have also both discussed participating in a second debate, but the details of where, when and who would host have not yet been settled.
Unlike the June debate between Trump and Biden, when their 2020 showdowns offered a preview of what to expect, no one is sure how this fall’s debates will unfold.
“I can’t picture it in my mind’s eye, if I’m being completely honest,” Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said Friday. “I think this match-up is so odd that it’s not obvious to me who’s got an advantage.”
Harris and her allies used the four-day Democratic convention in Chicago to frame the election as Americans’ opportunity to move past the toxicity of Trump’s decade as a dominant political figure once and for all.
“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past,” she said in her Thursday night speech.
Trump’s campaign, though, argues that Harris can’t credibly claim to offer a fresh start when she’s been vice president for more than three years.
“Her argument and the argument of her surrogates, is, ‘We’re going to do things better when I get power.’ She’s had power for three-and-a-half years, and she’s made everything worse,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said Thursday while campaigning in Georgia.
The former president has struggled to adapt to the change atop the Democratic ticket — but is testing new lines to brand Harris as too liberal. In recent days he has called her “Comrade Kamala.”