Kamala Harris is already the de facto candidate of the Democratic Party, whose delegates will begin voting on Thursday, August 1st to nominate her to the position without any other alternative, so the process is only about knowing how overwhelming her victory will be.
Meanwhile, what Donald Trump's campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has described as a "honeymoon" between voters and the vice president does not seem to be losing steam. A week ago, a poll by the respected Siena company for the New York Times had the former president just one point ahead of Harris, when just three weeks earlier he had a six-point lead over Joe Biden. Other polls place the Democratic candidate in pectore one point ahead of the Republican (according to PPP) or one or two points ahead (according to YouGov for The Economist). However, the U.S. electoral system requires Democrats to be at least three points ahead to have a minimal guarantee of victory.
In any case, Harris' arrival has injected energy into the Democratic Party, which was watching Biden's campaign as a slow-motion derailment. This, in turn, has unsettled Trump and his team, who surprisingly did not seem to have anticipated the possibility of the vice president entering the campaign. This is compounded by internal criticism over the selection of Senator J.D. Vance as the vice presidential candidate, as his illiberal, racial, and ultranationalist message does not broaden Trump's voter base beyond his core supporters.
And when Trump is nervous, he unleashes. Just on Wednesday night, at a rally in Pennsylvania, he claimed that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer refused to shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visited Washington last week, which is false. Furthermore, Trump stated that Schumer is "a member of Hamas, something he is proud of."
Calling a pro-Israeli Jew to the core like Schumer a "member of Hamas," who famously said "one of my roles in the U.S. Senate is to be the guardian of Israel, and as long as I have a breath of life, I will continue to be so", is a joke that very few members of that community will find amusing, at best. Similarly, Trump's comment about Harris on Wednesday is unlikely to be well-received by African Americans and Indians. "She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black," Trump said, referring to the vice president.
The alleged racial transformation of Harris was perceived by many as a display of racism by Trump, especially as it was made at a forum of the National Association of Black Journalists. The former president did not improve matters by accusing illegal immigrants of "taking black jobs," a phrase he often uses at his rallies but that no one knows what it means and he did not clarify. The rest of the debate was a cascade of verbal confrontations and booing from the audience - mostly black - who did not seem at all convinced by the arguments of the Republican candidate.