Harris narrows running mate choices to two – report
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice-presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, three sources with knowledge of the matter said today.
Harris, the US vice-president, is expected to announce her selection by Tuesday, ahead of her first scheduled public appearance with her running mate in the evening at Temple University in Philadelphia, Reuters reports.
It was unclear if a final decision has been made, the sources told the news wire. The rally will kick off a five-day, seven-city tour of the battleground states likely to decide the 5 November election.
Speculation had focused on six men in all – four governors, a senator and a cabinet secretary in the Biden administration.
Key events
Kamala Harris has spent the last few days interviewing contenders to be her running mate on the Democratic ticket this election and may have whittled her list from six to just two in recent hours, if a report via anonymous sources from Reuters comes true.
The news wire says it’s down to Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz.
Guardian US has not verified this report. At the top of the day there apparently were still six guys in the race, although some outlets appeared to be homing in on Shapiro, Walz and the US Senator from Arizona, Mark Kelly, as the top three.
Harris and her No.2 will debut as the presumptive Democratic ticket at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania tomorrow evening. So if it’s not Shapiro that would be hard for him to swallow.
If it’s really down to two, here are our thumbnails on them.
Shapiro, a congressional aide turned state representative and state attorney general, the 51-year-old father of four was elected governor in 2022. Close to two years later, he maintains historically high approval ratings. What are regarded as pros and cons of choosing him? Report here.
Walz has captured the internet’s attention and swayed Democrats’ messaging recently by succinctly summing up how he views Republicans: they’re weird. Before he took up politics, Walz, 60, was born and raised in small-town Nebraska and became a teacher, first in China, then Nebraska, finally Minnesota. Report here.
Harris narrows running mate choices to two – report
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice-presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, three sources with knowledge of the matter said today.
Harris, the US vice-president, is expected to announce her selection by Tuesday, ahead of her first scheduled public appearance with her running mate in the evening at Temple University in Philadelphia, Reuters reports.
It was unclear if a final decision has been made, the sources told the news wire. The rally will kick off a five-day, seven-city tour of the battleground states likely to decide the 5 November election.
Speculation had focused on six men in all – four governors, a senator and a cabinet secretary in the Biden administration.
The independent US presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr, called Donald Trump “a terrible human being”, the “worse [sic] president ever” and “barely human”.
“He is probably a sociopath,” Kennedy said in texts to an unnamed person, the New Yorker reported on Monday.
Kennedy has been linked to a job in any second Trump administration, not least after Kennedy’s son posted footage of such a move appearing to be discussed. Kennedy attended the Republican convention in Milwaukee in July.
On Monday, a spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Kennedy’s reported remarks.
They were included in an in-depth New Yorker profile otherwise remarkable for containing the story of how Kennedy came to dump a dead bear in the city’s Central Park 10 years ago.
Last month it was reported that Kennedy held recent talks with Trump about endorsing his campaign for a second presidency and – if successful – taking a job in his administration. The election is on 5 November.
Read Martin Pengelly’s report in full here.
In the realm of how many flip-flop emojis you can garner, however, RFK Jr is running behind Trump’s veep pick, his underperforming and apparently lowly valued running mate JD Vance, a Republican Ohio senator and Maga convert.
Meanwhile, here’s an interesting image from the campaign trail:
Climate activist, feminist and screen legend Jane Fonda has put out a video message endorsing Kamala Harris to win the White House in November.
“Today I’m proud to endorse Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States,” Fonda begins, talking to camera in close-up.
“Not just because Donald Trump would be a total disaster for our democracy and our planet but because she’s the right person for the job,” Fonda continues.
“I have faith in Kamala’s record of putting our planet and its people before corporate greed,” she says.
Fonda warns that “everything is on the line” but expresses hope that people can feel “the possibility that this moment holds”, urges people to come together behind Harris and says “we can do this”.
It might be a long day on the edge of your seat in the Veepstakes.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is expected to officially announce her running mate sometime Tuesday morning, followed by a video before their Philadelphia rally that same day, according to multiple people familiar with the selection process.
(w/@nancycordes)
— aaron navarro (@aaronlarnavarro) August 5, 2024
That’s clearly what some of CBS News’s Washington politics team is hearing.
We’ll bring you all the news (and credible speculation) here as it happens.
Martin Pengelly
Women offended by JD Vance’s contention that the US is run by “childless cat ladies” should realise he meant it as a “quip”, the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s wife, Usha Vance, said in an interview broadcast on Monday.
“I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and tried to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often,” Vance told Fox News.
“And the reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive and had actual meaning. And I just wish sometimes that … we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase.”
JD Vance’s comments lie at the heart of a rocky roll-out as running mate to Donald Trump.
Speaking in 2021, a year shy of his election to the US Senate in Ohio and when best known as the author of the bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson the US was run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
“It’s just a basic fact – you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Now, Vance has come under sustained fire over the comments, as well as many other allegedly misogynistic remarks about women who choose not to have, or cannot have, children.
Harris, a stepmother of two, is now the Democratic nominee for president, preparing to name her own running mate to face Trump and Vance.
On Fox and Friends, Usha Vance insisted that with his “childless cat ladies” remark, her husband “was really saying … that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.
“And we should be asking ourselves, why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents? And that’s the conversation that I really think that we should have and I understand why he was saying that.”
Man charged with threatening Kamala Harris
A Virginia man was charged with making violent online threats against US vice-president Kamala Harris days after she began her US presidential campaign.
Frank Carillo was charged last Friday in federal court in Virginia with threatening the vice-president after posting a series of messages targeting Harris on the social media site Gettr, according to court records, Reuters reports.
Kamala Harris needs to be put on fire alive I will do it personally if no one else does,” read one post cited in court documents.
Another said Harris is
going to regret ever trying to become president.”
The messages were posted on 27 July, six days after Joe Biden announced he would not run for reelection and endorsed Harris to take his place as the Democratic candidate. The account also posted messages targeting Biden and FBI director Christopher Wray.
FBI agents seized a rifle and a handgun during a search of Carillo’s home, according to court documents.
Carillo was expected to make his first court appearance today. Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last month. Officials have not identified a motive for the shooting.
Larry Elliott
Donald Trump’s message to US voters has been consistent as he seeks to win a second term in the White House: the economy under Joe Biden has been a disaster.
Until recently the hard data has not supported Trump’s argument. The US has been comfortably the fastest-growing of the G7 leading industrial nations since the Covid pandemic. Unemployment has been low by historic standards. America’s self-sufficiency in energy meant it suffered a less severe inflation shock than Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yet the former US president now has some evidence to back up his case. The latest set of US jobs figures, released last week, showed the labour market cooling fast. Payroll growth in July slowed to 114,000 – about half the average of 215,000 in the previous 12 months and well below economists’ expectations. The unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 4.3%.
That set alarm bells ringing. Financial markets have been betting heavily on the US economy … But the cracks in the labour market prompted fears that the economy might now be heading for a hard landing … [there are several] warning signs for Kamala Harris …
Read the full report here. You can follow the business live blog here.
The dates are set. The venues are chosen. The only thing missing from this week’s campaign blitz with vice-president Kamala Harris and her 2024 running mate is the name of the running mate.
After a weekend spent interviewing finalists, Harris must decide on her wingman before the two set off on Tuesday on a tour across key battleground states, the Associated Press writes.
Everything about her campaign has been rapid fire out of necessity. She’s only been a candidate for a little over two weeks, since Joe Biden bowed out of the race following a dismal debate performance and escalating calls within the Democratic party for him to step aside.
Harris has had to do condensed vetting of her potential running mates as the party’s convention draws near. That means there’s not much time left for advocates for and against different picks to get in their final licks.
A new CBS opinion poll finds that Kamala Harris has pulled ahead of Donald Trump by one point nationally as the presidential election enters a vital few weeks.
Nate Silver links to that poll in his latest bulletin, too.
The TV network characterizes the results as a “reset” of the election, as Harris prepares to choose her running mate, after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this election, and faces off against the Republican ticket of Trump and JD Vance.
The latest survey completed for CBS shows Harris edging just ahead of Trump, while noting that was “something President Biden never had – he was down by 5 points when he left the race” for re-election last month.
CBS reported online: “Boosted by Democrats, younger and Black voters becoming more engaged and likely to vote, and by women decidedly thinking she’d favor their interests more, Vice President Kamala Harris has reset the 2024 presidential race.”
But it warns that Trump is still more popular with voters when they are asked about stewardship of the economy and handling immigration, especially at the US-Mexico border.
Harris edges Trump in new national poll crunch
Kamala Harris has crept just ahead of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in the 2024 presidential election, according to some influential new polls.
The race is neck and neck, but Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, now leads Trump by 1.4 points in a national polling average presented yesterday by Nate Silver in his Silver Bulletin newsletter. Silver is a prominent US uber-number-cruncher and the founder of FiveThirtyEight.
Silver added that Harris has a 51% chance of winning the electoral college. He said the election is a toss-up, but declared himself “bullish for Harris”.
He also cites a new CBS poll, more on that shortly.
Harris to announce running mate soon
Kamala Harris is very close to naming her choice of vice-presidential candidate to join her on the Democratic ticket to fight the 2024 election against Donald Trump this November.
She has been talking to final contenders over the weekend and she needs to announce her choice before tomorrow evening, when Harris and her running mate are due to appear together at a rally in Philadelphia to raise the curtain on their campaign together. The “veepstakes” has been very exciting.
Last Friday, the Democratic party announced that Harris, the sitting US vice-president, had secured enough votes from party delegates to become the presidential nominee, making her the first Black woman and person of south Asian heritage to lead a major party ticket.
The six contenders to be named, as early as today, as her No 2 are state governors Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), Tim Walz (Minnesota), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), JB Pritzker (Illinois), and US Senator for Arizona Mark Kelly and the current transportation secretary in the Biden-Harris administration, Pete Buttigieg.
Harris closes in on choice of running mate
Good morning, it’s going to be quite the week in US political news, starting with big news as early as today as we wait for Kamala Harris to pick her running mate for the 2024 election. Let’s get going:
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US vice-president Kamala Harris needs to announce who her choice of vice-presidential candidate is, now that she’s the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, before a crucial event scheduled tomorrow.
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Harris could announce the name today or even tomorrow – she is going to appear for a rally with her presumptive No 2 in Philadelphia tomorrow evening. The format of the announcement is not yet known.
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Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Arizona senator Mark Kelly met with Harris at her residence in Washington DC yesterday, she met with transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg last Friday and has probably had remote meetings with the other contenders, the governors of Kentucky and Illinois, Andy Beshear and JB Pritzker, respectively.
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Harris and her veep contender will start a tour in the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania, then Wednesday through Saturday they’ll zip through the other swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, in that order.
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Donald Trump is busy figuring out how to counter the renewed energy and financial giving on the Democratic side as Harris is shown continuing to catch up to the Republican presidential nominee in some new polls.
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Independent presidential candidate and a member of the Kennedy political dynasty, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has hit the headlines thanks to a profile in the New Yorker. He excoriated Trump before sucking up to him and also in a bizarre stunt he dumped a dead bear in New York’s Central Park a decade ago, to make it look as though a cyclist had hit it.
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Joe Biden will meet with his national security team at the White House this afternoon, accompanied by Harris, as tensions escalate in the Middle East, chiefly concerning Israel, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. The US president is due to speak with King Abdullah of Jordan this morning before traveling to Washington DC from Delaware.
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Our global team in London is running live blogs to cover the developing news across financial markets, as Wall Street follows others in plunging this morning, and the Middle East, where observers are braced amid extreme tension between Israel and Iran.