Georgia became the nadir of the election campaign a month ago, when Joe Biden delivered one of the worst presidential debate performances in American political history.
The front-runner to replace him, the Democratic candidate most likely to win, demonstrated on Tuesday that the debate that threatens to set the course of the presidential race and make a Donald Trump victory inevitable is just the latest political illustration of H.G. Wells’ cliché: “What’s past is the beginning, and all that is and all that has been is but the twilight of dawn.”
The question that followed Tuesday night’s rally, the largest yet for Kamala Harris’ “people-led campaign,” with 10,000 people in attendance: Can the vice president convince unlikely voters that he can do what Democrats have failed to do since 2008 and lead the country?
Harris appears to have more to offer as a soup-to-drink presidential candidate than she did in her risky, unwinnable 2020 election.
Rapper Megan Thee Stallion opened for the vice president, delivering her own catchphrase: “Hot people for Harris,” a nod to the widening gender and demographic gaps in a presidential campaign that has shifted from a mostly bygone era of two-man choices to something more generational.
The contrast between this generation of artists and Trump favorite Lee Greenwood is a sign of the unstoppable shifting cultural sands beneath the feet of the three-time Republican candidate.
Meanwhile, Harris has made it “very clear” that the “road to the White House” runs through the “Peach State.” Her “prosecutors vs felons” approach, coupled with the now-obligatory “put him in jail” chant, is the ultimate irony for anyone who remembers Trump’s empty promises to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Despite arriving in the twilight years of Biden’s political career, the Harris campaign appears to be greater than the sum of its parts — a scenario that no one would have expected in an era when Republican activists and commentators were gleefully compiling supercuts of the vice president’s more opaque statements.
And more importantly, who on the right can effectively counter what is becoming a coalition of young people, women and pop-culture icons that is feeling truly populist for the first time in the Democratic Party since Barack Obama in 2008?
Some of it was misleading: The post-pandemic era that Biden will lead will place unique pressures on middle-income families, but she insisted that “building the middle class” will be a big part of her presidency.
But as the crowd chanted “there’s no turning back” and Harris criticized Trump for refusing to debate, saying “If you have something to say, say it to my face,” it became clear to the thousands in the audience that for the first time in 16 years, Democrats were winning the cultural debate.
Of course, Obama is the greatest political speaker of the century. Kamala Harris may not be. But that doesn’t seem to matter: She’s established herself as a mainstream figure in 2024, and Donald Trump has never looked more old and outdated.
While the choice of J.D. Vance as running mate certainly made sense in the moment, before a flurry of old quotes from his opposition files made him seem out of the mainstream and, in Harris’ words, “just plain weird,” there’s a reason why Trump’s post-convention approval ratings didn’t rise in the days after the assassination attempt.
The zeitgeist is shifting, and that’s bad news for a man who has made his main bet on promoting the idea that his event is the biggest show in politics, with his show on the brink of cancellation and the so-called “rigged” 2020 election seemingly irrelevant history.
And a return to outdoor gatherings, much coveted by President Trump, is unlikely to bring about a resurgence of momentum.
Sure, Georgia polls often show Trump leading Harris, and MAGA Inc. and its allies will claim she is “dangerously liberal.” Whether that’s true or not, it’s irrelevant to swing votes in battleground states.
And Harris knows it.
“The momentum in this race is shifting, and there are indications that Donald Trump feels it too,” Harris said.
Unless the former president realizes this soon, the momentum may never recover.
