With the conventions over, Harris and Trump begin the final sprint to Election Day

By Eric Bradner, Jeff Zeleny, Kevin Liptak, Kit Maher and Camila DeChalus, CNN

(CNN) — An unsettled and unpredictable 2024 presidential race is entering its final stretch, with Vice President Kamala Harris looking to build on the momentum of this week’s Democratic National Convention and former President Donald Trump honing his lines of attack.

The former president’s early-summer polling and fundraising advantages were wiped out in an unprecedented five weeks that saw Trump survive an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden drop his reelection bid and Harris ascend to the top of the Democratic ticket and inject new enthusiasm into the party. Now Democrats are on offense, eyeing an expanded battleground map that could include new paths through the Sun Belt to 270 electoral college votes.

Trump reclaimed the spotlight on Friday as he campaigned in Arizona alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The independent candidate had suspended his presidential campaign hours earlier and said he was pulling his name from the ballot in key swing states to avoid being a spoiler.

“Don’t you want a president who’s going to get us out of the wars and who’s going to rebuild the middle class in this country?” Kennedy said of Trump in Glendale.

Kennedy’s departure from the fringes completes the reset of the 2024 race as a two-person contest between Trump and Harris, eliminating one wild card.

With the conventions over, the next race-defining moment on the calendar is their September 10 debate hosted by ABC. The campaigns have also both discussed participating in a second debate, but the details of where, when and who would host have not yet been settled.

Unlike the June debate between Trump and Biden, when their 2020 showdowns offered a preview of what to expect, no one is sure how this fall’s debates will unfold.

“I can’t picture it in my mind’s eye, if I’m being completely honest,” Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said Friday. “I think this match-up is so odd that it’s not obvious to me who’s got an advantage.”

Harris and her allies used the four-day Democratic convention in Chicago to frame the election as Americans’ opportunity to move past the toxicity of Trump’s decade as a dominant political figure once and for all.

“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past,” she said in her Thursday night speech.

Trump’s campaign, though, argues that Harris can’t credibly claim to offer a fresh start when she’s been vice president for more than three years.

“Her argument and the argument of her surrogates, is, ‘We’re going to do things better when I get power.’ She’s had power for three-and-a-half years, and she’s made everything worse,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said Thursday while campaigning in Georgia.

The former president has struggled to adapt to the change atop the Democratic ticket — but is testing new lines to brand Harris as too liberal. In recent days he has called her “Comrade Kamala.”

‘Communism to capitalism in about two weeks’

At a rally in Nevada on Friday, Trump again mispronounced Harris’ first name and described her as a flip-flopper.

At the center of Trump’s attacks was Harris’ failed bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Still a senator at the time, Harris dropped out of the race in 2019, before any votes had been cast. Harris took a number of liberal positions in that primary race, which was at times dominated by esoteric fights about progressive policies, that she has since abandoned.

Trump claimed that “nobody ever heard of her before she lost” then.

The former president also fumed about Biden winning this year’s Democratic primary but ending his campaign in July.

“He got 14 million votes, and he’s sitting on a beach angry as hell, and she got no votes, and she’s running. So you explain that to me,” Trump said of Biden.

And, at an event at a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas, Trump complained that Harris had “copied” his proposal to end taxes on tips. Harris called for ending taxes on tips while rolling out a series of populist economic proposals last week, echoing a policy Trump already supported.

He accused Harris of “pretending” to endorse his policy, calling her a “copycat” and the “greatest flip-flopper in history” who “went from communism to capitalism in about two weeks.”

Trump’s campaign on Friday also launched new ads that promote his proposals to end taxes on Social Security benefits and tipped wages for service industry workers.

Later Friday, in Arizona, Trump mocked Harris for saying “thank you” repeatedly as Democrats gave her a standing ovation when she took the DNC stage Thursday night in Chicago.

He also criticized Harris for attacking him on immigration. The vice president pointed to Trump’s opposition to a bipartisan border security and immigration bill, which turned Republicans against the measure.

“I haven’t been there in four years,” Trump said. “You saw it, I had the safest border, the best border we’ve ever had. She blamed me for the border. They lied so much.”

Democrats brace for ‘extremely close’ contest

Harris views the march to November as a series of building blocks, advisers say, with a wave of momentum from the Chicago convention poised to carry her toward the September 10 debate.

The vice president has made clear in conversations with her campaign team and in meetings with donors and supporters that she is under no illusion that the remainder of the campaign will be as smooth or soaring as her ascent to the top of the ticket.

“Let’s know we’re underdogs and this is going to be rough and tough,” Harris told a small group of celebrating boosters she visited after her convention speech. “After tonight and a bit of partying, let’s get back to work and let’s see this through.”

The roadmap for the general election is coming into sharper view, with battlegrounds that Democrats all but written off during the Biden campaign now suddenly competitive. North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia offer a pathway — and a potential insurance policy — beyond the blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Harris is set to visit Georgia next week, aides said, along with a limited number of campaign stops as she urgently turns her focus to debate preparations for the next two weeks. She spends at least part of every day familiarizing herself with Trump’s record — and statements — as she approaches September 10 with the diligence of a trial lawyer she once was.

Additionally, practice sessions are already underway for next month’s debate, the first time she will be in the same room as Trump aside from his State of the Union addresses, when she was a California senator. Her team made a conscious decision not to wait until the week before to begin preparing, aware a mistake on the debate stage could shift the energy in the race in an instant.

Trump has also begun preparing for the debate. He enlisted one of Harris’ former 2020 Democratic primary rivals, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The two had several notable exchanges during Democratic primary debates, where Harris criticized Gabbard for her foreign policy views while Gabbard challenged Harris’ record on criminal justice.

Friends who have known Harris for years say they see a new sense of confidence in her. But the excitement and energy surrounding the ticket doesn’t change the fact that the race with Trump is almost certainly heading toward a bruising chapter unlike many others in American history.

Harris is seeking to present herself as a change candidate, despite her incumbency as vice president and her record in the Biden administration. If the election can be seen as a choice between Harris and Trump, not a referendum on her, advisers believe she could be well positioned to try and win over independent voters and even some moderate Republicans, whom she referenced in her speech Thursday night.

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, told CNN that complacency among Democratic voters is among the things that keeps her up at night. The long shadow of the 2016 campaign, which sent Trump to the Oval Office, continues to haunt many Democrats.

“This,” she said, “is going to be an extremely close race.”

A race with no roadmap

Harris advisers acknowledge they are writing the playbook for an extraordinarily truncated race in real-time, and say the decisions they will face over the coming months are likely to be made without ample precedent to rely upon.

Her campaign has purchased nearly $400 million in advertising space through the fall, snapping up premium slots on sports and season premieres in a bid both to introduce their candidate and to deprive Trump of marquee opportunities for visibility.

And, although Chicago’s convention was bursting with celebrities, there are other endorsers the Harris team is hoping will emerge in splashy fashion closer to the election as voters begin casting ballots. The Harris team has also begun thinking out how to deploy top surrogates, like the Obamas and Biden, in the months ahead of Election Day.

Multiple Harris advisers also voiced trepidation this week at the prospect of an “October surprise” — an event in the world that could alter the race’s trajectory. As the sitting vice president, Harris’s response to an economic calamity or foreign crisis would be closely scrutinized.

Fleshing out policy details

For Harris, the coming weeks will come with increasing pressure to lay out in more detail her plans to address the biggest problems facing the country, including immigration, climate change, gun violence and crime. She will undoubtedly be asked to articulate a foreign policy doctrine and for more specifics on how she might handle a range of foreign flash points.

Her team, for now, does not appear in any rush to churn out policy white papers or schedule a slate of policy appearances. Deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said Friday on MSNBC she would sit for one-on-one interviews “on her time and when she’s ready.”

Instead, they seem intent on riding the enormous surge in momentum and energy for as long as it lasts. They are helped by Trump’s inability so far to settle on an effective line of attack, though her aides believe he will eventually land on something that sticks.

On Friday, as confetti and deflated balloons were being swept from the United Center floor, Harris returned to Washington without any campaign events publicly announced. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also returned to his home state without anything made public about his plans moving forward.

Yet it seemed certain their schedules wouldn’t remain empty for long. As they caught their breath following the convention, Democratic advance teams were put on alert to be ready for an intensive stretch of campaigning in the coming weeks.

Harris targets young voters

Harris has erased Trump’s polling lead in part by galvanizing young people who were disinterested in a Trump-versus-Biden matchup.

At the Democratic convention, the party sought to use social media influencers and content creators as a conduit — granting them credentials in hopes of expanding the reach of a four-night event increasingly watched through phone screens, rather than televisions.

“For any party that’s interested in trying to convince younger individuals and trying to get their attention, trying to inform them about the candidates, trying to inform them about the policies, and trying to motivate them to go out and vote, they have to meet them where they are,” said Pinar Yildirim, a marketing and economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Deja Foxx, a content creator and former Kamala Harris 2020 campaign staffer, who attended the DNC, told CNN that campaigning looks different every election cycle.

“The days of Facebook and text and even photo-based platforms are behind us,” she said. “Young people are taking up a place at the table, young people who are uniquely situated because of our ability to use these platforms, emerging platforms, because of the ways that they feel natural and organic to us.”

Harris’ campaign saw more than 10 times the number of Gen Z donors in July compared to June, before Biden dropped out of the race, and more than eight times the number of Millennial donors, according to a Harris campaign spokesperson.

The spokesperson also said there have been more than 1,000 sign-ups for Students for Harris chapters across the country since the launch of Harris’ campaign.

Trump seeks to settle GOP quarrels

The former president is attempting to tamp down intra-party grudges that he has nursed for years — including one with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a popular Republican in one of the nation’s most critical battleground states.

Kemp won reelection in 2022 after trouncing a Trump-backed primary challenger. The Georgia Republican has been a conservative governor, but refused to support Trump’s efforts to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

“Thank you to #BrianKempGA for all of your help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important to the success of our Party and, most importantly, our Country,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “I look forward to working with you, your team, and all of my friends in Georgia to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Vance, Trump’s running mate, said Thursday in Georgia he spoke “very briefly” with Kemp and guaranteed the governor is behind the GOP ticket, despite his history with Trump.

“I read the headlines. Brian Kemp and Donald Trump have had some disagreements. I can 100% guarantee you that Brian Kemp is behind this ticket. He wants us to win, because he believes the policies of Kamala Harris are disastrous for this country,” Vance said.

Kemp, in an interview with conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night, lambasted Harris on policy issues — signaling at least a tamping down of hostilities with the former president.

“We’re going to put Georgia back in the red column for the presidential race, unlike we did in 2020,” Kemp said.

VP showdown also looms

Trump and Vance had one joint event in Asheboro during the Democratic convention — a Wednesday outdoor rally where Trump spoke from behind bulletproof glass.

But their strategy appears to be to divide and conquer as they held several events in different cities and states.

Vance continues to accuse Harris of hiding from the media, as she has yet to sit down for an interview with a major network.

“Kamala Harris is going around asking people to be their president of the United States, but she won’t answer a single tough question, and she won’t interact with the American people unless there’s a teleprompter standing between them and her,” Vance said on Tuesday in Wisconsin.

At events, Vance regularly takes reporters’ questions in front of attendees and does brief one-on-one interviews. He also speaks with traveling press on his campaign plane or under the wing before or after he boards.

He is set to debate Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, on October 1.

Vance said he is preparing by focusing on policy and answering the “American people’s questions on how we’re going to make their lives better, how we’re going to make their communities safer, how we’re going to bring back prosperity and low prices to the American economy.”

He also quipped, “I found a good friend from back home who embellishes and lies a lot and have him stand in for Tim Walz.”

CNN’s Ted Barrett, Kate Sullivan, Kristen Holmes, Ali Main, Aaron Pellish, Alejandra Jaramillo and Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.

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