Harris Clinches Democratic Nomination, Cementing Trump Matchup

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(Bloomberg) — Kamala Harris clinched the Democratic nomination for president on Monday, prevailing in a virtual roll call vote to become the first Black woman and Asian American to lead a major US political party’s presidential ticket.

The vice president, 59, is expected to ceremoniously accept the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month, after which she can be certified on state ballots. She was already the presumptive nominee; President Joe Biden endorsed her after ending his reelection bid and no other challenger made the ballot.

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Though it amounted to a formality, the delegate vote brought one tumultuous chapter of the 2024 presidential contest to a close, even as it opened a new one — a truncated race against Republican Donald Trump. She won 99% of votes, according to a statement from the Democratic National Committee.

Harris’ first order of business will be announcing her running mate — a decision the campaign is expected to share tomorrow. She met Sunday with at least three possible picks, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, according to people familiar with her plans. Harris also spoke with other contenders, just not in person, the people said.

The short list of potential choices has trended White and male, and included multiple elected officials from states Democrats are targeting to prevent Trump from clinching a win in the Electoral College. Harris plans to barnstorm battlegrounds with her running mate starting Tuesday.

Harris’ nomination caps a stretch that saw Democrats whipsawed for more than a month. 

First, party members panicked at Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance, then prevailed on him in public and private to step aside and ultimately flocked to Harris as their best shot at stopping Trump from returning to the Oval Office. A mood of gloom about Biden’s fading chances has been replaced — for now — with the energy of a party that discovered a better alternative had been right there, all along.

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The candidate swap shook up what was starting to look like Trump’s election to lose. It has forced Republicans to switch tactics after months of training focus on the 81-year-old president’s age while capitalizing on a dearth of enthusiasm for Biden among key segments of the Democratic base: Black voters, younger adults and Latinos. Trump, 78, and his surrogates stumbled in the earliest days, struggling for an attack line on a younger, more poised candidate.

The Harris campaign said it raised a record $310 million in July, a flood of contributions that eliminated Trump’s fundraising lead. Democratic Party officials reported a surge of would-be volunteers.

Instead of seizing momentum after surviving an assassination attempt and reveling in his supporters’ adulation at the Republican National Convention, Trump found his campaign on the defensive.

His challenges were amplified when reporters combed through past interviews of his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, in which he made a series of attacks on childless adults — especially women, a group among which Trump already lagged even before Harris emerged as his rival.

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New Race

Still, Trump continues to poll ahead of his numbers from four years ago. Having erased Biden’s early lead in fundraising, the former president is well-positioned to attack Harris in crucial Midwestern and Sun Belt states that represent her most likely paths to assemble the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

With three months before Election Day, the two parties are testing new messages and lines of attack, and watching anxiously to see if the damage Trump managed to do to Biden’s chances in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin had been repaired by Harris.

A new Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll showed Harris ahead of Trump 48% to 47% — a statistical tie — in the seven states most likely to decide the election. The vice president’s ascension to the top of the ticket essentially erased what had been a small but stable lead for Trump over the summer.

As the race tightened, Trump lashed out, including with a series of attacks on Harris’ racial identity. In a tense interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump declared that Harris “happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.” The vice president, a Black woman, is the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants.

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The testy performance was a far cry from the Trump campaign’s rhetoric of previous weeks, in which the candidate and his advisers had boasted of his appeal to Black voters, long a core Democratic bloc.

Harris denounced Trump’s remarks, including insults directed at the journalists conducting the NABJ interview, saying “the American people deserve better.” In other venues, Harris and her surrogates have focused on branding Trump and Vance as targets of bemusement. “By the way,” Harris said Tuesday at her Atlanta rally, “don’t you find some of their stuff to be just plain weird?”

Campaign Rush

Now the advertising wars have begun in earnest, with both campaigns announcing that they purchased large blocks of TV time. The Trump campaign is leaning hard into the border, trying to tie Harris to voter concerns about migration, though illegal border crossings have been falling.

Harris has quickly pivoted to campaign in states that had seemed to be slipping out of reach for Biden before he stepped aside. She began last Tuesday with a rally in Atlanta, a direct appeal to Democratic voters in that city who would have to turn out in huge numbers to give her a chance at winning Georgia — the state that pushed Biden over the top to defeat Trump in 2020. Trump and Vance also held a rally in Atlanta on Saturday.

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Trump’s choice of Vance was broadly seen within his party as a show of confidence about how the campaign was unfolding in late July. Though his Ohio roots could help in the Midwest, Vance’s hard-right positions on issues like abortion signaled to some Republicans that Trump saw no need to be conciliatory and win back voters turned off by him.

Trump’s conduct has been at the center of Democratic attacks, which have focused on his New York felony conviction for paying hush money to cover up an affair with an adult film star in order to influence the 2016 election. The former president was also found liable of sexual assault and ordered to pay $83 million for defaming his accuser.  

Harris’ pick could set off speculation about the way her campaign views its own strengths and weaknesses. A swing state governor to deliver a crucial chunk of electoral votes? An anodyne personality, to counter-balance as Trump tries to portray Harris as a liberal radical? 

Whoever Harris picks, the sprint phase has arrived. The campaigns will have about 90 days to figure out what type of history will be made on Nov. 5.

—With assistance from Gregory Korte.

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