Harris to face biggest test of her political life with Democratic convention speech

Notable speakers include rising stars such as the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the Arizona senator Mark Kelly; Democrats running in swing races such as the Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, the Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin and the Arizona congressman Ruben Gallego, who is running for an open Senate seat in Arizona.

Across three days so far, speaker after speaker has already hailed Harris as a change-agent who would not only defeat Trump but lift the country higher, ushering in a new chapter of possibility and seek to return US politics to some semblance of normality since Trump came onto the political stage eight years ago.

Certainly it seems to have unsettled Trump and his campaign. Trump has adopted a policy of directly insulting Harris and inventing a series of nicknames for her while trying to paint her as a leftwing extremist and questioning her racial identity. But the jibes have had little effect and even drawn criticism from some senior Republicans.

They have not blunted her lead. Harris consistently tops Trump by three or four points in recent head-to-head surveys and has also improved her standing in the handful of key states that are crucial to victory. While the electoral contest remains impossibly close, she has widened the battleground once more from the Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to once again include Sun belt states like North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

This week, however, has added a new hurdle for Harris, with the independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr posturing to drop out of the race and endorse Trump. This could mean some critical independent voters would back the Republican candidate.

Throughout the convention so far, Democratic speakers have tried to make Trump seem small and diminished. They have sought to keep him on the backfoot and in a reactive mode, responding to attacks and being kept off-balance.