President Joe Biden’s Sunday announcement that he was withdrawing from the presidential race, coming with less than four months until Election Day, leaves both Democrats and Republicans with monumental tasks to accomplish.
Democrats will need to ramp up a campaign behind a new candidate, most likely Vice President Kamala Harris, and to highlight what they believe are her greatest strengths as she squares off against former President Donald Trump.
For Republicans, the challenge will be to reorient themselves from a campaign that had largely been designed around hammering Biden for his age and alleged infirmity. They face a different threat from Harris and will need to develop new criticisms.
When Biden announced that he was stepping back, it was not immediately clear whom Democrats would back as his replacement, but by Monday afternoon, most signs pointed to Harris as the person most likely to take that role.
Harris had already collected the endorsements of multiple, high-profile Democrats on Sunday, and by Monday nearly all the Democratic officeholders considered potential rivals for the nomination had publicly endorsed her candidacy.
“Well, the first step, which they've largely done, is rallying behind her,” said Seth Masket, a professor of political science and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.
“You can imagine a world in which the party was going to look a lot more divided, and there'd be a lot of different candidates throwing their names in the ring, and it doesn't look like that's going to be happening now,” Masket told VOA.
Generational shift
Democrats supporting Harris are likely to lean into several aspects of her candidacy, particularly the fact that she represents a generational shift for the party. With Biden aged 81 and Trump aged 78, either would have ended a second term as the oldest person ever to serve as president.
Harris, by contrast, is 59, creating an implicit comparison to the former president, whose campaign’s focus on Biden’s advanced age might now create some unwelcome echoes in the new matchup.
Democrats seem convinced that Harris, who served California as a senator, attorney general and prosecutor, will be able to make the party’s case against Trump with more force and eloquence than Biden.
“I think we’re going to see a very positive case being made for Kamala Harris,” said Jennifer N. Victor, an associate professor of political science at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government.
“On the positive side, I expect them to emphasize her record on abortion rights and reproductive politics, a record on which she's very clear and very strong and unwavering — and can make a very forceful case in a direction that is consistent with where most Americans live and their policy preferences,” Victor told VOA.
Harris has also been the administration’s most effective voice in tying Trump to the effort among Republican-leaning states to restrict abortion rights. In public appearances, Harris has blamed Trump for the narrowing of abortion access, because he nominated three judges to the Supreme Court with the explicit promise that they would vote to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.
“And I think we'll also see them making a strong case in her favor on things like sort of family-oriented policies, economic policies, crime policies, things on which she herself has a strong record, and can point to previous policy or political successes,” Victor added.
Also, as a former prosecutor, Harris may prove better than Biden at hitting Trump on issues like his multiple felony convictions in New York and his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in which a mob of his supporters violently assaulted police during an attempt to block Biden’s certification as winner of the presidential election.
Republican criticisms
By Monday, Trump was already signaling one of the ways in which his campaign would be going after Harris. Posting on Truth Social, his social media network, he referred to Harris as Biden’s “border czar” and warned that things would get “worse” under her leadership.
While her title was not “border czar,” the reference was to the role Harris played, early in the Biden administration, in efforts to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S. southern border by addressing the root causes of crime and lack of economic opportunities in their home countries.
The initiative made little impact on the flow of migrants, which increased during Biden’s tenure before dropping sharply in recent months.
Experts also believe that many of the attacks the Trump campaign leveled against Biden, especially those related to the economy, will also be somewhat effective against Harris.
"They're going to focus on a lot of the same sort of things that were real vulnerabilities for Biden,” Masket said. “She's still part of the administration during a time when people are pretty largely unhappy with the direction of the country. People are still dissatisfied with the economy; they're dissatisfied with the way a number of things are going, and people tend to blame the party that's in charge during those times. So. she's still vulnerable on that.”
Disqualification floated
Victor said that she has seen some evidence that Trump’s supporters are exploring the debunked claim that Harris is disqualified from serving as president because her parents were not U.S. citizens.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, and is a citizen under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. However, the same was true of President Barack Obama, and it did not stop Trump, then a businessman and reality television personality, from repeatedly claiming that Obama was ineligible to serve.
“That's a very common kind of tactic that we've seen from Trump in the past,” Victor said. “He has a long history of either dehumanizing or trying to invalidate or disqualify his political opponents in different ways. And so it would be consistent with how he tends to run things for him to follow that type of line of attack.”
