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ANDREW NEIL: My guess is that this election is still Trump's to lose - just. But unless he starts attacking Harris on policy and not trivia, lose it he will
Joe Biden was always Donald Trump's preferred Democratic opponent in this year's U.S. presidential election. Trump was confident he could beat him.
He wanted revenge for his defeat at Biden's hands four years before (vengeance matters to someone as self-absorbed as Trump). He even called off the Republican dogs of war on Capitol Hill when they began moves to impeach Biden.
Nothing could be allowed to get in the way of a Trump v Biden rematch. He feared a younger, more energetic Democratic opponent would prove a tougher nut to crack. Bar one: Vice President Kamala Harris. 'Cackling Kamala' would be even easier to beat than 'Sleepy Joe', he'd chortle to his inner circle. He's not chortling now.
The sudden emergence of Harris as the Democrat he must beat to reclaim the White House has caught Team Trump flat-footed.
Republicans have been taken aback by the speed of the switch, the near-unanimous manner in which leading Democrats — many her rivals for the crown — quickly flocked behind her, and the millions flowing into her campaign coffers (more than $80million within days of Biden stepping aside).
Barely ten days ago, Donald Trump pretty much had the presidency in the bag, but not anymore as the U.S. presidential election of 2024 is now wide open
Then there's been the brazen cheerleading of the Democratic-leaning media (90 per cent of outlets in the U. S.), which has been re-energised by the Harris candidacy.
Barely ten days ago, Trump pretty much had the presidency in the bag. Even senior Democrats admitted as much, if mainly in private. No longer. The U.S. presidential election of 2024 is now wide open — and the momentum currently resides with Harris.
Wise observers on the Left and Right always said that the first party to select a candidate from the next generation would gain the upper hand, at least for a time. The Democrats have belatedly done just that — and they have.
Republican strategists are reluctantly reconciled to the inevitable 'Harris Honeymoon'. Rather than consoling themselves that it will dissipate quickly, as most political honeymoons do, they fear the Harris novelty factor will last through the summer to the Democratic Convention in late August in Chicago.
Far from being the open forum to choose a successor to Biden many Democrats had hoped for, this will now be the coronation of Kamala, undisputed Queen of the Democrats, a U.S.-style political jamboree on a scale never seen before.
Yesterday, she was anointed by Barack Obama, who had done so much behind the scenes to ease out poor old Joe. Her candidacy was complete. Chicago will be a triumph.
There is even breathless speculation among Democrats that Taylor Swift or Beyoncé might be prevailed upon to make an appearance. Even if the convention does not quite hit these heights, stars of stage and screen will be ubiquitous, adding to the event's prime-time broadcast appeal and ensuring an audience of millions.
Republicans fear this will further fuel Harris's momentum, propelling her as front-runner into early September when the presidential campaign starts in earnest.
Trump, who dominated the news in the aftermath of the assassination attempt and the Republican convention which followed, faces a month or more of playing second fiddle in the headlines. He hates that.
The sudden emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrat he must beat to reclaim the White House has caught Team Trump flat-footed, writes Andrew Neil
Trump, who dominated the news in the aftermath of the assassination attempt and the Republican convention which followed, faces a month or more of playing second fiddle in the headlines
It is a piquant measure of how unprepared Republicans were for the Harris ascendancy that they have floundered in the days since, with attack lines — faithfully parroted on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News — which have been weak, counter-productive and even offensive.
Forcing Biden to step aside and elevating Harris was undemocratic, moans Team Trump. It's a poor argument — presidents have declined to run for re-election in the past — and nobody outside Trump World cares. A huge majority of voters wanted rid of Biden as a candidate. The Democrats have obliged, at last.
Voters would not necessarily have chosen Harris as the replacement. But they can have their say about that come November. The Democrats have united behind her with almost zero dissent.
Republicans are also arguing that, if Biden is not fit to run again, he's not fit to remain as President. This is ludicrous (and irrelevant since Biden is not going to resign).
Relieved of having to fight a gruelling campaign with its exhausting schedule of travel and events, Biden can concentrate what's left of his limited energies on running the country — and he has a strong and experienced team to assist.
His halting, lacklustre address to the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, crammed with banalities, pregnant with solipsism, underlined how unfit he is to run again and what a breath of fresh air Harris is for the Democratic faithful. But America will somehow make it under Biden until next January.
And if Biden did resign Harris would become President and fight the election with all the majesty and power of the modern U.S. imperial presidency. Cloaked with that authority she'd be more likely to win than she is now.
Republicans have not thought this through, another indication of how the elevation of Harris has discombobulated them.
It gets worse. Democrats uncovered some words by J. D. Vance, Trump's new running mate, from 2021 claiming America was being run by 'childless cat ladies' like Harris, who had no 'direct stake' in the country's future.
It was clearly offensive to women without children, indeed to all women, a demographic Trump needs to do better among if he is to win in November. It was also self-defeating, provoking the previous wife of Harris's husband to say what a wonderful stepmother the Vice President has been to her two children.
Yes, Vance's remarks were from three years ago. But it shows how the Trumpian tendency to play the man (or woman) rather than the ball can so easily backfire.
Of course, there is another way, though whether Trump will take it remains to be seen. It is illustrated by a TV commercial about Harris produced by the mainstream Republican challenger in Pennsylvania's Senate race.
It shows Harris backing a ban on fracking and offshore drilling (both of which have helped make America energy independent); flirting with defunding the police; sympathetic to rent controls; arguing that crossing the border into America illegally should not be regarded as criminal; supporting a universal government health system like the NHS and the end of private health insurance; votes for prisoners; and the Green New Deal, a project of the Democratic Left which involved a massive expansion of federal power and government spending.
Kamala is being depicted as Wonder Woman, even among those many Democrats who hitherto never rated her
It is these policy positions which earned her the title 'most liberal U.S. senator' by a non-partisan monitor of U.S. lawmakers when she was the junior senator for California. That is where she is most vulnerable in the coming campaign — and where the Republicans should be concentrating their attacks.
In truth, Harris has always been a political chameleon. When law and order were fashionable even among Democrats, she posed as a tough Californian prosecutor, ending up as the state's attorney general and often earning the ire of the Left for the enthusiasm with which she put the bad guys behind bars.
As the progressives grew in strength inside the Democrats, she tilted Left, hence the slew of fashionable policy positions which won her the 'most liberal senator' moniker.
She ran to the Left of Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2019. But when Biden asked her to be his running mate she quickly fell in behind his more centrist positions, from which she has never veered as Vice President.
In the avalanche of collective euphoria which has enveloped the vast Democratic Media Industrial Complex since Biden made way for her, it's been forgotten what a poor campaigner and politician she can be. Harris's campaign was so bad when she last ran for the presidential nomination five years ago, she pulled out before the primary season had even started.
Yesterday, her campaign released a video of her accepting Obama's backing by phone. It was so staged and scripted, it was cringing. Harris held the phone to her ear even though she was on speaker mode. Despite the boosterism of her fans, she's still some way from walking on water.
Much of what passes for broadcast journalism in America is actually Democratic Party activism and its practitioners and adherents have gone from division and despair under Biden to unanimous praise and enthusiasm for his successor as candidate.
Harris is being depicted as Wonder Woman, even among those many Democrats who hitherto never rated her. Only a few months ago party powerbrokers argued against Biden standing down because the Vice President was regarded as generally too useless and unpopular to be a credible alternative.
Democrats are now loudly trumpeting that Trump is too old. So age does matter after all! When their candidate was the older, we were assured it didn't, that even to raise the issue was somehow unfair and unpatriotic.
Kamala was anointed by Barack Obama, who had done so much behind the scenes to ease out poor old Joe. Her candidacy was complete. Chicago will be a triumph, writes Andrew Neil
But Harris is almost 20 years younger than Trump. So suddenly it's relevant after all, illustrating that the oh-so pious Democrats and their media allies can be every bit as shameless as Trump and his Fox News acolytes. It is best to regard all this, from both sides, as noise signifying nothing.
What matters is that the demise of Biden and the rise of Harris has reset the race to where it was before Biden's car-crash debate: Trump is marginally ahead in the polls but within their margin of error. The crucial difference with a few months ago is that the initiative is now with the Democrats.
Harris has raised her game. Her notorious word salads and obscure off-the-cuff remarks have gone. She can deliver a scripted speech from the teleprompter with vim and vigour, which is more than Biden has been able to do for quite some time, even if there is — as yet — little substance to her speeches.
In an election in which digital channels will matter more than ever she has a social media presence of which Biden could only dream, especially on TikTok, where she's taken off big time since British pop star Charli XCX deemed her to be 'brat'(apparently a mixture of messy, fun and cool), which the Harris campaign has fully embraced in its own social media output.
Early signs are that Harris is polling better among the young and voters of colour but weaker among older and working class voters. She risks piling up votes in liberal states but losing them in swing states.
Harris can campaign on a strong U.S. economy. It grew at a brisk 2.8 per cent annual rate in the second quarter of this year, way above expectations.
But, curiously, voters are disinclined to give the Biden-Harris administration much credit for an economy growing at a rate European leaders (including Keir Starmer) can only dream of.
Even though inflation is way off its peak, voters are still smarting from previous price rises now baked in at supermarket checkouts and the petrol pump.
She will not want to say much about America's southern border with Mexico, over which perhaps 10 million illegal immigrants have poured on the Democrats' watch. She was given a prominent role to do something about this by Biden but achieved nothing.
She is being tagged as the 'failed border tsar'. It is, Republicans will say, par for the course for a 'San Francisco radical'.
This is the most potent epithet they can throw at her. It conjures up images of the degradation of what was once America's most beautiful big city under liberal-Left rule: swathes of the centre taken over by the tents of the homeless (many immigrants), becoming no-go areas in the process; hard drugs openly injected on the streets; shop-lifting rampant because it is not penalised; a general sense of squalor and lawlessness.
Republicans will use 'San Francisco radical' to tar Harris's reputation in much the same way Republicans used 'Massachusetts Democrat' to see off Mike Dukakis and John Kerry in previous presidential contests. It is their most effective attack line. How effectively it will be used is another matter.
Trump is his own worst enemy. At his party's convention in Milwaukee, he had the opportunity, especially in the aftermath of the shooting, to reach out beyond his base to the independents, moderates and suburban women he needs to win.
For the first scripted 30 minutes of his speech, it looked as if he would do just that. Then he went off-script and meandered for an agonising hour, trotting out his self-obsessed, shopworn stump speech and riffing about whatever came into his undisciplined mind, lying as he went.
Only the cult was impressed. For everybody else it was mind-numbing, the longest convention acceptance speech on record.
His reaction to Biden pulling out of the race was graceless, even childish — characteristics which infect his campaign team. On Thursday, it said it would not negotiate debate dates with Team Harris because of the 'political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden' and his party, which was beginning to regard Harris as a 'Marxist fraud' and so thinking of choosing 'someone better'. It claimed Obama was of such a mind, referring to him as 'Barack Hussein Obama'.
It was all stuff and nonsense, offensively so. Any sensible Republican strategy would pin Harris down now to two or even three debates this autumn. She is no great debater and something of a risk when she has to think on her feet.
Given her track record there is every chance, despite the guardrails with which the Democratic leadership will surround her, that her campaign will have its embarrassing setbacks, some potentially terminal.
But sense is in short supply from Trump and his team since Harris took the stage. They have time to put it right, though not much time.
My guess as things stand is that it is still Trump's to lose, just. But unless there is a course correction, lose it he will.