Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s ahead in the polls?

At 59, Ms Harris is more than two decades younger than Joe Biden, whom she replaced as the Democratic nominee. Her mother was an endocrinologist born in India; her father is an economist born in Jamaica. In California she won elections as a prosecutor by leaning to the right on criminal-justice issues, while also appealing to Democrats, and was elected as the state’s attorney-general in 2010. Since she came to Washington, first as a senator in 2017, Ms Harris has been most effective at debates and hearings, where her skills as a litigator are on display.

She is a creature of institutional politics, not a visionary or an ideologue, and has struggled to define herself on a national stage. Her presidential run in 2020 crashed badly. As vice-president she is tied to the Biden administration’s record, which is unpopular despite the major legislation it passed to onshore chip manufacturing and invest in green energy. If she is to beat Mr Trump she will need to answer his attack lines on immigration directly and lay out a more ambitious domestic policy agenda than Mr Biden was able to communicate.

Mr Trump’s extraordinary campaign follows his no less remarkable term as America’s 45th president, which concluded shortly after his supporters staged an armed attack on the Capitol. His alleged role in instigating the attack and a broader effort to overturn results of the 2020 election resulted in two criminal indictments, in federal court and Georgia state court. He faces two others, totalling 91 felony charges. The 78-year-old denies all wrongdoing. Mr Trump is a billionaire who made (and lost) much of his money in real estate, before he became a reality-TV star. This time his campaign pairs familiar culture-war issues (building a border wall, “left-wing gender insanity”) with fresh grievances (against the lawyers prosecuting his cases and the judges overseeing them).

On July 13th a gunman shot Mr Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, grazing the former president’s ear but otherwise leaving him unharmed (a bystander was killed). Afterwards Mr Trump briefly seemed a changed candidate, trying to present himself as a unifier in a speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. But he went back to his past ways quickly, throwing insults at his political opponents.