Tradu in limba romana si rezumați acest conținut la 300 de cuvinte The circumstances could not have been more different. One president was nearly assassinated, and the other president reluctantly quit his reelection and ended his career. Yet the reaction from each of their parties to consecutive, history-making weekends has been the same: exultance. When former President Trump, bleeding from a bullet to his ear, raised his fist and urged his supporters to “fight” a week ago Saturday, Republicans felt the power of history — and, they hope, destiny. Rallying to their nearly martyred leader, GOP voters instantaneously veered from alarm to outrage to joy. On Sunday, in the hours after President Biden finally withdrew his candidacy, Democrats felt they had been handed their own new lease on life, at least in this campaign. Unburdened by an incumbent who a vast majority of voters believed was too old for the job, the party burst with optimism and excitement. The sounds of “Happy Days are Here Again” could nearly be heard, yet again, in Chicago. “It’s really palpable,” Representative Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), the lone Democratic lawmaker last year to say publicly what so many said in private about Biden, told me Sunday night. “He’s heroic for doing this, even if it took longer than expected, and it has lifted the angst that was like a pall over our party.” After suffering nearly a month of trauma, Democrats, who have become the hierarchical party Republicans once were, turned from relief to hope to certainty: Vice President Kamala Harris must be the standard-bearer and order must be imposed, no contested convention or further internecine warring can be allowed. The future outwits all our certitudes, as another witness to political convulsions once said, so I’m reluctant to suggest the hand of fate is done with this campaign. But if the events of one week in July are to shape the remainder of the race, the outlines of the campaign each party will run are now clear. Trump, having narrowly dodged death and attempting to reclaim power against a woman, will run as a strongman — an American caudillo who can return order to a country now more open to the old regime. Democrats will almost certainly elevate Harris to do what Biden could not: make the race more about Trump than the current occupant of the White House. With a unified party and a chance to motivate dejected constituencies, Harris will remind voters that Trump is an agent of the chaos and extremism they have been rejecting in elections since 2017. It’s unclear at the outset which of these two appeals will prevail. However, make no mistake: the task Harris has now is as fearsome as what Trump faced four years ago, the only other time in recent decades an incumbent party faced such a forbidding reelection path. She’s not just aiming to break a glass ceiling, she’s a break-glass nominee, an emergency candidate thrown forth by a desperate party. His party’s nominee for a third consecutive election, Trump enjoys an iron floor of support and has more paths to 270 electoral votes than Harris, who has only previously appeared on a national ticket for slightly less than the number of days she’ll effectively lead one this year. Biden’s decline alarmed Democrats that he may bring more blue states into play, but Harris may have the same effect if she runs a maladroit campaign. This has been the backstage chatter among Democrats ever since that fateful June 27 debate: which is riskier in swing states, a wounded Biden or a healthy Harris? We may know before Labor Day. If Harris can unify her party, which she was on the way to doing even before dusk Sunday, tap a strong running mate and then harness the lead-up to and convention itself to go on the offensive against Trump, she will have a chance to win. If she doesn’t, Trump will fulfill his Truth-borne hint not to debate her and the fall will go about as well for Democrats as it did for Harris in her last presidential bid, which didn’t make it to the holidays let alone the leadoff Iowa caucuses. “She’s got to kill it out of the box, she can’t be defined by Trump before Chicago,” said James Carville, the Democratic strategist. “Trump is not popular, but she’s just not known.” Harris’ ostensible allies also do her no favors by arguing for her nomination — or warning against denying it to her — on the grounds of race and gender. Such appeals only offer fodder to Trump and his allies, who are eager to portray her, as some already crudely have, as a “DEI Candidate.” What her friends may think helps her in the summer will be weaponized against her in the fall. “You don’t hear that coming from me,” Donna Brazile, a former DNC chair, said of the identity appeals. “She’s a proven leader who has been battle-tested and knows the job. I want them to lean into the fight for a country where people who work hard get ahead, a country where our basic rights are secure, and where everybody, including the president, plays by the same set of rules.” Trump will almost certainly not be able to resist invoking Harris’s race and gender. Let him pay a price for that: Many Americans are uneasy with identity politics, but many more will recoil from race baiting and misogyny. Gender will inevitably be part of the campaign and even some otherwise elated Democrats are skeptical the country’s first female president will be a California liberal of Jamaican and Indian descent. But I think Harris could be helped — and her party certainly will be — by her gender, given what it means for articulating the best issue Democrats have in their arsenal. Since Roe v Wade was overturned two years ago, they have won a series of elections and ballot measures contested on the grounds of abortion rights. Now, they have a standard bearer who can talk in personal terms about a topic that energizes high and low-information voters alike. “The fact that she is a candidate able and willing to say the word ‘abortion,’ should not be underappreciated,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran, alluding unsubtly to Biden’s reluctance to prosecute the party’s most galvanizing issue. Viewed through the optimistic lens so many Democrats were witnessing the race Sunday, the 59-year-old Harris may not be perfect but she’s not turning 82 this fall. Pressed on her prospects as a candidate, Carville said the point is at least now the party has a chance. “I know one thing, we were in a ditch before,” he said, before going off on a tear. “The Democratic Party is not falling apart — if we were, how come we keep winning so many elections?” he asked. “People want to vote for Democrats, or against Republicans, but we had Biden’s age, that was it.” Democrats also own the burden of inflation and immigration, the latter of which Trump campaign chief Chris LaCivita told me last week in Milwaukee they believed was her most significant vulnerability. The risk is Harris’s candidacy recalls that of Gerald Ford, the last vice president pressed into duty under extraordinary circumstances. Though Ford had ascended to the Oval Office by his 1976 race, he was still hurt by the president who tapped him for vice president. He mounted a strong comeback but still fell short in November. How Harris runs — and nobody can say for sure what ideological direction she’ll take given her dexterity in the past — will partly determine her fate and that of the down ballot Democrats who were bracing for a Biden-led wipeout. “Right now, nobody could articulate what the Biden-Harris plan was for the next four years,” Phillips told me, urging Harris to offer up “not just red meat for the base but something medium-well for the middle.” Four summers ago, when Biden was making his decision on a running mate, my colleague Alex Burns and I wrote that it was an unusually fateful choice. “Should Mr. Biden win and not seek reelection, the Democratic nomination might not be up for grabs for another 12 years — an eternity for the party’s many ambitious up-and-comers,” we said at the time. Well, that moment is upon us. Biden is not running again but the nomination is…
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