Editor’s Note: This is the third of a five-part series that tells the story of the closing months of the 2024 presidential campaign, starting with the June debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Read the first and second installments.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president.”
Joe Biden is out.
More than five decades after he won a county council seat in Wilmington, he is less than two hours away at his Delaware beach home when he gives up his fight to hold the Oval Office. His decision is made on a weekend spent with his family and closest advisers, and in such secrecy even people close to him are telling CNN’s MJ Lee just hours earlier there is no way he will quit. They were not deceiving her, she will conclude, they just didn’t know.
“The inner circle that was always really small got even smaller,” she says of the endgame.
The tipping point appears to have been a talk with House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, in which she predicted a Biden loss would produce an avalanche of defeats for other Democrats fighting for control of Congress. As Lee puts it, “She said to him, per our reporting, the polling shows you’re going to lose and you’re going to bring the House down with you.” Months later, Pelosi will tell The Guardian that she and Biden have not spoken since and that some of his allies have not forgiven her.
Biden announces his decision on social media on July 21, then talks about it on television a few days later.
“I revere this office. But I love my country more,” he says from the White House, which he will now have to vacate at the start of the new year. By all accounts, it has been a tortuous decision for this man who suffered publicly through the deaths of his first wife and daughter in an auto accident in the 1970s and the loss of a beloved son to cancer almost 10 years ago.
As Biden speaks, it is easy to see another grief piling atop the grandeur of his life. “America’s going to have to choose between moving forward and moving backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division,” he says in a parting shot at Donald Trump. “We have to decide if we still believe in honesty, decency, respect, freedom, justice and democracy.”
Any hope Democrats had that such appeals to principle would triumph have so far been fruitless. Trump’s preening, divisive words at the Republican National Convention have cost him nothing. He did not get much of a “convention bounce” in the polls. Candidates rarely do anymore. But his numbers are still firm, the attempt on his life has slightly boosted his approval ratings, and Team Trump remains confident it has the race in hand. Sort of.
A bold headline in The Atlantic in early July had proclaimed, “Trump is Planning on a Landslide Win.” That possibility, however, was anchored in the predictability of the race against Biden, whose departure has dismantled the Trump team’s careful plans. “They were pretty surprised and unpleasantly surprised,” Atlantic writer Tim Alberta tells NPR’s Michel Martin, “because this was who they wanted to run against. Make no mistake, Joe Biden was the optimal target, they felt, for Donald Trump in this campaign.”
Biden’s withdrawal is almost Trumpian in that it is unexpected, unprecedented and has released unpredictable forces. Chief among them, the person the outgoing president tapped to replace him on the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Joe Biden’s legacy of accomplishment over the past three years is unmatched in modern history,” she says in her first stop in front of cameras after he steps aside, “and we are deeply, deeply grateful for his service to our nation.” Focusing on a note of thanks rather than a campaign message is a gracious move in the eyes of some White House watchers, but it is also tactical.
For weeks, plenty of possible heirs to the nomination have been floated. Governors including California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Maryland’s Wes Moore and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia were bandied. Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has been in the mix.
Some politicos speculated that the mix of oversize egos and opportunity could explode into a vicious floor fight at the Democratic National Convention less than a month away. Yet the ascension of Harris, coupled with her praise of Biden, produces no discernable dissent. Biden paved the way by choosing her. Harris helps herself by reaching out to influential and powerful Democrats, saying she is not just asking for their support but is committed to winning it.
At the vice president’s residence and office on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, Harris (who learned Biden was stepping aside shortly before he told the nation) goes into a marathon of 100 straight calls. “She just sat there and did one phone call after another,” Lee says. The pieces come together and are welded tight by party leaders who recognize skipping over a Black woman in such a natural seat of succession could be perilous.
Ashley Etienne previously served as a communications director for Harris and Pelosi, and she was a special assistant to former President Barack Obama. “People understood that if you didn’t choose Kamala Harris, you’d have a big problem with your base voters,” Etienne says. “You would almost have a civil war within the Democratic Party.”
Less than two days after Biden withdraws, Harris has the firm commitment of enough delegates to know the nomination is hers. Democrats breathe a sigh of relief. Republicans do not. In his infamous golf cart takedown of Biden weeks earlier, Trump had dismissed Harris’ chances with the bravado of a duffer about to hook his ball into the deep woods. “She’s so bad,” he growled. “She’s so pathetic. She’s so f**king bad.”
The Harris team seamlessly takes over the Biden organization, the campaign rakes in $126 million in donations over the first couple of days, and more than 100,000 new volunteers sign up for duty. Democratic organizers in states that seemed all but lost start recalibrating their party’s chances. Where no official campaign yard signs for Harris can be found, fans are making them. Coconuts are in vogue based on a lesson about community the new candidate says she learned from her mother: “She would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’”
Charli XCX posts on X, “Kamala IS brat.” The term was spun out of the British pop star’s hot new album, and she says it means “that girl who is a little messy, and likes to party, and like maybe says some, like, dumb things sometimes… is very honest, is very blunt, a little bit volatile… that’s brat.” Young women flood social media with pro-Harris “brat” memes.
“I’ve never seen energy like this, this time in an election cycle,” says Ron Bieber, head of the AFL-CIO in battleground Michigan.
Harris storms into Wisconsin for her first rally since becoming the Democratic candidate, where she paints Trump as little more than a common criminal. She says as a prosecutor she “took on perpetrators of all kinds: Predators who abused women; fraudsters who ripped off consumers; cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” adding, “so hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
The crowd explodes with cheers and chants of “Lock him up!” Alternating between broad smiles and fervor, Harris talks about building up the middle class, shutting down conservative fantasies about Project 2025, and Trump’s many failings in the eyes of her party.
Much of it is strikingly like Biden’s message, but Harris brings fresh energy and her audience plugs in, taking up the call and response when she shouts, “We’re not going back!”
The intensity of the moment seems to catch Team Trump off guard. “They say they were prepared with opposition research on everybody who could have replaced him (Biden), but it was clear that whatever they had was not sufficient in the days after she ascended to the top of the ticket,” says CNN’s Kristen Holmes, who is covering the Trump campaign.
“They had no roadmap for this,” says CNN’s Phil Mattingly about the chaotic days in Trump land after the switch on the Democratic side. “Do you know any presidential campaign built to be a multibillion-dollar enterprise (that) can all of a sudden immediately pivot out of that? Every campaign would have had a similar type of response. You have to kind of rebuild the plane while it is in the air.”
Trump’s instinct is to counterstrike, calling Harris a “radical crazy person,” a “danger to democracy,” a “socialist” and “ultraliberal.” He insists she is a champion of open borders, and an economic naif with no plan for the economy. His allies say she is afraid to submit to hard interviews – an interesting charge coming from the camp of a candidate who generally sits only for the most ingratiating media hosts. He and his supporters allege she stole the nomination, slept her way to the top, and, as a “mediocre vice president,” has advanced only because she is a minority woman being given unfair advantages.
That last slur spurs CNN political commentator Van Jones to say Trump could quickly lose some of the modest gains he’s had with Latino and Black men. “You start insulting Black women, you‘re going to see something you haven’t seen before. Black men are not going to put up with that.”
If Trump hears the warning, he doesn’t let on. At the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, the former president drops jaws with a shocking claim about his opponent. “She was always of Indian heritage,” he says, “and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris’ father was born in Jamaica, her mother in India. She has long and publicly identified as Black and attended Howard University, a renowned name among historically Black colleges and universities.
Trump’s attack conjures memories of the way he went after Obama for five years saying the first Black president was not born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to hold the office. Only under immense pressure in the 2016 race against Hillary Clinton did Trump finally admit he was wrong.
Many of the other claims from Trump and his allies about Harris are also false, but the truth is clear: Team Trump is doing anything it can to respond to the unexpected speed and power of the Harris freight train. While repeatedly (and plenty of political observers would say purposely) mispronouncing her name, Trump tries out one of his favorite tricks for demeaning opponents. He cycles through a series of nicknames, finally landing on “Lyin’ Kamala” and “Comrade Kamala” as his favorites.
Trump does not seem to fully grasp that Harris is a formidable foe. But Democratic insiders know of her powers via what was in effect a secret weapon. Though every vice president struggles for attention in the shadow of their chief executive, in a prescient move years earlier, Harris had begun sending newsletters to top Democrats coast to coast, updating them on her accomplishments. “So although it wasn’t covered nationally,” the former aide Etienne says, “people were getting that information in their inbox. So they had no question within the caucus whether the vice president was doing anything.”
On the trail, CNN’s Alayna Treene notices Trump pining for the past. “He always says, ‘I won that first debate with Joe Biden.’ There is definitely no question that he still longs (for that time) and occasionally forgets that he’s not running against Joe Biden.”
CNN’s Jeff Zeleny puts a finer point on Trump’s reaction to his new opponent. “I don’t know that he detests Biden as much as he clearly, viscerally detests her. … This is like interlaid with sexism, racism and other stuff. He’s had plenty of women who worked for him over the years, but there was no one who looked like Kamala Harris and there was no one in a position of authority. So for sure, I think he’s had a very hard time getting his head around her as an opponent.”
When Harris picks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance leaps into the fray. A Marine veteran, Trump’s vice presidential nominee criticizes Walz for retiring from his 24-year career in the Army National Guard not long before Walz’s unit deployed to Iraq. “When the United States Marine Corps, when the United States of America, asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it,” Vance says.
The Ohio Republican never saw combat, and Walz was not certain his fellow troops would either. Still, Walz had implied in at least one speech that he had carried a weapon in war, which was untrue. Questions also come up about Walz claiming a higher rank at retirement than the records show.
Other veterans invoke the notion of “stolen valor,” but within a few weeks Trump himself runs indirect interference for Walz. Visiting Arlington National Cemetery to honor service members killed in the chaotic US departure from Afghanistan in 2021 (which Trump is using as an election talking point), his staff gets into a confrontation with a cemetery worker. The Pentagon says Trump’s team was explicitly told it could not shoot video for political purposes on the hallowed grounds, and yet witnesses say Trump photographers tried to force their way in. Trump calls the controversy a “made up story” as pictures emerge of him grinning and giving a thumbs-up over the graves of troops.
The broader problem for the Trump-Vance ticket is that none of their attacks on the Harris-Walz team appear to be sticking with undecided, moderate voters key to victory in the deeply divided electorate. Then again, maybe that is not who Trump is seeking. In 2020, roughly a third of all eligible voters, 80 million of them, did not vote. One theory of 2024 is that Trump can win if he activates enough of those folks on the distant right to offset the voters he may not be able to reach in the middle.
It’s a risky strategy to carry into the general election, when not just Republicans are voting. But CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere says of Trump’s crude calculation, “He believes there is a way to get those people who want to stick it to the system.”
The voters Harris wants to add to her tally are apparent from the start: young people who were not excited about Biden, minority groups, anyone who thinks Trump is too deceitful or chaotic, disaffected Republicans if she can get them, and women. Especially women.
Roughly 57% of female voters in 2020 backed Biden. Trump had 53% of men, but that wasn’t enough to make up the difference. Trump is courting young men again, especially those with lower educational levels, by appearing at sporting events, on podcasts angled toward male audiences and by constantly pushing his “strongman” image.
By contrast, Harris is thrashing Trump over abortion rights. Biden tried to exploit Trump’s vulnerability on the issue, but Harris connects squarely. It echoes through her first, rousing commercial backed by Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” As the music builds over images of smiling Americans, Harris says, “We choose freedom. The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about our own body.”
In a nation where polls consistently show a large majority of voters believe abortion should be legal everywhere with only some exceptions, the issue has proved a powerful motivator. When it is put up as a ballot measure even in deeply red states, voters have chosen the abortion rights side time and again.
That puts Trump in a bind. On one hand, his evangelical followers love it when he takes credit for dismantling Roe. On the other, Trump knows that this part of his record is electoral poison to some women. His standard move when pressed is to dodge responsibility. “Every Democrat, every Republican,” he tells Fox News, “everybody wanted Roe v. Wade terminated and brought back to the states.” In person and in social media posts, he insists all legal scholars wanted it back in the hands of the states too. Those claims are not true.
To make it worse, in Alabama, where he won 62% of the vote in 2020, the state Supreme Court started 2024 by pulling the pin on a grenade and handing it to the former president. The court ruled embryos created via in vitro fertilization should be legally considered children. Health care providers and women’s rights advocates tore into the ruling, and once again questions came barreling in for Trump. Now with Harris tapping into that anger and outrage, Trump sees the thing his team fears most: movement for her in the polls.
The advantage Trump held over Biden is melting. In some places Trump and Harris are even. In others she is pulling ahead. In a few, either candidate might have the edge. But more and more, Trump is on the trailing side of the numbers just as Biden was. And pollsters are finding Harris is drawing more voters who actually like her, not just dislike Trump.
He is also about 20 years older than Harris. All the questions and smirking innuendoes about Biden’s age are now swirling around Trump as he meanders through speeches, mangles words and suffers occasional memory lapses.
And Harris is pressing for a debate of her own. Almost as soon as she began this sped-up campaign, she said she wanted to go ahead with the debate already planned for ABC News in the waning days of summer. “I think that the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage and so, I’m ready. Let’s go,” she said.
When Trump waffles, her surrogates accuse him of being afraid. Her campaign posts video of him overlaid with the sound of a clucking chicken. Trump, who so often delights fans by bullying his opponents, is on the unfamiliar receiving end and uncharacteristically unable to flip the script.
Under building pressure, he finally agrees to share the stage with Harris. Same rules as before. On September 10, the two presidential hopefuls will meet. Or as some might see it, the brat and the bully will have a showdown.
Coming Thursday: How cat people are still haunting Trump’s campaign