Harris has the momentum; Trump’s rattled

JUST over two weeks ago, former president Donald Trump felt as though he was in political heaven; that he had the presidential race all sewn up.

Indeed, the image of Trump pumping his fist in the shadow of the American flag in the immediate aftermath of his assassination attempt, just days before the Republican National Convention, dominated social media, with some pundits suggesting that “the Donald” may now be unbeatable.

And with that mood of victory-is-mine came a sense of excessive pride, of hubris that has damaged the careers of many politicians.

Some of Trump’s advisers recommended that he pick either Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin or North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as his running mate. They are technocratic figures who can balance the more impulsive shoot-from-the-hip Trump. More importantly, they are middle-of-the-road Republicans who can attract moderate Republicans and independent voters who may be repelled by Trumpism.

But then Trump, who was floating on political cloud nine, dismissed those suggestions and decided that he possessed enough electoral strength, allowing him to choose a radical Trumpist as the vice-presidential candidate.

While JD Vance may be a bright intellectual with a law degree from Yale University, the 39-year-old Ohio senator is not a skilled nor seasoned politician. And, like his political idol, he also tends to shoot from the hip, as his comments about “childless cat ladies” have demonstrated.

But choosing Vance as his running mate proved to be the least of Candidate Trump’s problems after the Democrats succeeded in forcing President Joe Biden to step down from the presidential race and replaced him with Vice-President Kamala Harris as their party’s candidate.

With her immigrant parents – an India-born mother and Jamaican father – the African-American/South-Asian Harris, the ultimate multicultural presidential candidate, has succeeded to excite and energise the Democratic Party’s electoral base.

And here’s a political rule-of-thumb of American presidential races: The more African-Americans, Hispanics and young people – traditional Democratic voters – show up on election day, the better the chances of success for the Democrats.

And here’s another political fact: American voters tend to prefer the younger presidential candidate over the much older one. See Bill Clinton versus Republican President George HW Bush (1992 election) and Senator Bob Dole (1996), and Barack Obama versus Senator John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012).

In a way, one could describe the recent developments in US presidential politics this way: American voters were dismayed, if not depressed, at the choice before them – two ageing presidential candidates. So after they got rid of one, they now intend to get rid of the other. Which explains in part why, as she prepares to be nominated in the Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Harris may now have the political momentum. Harris has been closing the gap with Trump in the national polls as well as the races in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where she is performing better than President Biden did before dropping out of the race.

Meanwhile, Trump is reacting to all of this with his trademark chaotic modus operandi, telling Black reporters that he wasn’t aware until recently that Harris was Black, and accusing the VP, who is married to a Jewish man, of “hating Jews”.