As Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for US president, and 100,000 red, white and blue balloons floated down from the rafters, Charlene Dukes’ eyes filled with tears. “It was when she spoke about her family, her upbringing, which is so similar to many of us,” said Dukes, a Black woman from Maryland.
“Many of us were not born with a silver spoon in our mouths,” added Dukes, who said the prospect of the US electing a woman of colour as president for the first time in its 248-year history left her feeling “euphoric”.
Democrats are not only buoyed up by their new ticket of Harris and running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota with dad, football coach and midwestern appeal: after years of soaring prices, the Federal Reserve has nearly conquered inflation without triggering a recession, a feat few economists predicted.
The number of people crossings into the US has fallen dramatically since Joe Biden’s asylum crackdown and stricter enforcement in Mexico, although migration can be cyclical and, as the weather cools, it is possible the numbers will begin to climb.
Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the Obama White House, said at a media event organised by Bloomberg: “They are pretzeling themselves trying to figure out how to attack Kamala Harris because she has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we have never seen before in our politics. She is an incumbent but she’s also a change candidate right now in this election. She’s been able to seize the banner away from Donald Trump.”
Gaspard, who has known Harris since the 2007-8 Obama campaign and describes her as a “Swiss army knife” able to appeal to voters in every context, added: “The Republican party will struggle for the next 75 days to impose some governing discipline on Donald Trump, [the US representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others who are going to continue to go after Kamala Harris with misogynistic, racist, ethnic, xenophobic tropes.
“They’re going to struggle with that and they’re going to fail miserably because [Trump] is a candidate who is incapable of being conditioned to a new kind of behaviour. There is no message discipline there. The challenge that they have: Donald Trump is a far better candidate in 2016 than the guy who’s standing on the stage today.”
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