Lawmakers say they’re still reeling from the twists and turns of the past few weeks that transformed a sleepy rematch into an edge-of-your-seat election battle.
Washington, D.C. — Last Thursday morning, one of the muggiest summer days here in recent memory, members of Congress waltzed down the steps of the U.S. Capitol to greet a gaggle of congressional reporters eager to gather string before representatives departed for their six-week recess.
House members’ last vote of the summer couldn’t be more fitting for the moment: a messaging bill “strongly” condemning vice president and “border czar” Kamala Harris’s “failure to secure the United States border.” The late-summer vote was yet another pre-recess reminder of the bitterly partisan nature of this year’s presidential election, which may get stranger still.
Even members of Congress — no strangers to speakership battles and party infighting on Capitol Hill — say they’re still reeling from the twists and turns of the past few weeks that turned a sleepy 2020 rematch into an edge-of-your-seat kind of presidential election.
“The period from June 27 through early July may end up being one of the momentous periods in American politics,” Representative Tom Tiffany (R., Wis.) told National Review on his way out of the U.S. Capitol building on Thursday morning. “When you have a president who fails on the stage the way President Biden did, fully exposing how infirm he is and has been, and then go to Supreme Court decisions, and then an attempted assassination . . . These are history-changing events.”
Uncertainties abound. After a drama-free GOP convention in Milwaukee earlier this month, during which they felt unusually confident about their electoral odds, Republicans now find themselves wading through entirely new political terrain complete with an entirely new presumptive Democratic nominee.
Yes, President Joe Biden’s handpicked replacement has a long list of political weaknesses that will be difficult to overcome. The vice president is a gaffe machine, inherits all the baggage of the highly unpopular Biden-Harris administration, and will likely spend the rest of the campaign struggling to distance herself from the wildly liberal positions she had staked out in 2019 during the Democratic presidential primary.
Still, the 59-year-old’s presence on the ticket adds youth and a jolt of enthusiasm to a fraying Democratic coalition that had long-running doubts — confirmed by polling — about her boss’s age and electoral viability. The hope for Democrats is that their (sort of) new nominee will choose a running mate who can neutralize some of her weaknesses and provide a contrast to Trump and his fellow America First running mate, J. D. Vance.
Republicans insist that they remain unbowed by the challenge. In interviews, they highlight silver linings wherever they can find them.
“The good part is, these guys can’t cover for Biden anymore,” Representative Derrick Van Orden (R., Wis.) told NR outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday as he buckled his motorcycle helmet and pointed to two congressional reporters clamoring to ask him questions. “That’s why he stepped out — he got forced out by the Democratic oligarchy. You think he doesn’t want to run for president? He does,” the Wisconsin Republican jeered. The Democrats “kicked him out.”
Soon, too, will senators depart Washington and return to their home states, where they will reflect with their families and constituents on the assassination attempt against Trump and Biden’s decision to leave the race.
“It takes me back to when I was very young, in the 1960s, and watched things change so quickly with multiple assassinations — JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr. — it was just one gut punch after another,” Senator Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) told NR. She recalled the “turmoil” of the anti–Vietnam War protests and the “very unusual” open Democratic convention of 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek or accept the nomination. “These times feel like those times,” she said. “Very disruptive, very: What in the world is coming next?”
“There’s some entire years where there’s nothing really written about it in the history books, but this week — these ten days — will be written about,” Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) told NR. “Certainly, many of us feel like it’s a time of Providence, that God is guiding [us] through this, that through a miracle President Trump’s life was spared. This is a moment for America to set a new course.”
In some ways, things have reverted to the mean. What could have turned into an open convention after Biden’s exit from the race instead became an almost immediate rallying behind Harris, who will head to next month’s convention in Chicago with a united Democratic establishment cheering her on.
As Harris basks in the glow of positive news coverage, Trump’s running mate has spent recent days catching flak from the left (and from many on the right) for an interview he gave to Fox News in 2021 in which he worried aloud that the country is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He directed his ire in that interview to a handful of Democratic lawmakers, including Harris, who has no children of her own but is a stepmother to two.
Harris and her allies may very well blanket the airwaves with that years-old clip of Vance from now until Election Day to drive home their straw-man argument — unfair though it may be — that the GOP is a good old boys’ club that hates women and anyone whose lifestyle choices diverge from their own. Even though this news cycle is far from ideal for Trump, the election is still months away. Independent voters are still fed up with the Biden-Harris administration’s record on the border and inflation, and the post-coronation honeymoon for Harris is coming to an end.
Lummis says she can feel the shift, too. The country is “turning the corner” after a tumultuous few weeks, and “we’re finally getting to that point where both parties are coalescing behind Trump and Harris,” she told NR. In her view, momentum is on her party’s side. “We’ve hit the apex of absurdity in terms of our everyday lives, and we’re about to stabilize again.”