Kamala Harris’s campaign said on Friday it raised $310m in July, the latest dramatic illustration of a US presidential race polls show has transformed from an apparent romp to victory by Donald Trump into a neck-and-neck race in battleground states, though Trump retains a narrow lead.
Harris doubled Trump’s July fundraising haul of $138.7m, which in any normal year would be an impressive result, boosted by the assassination attempt he survived in Pennsylvania and by the Republican convention in Milwaukee.
But Harris’s strong start since Joe Biden stepped aside on 21 July and she became the de facto Democratic nominee has given her campaign $377m cash on hand, compared with Trump’s $327m, indicating the extent to which Democrats and progressives are newly engaged.
“Kamala Harris’s rising momentum seems to be transforming into a cultural wave we haven’t seen since Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008,” said Tara Setmayer, a Republican operative turned anti-Trump activist and founder of the Seneca Project, a group working to protect women’s rights.
On Friday, in online voting ahead of the convention in Chicago starting on 19 August, Harris collected enough delegates to secure the nomination. She has changed the race in a remarkably short time. It is still less than two weeks since Biden, 81, facing criticisms he was too old for a second term and calls to quit from donors prominently including the actor George Clooney, said he would stand aside.
National polls now show Harris and Trump evenly matched, a clear improvement for Democrats compared with when Biden was the candidate. The FiveThirtyEight.com polling average, an influential metric, shows Harris up by 1.5%, though it cautioned the figure was within its “uncertainty interval”.
More importantly, polls in the seven swing or battleground states that will decide victory show Trump still slightly ahead but Harris gaining.
As the 100-day countdown to the 5 November election began, Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm, found tight races in five of those states: Harris led Trump in Pennsylvania by 3 points and Wisconsin by 2, while Trump led in Arizona by 5 points and Nevada by 1. Michigan was a tie.
In the two other key states, Georgia and North Carolina, FiveThirtyEight put Trump up by about 1%. “We’re now officially in the zone where we can call the race a toss-up,” the polling site’s founder, Nate Silver, wrote.
Setmayer said: “The truncated election timeline is to Harris’s advantage. It’s boosting the sense of urgency now for voter enthusiasm. To maintain this surge Harris needs to avoid major missteps and stay on offense. So far, her reintroduction to the electorate has been nothing short of brilliant.”
Key decisions to come include the naming of a running mate, before a first joint rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
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Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro is a top contender, as are two other popular governors, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Andy Beshear of Kentucky; the Arizona senator Mark Kelly; and Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s secretary of transportation.
All five men have centrist appeal, with Walz among the most popular among progressives and Shapiro the least, given his stance on Israel and its war in Gaza. Shapiro and Kelly are from battleground states.
Whoever it is will be expected to take the fight straight to JD Vance, the hard-right 39-year-old Ohio senator who has endured a rocky rollout as Trump’s running mate. Attacked by Democrats and progressives for statements about women and families, Vance has even seemingly been dismissed by Trump himself.
“I think this is well documented historically, the vice-president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact,” the 78-year-old candidate said on Wednesday when asked if Vance was ready to step up if required.
Trump, too, has floundered since Harris entered the race. This week, in the chaotic interview at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in which he disparaged Vance, he also reacted angrily to questions and cast doubt on Harris’s racial identity.
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said, as the audience audibly gasped. “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman.”
Harris’s father, the Jamaican-born Stanford professor Donald Harris, is Black. Her mother, the scientist Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was Indian. Trump’s comments caused uproar. Black, Hispanic and other minority voters are key targets for both parties, Harris looking to shore up support after signs of slippage under Biden.
On Thursday night, the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund, which had held off on supporting Biden, announced its endorsement of Harris, with its chief executive emphasising the importance of Harris’s stance on Israel and Gaza.
“She has shown more sympathy towards the people of Gaza than both President Biden and former president Donald Trump,” Salima Suswell told NBC.
“During Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress, she decided not to attend. She has repeatedly called for a ceasefire, and I believe she has also expressed empathy towards civilian life and has been very caring as it relates to getting aid to the people of Gaza.”
Meanwhile, following a raucous Harris rally in Atlanta featuring prominent political leaders and a performance from the rapper Megan Thee Stallion, Black organisers say they are seeing increasing energy for Harris.
“I hear nothing but enthusiasm,” Helen Butler, who runs the non-partisan Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, said this week. “More people are calling to volunteer. The young people are saying, ‘What can we do?’”