“This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared,” reads the headline in The Atlantic following Vice President Kamala Harris’ coronation as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. “A campaign that had been optimized to beat Joe Biden must now be reinvented,” reports Tom Alberta.
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Really? How so? Alberta writes:
On the evening of Super Tuesday, March 5, shortly before Donald Trump effectively ended the Republican primary and earned a general-election rematch with President Joe Biden, I asked the co-managers of Trump’s presidential campaign what they feared most about Biden.
“Honestly, it’s less him,” Chris LaCivita told me. “And more—”
“Institutional Democrats,” Susie Wiles said, finishing her partner’s thought.
It was a revealing exchange, and a theme we would revisit frequently. The Democratic Party, Wiles and LaCivita would tell me in conversations over the coming months, was a machine—well organized and well financed, with a record of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years in presidential contests. Ordinarily, they explained, Democrats would have structural superiority in a race like this one. But something was holding the party back: Biden.
That ignores the savage response Donald Trump had to Harris’s challenge of J.D. Vance: “We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for Vice President is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate.” The Trump campaign knew before the Democrats that Biden wasn’t going to be the nominee.
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Will there even be a vice-presidential debate? Trump was 100 percent right — the Democrats have no idea who’s going to be running for vice president on their side.
By the way, here’s the scene in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, in advance of his solo campaign rally there:
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