SEATTLE – In an instant, Joe Biden has done several things at once.
He has given his party a chance of winning in November; he has ensured that he can rightly be remembered as a man who put his party and country ahead of himself and has tactically turned the presidential race on its head.
Now it is Donald Trump – not Biden – who will be portrayed as ageing and out of touch – the oldest presidential candidate in history at 78.
As Biden, 81, in recent weeks struggled for his political life in the aftermath of his abysmal performance in a TV debate with Trump, it had become clear the former president wanted another go against the President.
The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on adverts attacking Biden as “weak” in comparison to Trump’s “strength”. It was no surprise the final person to speak at the last night of the Republican National Convention before Trump delivered his long, rambling acceptance speech was Dana White, a former mixed martial arts companion and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who has a cult following among working-class white men.
Now, Trump will have to change his tactics.
He can throw insults about Kamala Harris. On Saturday night, he told a rally in Michigan: “I call her Laffin’ Kamala. You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s nuts.”
He can also accuse her of having failed to address the immigration problem at the US-Mexico border, a thankless job she was handed by Biden in her first months, and which was a poisoned chalice given the US has not had meaningful immigration reform since 1986.
But he cannot call Harris, 59, sleepy or dozy or claim she cannot make her way down some stairs without assistance.
Polls showed the majority of Americans thought Biden was too old to run again, and in standing down he has removed age as weapon to be used against the party for which he was first elected to the Senate in 1972.
It is not as if the Republicans were entirely blindsided by this. This month they started releasing a series of “Stop Kamala” adverts. They included one showing a succession of alleged gaffes by Biden and pointing out that Harris was preparing to take over.
Harris will also be well positioned to lead the battle over what has been one of the most important issues for Democrats – the access to abortion after the scrapping of Roe v Wade in 2022 by the Supreme Court.
At speeches across the country, she pointed out that Trump often “boasted” about scrapping Roe because he had appointed three hardline justices that gave the court its conservative majority.
“The previous president expressed his intentions quite clearly,” she said earlier this year. “And fast forward to just recently, says he’s proud of what he did.”
She and whoever she selects as her running mate, will be able to extend that criticism to JD Vance, the 39-Ohio Senator who was last week picked to be Republican vice president if Trump wins another term.
The author of Hillbilly Elegy has for a number of years positioned himself as a social conservative, suggesting he backs moves to scrap “no blame” divorces that could force a woman to remain in a marriage, even if she had been the subject of violence.
In 2022, when running for Senate, he said he supported a national ban on abortion, a position to the right of Trump, who has said the decision should be left to the states. “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said.
African-American women have long been some of the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party but Harris also polls well with young people and other people of colour.
Despite his age, Trump has a preternatural energy; at his rally on Saturday night he spoke for almost two hours.
Yet, just as Biden has declined physically and mentally, Trump is not the same candidate he was in 2016 or 2020.
Critically, that is something Democrats can go to town on.