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A lot of funny things happened on the way to the 2024 U.S. presidential election that have left us facing the unfunny prospect of a second Donald Trump term.

This chilling scenario could have been avoided if President Joe Biden, who ran in 2020 as a “transition candidate,” had remained faithful to that pledge and enabled a new generation of Democratic leaders to vie for the 2024 party nomination in a competitive primary race. Instead, Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline was covered up until it became too obvious for average Americans to ignore.

By stepping aside and endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as his successor in late July, barely three months before the election, Mr. Biden further denied his party the opportunity to hold a primary that would have tested Ms. Harris’s mettle. By then, no other Democratic candidate wanted to be seen as trying to deny the first Black and South Asian woman to serve as vice-president her shot at the top job. Ms. Harris became the nominee by default.

The initial enthusiasm for her candidacy belied the downtrodden mood of the country. Polls showed that almost three-quarters of Americans thought their country was headed in the wrong direction. Voters also said they were far more worried about the economy and immigration than anything else.

Even before Mr. Biden stepped aside, the first assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in mid-July had dramatically shifted the dynamics of the race in the former president’s favour. The shooting stuck in the collective consciousness more than any domestic political event in recent memory. Google searches of the shooting were off the charts. The event changed negative perceptions of Mr. Trump.

“Trump’s favourability ratings rose by a net of about four [percentage points] after the [attempted] assassination to the highest level they’ve been in years and have more or less held there since,” polling expert Nate Silver wrote this week. “If the race is as close as polls show, the sympathy it generated might be enough to make a difference.”

Ms. Harris, meanwhile, never seemed to find her groove. To be fair, she was thrown into the race without advance notice or preparation. She had to come up with a platform within days. But despite a solid convention speech and a superior debate, she has appeared flustered in interviews and unsure about what she stood for or would do as president.

Here are the latest updates on Harris's and Trump’s final showdown and key things to know before Nov. 5

Luckily for Ms. Harris, the focus of the campaign has shifted in its dying days to Mr. Trump’s well-documented fascist tendencies.

Democratic strategists had previously warned against using the fascist label against him because it only further riled up Mr. Trump’s supporters. Besides, as former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton has noted: “To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that.” Most voters are not even sure what the term “fascist” means, and most of those who do would never vote for Mr. Trump in the first place.

Those caveats have now been swept aside. The revelations that former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly and ex-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Trump, General Mark Milley, consider the former president to be a fascist provided Ms. Harris with the closing argument she badly needed.

Mr. Trump’s surreal Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden – with its parade of vulgar, racist and misogynist warm-up acts – was a display of hubris befitting a wannabe dictator who believes no rules of decency or democratic norms apply to him. It took a stand-up comic’s insult toward Puerto Ricans for many Americans to wake up to the ugly possibility of a second Trump presidency.

Just in time for Ms. Harris.

Her Tuesday evening speech on the White House Ellipse – the same spot from which Mr. Trump is accused of encouraging rioters who attacked the Capitol in 2021 – was her strongest of the campaign. She managed to both remind Americans of the danger posed by a second Trump term while captivating them with the possibilities presented by an inaugural Harris presidency.

“Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” she told the spillover crowd of about 75,000. “And those who came before us – the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmland and factory floors – they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms. They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”

By tying together the struggles for democratic freedom (Normandy) and those for civil rights (Selma), women’s rights (Seneca Falls), workers’ rights and LGBTQ rights (Stonewall), Ms. Harris offered a modern riff on what truly makes America great.

It just might have been enough.

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