WASHINGTON: The 100-day sprint to the US election began Sunday, the final act in a campaign transformed by an assassination attempt and the stunning exit of President Joe Biden. After weeks of infighting and despondency over Biden’s candidacy, Democrats have largely consolidated behind Vice President Kamala Harris, radically reshaping a race that was fast becoming Republican nominee Donald Trump’s to lose.

Harris cast herself as the “underdog” in the presidential race and called Trump “just plain weird”, while Trump painted Harris as “evil,” “sick” and “unhinged” as the rivals exchanged barbs from afar on Saturday. Republican strategist Matt Terrill said Harris’ uniting of the Democrats had ensured a photo finish on Nov 5 - a ballot that will largely be decided by around 100,000 swing voters in a handful of battleground states.

“It comes down to those independent, undecided voters. Inflation, immigration, the economy and crime - those are the issues they care about,” he told BBC News. “Right now, I think, former president Trump is doing quite well on those issues. This election will be a referendum on the incumbents in office - that’s still Biden and Harris. We’ll see how that takes shape,” Terrill said.

The former Biden-Harris ticket — now just the Harris campaign — held its biggest-ever rally Tuesday in Wisconsin and has raised more than $200 million in recent days, with disenchanted donors returning to the fold. “In the week since we got started, @KamalaHarris has raised 200 million dollars. 66% of that is from new donors. We’ve signed up 170,000 new volunteers,” Harris’ deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, posted on X.

While American election campaigns typically last almost two years, the 2024 edition has effectively been reset, making it unofficially the shortest in modern history. The Democratic convention in mid-August is expected to be a jubilant celebration of the party’s new standard-bearer Harris, who is enjoying record fundraising, growing grassroots support and an early boost in polling.

It all looked so different just a month ago. Dogged by voters’ concerns about his age and mental acuity, the 81-year-old Biden was an outside bet at best, trailing his predecessor in the first presidential rematch since Dwight Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Biden’s dismal June 27 debate showing ignited a five-alarm fire within his party.

The flames were fanned by a flawless show of unity behind 78-year-old Trump at the Republican national convention — an event galvanized by the failed bid, just days earlier, to assassinate the former president at a rally in Pennsylvania. After an initial show of defiance, Biden bowed to the inevitable and dropped out last weekend. Harris, a generation younger at 59, threw her hat in the ring — turning what had been a stale contest between two unpopular, ageing, white male candidates into a dynamic and unpredictable showdown.

A new Wall Street Journal poll showed Harris had closed Biden’s six-point deficit with Trump to just two points – well within the margin of error – with boosted support from black, Latino and young voters. But Republican pollster David Lee, who conducted the Journal survey, cautioned Democrats not to get carried away by the race tightening.

“Donald Trump is in a far better position in this election when compared to a similar time in the 2020 election,” Lee said. If the race is at a dead heat nationally, the advantage still lies with Trump given the mathematics of the Electoral College system for electing the president. Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton came despite losing the country-wide popular vote by nearly three million ballots.

Democrats enjoying the sugar high of the last week have been cautioned by party elders to sober up, with Harris still facing an uphill battle to beat the oldest major party nominee in history. “Before long, Harris’s ‘honeymoon’ will end and voters will refocus on her role as Biden’s partner and co-pilot,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio wrote in a memo this week.

Democratic strategist James Carville told MSNBC that Democrats needed to cut the happy talk and prepare for the coming storm. “They’re coming at us and they’re going to keep coming. And this kind of giddy elation is not going to be very helpful much longer because that’s now what we’re going to be faced with,” he said. Even former president Barack Obama has cautioned against hubris, acknowledging as he endorsed Harris that Democrats are “going to be underdogs” and that she would have to earn the trust of voters.

Harris, speaking at a private fundraiser headlined by singer-songwriter James Taylor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said much of the rhetoric coming from Trump and his running mate, US Senator JD Vance, was “just plain weird.” As she did during a blitz of campaign stops this week, Harris, 59, again contrasted her background as a prosecutor with Trump’s record as a convicted felon and said her bid was about the future, while Trump, 78, wanted to return the country to a “dark past”. “We are the underdogs in this race,” Harris acknowledged. “But this is a people-powered campaign and we have momentum,” she added.

Hours later, Trump unleashed a barrage of hyperbolic attacks at a rally in St Cloud, Minnesota, asserting that Harris would “destroy the country” and criticizing her on issues ranging from public safety to immigration. “If a crazy liberal like Kamala Harris gets in, the American dream is dead,” Trump said, adding that Harris is “even worse” than Biden.

The former president’s speech - suffused with familiar grievances and false claims about election fraud - made clear that his short-lived call for unity following the attempt on his life two weeks ago had dissipated altogether. “I want to be nice. They all say, ‘I think he’s changed,’ Trump said. “No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse.” – Agencies