Key Moments from the Donald Trump–Kamala Harris 2024 Presidential Election

On the finish of October, a trim and smiling Joe Biden, now not the Democratic candidate however nonetheless the President, delivered some pizzas to a couple dozen phone-bankers at a union corridor in western Pennsylvania. It was precisely the form of picture that was as soon as imagined to outline the 2024 marketing campaign: Democrats noticed in Biden a grandfatherly determine who had restored order and customary objective, whereas Republicans detected a doddering emblem of a frail and growing older regime. The occasion at which Biden was imagined to dispel that impression, the primary Presidential debate, backfired spectacularly: he couldn’t even cogently give his speaking factors. On the different lectern, Donald Trump, mugging, might hardly imagine his luck. Through the subsequent two weeks or so, an murderer’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear; Democratic polls, already weak, plummeted; and, on the Republican Nationwide Conference, in Milwaukee, a brand new technology of younger conservative delegates performed cornhole and toasted J. D. Vance’s choice to the G.O.P. ticket and the victory to come back.

However, relatively than placing the election on a brand new observe, these occasions merely detonated its guardrails. The Democratic Occasion moved towards Biden, and Kamala Harris, generally derided as a light-weight, donned a Howard College sweatshirt, flipped by means of her formidable Rolodex, and effectively organized a determined Occasion behind her. Inside weeks, Harris had the nomination, an anthem (Beyoncé’s “Freedom”), and a theme—“We’re not going again.” She selected Governor Tim Walz as her operating mate—the feel-good choose for liberals—and went on the path, showing at buoyant rallies throughout the nation. In a Georgia doughnut store, Vance struggled to determine whether or not to order glazed or sprinkles for his workers. “No matter is sensible,” he finally stated. The polls tightened. The Trump marketing campaign regarded somewhat directionless. Harris gained the talk.

It was the second try on Trump’s life, in mid-September, that gave the race existential that means. “There’s now widespread concern throughout the globe,” the Occasions reported, “that the November election is not going to finish effectively and that American democracy, as soon as a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking level.” In each campaigns, advisers have been nonetheless saying mundane issues—“Keep on with the economic system”—however neither one appeared to heed that recommendation. The Republicans as a substitute turned relentlessly to the difficulty of immigration, manipulating the on a regular basis struggles of migrant life to look just like the plundering of an invading horde. In the meantime, the Harris marketing campaign staged a rally with Beyoncé in Houston, emphasizing the risk to reproductive rights, and a sombre night occasion on the Ellipse, in Washington, D.C., memorializing January sixth and highlighting Trump’s fascism, a phrase that her marketing campaign had solely lately begun to make use of. On the eve of Election Day, the competition was nonetheless being measured in margins of error, in probably voters, in doorways knocked on and viewers reached, within the flaws of its candidates. However it was additionally understood by each side as a sort of civilizational wrestle. The distinction between the stakes of the election and the chaotic type wherein it unfolded has given 2024 a veneer of surreality.

To excavate the characters and the scenes of the marketing campaign is to map a political setting wherein solely essentially the most heightened and lurid model of occasions is vivid sufficient to seize the general public’s consideration. The truncated 2024 marketing campaign has been seen by means of a lens fractured by partisanship and new media, wherein three dimensions grow to be two. In its ultimate days, the marketing campaign was formed by feedback made by a Trump warmup comedian mocking Puerto Rico as a “floating island of rubbish” and by Elon Musk’s pledge to pay 1,000,000 {dollars} every day to a swing-state voter who signed his tremendous PAC’s pro-Structure petition, which Philadelphia’s district legal professional has alleged quantities to an unlawful lottery. Musk, who has spent greater than 100 million {dollars} supporting Trump’s bid, has stated that the hassle isn’t meant to get individuals to “vote for or register for anybody.” The sorts of campaigns that first delivered Biden to the nationwide stage, greater than fifty years in the past, have lengthy disappeared. We are actually totally by means of the trying glass.

—Benjamin Wallace-Wells