Monday briefing: ‘Not going back’ – why Kamala Harris has reason to hope

Good morning. In the week since Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee , the contest for the presidency has been transformed. Money has poured in, the polls have tightened, and the campaign is about something fundamentally different. The same Democrats who were almost catatonic over Joe Biden’s chances of victory because so many voters saw him as too old to do the job now believe that Donald Trump can be defeated.

But none of that means that Harris is sure of taking the Oval Office – or even that she is the favourite. Today’s newsletter explains how she has changed the race, and how much she still has left to do. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Social care | Teachers, NHS staff and other key workers who balance part-time work with caring for loved ones are quitting their jobs to avoid being hit with huge cash penalties for breaching carer’s allowance rules, according to a study by Carers UK. The report details carers being forced to take desperate measures to avoid breaching tight earnings limits, including quitting their jobs, cutting their hours, turning down pay rises, one-off cost of living payments and performance bonuses, and even working free hours each month.

2. Israel-Gaza war | Global leaders were engaged in intensive diplomacy on Sunday to dissuade Israel from increasing attacks on Lebanon, in response to a rocket strike that killed 12 children in the occupied Golan Heights. Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he would determine the “type” and “timing” of the response to Hezbollah’s attack.

3. Immigration and asylum | A woman has died trying to cross the Channel in an overcrowded dinghy, as a number of small boats made the dangerous journey over the weekend.

4. Home Office | Environmental groups are among 92 civil society organisations who have warned the home secretary Yvette Cooper against “the steady erosion of the right to protest” in the UK, and called on her to reverse the previous government’s crackdown on peaceful protest .

5. Venezuela | Nicolás Maduro has been declared the winner of Venezuela’s presidential election by the government-controlled electoral authority – a result that appeared to dash opposition hopes of ending 25 years of socialist rule and looked certain to be bitterly contested.

In depth: ‘The Republicans are road testing a lot of different messages’

On Friday, Barack and Michelle Obama formally endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, completing the set of high-profile party leaders who have publicly given her their support.

Her ascent to the nomination appears to have gone much more smoothly, and with her party much more united behind her, than anyone imagined before Biden stepped aside.

But the disastrous Biden campaign is a low bar for comparison – and Trump still holds plenty of cards. Here’s what you need to know as the Harris campaign moves from being a novelty act to the new normal.

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Her messages on the campaign trail

Even though she’s been vice-president for more than three years, Harris is still relatively undefined for most voters, and so this is a crucial moment to set up the rest of the campaign.

Her first campaign ad sought to draw a sharp contrast with Trump through the prism of freedom: to the tune of Beyoncé’s song of the same name, she talks about “the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Trump’s vision of America, she meanwhile said, was “a country of chaos, of fear, of hate”.

She struck a similar note in an address to a teachers’ union in Houston, saying: “We are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms” and warning that “we want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books”. And in a speech to more than 6,000 Black women in Indianapolis, she said: “Ours is a fight for the future and a fight for freedom.”

In her first rally in the battleground state of Wisconsin a couple of days earlier – which saw a hasty venue change because it was so oversubscribed – she set up what is likely to be the consistent contrast drawn with Trump in the months ahead: she is a prosecutor, he is a convicted criminal. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Two slogans, meanwhile, have come to the fore – and they have a vigorous, defiant tone that sounds like it’s meant to enthuse the Democratic base. She led the fired-up crowd in Wisconsin in a chorus of “When we fight, we win.” And when she said: “America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back,” the crowd chanted: “Not going back! Not going back!”

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How the Trump campaign has responded

One analysis of Harris’s impact on the campaign came from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio , who sent a memo to staffers acknowledging a “honeymoon” with “wall-to-wall coverage … from the mainstream media” but added: “the fundamentals of the race stay the same”.

But that seems obviously untrue: Harris is a very different candidate to Biden, and is invulnerable to the case that the Trump campaign has been set up to make – that their opponent is too old.

Trump’s own approach was crystallised at the Bojangles Coliseum (real name) in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he held his first campaign rally since Biden’s exit. He called her the “ultraliberal driving force” behind Biden’s policies and said she was a “radical-left lunatic who will destroy our country”. He also branded her “lyin’ Kamala Harris” and repeatedly pronounced her name wrong. While immigration is meant to be a central line of attack, he did not mention it once in an interview with Fox News last Monday. Fox News contributors, meanwhile, seem to be obsessed with her view on plastic straws .

All of that suggests that the Republicans are yet to settle on a message that is likely to appeal to swing voters, although that’s not to say they won’t: “They’re road testing a lot of different messages, have not really narrowed down what resonates, what people care about,” Republican strategist Jason Roe told Politico .

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How Democrats have reacted

The scale of the fundraising improvement – $200m in the week since she was endorsed by Joe Biden – is well documented, but also important is where it comes from: the Harris campaign said that 888,000 grassroots donors made donations of less than $200 in the first 24 hours. About 66% of the weekly total came from first-time donors, according to the campaign, opening up a potential new revenue stream in the months ahead. Late last week, Harris’s team hosted a zoom call with 160,000 attendees which appeared to break records in donations.

Meanwhile, Future Forward, the biggest Democratic political action committee – which operates independently of the campaign – said it raised $150m in the first 24 hours.

The campaign also said that 100,000 people had signed up to volunteer by Wednesday, and 2,000 had applied for campaign jobs. As supporters waited for new Harris for President signs – her design team came up with six options in three hours last Sunday and had to take them to campaign headquarters while they were still wet – some of them made DIY versions by lopping the incumbent president’s name off the top of existing BIDEN HARRIS signs. All of that, along with the memeification of Harris via Charli xcx’s “brat summer” , suggests an early rush of enthusiasm of an organic kind that is gold for political campaigns.

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How the polls have changed

The first concrete evidence that the race has changed came in a spate of polls released towards the end of last week, which showed a significant narrowing of the gap between Trump and Harris as compared to Biden’s performance.

A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College showed Harris behind 47 to 48 – closing the Biden-Trump gap by five points. An aggregate of 80 polls from the Hill and Decision Desk HQ had Harris 2.1 points behind, where Biden had been trailing by 3.3 points.

Polls in the crucial battleground states , meanwhile, tend to show Trump with leads, but Harris improving on Biden’s position. And the Democrats say that they believe Harris at the top of the ticket can put them in contention in a swathe of states that appeared to be out of Biden’s reach: a memo from Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon argues that her greater popularity with young and minority voters means that North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – all which were leaning towards Trump – are now in play.

While all of that looks like very good news for Harris, there are strong caveats. Most polls say that Trump is still winning. And the improvement in national polls may overstate her chances because she is less popular with older, white working-class voters than Biden was – and they are the key constituency in the states most likely to decide the election.

It’s also probably true that Harris is enjoying a honeymoon – and her momentum may slow. But the Democratic convention is two weeks away, and she will make more headlines when she announces her pick for vice-president before that. The hope for the Harris campaign is that by the time Trump has the chance to wrest back control of the agenda, she may be in an even better position than she is today.

What else we’ve been reading

• Ann Lee’s interview with Sean Wang (above) about his new debut film Dìdi is delightful. The pair discuss the significance of the semi-autobiographical film and why he felt compelled to make it. Nimo

• “You just don’t imagine these complications happening to a top athlete”: the Guardian’s Fascinating Olympians series ends with an interview with Allyson Felix, who tells Tobi Thomas about the highs and lows of elite competition, and why she has spent the last few years advocating for better maternal health outcomes for Black mothers. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

• Public inquiries can be an important way to uncover wrongdoing. In recent years though, they have become a routine response to institutional failures and rarely prompt significant change. “If justice delayed is justice denied, then inquiries that take years to report, after taking decades to get off the ground, look as though they are simply kicking difficult issues into the long grass,” Samira Shackle writes. Nimo

• From burpees to shoulder circles , Phil Daoust has got some exercise “snacks” to pepper throughout your day – even if you’re in the office. Hannah

• Michael Safi and William Christou’s dispatch from Lebanon finds that despite the high tensions with Israel and deadly strikes, the tourism industry is still booming. Dalya Farran, the owner of a beach club, said that while it’s bizarre, “you eat some good food, have some beers – or juice – and then go for a swim, and the sea washes away your worries and stress.” Nimo

Sport

Olympics | Adam Peaty missed out on a third consecutive Olympic 100m breaststroke title by 0.02sec, sharing silver with Nic Fink of the US in a desperately close race won by the Italian Nicolò Martinenghi. Countless celebrities lined the stands as Simone Biles returned to compete in front of the world . Biles effortlessly worked her way through a smooth, ­efficient ­opening beam routine, qualifying for the all-around final in first place with a score of 59.566.

F1 | George Russell won the Belgian Grand Prix, pulling off a surprise victory for Mercedes at Spa Francorchamps after a thrilling and impossibly tense battle with his teammate, Lewis Hamilton, who was second, completing a Mercedes one-two.

Cricket | “In the end, resistance was futile,” writes Ali Martin about England’s decisive victory over West Indies , with the team securing a 10-wicket victory for England and a 3-0 series clean sweep.

The front pages

The Guardian leads with “Reeves paves way for cuts and tax rises to fix finances”. The Times characterises the Chancellor’s comments as “Squeeze on spending to lift UK from £20bn hole”.

The i reports “GPs threaten to bring NHS to ‘standstill’ by capping daily patient numbers”. The Mail has “GPs: We will bring NHS to a standstill”. The Mirror covers the same story under the headline “Bitter pill”.

The Telegraph leads with “Israel ‘to retaliate’ against Hezbollah”. The Financial Times reports “Harris raises $200mn in first week of ‘record shattering’ election campaign”.

Today in Focus

Why Spain wants tourists to go home

For decades, Spain has been the destination of choice for Brits desperate for sun, sea and sand. But now there is a growing backlash against tourism. What went wrong? Sam Jones reports .

Cartoon of the day | Ella Baron

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

A new report by the development agency FSD Africa has found that greener economies could bring millions of jobs to some of the largest countries in Africa by 2030. About 10% of the jobs created, which will mostly be in renewable energy, will require university degrees, 30% will be “specialised” work that needs certification or vocational training, and 20% will be administrative. “Unskilled” labour will be more stable, with opportunities for upward mobility, the study predicts. The researchers behind the report are urging policymakers, funders and educational institutions to invest in training a workforce in green industries. They say it could “contribute to the formalisation of African economies”.

Kevin Munjal, director of development impact at FSD Africa, says investing in greener economies provides ample opportunity to address the continent’s demographic crisis: “Africa has the youngest, fastest-growing workforce but … the youth need jobs.”

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Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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