Fifty days until Election Day – and the race for the White House is rocked once again.
Two months after former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in western Pennsylvania, the Secret Service opened fire while Trump was playing golf at one of his courses in southern Florida to prevent what appeared to be a second assassination attempt against the former president.
After decades without an assassination attempt against a sitting president or major party presidential nominee, for the second time this summer, the nation has narrowly avoided a tragedy of gigantic proportions that would only further deepen the nation’s already firmly cemented polarization.
‘Nothing will slow me down. I will NEVER SURRENDER!’ the former president vowed in a fundraising email to supporters on Sunday, following the incident.
A top Trump ally, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, argued in a statement that ‘as Americans we must unite behind him in November to protect our republic and bring peace back to the world.’
It is way too early to gauge whether the latest incident will impact the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed President Biden.
The only thing that is certain is that the time left in the 2024 campaign is fleeting.
Harris emphasized that the ‘clock is ticking,’ as she called on supporters at a fundraiser on Saturday to volunteer and mobilize their friends to vote.
‘Please join our teams in our battleground states and help register folks to vote. … And talk with your neighbors and your friends about the stakes,’ she urged.
With the first and potentially only debate between the Democratic and Republican Party presidential nominees now in the rearview mirror, and early voting and absentee balloting starting to get underway, the showdown between Harris and Trump remains a margin-of-error race in the seven crucial battleground states that determined the outcome of Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump and will likely determine the winner of the 2024 election.
The latest Fox News Power Rankings currently rates six of the seven states as toss-ups.
Those states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada – have seen the bulk of the campaign traffic from the Democratic and GOP tickets and are the battlefields in the ad wars between the two sides.
‘I think this is going to be a turnout exercise. Whoever does a better job of turning out their voters in those seven states will win,’ veteran Republican strategist Nicole Schlinger told Fox News.
Harris’ campaign, touting an ‘historic, 24-hour haul,’ last week showcased their fundraising prowess by hauling in $47 million in the immediate aftermath of the debate.
The money raked in by the Harris campaign was the latest sign of the vice president’s surge in fundraising in the nearly two months since she replaced Biden atop the Democrats’ 2024 national ticket.
‘Fifty-days is a lifetime in politics, but today I’d much rather be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump,’ longtime Democratic strategist Joe Caizzzo, a veteran of multiple presidential campaigns, said. ‘I think the enthusiasm remains overwhelmingly with the Democrats but there’s still a lot of work to be done.’
The Harris campaign highlights that it is investing much of its fundraising dollars into its grassroots outreach and get-out-the vote efforts, noting that it is ‘putting its resources into reaching the voters who will decide the election.’
The large ground game operation, originally constructed when Biden was the nominee, according to the campaign, includes over 312 offices and more than 2,000 staff in the key battlegrounds coordinated between the presidential campaign, the DNC and state Democratic parties.
In a straight Harris campaign and the DNC comparison to the Trump campaign and the RNC, the Democrats enjoy a sizable ground game advantage. However, Trump is relying on a handful of aligned outside groups to help run turnout operations that are traditionally performed by a presidential campaign.
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley took issue with the suggestion that the Democrats enjoyed a stronger get-out-the-vote operation.
‘No, they don’t have a stronger ground game. I feel very, very comfortable about the ground game we’re putting in place through Trump Force 47,’ the RNC chair emphasized in a Fox News Digital interview last week.
Whatley pledged that ‘we absolutely have the resources that we need to get our message out to all the voters that we’re talking to and feel very comfortable that we’re going to be able to see this campaign through, and we’re going to win on November 5.’
Additionally, Schlinger, a veteran of numerous Republican presidential campaigns, says on the key issue, Trump has the advantage.
‘Voters whose number one issue is the economy believe the economy is headed in the wrong direction and believe Donald Trump will do a better job fixing that,’ she emphasized. ‘Harris, I think, has an uphill climb explaining how she’ll do anything different than Joe Biden on that.’
Schlinger added for undecided voters, familiarity with the GOP nominee could give Trump an edge.
‘Nearly a third of voters have said they need to know more about Kamala Harris. With President Trump you know what you get, and I think that’s an advantage for Republicans,’ she argued.