A ‘weird roller coaster ride’: Trump vs. Harris and America’s surreal summer

“I feel like an extra in a slasher horror film right before everybody knows that somebody’s head is about to get lopped off,” the Democratic volunteer in battleground Michigan wrote in an agitated text as America celebrated its 248th birthday.

The plot would only accelerate in the coming weeks, weaving through one unprecedented moment after another. A gunman would attempt to assassinate Trump. Democrats pushed Biden to leave the race. A normally sleepy stretch of the election year had suddenly become a remarkable chapter in future history books. It snapped voters in both parties to attention and put them on edge as they wondered: What could possibly come next?

“It’s a weird roller coaster ride that we’ve been on,” Skelcy said last week as her party pinned their hopes on Kamala Harris. She was hopeful about Harris and her party’s prospects. But as she rattled off all the things she worried Trump would do if he won, the dread she felt a few weeks earlier wasn’t far away.

A Trump-Biden rematch that often felt stale and static to many voters gave way this summer to a surreal stretch in which words like “extraordinary” and “shocking” at times seemed insufficient to describe what was happening. Republicans watched their nominee push past a historic felony conviction, dodge other charges and survive a campaign rally shooting. Democrats grew so alarmed about their chances that they swapped candidates weeks before their convention, rallying behind a vice president that some had long discounted.

Now, a new sense of uncertainty hangs over the race, leaving historians reaching back to the political turmoil of 1968 for comparisons. Even some people who pay little attention to politics appear riveted, leaving campaign veterans remarking at the energy and engagement they are seeing on the ground before the traditional post-Labor Day surge of activity.

Martha Zoller, a conservative radio host in Georgia, said even “normal,” nonpolitical friends were texting her about the election after Biden announced his withdrawal. “This is something that has broken through, that people understand,” she said.

“This is a crazy cycle,” Zoller added. “All bets are off. There is no conventional wisdom in politics anymore.”

Shades of 1968

“Obviously, the situation we find ourselves in today is totally uncharted territory and has no modern historical parallel,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio wrote in a strategy memo he released publicly last week.

The turmoil of 2024 has parallels to 1968, scholars of presidential history said, an election year rocked by upheaval and violence. President Lyndon B. Johnson said in March of that year he wouldn’t seek reelection amid poor approval ratings; a leading Democratic candidate to replace him, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated a couple months later, not long after the murder of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King Jr. And Democrats’ convention in Chicago devolved into chaos as police clashed violently with antiwar protesters.

Democrats will be back in the same city for their convention next month and party leaders are bracing for major protests over the Israel-Gaza war.

Michael Cohen, author of “American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division,” said that for a long time he thought the current election was “kind of boring,” because so much of the electorate seemed locked into their views of the candidates. That feeling evaporated about a month ago with Biden and Trump’s debate.

A race that had chugged along steadily for months — even in the face of Trump’s criminal trial — slipped away from Biden almost overnight after he struggled through the debate, appearing to repeatedly lose his train of thought. All of the simmering concerns voters had expressed about the 81-year-old’s age and acuity quickly boiled over.

Democrats began to openly revolt. Biden at first resisted their calls to drive him from the race. But after reviewing dismal internal polling, he bowed out on July 21 and endorsed Harris. The rest of the party quickly rallied behind her.

Now Trump and Harris are locked in a tighter race, with polls showing the vice president doing better than Biden in head-to-head matchups. Harris’s campaign also raked in more than $200 million in less than a week. But Trump and his allies are working to magnify her vulnerabilities on issues such as the border, and some Democrats have worried that racism and sexism will work against a female candidate of color.

There is no precedent for a presumptive nominee withdrawing as close to Election Day as Biden did and after winning the party’s primaries, Cohen said. There is also no precedent for a major party’s nominee being convicted of a felony — but with so much other news, Trump’s legal cases can feel to some political observers like an afterthought.

“I almost forgot about that,” joked Barbara Perry, a professor at the University of Virginia who directs the presidential oral history program, when a reporter brought it up. A federal case against Trump was dismissed on July 15 in another dramatic twist.

‘This is not normal’

Patricia Poprik has watched this dizzying election play out on the ground in Bucks County, a suburban area in battleground Pennsylvania where Republicans just surpassed Democrats in registrations for the first time since they lost their edge in 2008. Poprik, the chair of the Bucks County Republican Committee, said seismic events like the attempt to assassinate Trump in Butler, Pa., have energized voters and brought some hesitaters back into the fold. Images of Trump pumping his fist moments after the shooting, blood on his face, are everywhere.

“People at our headquarters, they were so angry,” she said recently. Supporters “wanted to do more.” Already, people she knew only tangentially were reaching out wondering how they could get mail ballots for their children heading to college.

“This is not normal,” she said.

The shooting was “too big for the folks who don’t normally pay attention to ignore,” echoed Sam DeMarco, the GOP chair in Allegheny County, Pa.

Investigators are still trying to learn more about the shooter’s motive and say they have found little evidence of an ideology that drove him.

Democrats said they are seeing a surge of enthusiasm, too, as Harris takes center stage — a woman of color two decades younger than Biden who would make history if elected. Pennsylvania Democrats say some 2,500 people signed up to volunteer in the first 24 hours of Harris’s campaign, quadruple their previous single-day record.

John Brady said he got into the Philadelphia Democrats’ office about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and found himself answering about two dozen phone calls before noon, most of them from Black Americans excited about Harris.

“They want to know what they can do and when they can start, and can they start now, and my response, of course, is thank you, thank God,” said Brady, who serves as both the political director for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and president of the Philadelphia Young Democrats.

Later, he texted a reporter a meme that he said could sum up the whiplash Democrats have experienced. It’s pulled from a self-defense video in which an older man is robbed at knifepoint and pretends to double over with a heart attack, yelling, “Call the ambulance!”

By the second frame, the old man has pulled a gun on his attacker. “But not for me!” he says.

Other 21st-century elections were defined by some norm-shattering moments. The political rise of a celebrity businessman. The release of a tape in which he bragged about groping women. A pandemic that halted most campaigning and left the president hospitalized weeks before Election Day. In 2000, there was the recount that transfixed the country and handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

Even so, 2024 stands out to many political veterans.

“I would say that this stands on its own as the wildest reality television show you could watch,” said Ben Burnett, who hosts a conservative radio show in Georgia and often discusses the election.