The Countdown to Election Day 2024: Trump vs. Harris

Sunday marks 100 days until Election Day 2024. It also marks one week since President Biden’s political landscape-altering announcement that he was suspending his re-election rematch against former President Trump.

Biden made his move amid mounting pressure from within the Democratic Party for him to drop out after a disastrous performance in last month’s first presidential debate with Trump.

The embattled president’s immediate backing of Vice President Kamala Harris last Sunday ignited a surge of endorsements for the vice president by Democratic governors, senators, House members, and other party leaders. Within 36 hours, Harris announced that she had locked up her party’s nomination by landing the verbal backing of a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates to next month’s Democratic National Convention.

Former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama on Friday became the final major party leaders to endorse the vice president.

Harris also hauled in a staggering $129 million in fundraising following Biden’s announcement, which her campaign touted on Thursday morning.

Besides uniting and exciting Democrats, the replacement of Biden by his vice president as the party’s standard-bearer – which is expected to become official during a virtual roll call of convention delegates that starts on Aug. 1 – has given Harris a bump in public opinion polling.

What was once a margin-of-error race between Biden and Trump had turned into a clear edge for the former president in the weeks after their June 27 debate showdown in Atlanta. However, with Harris now at the top of the ticket and Biden out of the race, surveys indicate it is back to a margin-of-error race.

“Instead of what was shaping up to be a Trump win, America has a real, bona fide race on its hands,” veteran political scientist and New England College President Wayne Lesperance said. “Game on.”

While Harris faces the monumental task of going from zero to 60 in an extremely condensed timeline, she is not starting from scratch, as she immediately inherited Biden’s large campaign apparatus with its vast ground-game resources in the key swing states.

However, Harris does face a crucial immediate task – choosing a running mate – which could come as early as the next week or two.

Biden and Trump are both well-known commodities to American voters. However, Kochel, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns who remained neutral in the 2024 Republican primary, emphasized that most Americans know so little about the vice president’s record and that both the Trump and Harris campaigns are “in a race to define” Harris.

In his first campaign rally since the presidential race was upended, Trump did not waste any time in trying to define his new opponent. At a rally in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina, the Republican presidential nominee repeatedly took aim at Harris, whom he derogatorily called “lying Kamala Harris.”

Throughout his more than an hour and a half stream of comments, Trump repeatedly slammed the vice president over border security and crime, two top issues in the 2024 election.

With 100 days to go until Election Day, the rhetoric this past week on the campaign trail is just an appetizer of things to come.

Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in New Hampshire.