Can Trump derail Kamala Harris bandwagon? It doesn't look like it

“Donald, if you’ve got something to say….” She paused, grinning, almost giggling, just long enough for her audience to begin its response. “THEN SAY IT TO MY FACE.”

It took all of 15 seconds for the clip to land on Tik-Tok’s For You feeds, and less 15 minutes for “Say it to My Face” T-shirts to hit Etsy.

Harris in that Atlanta moment looked and sounded like no-one so much as Barack Obama circa July 2008, telegenic and transformative, a politician comfortable in her own skin and confident in her own abilities to control the cadence and mood of an arena crowd. But while the 43rd President of the United States had a cool, occasionally cold, persona both off and on stage, Harris exudes warmth and humanity of the other Obama, Michelle.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2024. Kenny Holston/The New York Times (Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times)

If this sounds like an unbeatable combination, so far it seems that is exactly what it will turn out to be.

The credible polls, which had been shifting slowly but steadily in Trump’s favour after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance at the end of June, have lurched towards Harris at both the national and, more importantly, state level. According to a new Bloomberg poll on Monday, the vice president has gained ground in six of the seven most crucial swing states since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. She leads in four of those states, is tied in one and trails in two, albeit within the margin of error.

Meanwhile, the demographic segments that had been worrying Democratic political operatives, particularly black and young voters, now have a more familiar look, with Harris leading amongst black voters by a 75% margin and by 34% with voters aged 18-34.

As for the national mood – you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. All you need is two minutes in the company of Fox News, where pro-Trump prime time hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have been lighting up the screen like a pair of five-watt bulbs over the last week or so. Both are a disgrace to journalism but they’re not dumb. They know their guy is on the ropes and taking gut punch after gut punch. Hence, the funereal gloom.

In its first week, Harris’ fund-raising efforts pulled in $200 million – four times what the Biden campaign raised in the entire month of April. That money is already spilling into the swing states, where the campaign’s first advert has been on constant rotation. Called “Fearless”, it seeks to define the candidate as a life-long campaigner against economic injustice and a career prosecutor of criminals and fraudsters who have tried to take advantage of ordinary Americans. Sound like anyone you might have heard of?

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Two-thirds of that $200m came from small donations, with the rest being chipped in by what the Republicans disparagingly call the “Hollywood elites”. The GOP hates money in politics, except when it is backing its agenda. Twas ever thus.

Hard cash matters, of course, but equally vital is the soft influence of cultural leaders, and here Harris has left Trump eating dust. George Clooney, who was the first high-profile Democratic celebrity supporters to break ranks on Biden, writing an New York Times’ op-ed calling for the President to step aside in favor of a younger candidate, is back on board and has endorsed her. Beyonce gave the candidate permission to use one of her songs on the “Fearless” ad, free of charge, of course. Charli xcx famously described Harris as brat, a Gen Z nomenclature the campaign embraced with impressive speed. Within hours the branding on its social media feeds carried the lurid green of Charli’s new album cover.

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign, and indeed the wider political community, awaits an announcement from the queen of the American cultural landscape. Taylor Swift, for it is she, has endorsed Democrats in the past but never in a Presidential election. Is this the moment for her to throw her support to Harris, a candidate who appears to embody everything we know about the singer’s political beliefs. If Tay-Tay goes for it, Trump is Tay-Toast. As every no good, deadbeat guy who has crossed America’s sweetheart in the past, from John Maher to Matt Healey, will attest – no-one messes with the Swifties and gets away with it.

There is an energy and excitement to all of this which is infectious. Presidential politics is serious business but victory cannot be secured without some style and, especially, good humour. Harris has shown both in bucket loads thus far. Frankly, Trump produced the same goods in 2016. He was toxic and offensive for the most part, but he was also on occasion funny. This time around he has been the absolute worst version of himself – a hateful and confused old ranter, the kind of guy you would change train carriage just to get away from.

Nor would anyone be rushing to sit beside Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, an odd duck with deeply offensive views about women, particular childless women, who has alienated mainstream voters in even less time that it took Sarah Palin to cement her place as one of America’s least appealing political crackpots.

Donald Trump (Image: free)

The former President has his fan base, of course, but sitting on the bleachers behind him at rallies as he delivers meandering speeches about electric boats, windmills and the deep state, even the regulars looked bored out of their skulls. Trump has lost his gift for reading the room. Given his inability to string together coherent sentences, his mind appears to be going the same way.

This explains why he, or at least his campaign handlers, used Biden’s departure from the campaign as an excuse to back away from the next scheduled Presidential debate on September 10. “I want to do a debate, but I also can say this: Everybody knows who I am, and now people know who she is,” Trump told a friendly interviewer this week. In other words, the self-styled “strongman” would rather get rid of his combover than expose himself to a 90 minute exchange of views and ideas with an experienced criminal prosecutor like Harris. She would have him for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner.

There are still 95 days until the election, of course. If we have learned anything from the last two weeks it is that nothing is certain in this 2024 electoral cycle apart from the chronic uncertainty. After all, who knew that Joe Biden would wake up two Sundays ago and decide he’d had enough? Who knew that Kamala Harris, who had run a well-funded but shambolic campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020, would return to the stage with such electricity in the tips of her fingers?

Well, here we are.

Mike Murphy, long-time political consultant, host of the hugely popular Hacks on Tap podcast and a confirmed Harris-sceptic, describes Biden’s departure from the Presidential campaign trail and Harris’ arrival as a “neck-snapping” moment.

“There was a tornado of positive emotion so big and so powerful that it picks up Kamala Harris, who had been damaged goods before. And now she is flying at 800 mph and 300 feet,’’ he says. “But the tornado is going to end, and she is going to hit the ground. The question then is, can she keep rolling?”

For Trump’s sake, she had better not. For the rest of the democracy-embracing world, fingers crossed.