This op-ed was published by The National on August 1, 2024

In just a week, US Vice President Kamala Harris has transformed both the 2024 presidential election and the entire American political scene. President Joe Biden’s withdrawal was no surprise, but her ability to secure the nomination in days, unite the party and inspire a new political and cultural atmosphere was stunning.

She grasped the nomination unchallenged, almost immediately gaining the support of thousands of convention delegates and all leading Democrats, seemingly effortlessly.

When Mr. Biden stepped aside, Democrats proved every bit the suddenly-unleashed coiled spring I described in these pages a few weeks ago. Ms. Harris raised an amazing $100 million in small donations, many from first-time donors, in the first 24 hours of her campaign. Within a week, she passed the $200 million mark. She has also evidently inspired a wave of new voter registrations around the country. In a few days, she reversed Mr. Biden’s collapse and drew even with the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in the polls.

More importantly, her display of unexpected political skill, including several devastating speeches against Mr. Trump, has clearly shocked him and other leading Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, privately acknowledged Ms. Harris’s striking political skills and described the switch at the top of the Democratic ticket as a “sucker punch”, that has created huge problems for Mr. Trump. That’s putting it mildly.

Not only is Mr. Trump now facing a completely different opponent than the ageing and declining Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris’s sudden emergence as an American cultural symbol has, arguably for the first time in the former president’s political career, sidelined him on the popular cultural, rather than political, stage he is used to dominating. Moreover, the prospect of losing to an African-American woman may be more than he can emotionally tolerate.

At the very least, the campaign is already back to a 50-50 proposition with the Democratic convention, vice presidential nomination and second debate all yet to come.

Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to know what to say in this new context, but Ms. Harris has already unveiled several damaging contrasts.

First, she is running as the tough, seasoned prosecutor facing a convicted felon she wants to paint as a habitual violator of the law. She boasted that she had taken on “perpetrators of all types”, including “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type”.

Second, and in contrast to Mr. Biden, she is running as a symbol of the uplifting future, contrasting the nostalgic message of return in Mr. Trump’s “make America great again” rhetoric with her own “we are never going back” insistence.

Moreover, the age issue suddenly belongs to Democrats, because while his decline is not as dramatic as Mr. Biden’s, the 78-year-old Mr. Trump is showing unmistakable signs of ageing badly. He, too, lapses into incoherence, forgets and confuses names and frequently makes no intelligible sense in his rally speeches.

Third, she is running as a “normal” candidate against a Republican ticket that Democrats are now systematically calling “weird”, and sometimes even “creepy”. It may prove surprisingly easy to paint both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance as extremist oddballs.

Mr. Trump may now be regretting his selection of Mr. Vance, who was the one option strikingly to his political right. Mr. Vance’s week was as devastatingly disastrous as Ms. Harris’s was breathtakingly successful.

He got into particular trouble when he stuck to his inexplicable and deeply misogynistic assertion that because of Democratic and corporate leaders, the country was being run by “childless cat ladies”. He insists this is substantially true, and that Republicans are pro-children and pro-family, whereas it is Democrats who have been pushing for legislation to help parents and aid children that has been largely blocked by Republicans, including Mr. Vance.

Mr. Trump’s own proclivity to extremism was on full display when he told evangelical Christians that they would never have to vote again if they help him win in November. It was one of his typically vague but unmistakably sinister comments that, in the context of his extensive and unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power despite losing, appears to threaten the abolition of the electoral system if he returns to the presidency.

Moreover, Mr. Vance has previously described his running mate as potentially “America’s Hitler”, and even referred to Mr. Trump as “demonic”. Now, however, Mr. Vance is one of the biggest proponents of Mr. Trump’s populist demagoguery he once referred to as “political heroin”. Along with his political extremism, this 180-degree transformation may prove hard to defend.

It’s probably too late for Mr. Trump to change his mind, while Ms. Harris has numerous potentially effective running mates. The extraordinary honeymoon she’s experiencing with anti-Trump voters will undoubtedly end, but perhaps not soon enough to save Mr. Trump from defeat.

A whole range of states that seemed totally unattainable for Democrats are again in play. Ms. Harris has already proven highly effective in painting Mr. Trump as a dangerous criminal but Republicans have not yet figured out how to effectively malign her. Dismissing her candidacy as a “DEI hire”, suggesting she is only their opponent because of her race and gender, doesn’t square with her impressive resume and is blatantly racist and misogynistic.

Their best bet is to cast her as an extreme “California leftist”, but she is already tacking decisively to the political center on issues such as fracking and support for law enforcement, which may render that, too, ineffective with swing voters. And her long-established leadership on abortion and reproductive rights could prove a trump card against Mr. Trump, who is trying to disentangle himself from the near-absolute prohibitionist stance Republicans adopted under his leadership.

The reframed campaign is now a sprint to the November election. It’s once again anyone’s to win, and Ms. Harris has all the political and even cultural momentum. She also has an obvious and potent gameplan, while Mr. Trump no longer does. Anything can happen, but Democrats are suddenly energized and inspired, and their new leader is definitely in it to win it.

Game on.