Kamala Harris Has Plenty of Time to Win the Election

In American politics, 75 days—the length of time between the end of the Democratic National Convention and Election Day—is the blink of an eye. The entirety of presidential elections now lasts well over a year: The Biden campaign began staffing up its reelection effort in June 2023. The first Republican debate was held exactly 440 days before Election Day 2024. Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination in March, though he has been the presumptive nominee for far longer. (Indeed, one could argue that this presidential campaign began the moment Joe Biden placed his hand on a Bible on January 20, 2021.) By mid-April, the Biden campaign already had 300 paid staffers in nine states; as of midsummer, it had already spent nearly $200 million.

All of that money was spent on a candidate who is no longer running for president. After Biden announced, in a surprise tweet on July 21, that he was stepping aside as the Democratic nominee, he and most of the party’s senior leadership quickly lined up behind Vice President Kamala Harris, who will almost certainly claim the party’s nomination when it assembles at its convention in Chicago in mid-August.

Harris has a number of advantages that the politicians who had been bandied about as potential Biden replacements, like governors Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom, do not. As vice president, she has widespread name recognition. She has run a presidential campaign before, albeit an unsuccessful one. And, perhaps most importantly, she will inherit the campaign infrastructure and funds that were being deployed to reelect Biden. A new candidate would have had to build an entire campaign from scratch. Harris is, moreover, off to a great start. In the 24 hours after Biden announced he was stepping aside, she raised a record $81 million.

Despite those advantages, Harris will, nevertheless, have to mount a presidential campaign in a remarkably short window. Carrying deeply unfavorable numbers, she’ll have to reintroduce herself to skeptical voters. This is a daunting, but not impossible, task. Harris will have a month to soft launch her campaign before the party gathers in Chicago for her coronation. Political conventions are typically drab and inconsequential. July’s Republican National Convention may have featured raucous shots of delegates dancing in the aisles, but it was also quickly forgotten, thanks to an interminable acceptance speech from Donald Trump and Biden’s earthshaking announcement, three days after its conclusion, that he was stepping aside. The Democratic convention will have real stakes; it will be Harris’s first big test as a presidential nominee. As United Center staffers sweep the floors on August 22, the party will have 75 days to run a presidential campaign and save the country from Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Project 2025. It may not seem like much time, but it can certainly be done.

Presidential elections were not always this long. Less than a century ago, primaries were a rarity, and nominees were selected by state delegates at national conventions held the summer before the November election. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower declared he was a Republican only 10 months before the election, and announced his intention to run a mere month later. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson waited until March 31 to withdraw from the race, leading to a calamitous convention.

That convention, marred by raucous antiwar demonstrations, police brutality, and deep division, also ultimately changed the way that presidents are selected. In 1968, nominees were still largely chosen by party functionaries in proverbial smoke-filled rooms. Afterward, the primary system expanded, and the people—and not the parties—selected the nominees. As a result, elections transformed from sprints to marathons and, especially as the Supreme Court shredded campaign finance laws, grew into the endless, costly spectacles we know today.

Nineteen sixty-eight looms over the 2024 Democratic National Convention partly due to a pat bit of symbolism: Chicago is the host city of both conventions. (That the Windy City also hosted the 1996 DNC is rarely mentioned in these bleak prognostications.) As encampments protesting America’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza spread across the country and Biden’s replacement as the party’s nominee grew more likely, Chicago 1968 has been invoked as a bogeyman.

But there is little reason to believe that the 2024 DNC will be anything like its 1968 version. Biden’s handling of Israel and Gaza has been abhorrent, but it has not galvanized voters the way that the Vietnam War did. Fissures may emerge, but Democrats are largely united on the existential necessity of ensuring that Donald Trump does not return to the White House. After a month of panic, the party is rallying behind Harris. In other words, 2024 is terrible, but it is not 1968.

As Democrats gear up for a sprint campaign against Trump, they are better served looking not to the past, but to Europe, and the recent taut, efficient, and victorious campaigns run by left-wing parties in the U.K. and France. On July 4, Britain’s Labour Party romped to victory less than six weeks after Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak dissolved Parliament and called for elections. Three days later—in the second round of snap elections called by French President Emmanuel Macron—a coalition of left-wing French parties won a surprise victory over the far right, which had been favored to take power for the first time since World War II.

To be sure, Labour’s victory in the U.K. had long been preordained. Boasting polling leads for months in the run-up to the election, the party campaigned by not campaigning. Led by the beige Keir Starmer, the party hardly took positions on divisive issues or, indeed, on any issue at all. Thanks to low turnout, Labour received a smaller vote share than any party forming a majority government since World War II, but it didn’t matter: Voters were sick of 14 years of Tory rule, which included the rise and fall of no fewer than five PMs and resulted most notably in draconian austerity policies and the disastrous Brexit.

France is perhaps more instructive. After the first round of voting on July 1, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally seemed poised to take power. Facing the disastrous rise of a xenophobic party with literal fascistic roots, the country’s moderate and left-wing coalitions took action, even though doing so ensured that the wildly unpopular Macron, the man responsible for the elections in the first place, remains in power for now. Like the U.K., France has a parliamentary system, and the Popular Front victory was possible thanks in part to strategic voting that’s impossible in a two-party one: The moderate and left-wing coalitions each sacrificed potential spoilers in order to ensure that the far right did not take power. That was accomplished via a message that Democrats must deploy, regardless of their nominee: Defeating the right is the most important thing.

This is a heartening message for the unpopular Harris. Her task is daunting but achievable. Voters do not have to like her. They just have to be convinced that she is a better alternative to Donald Trump, a man whom a majority already distrust and dislike. If Harris can successfully reintroduce herself by August 22, when she accepts the Democratic nomination, as a trustworthy candidate who is more than capable of running the government, and she can vigorously campaign on the threat posed by Trump and Vance, she can win—even though she will have run one of the shortest campaigns in modern American political history.

There is, in these recent European elections, also a strong suggestion that a winning campaign can be built, from the ground up, rapidly, and that voters who are anxious about Trump would rally behind an imperfect alternative. And key logistical differences exist: Campaign spending is severely limited in both countries. In the U.K., parties are barred from spending more than about $70,000 per constituency, meaning spending is maxed out at roughly $44 million. In France, presidential candidates cannot spend more than about $24.5 million on campaigns.

“The hugeness of the election in the U.S. is a function of the massive amounts of money at play to some degree,” said Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London. “You do have to have these long periods of fundraising alongside campaigning, and we just have completely different rules and structures around that.” Harris will have to simultaneously fundraise and campaign in a short window. But if Harris’s early numbers are any indication, she may not have to spend too much of her time wooing the superrich at glitzy fundraisers and can instead devote the vast majority of her time to actually making the case that Donald Trump is unfit to return to the White House.

Still, the euphoria that followed Biden’s announcement will likely dissipate. There will be bad polls. There will be hand-wringing, if not outright panic, about Harris’s favorability numbers and her standing in the states that will actually decide the election. But she can find a heartening lesson in Europe: Unpopular candidates can win if their opponents are even less popular. That is especially true if their opponents are also considered dangerous. Harris will have to do something that hasn’t been done in America in decades: win a presidential election in just three months. But it isn’t impossible. In fact, it happens all the time.