Trump and Harris enter final 100-day stretch of a rapidly evolving 2024 race

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are entering the last 100 days of one of the fastest-moving and least predictable campaign seasons in memory, after a historic month upended the 2024 presidential race.

The ground has shifted under both political parties since June 27, when President Joe Biden’s poor performance in his debate with Trump threw the Democratic Party into chaos and prompted Trump’s team to eye an expanded electoral map.

The race was rattled yet again after the former president survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. Just days later, he chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate and rallied the Republican Party at its convention in Milwaukee.

Then, a week ago, Biden announced his exit from the race – and pointed to Harris, his vice president, as his successor. Within 36 hours, Harris had rallied the party behind her candidacy, locking down enough support from Democratic National Convention delegates to become the party’s presumptive nominee.

Then she hit the ground running, holding events with voters in the swing state of Wisconsin on Tuesday, a Black sorority on Wednesday and teachers on Thursday. Friday morning, she touted the endorsements of Barack and Michelle Obama.

Trump has responded to Harris’ apparent momentum with a series of personal attacks. At recent campaign stops, he has referred to her as “evil,” mocked her laugh and the pronunciation of her name, and said that “the American dream is dead” if Harris wins in November. The vice president responded at a Saturday fundraiser that the attacks by Trump and his running mate were “plain weird.”

Polls are only beginning to capture the new state of play in a race that now has no clear leader.

A Democratic vice presidential pick and convention, as well as potential debates between Harris and Trump and between their running mates, could further shake up the 2024 contest in the 100 days between now and Election Day, November 5.

Trump escalates attacks on Harris

The issues and lines of attack that are animating both campaigns are increasingly coming into view.

Trump’s campaign has focused on inflation, border security and crime – and the former president is arguing that Harris bears just as much blame as Biden on those issues and that she is more liberal than her boss.

However, Trump has also escalated his attacks on Harris, criticizing her in deeply personal terms at campaign events Friday and Saturday.

At a conservative Christian gathering in Florida on Friday, he said that Harris had been “a bum three weeks ago” before her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket and dubbed her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice president in American history.” He also said he “couldn’t care less” about mispronouncing her first name.

Then, at a Saturday night rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Trump called Harris “evil” over her handling of the border and said that if “a crazy liberal like Kamala Harris gets in, the American dream is dead.”

He also mocked his Democratic opponent’s laugh, claiming that the media was trying to portray Harris as a “Margaret Thatcher,” referring to the late British prime minister, but that “it’s not gonna happen,” because “Margaret Thatcher didn’t laugh like that.”

A Harris spokeswoman responded to Trump’s Minnesota speech by slamming the GOP nominee as a “bitter, unhinged, 78-year-old convicted felon.”

On Friday, Trump said protesters who sprayed pro-Hamas graffiti in Washington on Wednesday were Harris supporters, even though the vice president condemned their actions. He criticized her for skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, without noting that Harris met privately with Netanyahu and that his own running mate also didn’t attend the speech. And Trump said that Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people. She doesn’t like Israel. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s always gonna be.” Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.

Trump, who continues to peddle falsehoods and raise fears about election fraud, also drew heat on social media for telling the Florida audience that if he wins in November, they won’t have to vote again.

“You won’t have to do it anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. … You gotta get out and vote,” the former president said. “In four years, you won’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Harris, at a Western Massachusetts fundraiser on Saturday, said that the former president was pushing “wild lies” about her record and that the attacks by Trump and Vance were “plain weird.”

“I mean, that’s the box you put that in, right?” Harris told supporters.

In campaign events since emerging as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris is taking on Trump over abortion rights and casting him as a threat to freedom.

“We are seeing a full-on agenda that is now about restricting rights, and one of the most fundamental rights, the right to make decisions about your own body,” she said at the Massachusetts fundraiser. “If there are those who dare to take the freedom to make such a fundamental decision for an individual, which is about one’s own body, what other freedoms could be on the table for the taking?”

Harris has also been pointing to the former president’s legal troubles. In remarks to campaign staffers Monday – her first time delivering a brief version of her new stump speech – she recalled her time as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, saying that she “took on perpetrators of all kinds.”

“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game,” Harris said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Veepstakes, convention questions

Among the next orders of business for Harris’ campaign is to accomplish two tasks in a period of days or weeks that Trump’s campaign achieved over months.

First, she must choose a running mate.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder is leading a team that is poring through financial documents, family histories, public statements, published documents, voting records, campaign experience and social media postings. Tony West, Harris’ brother-in-law and a former associate attorney general under Holder, is also playing a central role in the search.

Democrats close to the process say the roster of leading contenders being vetted still includes North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has developed a close relationship with Harris and has also been previously vetted and confirmed by the Senate, is also under consideration, along with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, sources say.

Many of those potential picks have been offering Harris’ campaign informal glimpses of how they’d perform as her running mate through appearances on cable news shows.

Democratic pollsters have been asked to test how Harris and the prospective candidates would fare in their home states – and in key battlegrounds – in hypothetical matchups against Trump and Vance.

Harris has told the team of lawyers and advisers conducting one of the most accelerated vice presidential searches in modern American history that she plans to name her running mate before August 7.

Then, Harris’ campaign and its allies must rapidly revise plans for the Democratic National Convention, which is set to start on August 19 in Chicago.

Instead of nominating Biden for a second term, Democrats will use the convention to showcase the outgoing president passing the baton to Harris – and could alter the party’s programming to better align with the vice president’s personality and political appeal.

Her campaign must also identify Harris’ best path toward 270 Electoral College votes. Biden’s hopes of a second term were thought to reside primarily in sweeping the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Harris, though, has been polling better among young and non-White voters – and could prove more viable in the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina that appeared to be moving away from Biden.

Debating the debates

One of the biggest questions, now that Harris has replaced Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, is whether she will face Trump on the debate stage.

The June 27 clash on CNN between Trump and Biden had already transformed the race. And a Trump-Harris debate could shape the race’s final weeks perhaps more than any other event.

Biden and Trump had agreed to another debate – one that would take place on September 10, hosted by ABC. Harris said she would participate in that debate.

“I think the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage. And so, I’m ready. Let’s go,” she told reporters Thursday.

However, Trump’s campaign released a statement indicating that the former president wouldn’t commit to any future debates until the Democratic nominee is formally selected.

“Given the continued political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, general election debate details cannot be finalized until Democrats formally decide on their nominee,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement Thursday.

That prompted Harris to reply on social media: “What happened to ‘any time, any place?’”

Coconut trees and ‘childless cat ladies’

Perhaps the clearest indicator of the political earthquake that’s taken place in recent days is the shift in cultural vibes and viral moments.

Just a week ago, Republicans were riding high after a convention in Milwaukee at which Trump’s reaction to the assassination attempt days earlier – his right fist raised in the air as he mouthed “Fight” to the crowd – had become a rallying cry.

Now, Democrats – who were previously fretting about slow fundraising, a disengaged base and slippage in support among young, Black and Latino voters – are rallying behind a candidate with more cultural cachet among those same voters. And Republicans are on defense, with Trump’s vice presidential pick, Vance, having to defend prior comments that could alienate the suburban women the Trump ticket is courting.

Vance has come under fire over comments he made as a Senate candidate on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2021.

He told Carlson that the United States is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He then specifically mentioned Harris, Buttigieg and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples.

Vance did not acknowledge that Harris has two stepchildren with her husband. Buttigieg, who has since become a father to two children, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday that he and his husband were struggling with “a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey” when Vance made the remark.

Actress Jennifer Aniston criticized Vance for the comment as someone who has struggled to have children and said she prays his daughter is “fortunate enough to bear children.”

In an interview Friday with conservative host Megyn Kelly on SiriusXM, Vance said he was being sarcastic and the substance of what he said has been lost. He said he was criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming “anti-family.”

“The simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective, and in a pretty profound way,” Vance said.

Vance said it’s a “catastrophic problem” that the United States has the “lowest birth rate in our history in this country.” As CNN previously reported, the United States’ fertility rate has been trending down for decades, and in 2023 it reached the lowest rate in a century. Vance said his remarks about childless adults had been motivated in part by a conversation with his wife about balancing life as a working mother.

“What a weird society that we’ve set up where moms who want to work, the thought that a lot of them are having is, ‘I can’t have more babies because it’s going to be bad for my career,’” Vance said. “How about we make the workplace more accommodating to working moms and working dads so that we can promote a real culture of life?”

Harris, on the other hand, has been the beneficiary of a series of viral moments.

Charli XCX, the British pop singer, declared the vice president “brat,” which is the title of her sixth studio album and a Gen Z summer soundtrack. It set off an avalanche of posts on TikTok, Twitter and other social media platforms featuring the same shade of bright green as the album cover and video compilations of Harris.

Then, there were the coconut memes, revisiting a May 2023 speech in which Harris spoke about “a difference between equality and equity.”

“None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context,” she said in that speech. “My mother used to – she would give us a hard time sometimes – and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’”

Since then, coconuts and coconut tree imagery have been used online in support of Harris, with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis even posting an endorsement of the vice president on social media that was communicated through three emojis: a coconut, a palm tree and an American flag.

“What we’re seeing is a really classic example of when pop culture really gets intertwined with politics, and it takes a special kind of candidate and a special kind of leader to inspire that,” Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 27-year-old Democrat, said on CNN. “It has to be organic. You can’t make it happen.”

Harris’ previous remarks revisited

There were signs that after a launch that had gone better than Democrats could have hoped, Harris’ previous remarks were coming under fresh scrutiny.

CNN’s KFile reported Friday that Harris voiced support for “defund the police” in a radio interview in June 2020 amid nationwide protests for police reform, just months before denouncing the movement after she had joined the Biden presidential campaign.

“This whole movement is about rightly saying, ‘We need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,’” Harris said on a New York-based radio program on June 9, 2020, adding that US cities were “militarizing police” but “defunding public schools.”

On Saturday, ahead of the campaign rally in Minnesota, the Trump campaign released a video that slammed Harris for her “soft on crime policies,” highlighting her 2020 support on social media for a fund that bailed out protesters in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The Minnesota Freedom Fund is one of several US charities dedicated to helping low-income defendants post bail that boomed in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. However, the fund, in addition to other charitable bail groups, later came under fire after some defendants who were bailed out were arrested again for alleged acts of violent crime.

As Trump’s campaign adjusts its tactics for the race against Harris, the former president has made clear on social media and on the trail that he plans to make political ideology an issue.

“We’re not ready for a Marxist President,” Trump said Thursday on Truth Social, “and Lyin’ Kamala Harris is a RADICAL LEFT MARXIST, AND WORSE!”

Trump had long criticized Biden over border security. He is similarly blasting Harris – who early in Biden’s presidency was tapped to tackle the root cause of migration from Central America. The Republican National Committee on Thursday posted a video on social media featuring assorted clips of Harris saying that an undocumented immigrant was not a criminal.

Down-ballot Republicans have similarly begun attacking Harris as too liberal.

In Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in one of the year’s most important races, posted a video Tuesday featuring Casey praising Harris – followed by a series of clips of Harris speaking in support of eliminating private health insurance, passing the progressive “Green New Deal,” abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a mandatory gun buyback program and more.

On Friday, McCormick posted a slightly shorter version of the video.

“Starting this Monday, Pennsylvanians watching the Olympics will also see Bob Casey and Kamala Harris’ dangerously liberal agenda on display,” he said.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, Kit Maher, Terence Burlij, Sam Fossum, Alayna Treene, Alison Main, Kim Berryman, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.