Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter a final 10-week sprint to election day, with the Democratic candidate surging ahead after a keynote speech to accept her party’s nomination. Less than three weeks before their first presidential debate, polls show the race for the White House is tight.
Ms Harris leaves Chicago with the wind in her sails, having raised more funds than Mr Trump and erased the polling leads he was enjoying before she replaced President Joe Biden last month.
But Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director, said at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the convention that the race “is not fundamentally changed” and still “very, very tight”.
“We have tremendous enthusiasm. I think momentum is on our side, but we now need to do something with it and engage the electorate effectively this fall,” he said.
Ms Harris has edged ahead in polling, reversing what had started to look like a likely Trump victory against Mr Biden before he pulled out and endorsed his Vice President.
In just a month, Ms Harris, 59, has raised a record-breaking half-a-billion dollars, enjoying a political honeymoon that shows little sign of ending.
Party leaders said that headwinds could still slow the campaign, however.
These include internal protests over US policy on the Israel-Gaza war and possible shifts in polling with the withdrawal on Friday of independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has endorsed Mr Trump.
Analysts are mixed on the effect of Mr Kennedy’s exit. He was polling in the low single digits and his embrace of conspiracy theories has made him a fringe figure.
However, in a very tight race, it is possible that even a few thousand votes in a crucial swing state could ultimately determine who takes the White House.
Mr Trump, touting plans on taxes and health, tried on Friday to turn the page on a week in which the Republican candidate was overshadowed and struggled to focus on policy issues instead of personal attacks on Ms Harris. From a lectern at a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas, the former president, spoke about his plan to eliminate taxes on tips to waiters and other service employees. He discussed his campaign’s efforts to court Hispanic voters in Nevada, one of the key swing states.
One question still to be answered is whether Harris will also outpace Mr Trump on the trail in the coming weeks. Mr Biden made relatively few campaign stops, easing pressure on the Republican candidate to travel more around the country. That may now change.
Mr Trump, 78, will travel to Detroit on Monday to address a conference of the National Guard Association of the United States and is scheduled to give a speech at a conservative women’s group’s annual summit in Washington on Friday.
The Harris campaign has not yet released details of her movements for next week.
