WASHINGTON: The 100-day sprint to the US election began on Sunday, the final act in a campaign transformed by an assassination attempt and the stunning exit of President Joe Biden.

After weeks of infighting and despondency over Biden’s candidacy, Democrats have largely consolidated behind Vice President Kamala Harris, radically reshaping a race that was fast becoming Republican nominee Donald Trump’s to lose.

Republican strategist Matt Terrill said Harris’s uniting of the Democrats had ensured a photo finish on Nov 5 — a ballot that will largely be decided by around 100,000 swing voters in a handful of battleground states.

“It comes down to those independent, undecided voters. Inflation, immigration, the economy and crime — those are the issues they care about,” he told BBC News.

Election campaigns typically last almost two years, but the 2024 edition has effectively become the shortest in modern history

“Right now, I think, former president Trump is doing quite well on those issues. This election will be a referendum on the incumbents in office — that’s still Biden and Harris. We’ll see how that takes shape,” Terrill said.

While American election campaigns typically last almost two years, the 2024 edition has effectively been reset, making it unofficially the shortest in modern history.

The Democratic convention in mid-August is expected to be a jubilant celebration of the party’s new standard-bearer Harris, who is enjoying record fundraising, growing grassroots support and an early boost in polling. It all looked so different just a month ago.

Dogged by voters’ concerns about his age and mental acuity, the 81-year-old Biden was an outside bet at best, trailing his predecessor in the first presidential rematch since Dwight Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson in 1956.

Biden’s dismal June 27 debate showing ignited a five-alarm fire within his party. The flames were fanned by a flawless show of unity behind 78-year-old Trump at the Republican national convention — an event galvanised by the failed bid, just days earlier, to assassinate the former president at a rally in Pennsylvania.

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After an initial show of defiance, Biden bowed to the inevitable and dropped out last weekend. Harris, a generation younger at 59, threw her hat in the ring — turning what had been a stale contest between two unpopular, aging, white male candidates into a dynamic and unpredictable showdown.

The Harris honeymoon

The former Biden-Harris ticket — now just the Harris campaign — held its biggest-ever rally in Wisconsin and has raised more than $120 million in recent days, with disenchanted donors returning to the fold.

Trump’s previous three-point nationwide lead in polling averages has been practically halved in a week, and the contest has become a margin-of-error tussle in most of the crucial swing states that decide elections.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2024

Header image: Attendees cheer during a rally for former US President and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and US Senator from Ohio and 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, on July 27, 2024. — AFP