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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

The writer is Chair of Public Humanities at the University of London and the author of ‘The Wrath to Come’

The volatility of the 2024 US election season comes as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. With the Trumpist Republican party gleefully ripping up rule books and stoking rage as a campaign strategy, the only certainty this year was high-octane uncertainty, and so it has proved. After President Joe Biden shook things up further with the decision to withdraw his candidacy on Sunday, commentators called the situation unprecedented, claiming it blew the riskiness of the election sky-high. 

But predictions of a contested convention were premature, to say the least. Within a day Kamala Harris had secured enough delegates to win the nomination. As always in American politics, money was a decisive factor: the vice-president can access the Biden-Harris war chest, as well as the campaign’s infrastructure in the swing states that will decide the election. 

Chaos did not ensue partly because a president deciding not to seek re-election is not at all unprecedented. While no other presumptive nominee has stepped aside so close to the national convention, James K Polk, James Buchanan, Rutherford B Hayes, and Calvin Coolidge all opted for a single term, while incumbents Harry Truman and Lyndon B Johnson both announced they would not run in March of their election years.

Until the 1970s and 1980s, the US election cycle was briefer and more dynamic than today’s extensive campaigns, making such shifts less destabilising. The multiyear process of recent American elections has introduced a deadening predictability. 

That all just changed. This will now be the first election since 1976 not to feature a Bush, a Clinton, or a Biden — and Trump suddenly became the oldest candidate in US history. His decision to choose as running mate another white man, whose reactionary positions on reproductive rights are wildly out of step with a younger electorate, looks increasingly foolish. And it makes Harris’s choice of running mate all the more important.

Harris, the first Black woman nominee, will undoubtedly choose a white male governor as her running mate. Democrats need a candidate who appeals to independent and red-state voters, meaning Governor Gavin Newsom is unlikely to join fellow Californian Harris on the ticket. Josh Shapiro could energise battleground Pennsylvania. Or there’s Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former astronaut married to Gabrielle Giffords, critically wounded in an assassination attempt in 2011.

The first Black woman plus a former astronaut could go a long way. But the smart money is watching Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat with a 64 per cent approval rating in Trump country. Beshear has an impressive record as attorney-general, and speaks with compassion of his Christian faith while recognising the rights and vulnerabilities of others — including reproductive rights.

Abortion is a crucial issue in the 2024 election, and pro-choice campaigners have won every contest that focused on reproductive rights since the overturning of Roe vs Wade in 2022. Harris will surely make it a central plank of her campaign; ads should feature her cross-examining Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, as she demanded whether he knew any laws that allow the government to interfere with male bodies.

What may prove the real game-changer, however, was alluded to by Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, another possible running mate. Responding to reports that he expected to be “running for something,” Pritzker wittily posted: “You think I just fell out of a coconut tree?” He was referring to a tsunami of memes across social media that have rapidly reclaimed and transformed rightwing efforts to shame Harris for her laughter and her quirky sayings, including one that her mother liked about no one having fallen out of a coconut tree (or, as Harris clarified, everyone having a context.)

She has instantly been embraced by younger voters who recognise the bigotries inherent in deriding a Black woman for her joyful individuality, or for using sayings from her multiracial heritage. Literally overnight they injected an explosion of positive energy into what had seemed a hopeless rerun of decades-old battles between moribund old white men.

Trump’s supporters may now regret the months they spent insisting that old Boomer men with declining capacity were unfit to be president. Harris is a Gen X Black woman rapidly building a Gen Z fan base for a historic candidacy. The story remains uncertain, but it is suddenly looking like the future, instead of the past.