Only a month ago we had our first Presidential debate and it raised troubling questions about the future, leaving Americans feeling uneasy. What we didn’t know at the time is that the debate was the first in a line of seismic political events that have reshaped the Presidential race and what it means for the future of America. In the span of a little over a week we witnessed an assassination attempt on former President Trump and then the unprecedented moment of President Biden dropping out of the 2024 Presidential race. These are just the two biggest moments in what has been one of the busiest and strangest political cycles in our history. We have a new candidate for President, Vice President Kamala Harris, and host of questions about the next five months and four years.

Much of the discourse following last month’s Presidential Debate surrounded President Biden’s age and mental fitness. His debate performance and political gaffes left many, including prominent members of his own party, questioning his ability to serve for four more years. President Biden spent most of the last month denying these assertations and reaffirmed his commitment to serving a second term. Something changed over the weekend and on July 21^st he announced that he was removing himself from the race and he put his support behind Vice President Harris. Biden’s decision to remove himself at this late stage is historic, with a little over three months from election day, and it renders much of last month’s debate moot. However, President Biden will still be in office for almost six more months regardless of election results. While companies and consumers are looking at what the next four years will bring, they need to know how things will change in the here and now. The policies and actions President Biden takes over these next six months could change the tides for those who are struggling right now.

The introduction of Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, as she has not won the delegates officially, this begs new questions as to what her Presidential tenure would look like. We do not know the full scope of her policies or the key issues she will be running on. While that is understandable given the early stages of her campaign, it is also very late. We are three months from the election, and she will need to get her policies and message out quickly. We knew where President Biden stood and what he has done for his three and half years in office and we have former President Trump’s first term to know what he would do, yet Vice President Harris is somewhat of an unknown quantity. That can be good for those unhappy with the current status quo and bad for those who do not like change. The replacement of President Biden as the next Presidential candidate has shifted the course of the future and we don’t have long to figure how things will change.

So far, VP Harris has said that she will champion some of President Biden’s policies that he failed to pass. Creating affordable healthcare and increasing employee wages seem to be two of her highest priorities. We have already seen the subject of higher wages cause discontent in states like California and companies like Starbucks and Panera have faced public backlash after employees sought to unionize for better benefits. We also know that VP Harris will be a pro-climate change reform President. She was the tie-breaking vote to pass a historic climate bill and she appears to want to pick up where the current administration has left off; President Biden has been the most pro-climate President in American history. On the other side, former President Trump has gone after the Democratic Party’s economic shortcomings and presumably VP Harris will pick up President Biden’s current economic agenda. The Republican answer to the economic woes as been corporate tax cuts without significant details about other economic policies. Former President Trump is also against most climate change initiatives and he will surely butt heads with VP Harris on the topic.

Other major political news from this month included the attempted assassination of former President Trump at one of his rallies. After recovering from the incident, he appeared at the RNC and named Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his VP nominee. Vance’s previous record indicates that he is against free trade and instead believes in industrial policy or the use of government tools like tariffs and taxes to boost and protect domestic companies over foreign ones.

Any one of the events that has happened in the past month would be the talk of an entire election cycle in previous years. With the political race changing so rapidly there is constantly something new to unpack and we are running out of time to do so. As we move closer to the election, we expect to hear more about what Vice President Harris hopes to accomplish as President as well finding out who her VP pick will be. Stay tuned to CSG as we keep you up to date with one of the most interesting election cycles in the last century.