If Vice President Kamala Harris goes on to win the 2024 presidential election, there is little doubt that the defining moment of the campaign will be the July 21 announcement by President Joe Biden that he was quitting the Democratic race in favor of Harris. In this report, voting and elections expert Rhodes Cook examines how in one fell swoop, the whole tone of the campaign swiftly changed in a way never before seen in American history.
Document Outline
Stranger than Fiction
“Defining Moments” in the Past
Defining moments in past campaigns have been marked by divisive conventions, effective negative advertising, and self-inflicted wounds by one of the candidates. But never as late as mid-summer has a presumptive nominee such as Biden upended a race by stepping aside.
To be sure, Biden was pushed out of the contest by party leaders. Through much of the year before, his campaign seemed stuck in neutral, with the frail-looking Biden, 81, looking and acting his age. His problems were exacerbated by a disastrous debate performance against Trump,78, in late June, in which the president often appeared zoned out and incoherent.
Many Democrats, leaders and rank and file, were stunned by his performance. Doubt and anxiety rose sharply within the party that Biden could mount a winning campaign against Trump. Into July, many polls showed Biden trailing in both the nationwide vote and in the key battleground states (starting with the five that switched from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). To many, the race appeared largely static and increasingly unwinnable for Biden.
Nobody could tell for sure what a switch from Biden to the 59-year-old Harris would do to the Democratic campaign. But the move in late July went about as positively for the party as it possibly could. With Biden gone, the age issue suddenly became a negative for the septuagenarian Trump, while Harris’ sunny, vigorous manner contrasted well with the dour former president. Overnight, the party that appeared lethargic and on the verge of defeat was energized, passionate and capable of raising large sums of money and volunteers. Harris’ choice of the ebullient Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate in early August added to the Democrats’ newfound momentum.
How long the Democratic ticket will have the wind at its back is an open question. Republicans have begun attacking, from Harris’ alleged liberalism to controversial details of Walz’s departure from the Army National Guard. They are the first in a wave of sharp attacks expected to continue throughout the fall.
To be sure, these are volatile times. The Democratic hand-off from Biden to Harris took place in a period of fast-moving events that began in the late spring.
For all practical appearances, this volatile time began on May 30, when a New York court convicted Trump on thirty-four counts of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, to keep her quiet about their relationship during the final stages of the 2016 campaign. (Sentencing for Trump is scheduled for September 18, with three other charges being weighed against him in other courts.)
On June 11, presidential son Hunter Biden was convicted in a Wilmington, Delaware, court, of three felony gun charges for violating laws meant to prevent drug addicts from purchasing firearms.
On June 27, Trump and Biden took part in a presidential debate that went spectacularly bad for Biden. Democratic calls for him to quit the race built quickly toward a crescendo.
On July 1, by a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents (including Trump) possessed wide presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken while in office.
On July 13, Trump was nearly assassinated at an outdoors rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A shot from the roof of a building roughly 450 feet away from the podium grazed his right ear, while narrowly missing entry into the side of his head.
Just two days later, Trump appeared on opening day of the Republican convention in Milwaukee with his newly named running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, a faithful young “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) supporter. The former president wore a white patch over his right ear, ostensibly an effort to highlight the wound he received from the assassination attempt. Throughout the convention, Republican leaders appeared confident of victory in the fall, possibly by landslide proportions.
Few voters, however, were eager to see a rematch of the 2020 campaign that featured two old white men, with Biden’s age and lack of energy in particular weighing down the Democrats. In short order, on July 21, Biden quit the race in favor of Harris, and the campaign changed dramatically in the Democrats’ favor.
On August 6, Harris named Walz as her vice presidential partner. Almost unknown nationally at the time he was picked, Walz showed a humorous and appealing (if not a bit quirky) personality that tended to magnify the appeal of the newly minted Democratic ticket. Harris and Walz immediately began to contrast themselves with their Republican opponents, portraying the new look, high-energy Democratic ticket as practitioners of a “politics of joy,” which would focus on the future, not the past.
Large, raucous crowds have greeted Harris and Walz on the campaign trail, and polls have shown that momentum has shifted in a big way to the Democrats. By the middle of August, many surveys showed Harris moving ahead of Trump in the nationwide popular vote, as well as breaking into Trump’s hegemony in the battleground states. All in all, to many who follow elections, this summer of presidential politics has felt stranger than fiction. And the fall might feature more of the same.
Next up on the campaign calendar is a debate between Trump and Harris scheduled for September 10, and a vice-presidential debate between Vance and Walz on October 1.
Big, momentum-changing “defining moments” do not happen every presidential election. In fact, they do not happen very much at all. In the past, some of the big changes resulted from divisive conventions that tore one of the major parties apart.
On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, for instance, the Democrats could not agree on the future of slavery in the territories, with the northern and southern wings breaking apart and nominating separate presidential candidates. The result was an easy victory for the fledgling Republican Party and its nominee, Abraham Lincoln.
In 1912, it was the Republican convention held in June that exploded. On one side was President William Howard Taft, a champion of the party establishment; on the other side, was former President Theodore Roosevelt, a bundle of energy who led the party’s progressive wing in 1912 and won most of the GOP’s newly minted presidential primaries that spring. Yet at its core, their contest was a battle of personalities, pitting strong-willed men against each other who were once close friends. Once Taft secured the GOP nomination with support from the party hierarchy, Roosevelt’s forces bolted the convention and held one of their own in August that nominated the popular former president. With the Republicans badly split, Democrat Woodrow Wilson coasted to victory.
And then there was the Democratic convention of 1968 in Chicago, where the party argued loudly over the United States’s involvement in the deadly, long-running Vietnam War that was defying resolution. President Lyndon Johnson had announced earlier in the year that he would not seek reelection. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, assumed the mantel of the establishment candidate, although he did not enter a single primary that year. The primaries were the terrain of anti-war candidates, Sens. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) and Eugene McCarthy. RFK might have been able to wrest the nomination from Humphrey at the convention if he had not been assassinated in early June after winning the California primary.
There were protests inside and outside the convention hall that August. Those outside turned particularly ugly, with the Chicago police waging what was described as “a police riot” against the anti-war protestors. Television vividly showed the carnage to voters across the country, leaving many voters to conclude that a party that could not govern itself could not govern the country. Democrats recovered a bit in the fall campaign, but Republican Richard Nixon emerged the winner.
And then there are other “defining moments” that have gone beyond conventions. Sometimes, it is a self-inflicted wound. A case in point: 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern dumping his running mate within days of his selection at the party’s convention. McGovern had picked Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri after a quick vetting process that missed the fact that Eagleton had past mental health issues, including two electro-shock treatments. McGovern complicated the problem by saying that he was “1,000%” behind Eagleton several days before ushering him off the ticket. McGovern’s ham-handed handling of the situation turned his chances of winning from vaguely possible to impossible. Nixon was reelected in a 49-state landslide.
In addition, there can be the combination of effective negative advertising with a self-inflicted wound, as occurred with the Democratic nominee in 1988, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. He emerged from his party’s convention in July with a seventeen-point lead over Republican George H.W. Bush in the Gallup Poll. But not long afterwards, Dukakis began to be pelted with negative advertising from the GOP, attacking Dukakis on several issues, especially Willie Horton.
Horton was a Black prisoner who was convicted of murder Dukakis’ state prison furlough program had given Horton several weekend furloughs. One, though, did not go well when Horton escaped, raped a white woman, and attacked her male partner. While the incident made Dukakis look like he was soft on crime, he did not respond quickly or effectively to the Republican attack. He felt voters would not linger on the issue. As it turned out, they did. Dukakis’ lead quickly began to shrink and by Election Day, Bush was the winner by 8 points.
In all of these examples – 1860, 1912, 1968, 1972, and 1988 – there was only one “defining moment” in each presidential campaign. But could this election have two or more? Might Trump gain back the momentum and go onto victory in November? His campaign has already launched negative attacks on Harris and Walz, as did Bush with great effect in 1988. Can Harris play defense better than Dukakis, or John Kerry in 2004, when the latter was “Swift Boated”?
Both Trump and Harris appear evenly matched – in terms of passionate supporters, enthusiastic volunteers, campaign fund raising, and even crowd size for their rallies. One fact worth noting that could work to Trump’s advantage: In both 2016 and 2020, he ran better on Election Day than in pre-election polling.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton led the election-eve RealClear Politics (RCP) rolling average of polls over Trump by 3.3 percentage points. In the election itself, Clinton’s popular vote margin was 2.1 points, not enough to nail down a number of battleground states that went for the victorious Trump. In 2020, Biden approached Election Day with a lead of 7.8 points in RCP polling, and ran ahead in the actual election balloting by 4.4 percentage points. That proved to be a large enough lead for Biden to switch five battleground states that provided Trump with his victorious Electoral College margin four years earlier. Meanwhile, on the eve of this year’s Democratic convention in mid-August, Harris led Trump by 1.5 points in RCP surveys.
What will happen next? In a presidential race that has already veered into the surreal, there is really no good answer at all beyond waiting and seeing.
Rhodes Cook 8/20/24