Democratic Enthusiasm Jumps With Harris Poised to Take the Nomination

Happy Wednesday! While we don’t think it’s racist to drink Diet Mountain Dew, we do think it’d be a little more reflective of millennial tastes for Sen. J.D. Vance to go with Code Red.

Up to Speed

• The Democratic Party will hold a virtual roll call vote prior to its convention to certify its nominee, which will likely be Vice President Kamala Harris, the Associated Press reported Monday, thus ensuring the party meets Ohio’s August 7 ballot certification deadline. Though the state legislature passed an accommodation for the party, it does not take effect until September 1, meaning that there could be legal challenges if it waits to nominate a candidate until the Democratic National Convention, which begins August 19. An AP survey also found that enough delegates support Harris for her to clinch the Democratic nomination.
• Markus Ceniceros, a Democratic delegate from Arizona, told Dispatch Politics he did not know why the party was doing the roll call virtually and said he would have loved to have seen the traditional vote at the convention, but he recognized that having a nominee was the most important issue. “What matters to me, what matters to young voters, is that we get ourselves a nominee and a vice presidential pick, and we start getting ready to get everything together and elect Vice President Kamala Harris and whoever the vice presidential nominee is,” he said. 
• Harris has raised more than $126 million since announcing her presidential run on Sunday, her campaign told reporters Wednesday, including $81 million in the first 24 hours of her candidacy. More than 1.1 million individual donors contributed to her campaign over the past two days, 62 percent of whom were first-time donors. In addition, Future Forward, the Democratic super PAC that supported Joe Biden, has received $150 million in pledged donations since the president exited the race—less than two weeks after donors reportedly put on hold a total of $90 million while he was at the top of the ticket.
• Former President Donald Trump committed on a call with reporters Tuesday to debating Harris multiple times, but he said he had concerns about ABC News hosting a contest.
• Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her position on Tuesday, 10 days after the attempted assassination of Trump. “In light of recent events, it is with a heavy heart that, I have made the difficult decision to step down as your Director,” she wrote in her resignation letter. Cheatle’s departure comes after a congressional hearing that prompted lawmakers from both parties to call for her resignation.
• Just before Cheatle stepped down, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced a bipartisan task force to investigate the shooting. “The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking,” Johnson and Jeffries wrote in a joint statement. “The task force will be empowered with subpoena authority and will move quickly to find the facts, ensure accountability, and make certain such failures never happen again.” The House will vote to create the task force—which will consist of seven Republicans and six Democrats—later this week.
• Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey on Tuesday announced he will resign his office on August 20 following his conviction on bribery and corruption charges last week and amid a campaign from his fellow Democrats to expel him. “While I fully intend to appeal the jury’s verdict, all the way and including to the Supreme Court, I do not want the Senate to be involved in a lengthy process that will detract from the important work,” he wrote in a letter to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. Menendez did not say whether he would end his independent run to keep his Senate seat in the fall. Although he is unlikely to win, some Democrats fear he could split the party’s votes and help Republican nominee Curtis Bashaw.

Harris Is Quickly Galvanizing Democrats

As she began her remarks at the first rally of her new presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris made it clear why she chose to appear in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis.

“The path to the White House goes through Wisconsin,” she said on Tuesday. “Yes it does. And to win in Wisconsin, we are counting on you right here in Milwaukee.”

It has been a whirlwind couple of days for Harris, who launched her campaign on Sunday shortly after President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection. The next day, as numerous potential rivals and Democratic party leaders joined Biden in endorsing her, Harris traveled to the headquarters of Biden’s campaign in Wilmington, Delaware. There, she spoke to campaign staff while Biden—still recovering from COVID-19—called in and offered some words of encouragement—making clear that Harris would be inheriting the president’s operation. (The vice president is also retaining Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, and campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodriguez.)

Harris’ quick action to assume the mantle of presumptive nominee before it’s official seems to be working. In a memo released Wednesday morning, O’Malley Dillon claimed the campaign has raised more than $126 million since’s Biden’s withdrawal and endorsement. Harris is well on the way to formally securing to the Democratic nomination, announcing in Milwaukee to the cheering crowd that she had locked in support from enough delegates to do so at the upcoming virtual roll call vote ahead of the Democratic National Convention next month. 

The current mood among Democrats is unusual for them: excitement.

“I’m not sure any candidate in presidential history has had a more successful first 48 hours,” Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau told Dispatch Politics. “Her ability to consolidate support and garner excitement is impressive. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but the dynamics of this race have certainly changed.”

The vice president arrived in Wisconsin on Tuesday just days after Republicans wrapped up their own national convention in Milwaukee. Both events underscore just how crucial the Badger State is for the two candidates. To win the general election as the Democratic nominee, Harris would almost certainly have to take Wisconsin, as well as the other two “blue wall” states Donald Trump won in 2016, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden flipped all three back into the Democratic column in 2020.

But Harris has her work cut out for her. According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of Wisconsin, Trump enjoyed a 2.3-point lead over Biden just before the president dropped out of the race. The Republican nominee’s lead was 2.4 points in Michigan and 4.4 points in Pennsylvania. The few national surveys of a Harris-Trump race thus far show everything from a narrow advantage for Trump to a narrow one for Harris. But the polls do suggest the vice president is performing better against Trump than Biden had been in the days and weeks since his disastrous debate.

In Milwaukee, Harris demonstrated one potential reason for that, offering a clear and articulate case against Trump that was unburdened by what has been—namely, Biden’s halting and rambling manner of speaking. She focused on her past career as a prosecutor and later attorney general of California to highlight that she once “took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.” Each phrase was punctuated by cheers from the audience.

“So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said, getting a loud, long, extended applause from the receptive crowd, who eventually broke into chants of “Kamala!”

Democrats, both at Harris’ rally and in Washington, appear ecstatic about the change in energy that Biden’s withdrawal has given their party. Their relief after weeks of frustration at the president’s refusal to drop out has been a boon to Harris. But the vice president has not yet had to face the full brunt of the Trump campaign, which has been scrambling since Sunday to rejigger a messaging strategy that had been trained on Biden for years. That will test Harris’ mettle far more than her relatively seamless inheritance of the Democratic nomination.

The newly minted heir-apparent seemed to acknowledge the difficult task ahead—and the little time she has to complete it.

“So friends, we have 105 days until Election Day, and in that time, we’ve got some work to do,” Harris said Tuesday. “But we’re not afraid of hard work. We like hard work, don’t we?”

The Haley Voters for Harris Kerfuffle 

Regular readers of Dispatch Politics will know we have covered the multiple iterations of a political organization dedicated to the views of Nikki Haley’s centrist supporters during the Republican primary season. What began as PrimaryPivot—an effort to encourage voters who don’t regularly vote Republican to vote for Haley in open primaries as a bulwark against Trump—eventually became “Haley Voters for Biden.”

The group was undaunted in its support for the Democratic president after Haley herself came out to endorse Trump in May. That was still the case when the former South Carolina governor spoke last week at the Republican National Convention to urge her supporters to back the former president. And when Biden dropped out on Sunday, the nonprofit organization quickly changed its name again, backing Harris and encouraging her to select a “moderate” running mate.

But on Tuesday, Fox News first reported that Haley’s presidential campaign wrote a cease-and-desist letter to Haley Voters for Harris, demanding the group not use Haley’s name or likeness to suggest any kind of connection to or support of the Democratic candidate. “Any attempt to use my name to support her or her agenda is deceptive and wrong,” Haley said in a statement to Fox News.

The letter from Haley’s campaign was harsher, threatening multiple paths of legal action if the group continued to use the name while operating or fundraising. 

In a response to that cease-and-desist letter, Haley Voters for Harris issued a statement, obtained by Dispatch Politics, that argued the group did not claim “to represent Ambassador Haley or her views.”

“There are many other likeminded Haley voters who also do not plan to support former President Trump in November,” the group’s statement read. “Our rights to engage with voters and encourage them to vote for Vice President Harris—who in our view is the clear better choice for the country—will not be suppressed.”

The statement suggested the group would be exploring its options if the Haley campaign pressed the point legally.

Notable and Quotable

“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room. That’s what it comes down to, and don’t get sugarcoating this. These are weird ideas.”

—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, co-chair of the DNC rules committee on MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight, July 23, 2024.