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Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race and Endorses Harris, The New York Times, July 21, 2024

Remember this day.

Presumably, most people will.

No matter what happens next, the day is historic in a singular way.

Joe Biden, President of the United States, withdrew from the 2024 race for the presidency.

Kamala Harris, Vice-President of the United States, was immediately endorsed by Biden to take his place at the top of the ticket.

Within hours, virtually the entire Democratic party, from the party leaders in all 50 states, to virtually all Democratic members of congress, numerous governors and national leaders (including everyone who had been talked about as any knid of other option to be the nominee), had endorsed Harris.

She is virtually guaranteed to be the nominee.

The first nominee with the potential to become the first woman, Black woman and Asian woman president in US history.

The nomination of Harris is not an absolute certainty at this point, but any other outcome is extremely unlikely and would likely result in the Democratic Party going from explosive enthusiasm to chaos.

Harris against Trump. Speaking of explosive, this is a campaign that will be. The Democrats went in a minute Sunday afternoon from seemingly doomed to being ignited with excitement and having a real chance.

Much more on all this to come as events unfold.

First, before moving on to the front page and other articles in The New York Times, a few words about President Biden and the events of the past few weeks.

He had the worst debate perfomace imaginable with Trump, which led to the increasing cascade of calls for him to withdraw from the race.

Then an assasination attempt against fomer President Trump, coming within a fraction of an inch of kiling him, and thankfully with only a small part of his ear injured.

Then a successful Republican convention days later, with Trump appearing for several minutes to strike a more somber and unity oriented note as promised, then devolving quickly off script to the lowlights of his usual comments for well over an additional hour.

Ironically, the latter was the beginning of Democrats getting energized again. They saw a Trump on display, while pleasing his base, that a majority of Americans disdain.

The reasons given often for why Biden should leave the race–too old and cognitively declining, were grotesquely ageist and wrong. These had been Trump themes drummed in by the media for some time, regardless of the same issues applying to him, with apparently far more accuracy related to mental acuity (and those themes will now be focussed squarely on Trump as he faces a much younger, energetic and articulate candidate in a generational passing of the torch). Despite sudden revisionary reports in some cases, Biden was the same person before and after the debate as he had been for a long time, unless something is discovered about a suddenly emerging medical condition. Many of the great leaders around the world, political and otherwise, have been and are well into their eighties and nineties. People age differently of course, and that’s exactly the point. Some people tragically get early onset alzeimers in their forties and die in their fifties and others fight the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy and are over 100 talking about it articulately today. Modern medicine continues to extend lifespan and capacity.

The presidency is literally a unique and most difficult job in the world and Biden perhaps has slowed down somewhat and perhaps showed some signs of the stress involved (but you never would have said that at the State of the Union a few months ago), impacts on all presidents. Would Biden maintain the degree of health needed to successfully complete a second term? As much so at least as Trump but a potentially credible question in both cases. Who knows. For younger women or men as well. That’s why vice-presidents matter.

The real issue of the disastrous debate moments for Biden were image over substance. Trump had a terrible debate and when read in transcript, commentators roundly said Biden was the winner. But Trump looked and sounded strong and energetic and no one heard what he said when comparing with the shock-effect of the audio-visual perfomance of Biden on split screen.

Biden was finished after the debate because the image of his performance in the unprecedented early debate (which the Biden campaign ironically wanted to put to rest any questions of decline) was not possible to overcome.

As historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin properly put it “the perception of age and health”, regardless of facts one way or another, was branded permanently after the debate.

Joe Biden was all the things that virtually everyone praised him for in his decision to step away. His lifetime of public service, in the face of tragedy after tragedy–US senator at 29, vice-president for two successful terms with Obama, and then president of the US since 2020 (after making the most historic comeback in modern presidential campaign history)–has been truly remarkable. While facing facts was certainly a factor (itself a compliment in today’s culture), his decision to walk away from the pull of power of the most powerful office on earth was truly patriotic, putting his nation and the world and everything at stake over self-interest. His victory over Trump in 2020 already changed history. His accomplishments were the most extraordinary since the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, and perhaps the most important since FDR in the protection of freedom, democracry and human rights globally.

As said above, there will be more to come.

Now, today’s articles (in print tomorrow) in The New York Times:

“Biden Drops Out of Race, Scrambling the Campaign for the White House”,

Peter Baker, July 21, 2024, front page July 22, 2024

The president’s withdrawal under pressure from fellow Democrats cleared the way for a new nominee to take on former President Donald J. Trump in the fall. He quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Peter Baker has covered the past five presidents and written multiple books about the presidency.

President Biden on Sunday abruptly abandoned his campaign for a second term under intense pressure from fellow Democrats and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris to lead their party in a dramatic last-minute bid to stop former President Donald J. Trump from returning to the White House.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Mr. Biden said in a letter posted on social media. “And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

Mr. Biden then posted a subsequent online message endorsing Ms. Harris. “My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President,” he wrote. “And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

The president’s decision upended the race and set the stage for a raucous and unpredictable campaign unlike any in modern times, leaving Ms. Harris just 107 days to consolidate support from Democrats, establish herself as a credible national leader and prosecute the case against Mr. Trump. Recent polls have shown her competitive with and even slightly ahead of Mr. Trump.

Although Democratic convention delegates must ratify the choice of Ms. Harris to take over as standard-bearer next month, Mr. Biden’s endorsement meant the nomination was hers to lose and she appeared in a powerful position to claim it. While Mr. Biden, 81, remained president and still planned to finish out his term in January, the transition of the campaign to Ms. Harris, 59, amounted to a momentous generational change of leadership of the Democratic Party.

The president said he would “speak to the nation later this week in more detail about my decision,” although it was not clear when he would do that as he recovers from Covid at his vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Del.

Biden officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the president began changing his mind on Saturday while in Rehoboth with family members and three aides: Steve Ricchetti, his counselor and longtime aide; Annie Tomasini, his deputy chief of staff; and Anthony Bernal, the chief of staff to Jill Biden.

At some point in the day, Mr. Biden also summoned Mike Donilon, one of his longest serving advisers and closest confidants, who rushed to Rehoboth to join the conversation, one of the officials said. Still sick, the president opted against making an announcement on camera and instead crafted a letter with Mr. Donilon, author of many of his public speeches.

Mr. Biden finalized his decision on Sunday morning and made separate calls to three people to reveal it: Ms. Harris; Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff; and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, his campaign chair. The president then held a video call with senior White House and campaign officials to tell them about his decision at 1:45 p.m., leaving some of his aides teary-eyed. The letter was posted online at 1:46 p.m. Mr. Zients then held a call with White House and campaign officials and then with the cabinet.

The last time Mr. Biden was seen in public, he disembarked from Air Force One in Delaware looking pale and tentative, pausing on the staircase, his mouth agape, before taking another couple steps and stopping again. Asked for his reaction to Democrats pushing him to withdraw, he said only, “I am doing well,” then struggled to get into his seat in the presidential limousine.

In the following days, aides denied reports that Mr. Biden was reconsidering his decision to stay in the race. During a conference call on Saturday morning, his campaign co-chairs grew testy when officials talked about door-knocking and social media without addressing the elephant in the room.

By that evening, campaign aides at social events appeared in a foul mood and clearly expected Mr. Biden to stay in the race. Some allies said they thought that he was digging in. Even minutes before the surprise announcement, campaign aides were still working the phones to push Democrats to stand with him.

No sitting president has dropped out of a race so late in the election cycle in American history, and Ms. Harris and any other contenders for the nomination will have just weeks to earn the backing of the nearly 4,000 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. While the convention is scheduled to take place in Chicago from Aug. 19 to 22, the party had already planned to conduct a virtual roll call vote before Aug. 7 to ensure access to ballots in all 50 states, leaving little time to assemble support.

Although some Democrats have called for an open competition, Ms. Harris starts the truncated process in the strongest position. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, previously seen as a possible candidate, instead endorsed her. An ally of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan indicated that she would not run. No other candidate said on Sunday that they would jump in.

Instead, a flood of Democrats quickly endorsed Ms. Harris, including former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Former President Barack Obama and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both of whom were privately concerned about Mr. Biden’s ability to win this fall, notably did not back Ms. Harris in statements they issued welcoming the president’s decision, but there was no indication they were seriously looking for an alternative.

In her own statement, Ms. Harris praised Mr. Biden for his accomplishments and for “this selfless and patriotic act” in putting country ahead of his ambitions and implicitly addressed critics who said she should not simply be given a coronation.

“I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said. She added: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”

Mr. Trump responded to Mr. Biden’s announcement not with the grace typically offered in modern American politics when an opponent drops out, but with a characteristically caustic statement. “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site.

Other Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, quickly piled on and demanded that Mr. Biden resign from the presidency immediately. “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for president, he is not fit to serve as president,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “He must resign the office immediately. Nov. 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”

Mr. Biden’s withdrawal came 24 days after a disastrous debate performance against Mr. Trump cemented public concerns about his age and touched off widespread panic among Democrats about his ability to prevent the former president from reclaiming power. Mr. Biden, the oldest president in American history, appeared frail, hesitant, confused and diminished, losing a critical opportunity to make his case against Mr. Trump, a convicted felon who tried to overturn the last election after losing.

Democratic congressional leaders petrified by dismal poll numbers mounted a concerted effort to persuade Mr. Biden to gracefully exit as angry donors threatened to withhold their money and down-ballot candidates feared he would take down the whole ticket. Polls after the debate showed that even most Democrats preferred that Mr. Biden cede the nomination to another candidate.

Although Mr. Trump, 78, is just a few years younger than Mr. Biden, he came across as forceful at the debate even as he made repeated false and misleading statements. Questions have been raised about Mr. Trump’s own cognitive decline. He often rambles incoherently in interviews and at campaign rallies and has confused names, dates and facts just as Mr. Biden has. But Republicans have not turned against him as Democrats did against Mr. Biden.

The president’s age was a primary concern of voters long before the debate. Most Democrats told pollsters more than a year ago that they thought he was too old for the job. Born during World War II and first elected to the Senate in 1972 before two-thirds of today’s Americans were even born, Mr. Biden would have been 86 at the end of a second term.

Mr. Biden consistently maintained that his experience was an advantage, enabling him to pass landmark legislation and manage foreign policy crises. He maintained that he was the Democrat best equipped to defeat Mr. Trump given that he did so in 2020.

But his efforts to reassure Democrats that he was up to the task after the damaging debate failed to shore up support. Instead, his slowness to reach out to party leaders and some of the answers he gave in interviews only fueled internal discontent.

Isolated at Rehoboth Beach, Mr. Biden grew increasingly hurt and upset at onetime allies deserting him. Ron Klain, his longtime adviser and former White House chief of staff, expressed the bitterness on social media, blaming “donors and electeds” for having “pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump.”

In bowing out, Mr. Biden became the first incumbent president in 56 years to give up a chance to run again. With six months remaining in his term, his decision instantly transformed him into a lame duck. But he can be expected to use his remaining time in office to try to consolidate gains on domestic policy and manage wars in Europe and the Middle East.

His announcement signaled the end of an improbable life in public office that began more than half a century ago with his first election to the New Castle County Council in Delaware in 1970. Over the course of 36 years in the Senate, eight years as vice president, four campaigns for the White House and more than three years as president, Mr. Biden has become one of the most familiar faces in American life, known for his avuncular personality, habitual gaffes and resilience in adversity.

Yet the backslapping deal maker has struggled to translate decades of good will into the unifying presidency he promised. He led the country out of the deadliest pandemic in a century and the resulting economic turmoil, but his hopes of healing the rifts that widened under Mr. Trump have been dashed. American society remains deeply polarized, and his predecessor is still a potent force in stirring the forces of division and emboldening white supremacists and antisemites.

While he has spent most of his elective career seeking the political center, Mr. Biden advanced an expansive progressive agenda after taking office that his allies likened to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Working with the narrowest of partisan margins in Congress, he scored some of the most ambitious legislative victories of any modern president in his first two years.

Among other measures, he pushed through a $1.7 trillion Covid-19 relief package; a $1 trillion program to rebuild the nation’s roads, highways, airports and other infrastructure; and major investments to combat climate change, lower prescription drug costs for seniors, treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and build up the nation’s semiconductor industry. He also signed legislation meant to protect same-sex marriage in case the Supreme Court ever reversed its decision legalizing it.

He also appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and installed more than 200 other judges on lower federal courts despite the razor-thin control of the Senate, more than any other president to this point of his tenure in the modern era. Roughly two-thirds of his choices were women and roughly two-thirds were Black, Hispanic or members of other racial minorities, meaning he has done more to diversify the federal bench than any president.

Some of the major bills Mr. Biden passed drew Republican votes, but his string of legislative successes effectively ended with the 2022 midterm elections when Republicans won a narrow majority in the House, even if not scoring the “red wave” sweep that they had anticipated. Mr. Biden has been left to play defense ever since, successfully forging agreements with Republicans to avoid government shutdowns and national default but accomplishing little else more proactive.

On the international front, Mr. Biden revitalized international alliances that frayed under Mr. Trump, rallying much of the world to stand against Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Despite opposition by Mr. Trump and his allies, Mr. Biden secured tens of billions of dollars to arm Ukrainian forces and provide economic and humanitarian aid, although some critics have complained that he has been too slow to send the most sophisticated weaponry out of fear of escalation.

Mr. Biden supported Israel in its war against Hamas after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, but he has grown frustrated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that Israel is not doing enough to avoid civilian casualties and guarantee humanitarian aid to Gaza. Mr. Biden alienated many in his own party by not doing more on behalf of Palestinians and then angered supporters of Israel by refusing to ship certain weapons if they were to be used for an all-out assault on the Gaza city of Rafah.

Mr. Biden’s decision to pull all forces out of Afghanistan after 20 years, carrying out an agreement that Mr. Trump had struck with the Taliban, led to a debacle in the summer of 2021. Taliban forces swiftly took over the country, fleeing Afghans swarmed American airplanes taking off from Kabul and a suicide bomber killed 13 American troops and 170 Afghans during the withdrawal.

The president has also struggled to secure the southwestern U.S. border, where illegal migration has soared, and to stabilize the post-pandemic economy, in which inflation rose to its highest level in four decades and gas prices shot up to record levels. While inflation has fallen to 3 percent from its peak of 9 percent and unemployment at 4.1 percent remained near a half-century low, many Americans remain unsettled by economic anxiety.

Mr. Biden’s overall approval rating remained mired at an anemic 38.5 percent, according to an aggregation of polls by the political analysis website fivethirtyeight.com, lower than nine of the last 11 presidents who made it this far into their terms. His aides brushed off such data, noting that Mr. Biden surprised forecasters in the 2020 primaries, as did Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections.

Mr. Biden has noticeably slowed down in recent years. His gait has grown stiffer, his voice softer, and his energy level at times has diminished. He mangles his words, gets momentarily confused or forgets names or words that he tries to summon. He exercises most days and does not drink; doctors have pronounced him fit for duty. Aides and others who deal with him have long insisted that he remained sharp and informed in private meetings.

His decision to withdraw makes him an outlier in American history. Only three presidents have served four years or less without seeking a second term, all of them during the 19th century: James K. Polk, James Buchanan and Rutherford B. Hayes. Several others wanted another term but failed to secure their party’s nomination.

The last president who had the option to run again given the two-term limit in the 22nd Amendment but chose not to was Lyndon Johnson, who served the remainder of John F. Kennedy’s term after his 1963 assassination and then won a full term of his own the next year, only to back out of another race in 1968 amid the war in Vietnam.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

. . .

“With Biden Out, Vice President Kamala Harris Has a Chance to Make History Again”

By Jazmine Ulloa, Reporting from Washington D.C., July 21, 2024, in print edition July 22, 2024

Ms. Harris, the first woman, and woman of color, to be vice president, has faced sexist and racist attacks, but she has energized a network of support.

President Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be the new Democratic nominee gives Ms. Harris, already the first woman, and woman of color, to be vice president, another opportunity to make history.

In a letter announcing his withdrawal, Mr. Biden offered his thanks to Ms. Harris “for being an extraordinary partner in all this work.” He endorsed her in a separate post on social media that included a photo of the two of them on the White House grounds.

“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made,” he wrote in the post.

Before she was chosen as his running mate, Ms. Harris had clashed with Mr. Biden during her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign. Mr. Biden vowed during that race to pick a woman as his vice-presidential candidate, as well as someone with experience and who would be “simpatico with me, both in terms of personality as well as substance,” he said. Earlier in her career, Ms. Harris had served as a senator representing California and the state’s attorney general.

In speeches and event appearances, Ms. Harris, who has long been seen as the embodiment of a country growing more racially and ethnically diverse, has often nodded to her mother and the generations of women of all races who paved the way for someone like her. Her selection as vice president was also seen as an acknowledgment of the critical role Black women have played in Democratic victories since 2016.

Just this month at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans, Ms. Harris cut a striking figure, appearing confident and clad in an electric blue suit, as she talked up the administration’s accomplishments on issues such as student debt and Black maternal health and made a case for embracing one’s inner power and ambition, despite not looking like others in the room. “People in your life will tell you, though, it’s not your time. It’s not your turn. Nobody like you has done it before. Don’t you ever listen to that,” she said, adding: “I like to say, ‘I eat no for breakfast.’”

The news of Ms. Harris’s potential candidacy electrified the network of organizations and members who have pushed for increasing the ranks of women in politics and have prepared to support her. Ms. Harris, they said, had substantial leadership experience and offered to be a powerful voice at a time when democracy and women’s rights are under assault.

“This is a historic opportunity that has the potential for exciting and mobilizing young voters in a way we haven’t seen in a long time,” said Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and executive director of UltraViolet, which focuses on educating voters about digital disinformation. “It would be hard to overstate how meaningful it is in a year when the Republicans are coming for women.”

Christina Reynolds, a spokeswoman with the abortion-rights-focused political action committee Emily’s List, which has spent millions to promote Ms. Harris, said she had struggled to break through because vice presidents tend to receive less media attention, and because as a woman and a woman of color, she is subject to criticism based on race and gender that other vice presidents have not faced.

“She gets racist and sexist attacks that are not just about the administration and their work,” she said. But she said Emily’s List and other organizations had been working to combat that negative attention since they began the online campaign #wehaveherback in the hours after Mr. Biden selected her as vice president.

Ms. Harris was a constant target last week at the Republican National Convention. In panels and onstage, speakers tied her to an administration that they say has led to increases in crime and inflation. They cast her as an enabler of an aging and ineffective president. They blamed her for record levels of migrant crossings at the border, repeatedly labeling her Mr. Biden’s “border czar.”

Attacking Ms. Harris served several functions, Republican and Democratic strategists said. Republicans already saw her as a possible alternative to lead the Democratic ticket should Mr. Biden step aside. And Ms. Harris has long been seen as an important figure with the potential to energize the parts of the coalition seen as up for grabs: women, young people and voters of color.

Ms. Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney, was elected in 2010 as the first Black woman to serve as California’s attorney general. Her election to the United States Senate in 2016 made her only the second Black woman in the chamber’s history.

The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Ms. Harris became a barrier-breaking pick for vice president at a time when many voters were demanding change and equality for Black people as civil-rights protests rocked the nation after the murder of George Floyd. But her extensive record in law enforcement — formed through the tough-on-crime 1990s — was seen as liability for her among Democrats who were pushing for aggressive criminal justice reforms.

Now, her career as a prosecutor could be advantageous, some Democratic consultants and strategists said.

Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic campaign consultant and messaging researcher who urged the party to elevate Ms. Harris even before Mr. Biden stepped aside, said a potential matchup between Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump could stir interest among voters who had planned to sit out the race.

“It’s almost Hollywood — who takes on a villain who has been outed as a convicted felon, except for a prosecutor?” she said. “Who takes on this villain who has a string of extraordinarily sexist actions other than a woman? Who takes on this villain who has made racism his day and his night and scapegoating his central premise and promise but a woman of color?”

Jazmine Ulloa is a national politics reporter for The Times, covering the 2024 presidential campaign. She is based in Washington. More about Jazmine Ulloa

The promise and risks for Democrats in Kamala Harris’s candidacy.

By Shane Goldmacher, July 22, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris swiftly established herself as the Democratic front-runner to take on Donald J. Trump within hours of President Biden’s exit on Sunday, fundamentally rewiring the presidential contest at warp speed.

Now the race has been transformed into an abbreviated 106-day sprint that more closely resembles the snap elections of Europe than the drawn-out American contests. The tight timeline will magnify any missteps Ms. Harris might make but also minimize the chances for a stumble.

And in a race that Mr. Trump had been on a trajectory to win, Ms. Harris immediately becomes the ultimate X-factor.

Mr. Biden quickly endorsed Ms. Harris, who would be a barrier-breaking nominee as the first woman, the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent ever to serve as president. As the Democratic Party rallies behind her — the loudest voices of dissent were simply those not publicly endorsing her — here are six ways her candidacy holds both promise and peril.

She inverts the age argument.

During the Republican primaries, Nikki Haley had warned everyone who would listen that the first party to swap out its octogenarian candidate — Mr. Trump will turn 80 while in office if elected to a second term — would win. She was making the argument for herself but the logic applies to Ms. Harris, too.

Unlike the 81-year-old Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, 59, is not old — and just that fact neutralizes what has been one of the most potent Trump lines of attack.

Within minutes of Mr. Biden’s quitting, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were questioning Mr. Trump’s capacity to govern into his 80s, a daring attempt to reframe an age debate that has been so damaging to Democrats.

“She can make the issue of age and fitness a liability for Trump,” Erin Wilson, Ms. Harris’s deputy chief of staff, said on a call on Sunday with the group Win With Black Women.

Polls have consistently shown that voters have not been overly concerned with the 78-year-old Mr. Trump’s age. But simply taking the issue off the table may be enough of a victory for Democrats. They were facing the stiff headwinds of three-quarters of Americans thinking Mr. Biden was too old — a view shared widely even before his doddering debate.

Ms. Harris is also expected to give Democrats a far more vigorous campaigner. Her day job is not nearly as demanding as Mr. Biden’s, and she can barnstorm the country at a pace far faster than Mr. Trump has undertaken.

She’s a former prosecutor. Trump’s a convicted felon.

Ms. Harris has often been at her best politically when she has taken on the role of prosecutor-in-chief, whether on the debate stage when she first bore into Mr. Biden in June 2019 over busing or as a senator on the Judiciary Committee where her intensive cross-examinations went viral.

When she ran for president, among her tag lines — and her struggling campaign cycled through a few catchphrases — was that she was best positioned to “prosecute the case” against Mr. Trump.

Now she will have the chance to do so in the same year in which an actual prosecutor in New York scored 34 felony convictions against him and Mr. Trump still faces more than one future criminal trial.

People who have worked with Ms. Harris believe that framework could allow her to play to some of her strengths — and expose some of Mr. Trump’s weaknesses. Polls have shown a noteworthy share of voters think Mr. Trump has committed crimes yet were still planning to vote for him.

Biden was ‘Scranton Joe.’ Harris will be tagged a California liberal.

If Mr. Biden was widely seen as too elderly to lead, he had other advantages built up over 50 years in the public spotlight. Namely, he has long been viewed as a more moderate Democrat who pushed back against the more extreme elements of his party. It helped him appeal to the political middle.

“Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” he fumed at one point in the 2020 race. His image was such that at times Republicans opted to attack him by suggesting he was being directed by other forces.

Ms. Harris does not have that advantage.

Instead, Ms. Harris got her start in politics as the district attorney of one of the nation’s most famously liberal cities, San Francisco, before winning statewide in one of the nation’s most famously liberal states, California. (Mr. Trump, notably, was among her donors then.)

And while Ms. Harris did not carve out a reputation in California as an outspoken progressive — her tagline as D.A. was about being “smart on crime” — when she ran for president in 2020 she regularly staked out positions to Mr. Biden’s left, including embracing a “Medicare for all” system that he had avoided.

As Mr. Biden’s partner for the last three-and-a-half years, Ms. Harris faces the added burden of supporting the agenda of a president who has become deeply unpopular.

The Trump team has already signaled they plan to attack her on immigration in particular. The question is whether Ms. Harris can successfully find a way to campaign on some of the Biden-Harris administration’s most popular accomplishments without the current unpopularity of the man who previously led the ticket.

She gives Democrats a much-needed jolt of momentum.

Mr. Trump and his advisers were not looking to shake up a race he was winning by almost every metric. As Republicans gathered last week in Milwaukee, they were downright jubilant about the direction of 2024, seeing Mr. Trump as almost a candidate of destiny days after he had survived an assassination attempt.

Now his team must shift to run a very different race against a very different candidate. Ms. Harris has the ability to potentially energize the Democratic base — especially some of the core constituencies who had felt alienated — in ways Mr. Biden no longer seemed capable of. The president had struggled, relative to his 2020 performance, among Black voters and younger voters in particular, constituencies that Ms. Harris’s historic potential candidacy would seem poised to improve upon.

In an early sign of the Democratic appetite for a change, donors contributed more than $60 million online on Sunday — the third biggest day in the history of ActBlue.

It was also notable that Mr. Trump cast doubt on a future debate with Ms. Harris after he had so eagerly sought to share a stage with Mr. Biden, suggesting a venue change from ABC to Fox News.

Her gender could galvanize Democrats — and also Republicans.

In the 2020 primary, Democratic voters wrestled for months with the question of who would be the strongest candidate against Mr. Trump. They wondered, often aloud, about the idea of nominating a woman.

Mr. Trump, after all, had just defied expectations and defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. The party ultimately selected an older white man in Mr. Biden.

For much of the Trump presidency and beyond, Democrats have benefited from a gender gap. Women voted for Democrats by a bigger margin than men favored Republicans. But Mr. Trump has swelled his advantage so much among men of late that the gender gap has been suddenly favoring the G.O.P.

Ms. Harris has a chance to reverse that and has already proved herself a far more compelling messenger than Mr. Biden on the issue that Democrats believe can win them the 2024 race. Mr. Biden rarely would say the word abortion; Ms. Harris visited an abortion clinic.

Ms. Harris faces other distinctive challenges as a Black candidate and a woman, in a country and a political system where both groups are often held to different standards. And in Mr. Trump, she faces an opponent with a history of exploiting stereotypes for his own advantage.

She can be transcendent, but also tentative.

One of the notable facts of Ms. Harris’s speedy rise to the pinnacle of Democratic politics in a little more than a decade is how few loyalists have been along for the full ride.

If Mr. Biden surrounded himself with a small, sometimes insular, coterie of advisers — a recent Biden inner-circle addition could have served him for a decade — Ms. Harris has relatively few similarly long-standing aides. Early on as vice president, her staff turned over significantly.

She has few advisers dating back even to her days in the Senate, let alone her time as attorney general of California. She parted ways with a swath of the senior team on her 2020 presidential primary run, which was wracked with infighting.

Those who have worked both for and against her say she has few equivalents when she nails a big speech, or delivers an acerbic line on the debate stage or a committee hearing. But they also say she can get in her own head, retreat back to canned comments and make tentative, self-inflicted mistakes.

Now she is inheriting Mr. Biden’s enormous campaign apparatus. And she has little more than 100 days to capture both the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.