JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – With the tickets set, both Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz and former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance have major challenges to confront.
For Harris, it is realizing honeymoons don’t last.
For Trump, it’s time for a campaign reboot. And most analysts will tell you -- along with many within his own campaign -- they don’t know how to get there.
Now that we’ve gotten to the bottom line, like they sang in the “Sound of Music,” let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.
Well, maybe not the beginning. At least where we are these days.
The Harris/Walz ticket seems to have taken the “Joyful Warrior” approach. Harris still must broaden that approach and the challenge is, does she practice the sort of defensive politics former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama mastered -- in their own ways and in different decades -- to reassure middle America that they weren’t radicals?
Or, as one analyst put it, “Will she adopt a new, fit-for-Trumpian-times model of simply rousing core supporters and betting contempt for opposition will carry the day?”
The Trump-Vance ticket has yet to figure things out and has to decide if the old line of attack is working or if it’s time to develop new lines of demarcation.
Or maybe they have decided, and they plan to go with the same old same old, paving the political road with insults and not worrying about people fact-checking things.
Either way, both political camps must decide the best way to reach voters in the “Rust Belt” and “Sun Belt” states. It’s those voters who are up for grabs and who can sway the election.
Now, it’s no secret Harris chose Walz to give the party a boost in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If the Dems can hold those states, they have a good chance of taking the Oval Office. That is if.
Why the “if”? Well, Walz had trouble holding the blue-collar and small-town area vote in his last campaign. An area where the party was not as competitive as it used to be.
What changed? Call it the “Trump factor.”
Of course, Trump now wants not one, but three debates with Harris. Now, he certainly doesn’t think it will have the same kind of ending it did with President Joe Biden, but it’s very telling. It shows he’s trying to gain some traction in this election.
And the debates could prove to be a pivot point in the campaign. The debates will be a major test for Harris. She was strong when she debated in her failed 2020 presidential bid. Not as well in others.
And face it, she has had some unflattering moments, shall we say, when she’s had to explain her position or has been put in a corner and asked tough questions in big interviews.
All that said, she is a savvier politician today, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
And then there’s this bombshell from Biden. He’s not “confident” of a peaceful transition of power if Trump loses the election. He pointed to comments made by the former president himself. The Republican nominee suggested in the past the only way he’d lose was if the election was stolen from him.
News4JAX political analyst and head of the Jacksonville University Public Policy Institute Rick Mullaney joined me on this week’s edition of “Path to the Polls.”
You can catch our encore presentation at 7 p.m. Tuesday on News4JAX+ or watch any time on demand on News4JAX.com, News4JAX+ and our YouTube channel.