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Now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the race, Democrats have about 100 days to mount an entirely new campaign. Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris made her the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, but much about the Democrats’ next moves remains unsettled. Below are seven questions, answered, about how this process could actually work.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
What Comes Next
Can Harris take over Biden’s campaign infrastructure—and receive his campaign’s money?
Yes—and very likely. Biden’s campaign filed paperwork to rename itself “Harris for President” yesterday afternoon, and the Biden-Harris campaign’s roughly 1,300 staffers were told they would now be the Harris campaign’s staff. If she becomes the nominee, Harris should be able to gain access to the Biden campaign’s coffers, although some Republican operatives and lawyers are suggesting that the Biden campaign’s money isn’t Harris’s yet, and they may mount legal challenges. (The Federal Election Commission chair, who was appointed by Donald Trump, has also said that this is an “unprecedented” situation with “open questions.”) Harris’s campaign has brought in an additional $81 million since yesterday, it said this afternoon.
Harris said that she intends to “earn and win” the Democratic nomination. Would another Democrat actually challenge her? Would they stand a chance?
As my colleague Russell Berman told me: Probably not, and no. The Democratic establishment is behind her and clearly wants her to be the nominee—and virtually all of her plausible challengers have endorsed her. Still, Russell reminded me that unlike Biden, Harris has not won any primaries. The delegates are now uncommitted, and are not obligated by the rules of the Democratic National Convention to back her. Harris is in a strong position. But if she stumbles badly or tanks in polls in the coming weeks, some Democrats could conceivably launch a last-minute bid against her, Russell said.
Why haven’t any prominent Democrats decided to challenge her at this point?
Everything moved so fast, Russell told me: “It became clear immediately that many, if not most, senior Democrats were looking to Biden for a signal of whether the party should rally around Harris or open things up to a wider field.” Biden’s endorsement of Harris, followed by statements backing her (with a few notable exceptions) from Democratic Party leaders, “point strongly to a coronation,” Russell said. Between that and her well-funded campaign, anyone running against Harris would likely have a very hard time winning.
What happens at the Democratic National Convention from August 19–22?
The convention will go forward as scheduled in Chicago next month. The Democratic National Committee has yet to clarify whether it will still virtually vote on a nominee in early August, as it had planned to do. If that doesn’t happen, delegates would vote at the convention itself—and the nominee’s presidential campaign wouldn’t start in earnest until August 23, perilously close to the beginning of early voting in some states. The Harris campaign is likely rushing to put together new programming for the convention now.
What qualities in a VP pick would be most useful to round out Harris’s ticket?
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper have all come up as potential Harris running mates. What these politicians have in common—beyond being white men, a quality that some Democrats think will broaden her ticket’s appeal, this being America—is that they are well-liked Democrats in swing or right-leaning states. Politicians in such states, my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro told me, especially those “who have proved their ability to win among Trump-partial voters,” will almost definitely be the people Harris looks to.
And a strong and strategic running mate for Harris could make Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance even riskier. As my colleague Tim Alberta wrote in The Atlantic today, the Vance pick was something of a bravado move made to invigorate the base when the Trump team was teeing up for a landslide win against Biden—not to bring in swing voters in a close election.
How has this development affected the Trump campaign’s plans so far?
The Trump campaign has been operating for months under the assumption of a Trump-Biden matchup, and it’s been preparing for victory. Now, having built a campaign focused on Biden’s weaknesses—including hammering him for his age—Republicans will need to scramble to try to beat a candidate two decades Trump’s junior. The Trump campaign is insisting that nothing has changed, Tim wrote yesterday. But “at the very least,” he wrote, Trump’s team realizes that “Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed jolt to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism, and enthusiasm.”
Harris has not polled very well as vice president, and she didn’t even make it to the primaries in her 2020 presidential campaign. Why do Democrats think she can win?
In short: Because she’s not Biden or Trump. Among Democrats, my colleague Ronald Brownstein told me, Harris is benefiting from Biden’s frequent framing: Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative. In this case, the alternative is Biden himself.
Democrats also consider her more effective than Biden at doing the job of running for president. Harris has already been on the trail delivering Democratic talking points to voters, and her communication skills are improving now that she has a clearer lane—what Ronald calls “her point-person role in responding to the red-state and Supreme Court rights rollbacks inspired and enabled by Trump.” And although “the negatives about Biden are virtually set in concrete,” Harris’s image is less settled, he said. That creates an opportunity for Democrats—but they need to act quickly, he said, lest Republicans take advantage of the opening to cement negative impressions of her.
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Evening Read
AI Can’t Make Music
By Matteo Wong
Anyone who expects that a program can create music and replace human artistry is wrong: I doubt that many people would line up for Lollapalooza to watch SZA type a prompt into a laptop, or to see a robot croon. Still, generative AI does pose a certain kind of threat to musicians—just as it does to visual artists and authors. What is becoming clear now is that the coming war is not really one between human and machine creativity; the two will forever be incommensurable. Rather, it is a struggle over how art and human labor are valued—and who has the power to make that appraisal.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Remember. Shannen Doherty, the late actor who turned her Beverly Hills, 90210 character into someone viewers could never forget, Lynn Steger Strong writes.
Read. “The Garden,” a poem by Grady Chambers:
“When my mother could no longer walk / from the kitchen to the yard, / the garden became my chore.”
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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