US election 2024: The state of the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump - The Front Page

The Democrats and Republican parties have both held their National Conventions now, but there’s plenty more water to go under the bridge as the US prepares for its November election.

US Vice President and Democratic Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris enjoyed a rapturous response in Chicago last week when she formally accepted the nomination at the Democrat National Convention.

It highlighted how drastically the race had changed in the month since Donald Trump was greeted by a similarly enthusiastic crowd at the Republican National Convention, which took place just days after a failed attempt on his life.

CBS News reporter Jake Rosen told The Front Page that the race has changed in unpredictable ways since that event.

“When Donald Trump was shot and they had the RNC, and there were chants of ‘fight, fight, fight’ through the crowd, and there were people putting ear patches on their ears, kind of parroting the person that they love and support, what they didn’t see coming was a complete shift in what Democrats were going to do.

“And I think that that’s the most telling thing of Joe Biden just a week after that, stepping down off the ticket and putting in someone who was able to really mobilize part of the base of the Democratic Party, but also really flip the script on enthusiasm. And it went from the Democrats fighting with one arm behind their back to being able to fight with two.”

Rosen, who has been following the Trump campaign around the country, said that the momentum is currently with Harris, and she is gaining support from black and white women who had previously not sided much with Biden.

“The difficult thing for the Trump campaign is how do you stop or try to message against just raw enthusiasm?”

While Harris has the energy behind her, she has faced criticism for having an undefined policy platform, something that Rosen said has started to be picked at by the Trump campaign.

“But like we saw in 2020 and 2019, there are ways to beat Donald Trump by staying as vague as possible on things like immigration, staying as vague as possible on things like stealing a couple of his economic ideas, and being very broad about things like this no taxes on tips thing, which in which service workers do not have to pay taxes on money that they’re tipped.”

On the other side, Trump is distancing himself from the controversial Project 2025 - a blueprint from a rightwing think tank of what the first year of a Trump presidency could achieve.

“Whether people believe it or not, it’s kind of become a catchphrase that people can just throw out there to label Donald Trump, and this is a guy who it’s been very hard to label despite the things that we know that are true about him.”

Listen to the full episode for more on how Trump and Harris are connecting with the public, what impact the departure of Robert Kennedy Jr. will have on the race, and what the next major moments are for the election.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

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