Harris vs. Trump: 100 days from election, it's a dramatically altered presidential race
Sunday marks 100 days until Election Day 2024.
It also marks one week since President Biden's political landscape-altering announcement that he was suspending his re-election rematch against former President Trump.
Biden made his move amid mounting pressure from within the Democratic Party for him to drop out after a disastrous performance in last month's first presidential debate with Trump.
2024 SHOWDOWN: TRUMP QUICKLY MOVES TO TRY AND DEFINE HARRIS
The embattled president's immediate backing of Vice President Kamala Harris last Sunday ignited a surge of endorsements for the vice president by Democratic governors, senators, House members and other party leaders. Within 36 hours, Harris announced that she had locked up her party's nomination by landing the verbal backing of a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates to next month's Democratic National Convention.
ICING ON THE DEMOCRATS' 2024 CAKE - THE OBAMAS ENDORSE HARRIS
Former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama on Friday became the final major party leaders to endorse the vice president.
Harris also hauled in a staggering $129 million in fundraising following Biden's announcement, which her campaign touted on Thursday morning.
"It’s go-time for both sides," longtime Republican consultant David Kochel told Fox News.
Besides uniting and exciting Democrats, the replacement of Biden by his vice president as the party's standard-bearer - which is expected to become official during a virtual roll call of convention delegates that starts on Aug. 1 - has given Harris a bump in public opinion polling.
What was once a margin-of-error race between Biden and Trump had turned into a clear edge for the former president in the weeks after their June 27 debate showdown in Atlanta. However, with Harris now at the top of the ticket and Biden out of the race, surveys indicate it is back to a margin-of-error race.
"Instead of what was shaping up to be a Trump win, America has a real, bona fide race on its hands," veteran political scientist and New England College President Wayne Lesperance said. "Game on."
While Harris faces the monumental task of going from zero to 60 in an extremely condensed timeline, she is not starting from scratch, as she immediately inherited Biden's large campaign apparatus with its vast ground-game resources in the key swing states.
However, Harris does face a crucial immediate task - choosing a running mate - which could come as early as the next week or two.
Biden and Trump are both well-known commodities to American voters.
However, Kochel, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns who remained neutral in the 2024 Republican primary, emphasized that most Americans know so little about the vice president's record and that both the Trump and Harris campaigns are "in a race to define" Harris.
In his first campaign rally since the presidential race was upended, Trump did not waste any time in trying to define his new opponent.
At a rally in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina, the Republican presidential nominee repeatedly took aim at Harris, whom he derogatorily called "lying Kamala Harris."
Trump aimed to paint Harris as the "most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history."
The former president charged that Harris "has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe. She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country if she ever gets the chance to get into office."
Additionally, pointing to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent, a far-left champion and two-time runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination, Trump argued that Harris is "more liberal than Bernie Sanders. Can you believe it?"
Throughout his more than an hour and a half stream of comments, Trump repeatedly slammed the vice president over border security and crime, two top issues in the 2024 election.
Trump campaign spokesman and senior adviser Steven Cheung said that the former president's team was ready to go on offense the moment Harris succeeded Biden as the Democrats' standard-bearer.
"There wasn’t any surprise. We were prepared for it. We had all our assets ready. We had all our content ready. It didn’t surprise anyone," Cheung told reporters ahead of the Trump rally.
Harris, pushing back, is pointing to her hefty law enforcement résumé as she spotlights Trump's numerous legal controversies, including his 34 felony convictions two months ago in the first criminal trial of a former or current president.
"As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds," Harris said Monday at an event at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
"Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type," she emphasized as she pointed to Trump's multiple lawsuits and criminal cases, many of which are ongoing.
Harris repeated the line of attack the next day at a rally in Milwaukee.
With 100 days to go until Election Day, the rhetoric this past week on the campaign trail is just an appetizer of things to come.