The 2024 Presidential Campaign Is Unlike Any Other

“I know it’s been a roller coaster,” Vice President Kamala Harris told her campaign staff on Monday.

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A Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday. The next day, the presidential race was upended again.

The latest

Vice President Kamala Harris consolidated Democratic support around her campaign for the presidency, as President Biden called into her first campaign event.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California endorsed Harris, ending speculation that she would favor a more competitive process.
Lawmakers from both parties pushed the head of the Secret Service to quit after the attempted assassination of former President Trump.

Remember a month ago?

This time in June, the presidential race was a dug-in contest between two elderly men who have already won presidential elections. The candidates were familiar. The polls barely moved. And if that (and my inbox) was any indication, the campaign felt to many voters like a dull trudge to the finish line.

So much for that.

Over the course of three and a half weeks in June and July, at a time when presidential campaigns are usually on cruise control before the conventions, American politics have been upended by three stunning turns that historians will parse for years to come: a disastrous debate for President Biden, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, and now, the withdrawal of the incumbent just three and a half months before the election.

“I know it’s been a roller coaster,” Vice President Kamala Harris told her campaign staff on Monday, making something of an understatement.

When it comes to presidential campaigns, change often comes slowly and then all at once, with unscripted, consequential events tumbling one after the other. In 1968, just days passed between President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s decision to bow out of his re-election campaign and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which touched off a wave of protest and grief around the nation and reshaped the election.

In September 2008, an economic crisis turned the race upside down — an opportunity that Barack Obama, then a young Democratic senator, seized to portray himself as in charge. In October 2016, a videotape showing Trump speaking crudely about grabbing women’s private parts rocketed around the world. Weeks later, a letter surfaced from the F.B.I. director reopening his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails just days before the election.

Now we are living through our own summer of political upheaval, one that has forced the presidential race to be reborn as a brand-new contest, and the first race since 1976 without a Clinton, a Bush or a Biden on the ticket. It has turned into a fight between a Republican former president who has the complete devotion of his party and, in all likelihood, a Black woman whose candidacy will make history and seems likely to jolt her party with energy that Democrats were desperately lacking a month ago.

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