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WASHINGTON (AP) — The past year’s presidential campaign seemed destined to be a tedious slog with just two candidates, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, neither of whom voters really wanted.
But all that changed on a quiet Sunday afternoon, just 107 days before the election.
Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor has restarted the campaign at a speed unprecedented in modern American politics.
The election, once a contest between two older white men, will likely force Trump to compete against the much younger Harris, who is solidifying Democratic support and would become the first woman of color to appear on a major party ticket.
“It completely changes everything,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “It turns everything upside down.”
Biden’s Democratic reelection effort has begun to unravel, beginning with his poor debate performance last month against the Republican former president, which has left both parties reeling. While no one has stepped up to challenge Harris for the Democratic nomination, she still faces an unprecedented challenge of taking over the campaign just four weeks before the party’s convention in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Trump must turn his attention to Harris as he prepares for a rematch with Biden, with his team claiming to be ready to run against the vice president and Republicans stepping up their criticism at their convention in Milwaukee last week.
However, Trump himself expressed frustration that “we have to start over” with the campaign, musing on his social media platform Truth Social that Republicans should be “compensated for fraud” for all the money they spent running against Biden.
The presidential race has been shaken up after an unusually turbulent month in American politics, beginning with an unusually early debate between Biden and Trump.
The June 27 showdown has raised concerns that Biden, 81, is too old to run for a second term.
Just as the Democrats were trying hard to knock Trump off the top of the presidential candidate list, Trump encountered an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, but narrowly escaped.
Just a week later, Biden bowed to intra-party pressure and stepped down. He quickly endorsed Harris, the first woman, Black and South Asian to serve as vice president.
These dramatic developments have left the political world breathless as everyone tries to readjust to the new reality.
Trump, 78, will almost certainly be the oldest candidate on the ballot after months of attacking Biden over his age. Harris is just 59, making her eligible to represent the generational change Biden will never be able to achieve.
Additionally, Harris is a former prosecutor, which provides new opportunities to attack Trump’s status as a felon after he was found guilty in his hush money trial earlier this year.
She is also the daughter of immigrants, raised by a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, a background that stands in stark contrast to Trump, who has made racist, sexist and nativist comments.
Harris tried to sum up their differences in a campaign ad five years ago when she was seeking the Democratic nomination before she dropped out of the race and joined Biden’s campaign as his running mate.
“She’s the anti-Trump in every way,” the narrator says. “So if you want the next president to be anti-Trump, there’s really only one person – Kamala.”
The head of the Trump campaign shrugged off the dramatic change, saying “Kamala Harris is as much of a joke as Biden.”
“They own each other’s records and nothing comes between them,” senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement.
Immigration will remain a major attack surface for the Democrats, especially since Harris was put in charge of immigration by Biden early in his administration. Republicans claim she was appointed “border czar” and accuse her of illegal border crossings.
“They’re still going to run the same Gotham playbook, they’re just going to exacerbate the racism and the sexism,” said Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher. “Let’s not pretend these things don’t matter, because they do.”
However, Belcher said Harris’ “x factor” is her potential appeal to a diverse electorate.
“If you look at her, she’s the best chance the Democratic Party has right now to reengage and energize its coalition of young, brown voters,” he said.
Democrats are eager to turn a political weakness plaguing Biden – his age – into an attack on Trump.
“It’s going to end up being a showdown between the oldest presidential candidate in history, Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 27-year-old Florida Democrat who has been working to reach young voters for Biden’s campaign.
Frost, who supports Harris, noted that the vice president’s work on gun violence protection could appeal to young voters and said Harris “will be able to win back a lot of young voter votes.”
“She’s someone who takes young people’s voices very seriously,” he said.
At last week’s Republican National Convention, Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster and senior adviser, said the campaign was “100% ready” to take on Harris. He noted that speakers at the event often referred to a “Biden-Harris” administration in their speeches and said the campaign had anti-Harris videos ready in case Biden stepped down early.
However, Trump seemed to have some doubts. After Biden dropped out of the race, Trump hinted that he was reconsidering whether to participate in another debate hosted by ABC News on September 10.
“Now that Joe has unsurprisingly dropped out of the race, I believe that whoever the Radical Left Democrats choose to debate should be held on Fox News and not on the very biased ABC,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
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