At the end of October, a trim and smiling Joe Biden, no longer the Democratic candidate but still the President, delivered some pizzas to a few dozen phone-bankers at a union hall in western Pennsylvania. It was exactly the sort of image that was once supposed to define the 2024 campaign: Democrats saw in Biden a grandfatherly figure who had restored order and common purpose, while Republicans detected a doddering emblem of a frail and aging regime. The event at which Biden was supposed to dispel that impression, the first Presidential debate, backfired spectacularly: he could not even cogently give his talking points. At the other lectern, Donald Trump, mugging, could hardly believe his luck. During the next two weeks or so, an assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear; Democratic polls, already weak, plummeted; and, at the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, a new generation of young conservative delegates played cornhole and toasted J. D. Vance’s selection to the G.O.P. ticket and the victory to come.
But, rather than putting the election on a new track, these events merely detonated its guardrails. The Democratic Party moved against Biden, and Kamala Harris, sometimes derided as a lightweight, donned a Howard University sweatshirt, flipped through her formidable Rolodex, and efficiently organized a desperate Party behind her. Within weeks, Harris had the nomination, an anthem (Beyoncé’s “Freedom”), and a theme—“We’re not going back.” She chose Governor Tim Walz as her running mate—the feel-good pick for liberals—and went on the trail, appearing at buoyant rallies across the country. In a Georgia doughnut shop, Vance struggled to figure out whether to order glazed or sprinkles for his staff. “Whatever makes sense,” he eventually said. The polls tightened. The Trump campaign looked a little directionless. Harris won the debate.
It was the second attempt on Trump’s life, in mid-September, that gave the race existential meaning. “There is now widespread concern across the globe,” the Times reported, “that the November election will not end well and that American democracy, once a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking point.” In both campaigns, advisers were still saying mundane things—“Stick to the economy”—but neither one seemed to heed that advice. The Republicans instead turned relentlessly to the issue of immigration, manipulating the everyday struggles of migrant life to seem like the plundering of an invading horde. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign staged a rally with Beyoncé in Houston, emphasizing the threat to reproductive rights, and a sombre evening event at the Ellipse, in Washington, D.C., memorializing January 6th and highlighting Trump’s fascism, a word that her campaign had only recently begun to use. On the eve of Election Day, the contest was still being measured in margins of error, in likely voters, in doors knocked on and viewers reached, in the flaws of its candidates. But it was also understood by both sides as a kind of civilizational struggle. The contrast between the stakes of the election and the chaotic form in which it unfolded has given 2024 a veneer of surreality.
To excavate the characters and the scenes of the campaign is to map a political environment in which only the most heightened and lurid version of events is vivid enough to capture the public’s attention. The truncated 2024 campaign has been visible through a lens fractured by partisanship and new media, in which three dimensions become two. In its final days, the campaign was shaped by comments made by a Trump warmup comic mocking Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and by Elon Musk’s pledge to pay a million dollars each day to a swing-state voter who signed his super PAC’s pro-Constitution petition, which Philadelphia’s district attorney has alleged amounts to an illegal lottery. Musk, who has spent more than a hundred million dollars supporting Trump’s bid, has said that the effort isn’t meant to get people to “vote for or register for anyone.” The kinds of campaigns that first delivered Biden to the national stage, more than fifty years ago, have long disappeared. We are now fully through the looking glass.
—Benjamin Wallace-Wells
