After joyous Chicago, Kamala faces ten weeks of fire

The show that was the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was a great success, full of stars and cheers and unity and excitement.

But now the much tougher task begins for Kamala Harris, as she must fight her way through the remaining 72 days of what promises to be a nasty but also nail-biting campaign to be elected the 47^th president of the United States on November 5. And unlike this past week, the election narrative will no longer be under her control.

Even so, we should not underrate her (and her party’s) achievement. Having emerged only on July 21 as the Democratic Party’s candidate when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, and having suffered throughout her three-and-a-half years as his vice-president from low public approval ratings, Harris has moved within barely a month from the underdog to the frontrunner.

She is ahead of Donald Trump both in national opinion polls and in the key states that will likely decide the election, namely Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Yet unless new polls show a dramatic change following the Democratic National Convention, her lead is too small to invite confidence.

It is smaller than the lead held at the same stage of the 2016 campaign by Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose to Donald Trump. Harris’s lead has room to grow, but this still looks likely to be a tight contest.

Last week, at the convention, she and her party had to achieve three main tasks:

• First, they had to avoid disunity over Harris’s candidacy or, more specifically, over the Biden administration’s main foreign-policy nightmare, the war in Gaza.
• They had to start to define what she and the party stand for in terms of domestic and foreign policy.
• Above all, they had to show that Harris and her