Presidential History Geeks

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert Kennedy, who served as Attorney General in his brother's cabinet, Senator from New York and whose own campaign for President was ended by an assassin's bullet in June of 1968. His uncle-by-marriage, Sargent Shriver, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972 and his uncle Ted Kennedy ran for his party's nomination in 1980 but was defeated in the primaries by then-incumbent president Jimmy Carter. 

On March 3, 2023, Robert Kennedy Jr. gave in a speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in which he publicly stated that he was considering a run for president in 2024. A month later, on April 5, 2023, Kennedy filed papers for his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission and he formally declared his candidacy at a campaign launch event at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston on April 19, 2023.

The Democratic Party held their convention to formally nominate their candidates for President and Vice-President in Chicago from August 19 to 22. The formal vote to nominate Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as the Democratic Party's ticket had already taken place virtually during the first week of August, and so the convention was ceremonial as delegates reported their votes to nominate the two candidates. The convention took place at the United Center in Chicago. Harris became the first Black woman and first South Asian woman to be the presidential nominee of a major political party in the United States, and the first Democratic presidential nominee from a western state.  

Earlier in the year, on March 12, incumbent President Joe Biden had become the presumptive nominee when he won sufficient votes to capture the party's presidential nomination in the presidential primaries and caucuses. However following his poor performance in a debate against Donald Trump on June 27th, pressure mounted for Biden to withdraw his candidacy. He finally did so on July 21st and endorsed Harris to run in his place. Harris received the support of enough convention delegates to make her the new presumptive nominee the next day, and Harris was the only candidate with enough delegate support to be on the ballot.

On August 6, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Governor Timothy James Walz would be her running mate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Walz, who was born on April 6, 1964, is a former school teacher, former football coach, and retired U.S. Army non-commissioned officer. Since 2019 he has served as the 41st Governor of Minnesota and before that he served as a member of the US House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019, where he was the ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs committee from 2017 to 2019.

Walz was born in West Point, Nebraska. He joined the Army National Guard after completing high school and later graduated from Chardon State College. He moved to Minnesota in 1996 where he taught high school social studies and coached the school football team. He spent a year teaching in Guangdong, China, with an organization called World Teach. Walz was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Minnesota's 1st Congressional District in 2006m defeating a six-term Republican incumbent. He was reelected to the House five times before being elected as Governor of Minnesota in 2018 and winning re-election in 2022

In the run up to the 2020 Presidential Election, then-Senator Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination on January 21, 2019. At that time she had been a United States Senator from California for only two years, but had spent six years as Attorney-General for the state of California. and before that as District Attorney of San Francisco for seven years. She participated in a number of all-candidates debates for the party, in which she was  criticized by her opponents for her record as the state Attorney-General. The criticisms were primarily about her past positions on prosecuting marijuana users, calling for cash bail from those who could not afford it, her parole reforms, and alleged negligence in investigating police misconduct. Her campaign faced challenges with poor poll numbers and weak  fundraising, as well as complaints from staff. She officially withdrew from the Democratic primaries in December of 2019 and went on to endorse Joe Biden on March 8, 2020, despite having attacked him during a debate over Biden's position on bussing when he had been a Senator. Biden let go of any hard feelings he had over the attack and selected Harris to be his running mate on August 11, 2020. After Biden and Harris won the general election, she became the first female vice president of the United States on January 20, 2021.

On July 21, 2024, incumbent President Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for re-election as President of the United States, announced his withdrawal as a candidate for President in 2024 and endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement.

Biden had previously announced that he would run for re-election in the 2024 presidential election on April 25, 2023, and that Harris would be his running mate. In the party's 2024 presidential primaries and caucuses, Biden won an overwhelming majority of the delegates up for grabs in the contests, and he was already considered the presumptive nominee even before the primaries were over. But there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Biden's candidacy. His critics cited concerns about his age, health, and mental acuity and many questioned his fitness for the office and his ability to carry out a second term.

These concerns were brought into the open and were greatly increased after watching Biden's performance in a debate he had with Republican candidate Donald Trump on June 27, 2024. Biden's performance was severely criticized. Commentators pointed out how Biden frequently lost his train of thought, how he gave meandering answers, how he spoke with a hoarse voice, and how he failed to recall statistics. On several occasions the answers he gave made no sense. 

The 2024 Republican National Convention was held from July 15 to 18, 2024, at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was the first of the nominating conventions for the two major political parties and was held a full month before the Democratic Party would hold their convention in Chicago from August 19 to 22.  

Just two days before the convention began, the party's presumptive nominee Donald Trump had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. The convention took place over four consecutive days, with each day having a set theme. The theme for each day was as follows:

July 15: "Make America Wealthy Once Again," focusing on the economy.

July 16: "Make America Safe Once Again," focusing on crime and illegal immigration.

July 17: "Make America Strong Once Again," focusing on national security and foreign policy.

July 18: "Make America Great Once Again." 

The convention did not produce a new platform. Instead it reused the 2016 platform, one containing numerous quotes from Trump's speeches and from his posts on his social media platform Truth Social. 

Former President Trump's name was placed into nomination by Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. The nomination was seconded by Michael McDonald, the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party. The roll call was held, with 2,388 votes cast for Trump and 41 votes for Nikki Haley. 

In recent years, historical assessment of John Adams and of his presidency has resulted in an increased appreciation of the second President of the United States and of his place in history, beginning with David McCullough's epic biography of Adams (which was made into an HBO mini-series) and continuing right up this year's wonderful offering entitled Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Its author, Lindsay Chervinsky, is the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. In this well-written volume, she examines the many challenges that Adams faced in his Presidency, as he attempted to fill the very large shoes left by his predecessor, while saddled with a cabinet composed of those who had a different agenda than their President, and who took every opportunity to sabotage many of their President's initiatives.

On aturday July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee for President and was anticipating the start of the Republican National Convention the following Monday. The possibility of attending a function where someone might have violent intentions towards the former President was not unknown to him. At one of his rallies outside of Las Vegas in 2016, a man had attempted to grab a security officer's gun, but the man was apprehended before anything more serious could occur. 

On July 3, 2024, it was announced that Trump would hold a rally on July 13 at the Butler Farm Show Grounds in near Butler, Pennsylvania. On July 10, an advance team began setting up for the rally, which was part of the Trump campaign's effort to win votes in the important swing state of Pennsylvania. David McCormack, the Republican nominee  for the US Senate was invited to appear onstage with Trump during the rally. The FBI had no information about any particular threats before the event, but the US Secret Service had increased Trump's security detail in earlier weeks because of intelligence indicating that Iran was plotting Trump's assassination.  Iran's acting Minister of Foreign Affairs denied the claim, but declared Trump a war criminal for ordering the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. 

On July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump announced that he had chosen Senator James David Vance of Ohio (better known as J.D. Vance) as his running mate. He made the announcement in a post on the social media platform known as "Truth Social."

Vance, who was born on August 2, 1984, is a US Marine veteran who has served as the junior United States Senator from Ohio since 2023. Vance joined the Marines after completing high school, and served in the Corp from 2003 to 2007. He graduated from Ohio State University in 2009 and from Yale Law School in 2013. He published his memoir in 2016, entitled Hillbilly Elegy. It was made into a movie in 2020. The memoir is about Vance's upbringing in the Appalachian region of Ohio and describes socioeconomic problems of Vance's small-town upbringing. Hillbilly Elegy was on the New York Times Best Seller lists in 2016 and 2017. 

In 2022, Vance won the election to the US Senate in Ohio, defeating Democrat Tim Ryan. Six years earlier, Vance had opposed Donald Trump's candidacy in the 2016 Presidential election, going so far as to publicly call Trump an "idiot" and said that Trump was "reprehensible." Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler. That year he wrote to an associate on Facebook, "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler." 

The first debate between the presidential candidates for the two major political parties in the 2024 US Presidential election was held on June 27, 2024. It was sponsored by the Cable News Network, better known as CNN. At the time the political parties had not formally nominated their candidates but Joe Biden and Donald Trump were the presumptive nominees for the Democratic and Republican parties respectively because each of them had won enough delegates in the primaries and caucuses sufficient to secure their parties' nominations when conventions would later be held. 

Four general election debates sponsored were originally scheduled by the Commission on Presidential debates, and were scheduled to be held between September 16 and October 9, 2024. But both candidates were opposed to the commission's debate format and schedule and in May of 2024, both campaigns agreed to bypass the CPD and hold the alternative debates. 

In April 2022, the Republican National Committee (the RNC) voted unanimously to withdraw from the debates arranged by the commission because committee chair Ronna McDaniel accused the organization of being "biased." Former president Trump did not participate in any debates during the Republican primaries, and he had also accused the commission of unfair treatment in 2016 and in 2020.