Matthew Continetti

For most of 2024, Americans had the unusual experience of living through a two-incumbent election . The year began with the first presidential repeat since 1956. It was the first time the major parties were set to nominate a current and past president since 1892. The presence of two incumbents introduced all sorts of peculiarities into the race. Both President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump were well known. Both men were unpopular. And both had records that could be easily contrasted.

“In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will now and then peek out and show itself.” —Benjamin Franklin (1771)

FacebookTwitterLinkedInOn July 30, Kamala Harris released the first TV ad of her presidential campaign. The 60-second spot, titled “Fearless,” leans heavily on biography. The narrator begins with Harris’s career as a prosecutor, when she locked up “murderers and abusers.” There’s a mention of her tenure as California state attorney general and her fight against “the big banks.” Harris’s years as vice president, we are told, have been spent controlling the price of insulin. We hear a quote from one of her recent speeches. “This campaign,” Harris says, “is about who we fight for.”

Senior Fellow Matthew Continetti discusses the Trump-Musk interview and 2024 Fox’s Special Report with Bret Baier.

Kamala Harris is to the Left of Biden on a range of big issues, including the war in Gaza, and that’s a bad sign for conservatives.

The convention's goal was to revive the faded tropes of Obamamania and use them to aid Harris in November. Entertainment figures who appeared on stage and in the audience turned the proceedings into not just a political event, but also a cultural one. Harris has her own Shepard Fairey poster . Stevie Wonder, who rocked Mile-High Stadium when Obama was nominated in 2008, spoke and sang in Chicago. Oprah Winfrey campaigned with Obama at a critical point in his ascent. She endorsed Harris from the dais. "We won't go back," Winfrey told the adoring hometown crowd. "We won't be sent back, pushed back, bullied back, kicked back. We're not going back."

FacebookTwitterLinkedIn“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” asked Michelle Obama at the top of her stemwinder speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week. “You know, we’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading across this country we love. A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the contagious power of hope.” Hope and change: the twin themes of her husband’s winning 2008 campaign.

There is a clash between free speech and modern censorship.

It was, Dana Bash said on CNN at 9 p.m. Thursday, "a watershed moment." Not just a watershed—"a defining moment." Why the fuss? Kamala Harris was giving an interview.

What's Kamala Harris's secret? In mid-June, she was a political liability for Joe Biden. Now, she's running neck-and-neck with Donald Trump.