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At the moment, according to data published by the polling aggregator Realclearpolling, Donald Trump is still ahead of his new opponent, the current vice-president Kamala Harris. We are talking about a +1.2% lead, a figure that is, however, thinner than the rate reached by ‘The Donald’ after the TV duel with President Biden. Harris currently has three complicated months ahead of her, during which she will have the arduous task of convincing the Democratic voters to take her to the White House, this time as hostess of the house.
HONEYMOON IN THE WHITE HOUSE
This is exactly what it’s all about, a honeymoon between candidate Harris and the Democratic voters after Biden’s step back. The President’s decision to complete his term but not to run in the next election has indeed given new life to the Dem world, creating a unity that, in recent months, had only been seen in the push for Biden to throw in the towel. Kamala Harris is, therefore, currently living her own special honeymoon, but once it is over, she will have to retain the support of the voters to overtake the Republican candidate. At the moment the wait is on for the TV debate, which the tycoon hopes will take place as soon as possible. Trump is certainly not afraid of confrontation on video, especially after the sound drubbing delivered to Biden in the last TV meeting, from which the movement that led the President to abandon the candidacy in favour of his vice-presidential candidate was triggered.
THE JUNE DEBATE
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t even think he knew.” This is how Donald Trump joked at the end of the TV duel on 27 June, after President Biden’s debacle was apparent to millions of Americans. It was in the CNN studios that President Biden staked the continuation of his political career. There he would have to prove to the citizens of the United States that he was able to run and complete a second term. All while trying to overcome the gaffes and behaviour that in recent months had led to the impression of a man too old to sit in the Oval Office. For 90 minutes the President, unfortunately, squandered his opportunity and failed to get away from the ropes against which Trump forced him. Sadly, the imprecise answers (sometimes without much sense) delivered in a hoarse, drawling voice, put the Dems on edge as they were no longer able to stem the President’s decline and the voices – from many quarters – calling for him to step back.
GOOFS AND POLLS
To weigh on Biden’s campaign and to fuel the pressures on the Dems’ world was not only the clash on TV. In the following days, in fact, Biden continued to fall into a series of goofs and contradictions that increasingly fuelled the debate and gave arguments to the internal Dem front calling for a resounding step backwards. While at the NATO summit in Washington Biden called the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky ‘Putin’, voices in support of the Harris endorsement increased among the Democrats. As if that were not enough, at a press conference, referring to his number two, Biden spoke of ‘Vice President Trump’. Then there was the affair of the ‘black man’, the term by which the President referred to the Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, in an interview with Black Entertainment Television (BET) without remembering his name. Strong pressure for a step back, therefore, came from those who were Biden’s historical allies, like party members such as Nancy Pelosi or former President Barack Obama. Stances that have come together with devastating polling data that have also prompted Congressmen and some Senators to call for a withdrawal from the presidential race.
THE STOP TO FUNDING
The decision to quit, communicated in a matter of minutes and posted on X almost simultaneously with the communication to his staff, would seem to have arrived not so much because of pressure from the President’s family or medical advice, or because the possibility of being beaten by the GOP tycoon would have swayed Biden. The only real obstacle that turned out to be insurmountable seems to have been the blocking of donations. The big campaign donors, in fact, used the only tool really in their hands to influence the decisions of the incumbent President: they turned off the funding taps. Many of them decided to withdraw their financial pledges, as they were no longer interested in financing a campaign that was increasingly doomed to disaster. With Biden’s step back and the endorsement of his deputy Kamala Harris, funding has returned to feed the organisational machine of the Democratic presidential election campaign, giving a sense of the strength of the investors at this juncture.
THE DIFFICULTIES FOR THE DONALD
What are currently the difficulties that the tycoon has to face with the change of candidate for the Democrats? What obstacles are there on the road to the Oval Office? Certainly, Trump’s campaign will have to be refocused. It will no longer have to deal with “Sleepy
Joe” – the nickname given to Biden by Trump long ago – but with a young and very active, energetic and prepared candidate with a track record of the highest level within American institutions. A candidate very capable of rebutting in a TV duel and against whom the swaggering oratorical strategies, the tycoon’s trademark, would not only not work, but could be counterproductive in so many different ways. Suffice it to consider how the popularity gained by Trump in the aftermath of the Butler bombing, with the willingness to use the rhetoric of the martyr and the redeemer, was tarnished after just a week by the moves of the Dems and of candidate Kamala Harris.
THE RHETORIC OF THE DREAM
Trump will have to compete against the “rhetoric of the dream,” the American dream embodied by candidate Harris. If on the one hand he, The Donald, represents the economic success and the possibilities of a big businessman, on the other hand Harris, daughter of civil rights activists, lawyer, former district attorney of San Francisco, specialising in cases related to sexual violence against minors, former Attorney General of California, senator since 2017 and finally vice-president, represents the personal story of a black woman candidate for the highest seat in the country. With this background, the will of the new Dem campaign is to mobilise a whole range of categories on which Biden should have appealed but were now at risk. Young people, black people, Hispanics and the many disillusioned with politics: these are the people Harris is aiming to bring to the ballot, focusing on very hot and polarising topics, with issues such as abortion and immigration. Subjects on which the positions of the two candidates could not be further apart.
FROM ONE SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC TO THE OTHER
Of course, the US elections are an event that is closely followed by European chancelleries and EU institutions. Especially because of what it entails for the role of the USA in the Atlantic Alliance and on the international chessboard. With major elements of instability such as the war between Russia and Ukraine, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becoming more and more severe, the focus on the debate between the candidates and on the role the US will play abroad is increasingly of interest on this side of the Atlantic.