IF the cash flow and the polls were anything to go by then it would appear a good call. In announcing US Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden must be a happy man this weekend. It’s not just that choosing the right running mate is a tricky business and if ill-judged can be catastrophic, but that Biden’s choice has given his campaign the kick-start it needs.

As any White House hopeful knows, a healthy financial war chest is a crucial commodity in a US presidential campaign, and to that end Biden’s bid is now that bit richer having raised $48 million in the first 48 hours since Harris was anointed the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. Many of those who put their hands in their pockets were first time donors, something which also bodes well for Biden.

Then there are the polls, which Biden’s campaign team will be watching forensically as the countdown to November’s election gains momentum. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published last Wednesday nine in 10 Democrats approved of Harris as Biden’s running mate.

The survey also found she was more popular among women, younger voters and even some Republicans than Biden himself, who will formally accept the party’s nomination at this week’s virtual convention.

If it was good news for Team Biden then Team Trump was showing signs of nervousness. In a separate Morning Consult/Politico poll released last Thursday, nearly half of Republicans said they were worried that Biden’s choice would hurt the US president’s bid for re-election in November.

For his part the incumbent set about doing what he does best – bad-mouthing opponents. Just as he did with Barack Obama, Trump set in train what a Washington Post headline described as questioning the “American-ness of another none-white candidate”.

For no sooner had Biden announced Harris as his running mate than a theory generated in a Newsweek magazine article by a conservative law professor gained traction, suggesting that Harris can’t serve as vice-president because her parents were born abroad. This, the author claimed, posed a “challenge to Harris’s constitutional eligibility”.

The fact that Harris, whose mother was from India and father from Jamaica, is a natural-born US citizen means of course she is constitutionally eligible to be president or vice-president. But just like that last non-white person on a presidential ticket, here again were these baseless theories clearly rooted in racism coming to the surface and being encouraged by Trump.

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“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump replied nonchalantly when asked by a reporter about the Newsweek article at a press conference last Thursday.

“And by the way, the lawyer who wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer. I have no idea if that’s right ... but that’s very serious. They’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country,” Trump continued, unashamedly stoking an issue purely for political gain.

This of course was classic Trump, but it also served as a reminder of how dirty this US election is likely to get in a nation politically polarised and under enormous economic pressure as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Right now, despite 160,000 Covid-19 deaths and one out of every five American workers claiming unemployment insurance, the US Congress remains deadlocked over a fifth pandemic relief package.

It is a country still racked by social unrest over racial injustice months after the death in police custody of an African-American man, George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed.

It was these recent events, some have said, that put Biden under pressure to select Harris, a Black woman as his running mate. Others, however, insist she is simply the right person to do the job and take on the enormous tasks and challenges in ensuring a Democratic presidency in the White House.

“She has all of the tools you need. She is a barrier breaker, for sure, but she had been vetted in her run for president, she is reasonably well-known, she is practised as a national politician and she’s extraordinarily smart and capable,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, the centrist Democratic think-tank, who spoke to The Financial Times last week.

Bennett highlighted how Harris’s “mainstream” political views gave her broad appeal throughout the Democratic Party, which has in recent years featured ideological tussles between left-leaning progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and centrist establishment figures such as Nancy Pelosi.

The early signs look good for the Biden-Harris ticket, with Biden currently enjoying a comfortable lead in all big national opinion polls. He is also trending ahead of the president in battleground states such as Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

But Democrats concede they will still have their work cut out between now and November. Much of course will hinge on the three head-to-head televised primetime debates between Biden and Trump. Allied to that is that issue of cash as each campaign spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in an effort to reach voters in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

If Trump is keen to reach out to prospective voters through advertising, then he’s so far been far less keen to allow the electorate to make postal ballots.

Just last Thursday he announced he was blocking Democrats’ effort to include funds for the US Postal Service (USPS) and election infrastructure in a new coronavirus relief bill, a bid to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic.

Congressional Democrats accused Trump of trying to damage the struggling Postal Service to improve his chances of being re-elected.

TRUMP has been railing against postal ballots for months as a possible source of fraud, although millions of Americans – including much of the military – have cast absentee ballots by mail for years without such problems. Evidence shows mail voting is as secure as any other method.

Roughly one in four US voters cast their ballot by mail in 2016, and Trump has himself voted using a postal ballot. Democrats insist that Trump’s moves are simply an attempt to make it harder for Americans to vote, as experts said concern about catching coronavirus could keep up to half of the electorate from voting in person.

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House speaker Nancy Pelosi said any coronavirus relief bill should include billions of dollars to protect not just Americans’ right to vote but also essential services, such as mailing prescription medicines. You would think they’d have a little sensitivity, but so obsessed are they to undermine absentee voting that this is their connection there,” Pelosi was quoted as saying by Reuters last week at a news conference.

“So the president says he’s not putting up any money for absentee voting and he’s not putting up any money for the Postal Service, undermining the health of our democracy,” Pelosi added.

The stand-off over the coronavirus relief bill and the question of postal votes for the election have added to growing alarm not just among Democrats but also among voting rights activists that Trump is intent on sowing discord and confusion over the result of the election. As The New York Times also highlighted, these concerns came amid growing scrutiny of Louis DeJoy the postmaster general, who happens to be a “Republican mega-donor”.

Recently appointed as postmaster general, DeJoy, who runs USPS, is taking steps to make postal voting harder. In the past weeks alone he has tripled the fee on postal ballots and eliminated overtime for USPS deliverers, which has slowed service across the country. Also, in what has been dubbed the Friday Night Massacre, 23 senior USPS executives were removed from their positions.

Unlike DeJoy, a generous Trump donor with no experience in the service, the ousted executives, according to The Financial Times, are career USPS managers. In short such measures are seen as an effort to make the USPS more responsive to Trump’s political objectives and have alarmed those who firmly believe Trump and his campaign team are looking to rig the election.

“We can no longer trust that our federal government will oversee fair elections this November,” warned David Rothkopf, author of Traitor: A History of American Betrayal From Benedict Arnold To Donald Trump, in an article for the newspaper USA Today, co-written with Bernard L Schwartz, publisher of the Democracy Journal.

“The repeated statements and actions of the president, his attorney general and leaders in the Republican Party have demonstrated that not only will they seek to cheat to ensure their ‘victory’, they will do so in multiple ways as part of a massive, systematic effort to defraud the American people and undermine our democracy,” the two contributors went on to warn in Friday’s article.

Many other observers agree, insisting that the risk to the integrity of the coming election cannot be overstated. Political analysts and activists alike highlight other infrastructural concerns that would make the possibility of a rigged ballot more likely.

Among these are state and local measures that would prevent ballots that arrive after polling day from being counted. Funding is also being denied for the tens of thousands of officials who need to be trained to count absentee ballots. Reports also indicate that measures are being put in place making it easier to reject ballots as fraudulent.

“Florida’s notorious battle of the “hanging chads” in 2000 could look like child’s play compared to the legal challenges that are being drafted across the US,” warned an editorial in The Financial Times a few days ago.

Right at this moment Trump’s job approval rating resembles those of Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H Bush in 1992, being as they were the two incumbent presidents in modern American history to have lost re-election.

No candidate since 1968 has come back from a polling deficit as large as the one Trump faces right now. Back in 2016 of course pollsters got it wrong (in one sense) when they predicted a win for Hillary Clinton based on national polling.

In one way their predictions were correct in that Clinton won the popular vote by a two-point margin, but ultimately lost because of the way those votes were distributed around the different states that make up the US Electoral College. This time around the Biden-Harris campaign will want to leave nothing to chance. They will also have to factor in the possibility of these structural flaws that could allow Trump to sneak a win or sow confusion in the lead up to or in the wake of the election. Short of a clear-cut victory for either candidate the outcome will likely be murky and potentially very messy.

As sitting president the latter outcome would suit Trump who would doubtless play for time and sow more discord in the process. His best chance of staying in the White House then would probably depend on whether as in 2016 he could squeeze out a technical win through the Electoral College.

With the selection of Harris, a fierce campaigner, Biden now has enhanced his chances.

At 77 years old not only did he need someone who could take on the weight of office and possibly if necessary replace him, but a figure who will help bring some unity back across the Democratic Party. Ultimately of course – short of some nefarious electoral gerrymandering – it will be the American people that will decide whether the Biden-Harris ticket is one they can buy into.

Speaking on the first full day of that newly announced ticket last week Biden and Harris outlined what they saw as a way out of the travails the Trump presidency and administration has created.

“We need more than a victory on November 3,” Harris stressed. “We need a mandate that proves that the past few years do not represent who we are or who we aspire to be.”

The months ahead will reveal whether the American people are ready and willing to make that mandate forthcoming.