Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Florida on Friday with one mission in mind: Get Donald Trump to pledge unequivocal support for Israel militarily and financially should he win in November.

That kind of backing from Trump would arguably help Netanyahu solidify his grip on power amid an increasingly hostile political scene back at home. The Republican candidate’s strong standing in the polls has had the Israeli leader eager to get his backing. And with President Joe Biden, a staunch supporter of Israel, dropping off the Democratic ticket, Netanyahu feels it is even now more essential to garner goodwill with Trump, according to two people familiar with the prime minister’s thinking.

But getting on Trump’s good side is not as easy as it used to be — and it's unclear if Netanyahu got what he wanted.

A Trump campaign readout of the meeting said the former president told Netanyahu that should he return to the White House, he “will make every effort to bring peace to the Middle East.”

The Trump campaign did not say if he would continue to support the $3 billion weapons package the U.S. approves for Israel each year — something team Netanyahu has been trying to solidify and speed up this week in meetings. His delegation this week circulated a list of weapons Israel wants transferred quickly in the face of what it views as an increasingly aggressive Iran.

Trump and Netanyahu have been at odds over how and when to wind down the war in Gaza — a divergence that likely complicated the discussions Friday.

Even though Trump and Netanyahu worked closely together on the Abraham Accords, they have had a falling out in recent years. Following Biden’s win in 2020, Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to publicly congratulate him, saying he looked forward to working with the administration. In a 2021 interview with Axios, Trump said of Netanyahu: "Fuck him.”

“I still like Bibi. But I also like loyalty," Trump said at the time, adding that he’d done more for Israel than any other president.

Since then, the two have interacted infrequently.

Netanyau viewed the visit to Florida as critical, particularly because there is a growing feeling in his camp that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, she may not be as forward-leaning in her support for Israel as Biden, one of the people familiar said, who, like others in this story was granted anonymity to speak freely about Netanyahu’s conversations.

Netanyahu’s Friday visit with Trump came after meetings in Washington with Biden and Harris. Netanyahu was unhappy with Harris’ public statement following their meeting, one of the people familiar said, in part because he did not view it as strongly supportive of Israel or indicative of their conversation.

Harris said afterward in a statement that she told Netanyahu the U.S. would always support Israel’s right to defend itself. But, she added, the images coming out of Gaza are “devastating.”

“The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” she said. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”

While not as focused on the civilian deaths, Trump’s stance on Gaza is somewhat similar to that of Biden’s — he wants the war to end quickly. He wants a deal that will bring the hostages home.

Netanyahu has resisted calls from within the Biden administration to halt operations in Gaza. Senior officials in Washington have behind the scenes grown frustrated with the Israeli leader, saying he is moving too slowly on the cease-fire deal and is unnecessarily delaying talks. But Netanyahu told Trump in the meeting, according to Axios, that he was dispatching a team to Rome to meet with CIA Director Bill Burns and officials from Egypt and Qatar to iron out a deal.

In an interview after his meeting with Netanyahu, Trump reportedly slammed Harris, telling reporters that she was “disrespectful toward Israel,” and adding: “I actually don’t know how a person who’s Jewish can vote for her, but that’s up to them.”

When America witnessed a pale, hoarse and feeble Joe Biden take the debate stage on June 27, the trajectory of the campaign changed almost instantly.

The image Biden’s campaign had projected until that moment — of an aged but still capable president ready to again defeat Donald Trump — crumbled as his party panicked over their presumptive nominee’s ability to lead them to victory in November.

Biden spent weeks defending himself. Democrats held their breath at each appearance, hoping for reassurance that never came. The scrutiny intensified with every gaffe.

While the chorus of Democrats calling on him to step aside grew louder and more public, an assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally shocked the world. The images immediately went viral: Trump rising from the ground to pump his fist in the air and yell “Fight!” as blood streamed down his face. Republicans began talking about his survival as divine intervention.

Meanwhile, the pressure on Biden kept building. Some of the most powerful members of his party urged the president behind closed doors to abandon his bid. Then a Covid diagnosis left the president isolating in Rehoboth Beach.

The dam finally burst on Sunday afternoon: Biden dropped out of the race only 107 days out from Election Day in a statement posted on social media and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Decades younger than Biden or Trump, Harris promised a fresh start for a Democratic Party in despair.

Here’s a look into the 28 days that transformed the 2024 election.

June 27, 2024CNN presidential debate

Trump and Biden took the debate stage at CNN’s studios in Atlanta, where the president delivered a faltering performance and stumbled through his responses. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he did, either,” Trump said after Biden completed a rambling answer during the debate. Democrats reeled.

June 28, 2024Biden rallies in Raleigh

As Democrats began to panic over his debate performance, Biden tried to repair the damage, telling supporters at a North Carolina rally: “I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know: I know how to tell the truth.” He acknowledged, “I know I’m not a young man.”

June 29, 2024Biden assuages donors

Biden spent the weekend after the debate at New York fundraisers attempting to reassure nervous high-powered donors that he was still capable of running for reelection. Outside of one fundraiser in East Hampton, a handful of demonstrators held signs.

July 2, 2024The first elected Democrat urges withdrawal

Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett became the first House Democrat to publicly call on Biden to bow out of the race. Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton follow in the coming days, beginning a cascade of party members calling for Biden’s exit.

July 4, 2024Biden radio interviews

Two radio stations based in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, WURD and WAUK, aired pre-recorded interviews with Biden as the president fought to calm his party’s concerns about his age. Subsequent reporting revealed that both hosts used questions provided in advance by the Biden campaign, and that WAUK edited out two segments at his team’s request. WURD fired the host of its interview while WAUK released the unedited audio.

July 5, 2024ABC News interview

Biden sat down with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos for his first televised interview since the debate, acknowledging he had a “bad night” while arguing he’s “still in good shape” and only the “Lord Almighty” could make him drop out of the race. Democrats told POLITICO shortly after the interview that it did little to stop the bleeding.

July 10, 2024Senate Democrat urges withdrawal

Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democratic senator to publicly call on Biden to step down from the race, bringing the tally to 10 congressional Democrats urging the president to withdraw.

July 11, 2024Washington NATO Summit

Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO Summit, but he also delivered one of his most embarrassing mistakes: “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

NATO press conference

At a “big boy” press conference later that day, Biden swatted away multiple questions about his candidacy but made another slip-up: mistakenly referring to Harris as “Vice President Trump.” He said he would drop out if his team told him “‘there’s no way you can win.’ No one’s saying that.”

July 13, 2024Trump assassination attempt

Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that killed one rallygoer and injured two others. Trump stood as he was led off the stage, raising his fist in the air and yelling “Fight!”

July 15, 2024Trump announces running mate

Trump announced Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate as delegates gathered at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

NBC News interview

In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Biden argued the race was still a “toss-up” and that his mental acuity was “pretty damn good.” The president became increasingly combative throughout the interview, pushing back on questions and taking swipes at the media.

July 16, 2024BET News interview

While in Las Vegas for the NAACP National Convention, Biden told BET News’ Ed Gordon that he would reconsider his run for reelection if he had “some medical condition that emerged.”

July 17, 2024Biden gets Covid

Biden tested positive for Covid-19, and, according to his doctor, experienced mild symptoms. He headed to his shore home in Delaware to isolate.

Top Democrats push Biden to withdraw

News outlets, including POLITICO, reported that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had all privately met with Biden before his diagnosis to express serious concerns about Democratic losses in November if he remained in the race.

July 18, 2024Trump accepts nomination

Trump embraced his party’s nomination at the RNC by breaking his own record for the longest acceptance speech delivered by a presidential nominee. He gave a detailed description of the attempt on his life before hitting his usual campaign talking points.

July 20, 2024Trump, Vance rally in Michigan

Trump held his first campaign rally since the assassination attempt alongside his newly minted running mate. The duo taunted Democrats for the growing uncertainty around Biden, with Trump polling the crowd about whether they would prefer he run against the president or Harris.

July 21, 2024Biden withdraws and endorses Kamala Harris

Biden made the extraordinary move of announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race in a statement posted on social media, marking the latest exit of a presidential incumbent in modern history. He swiftly endorsed Harris to be the Democratic nominee.

Harris launches presidential bid

Harris made it official. With a little over 100 days to make her case, the vice president launched her bid for the presidency and committed to uniting the Democratic Party.

July 22, 2024Harris delivers remarks

On the South Lawn of the White House for an event designed to honor NCAA champions, Harris delivered her first remarks since Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her. She praised his “unmatched” legacy and “deep love” of the country.

July 24, 2024Biden addresses the nation

Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk in his first remarks since ending his reelection bid, saying that “saving our democracy” was “more important than any title.”

Photo editing: Katie Ellsworth
Design and art direction: Erin Aulov, Jade Cuevas, Andrew Milligan
Video editing: Jackie Padilla
Editing: Kaitlyn Locke

A growing number of states are forcing public employee pension funds to divest from China, pulling out of the world’s second-largest economy because of hostility toward Beijing and fear that U.S. assets could be frozen if conflict breaks out in the Indo-Pacific.

Five states — Indiana, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas — have directed state fund administrators to begin the divestment process over the past year. And more are considering doing so — the latest sign of deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China.

“This is a great issue for folks to put politics aside, circle the wagons and say ‘We're going to stand against the Communist Chinese Party and all the threats they pose to our nation,’” said Indiana state Sen. Chris Garten, who co-sponsored his state’s bill.

While the states that have taken such steps are heavily Republican, the trend reflects a souring in the perception of China in the U.S that goes beyond political parties. For years, pension funds clamored alongside U.S. companies to invest in a growing economy that many once believed would become less authoritarian as it modernized. Now the states are looking at China and seeing a pile-up of risks.

They aren’t alone. The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, the main U.S. federal government pension fund, announced in November that it would stop investing in Hong Kong and China-listed stocks due to worsening U.S.-China friction.

Divestment also may make economic sense — the value of China’s stock index hit a five year low in February and Chinese policymakers failed to produce a credible roadmap to an economic rebound at a high-level meeting in Beijing last week.

But excluding Chinese investments from pension funds could be short-sighted. U.S. state pension fund managers “risk missing a potential bounce back if they let asset allocation be clouded by America’s pervasive anti-China sentiment,” said Stephen Roach, an economist and former chair of Morgan Stanley Asia.

Indiana passed its law last year barring investing in entities “controlled by the People's Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party” and state pension funds have begun divesting. Indiana lawmakers said their concerns included China’s intellectual property right violations and espionage operations.

In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt announced a series of measures last month aimed at shielding state tax dollars “from Chinese Communist Party aggression.” He ordered relevant agencies to draft divestment plans to protect state assets, including retirement funds, that could be vulnerable if Chinese leader Xi Jinping were to invade Taiwan or otherwise foment conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

“President Xi is looking at Taiwan and wants to have a united China at some point,” Stitt said. “I'm just trying to protect my state. … If something does come up [in the Indo-Pacific], I want to know what the exposure is to our pension plans,” Stitt said.

Other states have passed laws that require divestment from multiple countries with hostile U.S. relations, but the backers of those efforts have stressed that China is their main target.

The divestment initiatives are part of a wider effort in the states to separate from China. They include bans on land sales to Chinese entities and legislation requiring state-level “stress tests” to assess the local impact of war across the Taiwan Strait. Some states lost money tied to investments in Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and want to protect themselves from the financial spillover effects of a potential Chinese invasion attempt of the self-governing island.

The fraught state of U.S.-China relations also makes divestment a political winner with voters on both sides of the aisle. According to a Pew Research Center survey last year, 83 percent of Amerians have “negative views” of China, and 4 in 10 Americans describe China as “an enemy” of the United States.

“China is not favorably perceived in Missouri,” said Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek, who led efforts to pull the state’s pension funds out of China last year. He is facing a hotly contested primary next month ahead of state elections in November and invoking the move in his campaign. An ad he released this week declares “China is a threat — they get no money from us.”

Perceptions of a wider threat that China poses to U.S. national security — including cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure — is also a factor for Malek. In Florida and Kansas, part of the motivation has come from concerns about China’s human rights record — particularly allegations of genocide targeting Uyghurs and other largely Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang. Others cite Beijing’s role in fueling the U.S. opioid overdose epidemic.

State pension funds currently hold between 1 percent to 5 percent of their funds in Chinese investments, according to a January report by Future Union, a nonprofit organization that advocates for diverting private sector investment from authoritarian countries to democracies, and is funded and led by venture capitalist Andrew King. Data compiled by Future Union shows that state pension funds invested $68 billion in China from 2021 through 2023. The move toward divestment “isn’t a fast trend … but I think there are other [states] that are coming,” King said.

Missouri sees the divestment as “a defensive measure,” said State Treasurer Malek. “When Ukraine was invaded by Russia, our investments in Russia tanked and we do not want anything like that to happen with China, especially when our own intelligence has reported that China may be considering invading Taiwan,” Malek said.

Concerns about the likelihood of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan have risen since retired Adm. Phil Davidson, then-head of Indo-Pacific Command, predicted in 2021 that Beijing might move on the island as soon as 2027. Taiwan’s defense minister fanned those fears later that year by warning that China would be capable of mounting such an invasion by 2025. But Pentagon officials have since expressed confidence that U.S. and Taiwanese deterrence efforts make such aggression unlikely anytime soon. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan isn’t “imminent or inevitable,” the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, Ely Ratner, told reporters in December.

The state initiatives come after federal legislation aimed at blocking pension fund investments in China nationwide stalled in the Senate. The bill, introduced in 2022 by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and now-former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), would strip state pension funds of their tax-exempt status if they don’t divest from China. With only five months left in this congressional session during a presidential election year, it’s highly unlikely the bill will get any traction by the end of the year. Hawley declined to comment on the status of the bill.

The Kansas law, enacted in April, will divest state pension funds from China and four other “countries of concern” — Russia, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela. Kansas pension funds’ investments in China total $600 million to $700 million, according to state GOP Rep. Nick Hoheisel, who sponsored the bill.

Russia has blocked Kansas from liquidating holdings it had before the invasion of Ukraine, “so right now we consider those holdings sunk,” Hoheisel said. “We started having the conversation … if China does move on Taiwan, will the same thing happen? So we moved forward with this legislation.”

The bill prompted a partisan split — Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, refused to sign it due to concerns about unspecified “unintended consequences” — a symbolic act that did not block its passage. Kelly didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lawmakers who supported the bill said it would have minimal financial impact. The slowing in China’s economy had already prompted the Kansas pension fund to proactively start moving money out of those holdings.

“Our numbers showed us that the fiscal hit to our fund would be negligible,” Hoheisel said.

Kansas Rep. Rui Xu, a Democrat, initially opposed the divestment law out of concern that it would spur hate crimes targeting the state’s Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

“Wariness of the CCP is certainly warranted, but the fear that I have as an Asian American would just be that it goes too far, that any resemblance of nuance gets lost,” Xu said. But he ended up voting for the bill “because it got bundled in with a bunch of other stuff” that he supported.

Pennsylvania’s Treasury pulled $394 million in state investments from China in 2022 following the sharp uptick in tensions across the Taiwan Strait after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island in August of that year.

“It looked like there was a real possibility that there could be some sort of [Chinese] invasion. … I worried they could freeze those accounts at any time and we could lose out,” said Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity.

That’s not enough for Pennsylvania Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano. He has co-sponsored a bipartisan bill introduced in April that requires a “gradual divestiture” from China by both Pennsylvania’s Treasury and the state’s two largest pension funds. Mastriano’s motivation for the bill included concern about China allowing the easy black market trade of chemicals used to make fentanyl.

“How do we in good faith continue to invest in these companies when we know China is the source of almost all the fentanyl that has killed tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians?” Mastriano asked.

Florida’s law, passed in May, requires the agency that administers its pension fund to unveil a plan by September to dump Chinese investments and complete the divestment within a year. That legislation cites concerns about Beijing’s human rights record and economic policies. The Florida state pension fund’s China investments stood at $174 million in May, a fraction of the fund’s total $200 billion.

Taxpayers and state lawmakers alike didn’t want to “invest into a country that's not being totally transparent or hasn’t the best interests of Floridians at heart,” said Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis.

Vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance tried to clean up his resurfaced attack on “childless cat ladies” in an interview Friday, asserting that he was not criticizing people who do not have children, while accusing Democrats of adopting “anti-family and anti-kid” messaging and policies.

Vance’s response, delivered on conservative media personality Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM podcast, comes after a yearsold video clip went viral this week which shows him questioning some Democrats for not having biological children — specifically naming Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee for president. Harris has two stepchildren.

“Obviously it was a sarcastic comment,” Vance (R-Ohio), Donald Trump’s running mate, said. ”People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said … and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it is true.”

Vance, who has three children, also sought to reposition himself as a defender of parents, describing his previous comments as a criticism of Democrats for taking stances that he said harm families. He specifically accused Harris of opposing the child tax credit after the Harris campaign said on Friday that Vance supported higher taxes for Americans without children — prompting some Republicans, including Vance, to rebut that Democrats are opposed to parents benefiting from the tax code. Harris and Democrats have supported legislation that would expand the child tax credit.

“I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this, Megyn, but the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way,” Vance told Kelly.

Campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika in a statement to POLITICO pointed to continuing criticism of Vance’s comments on social media and accused him of “insulting couples struggling with infertility, demeaning women’s choices and their freedoms, and reminding voters about his and Donald Trump’s anti-IVF Project 2025 agenda.”

Vance also called the country’s record-low birth rate — which he said was due to parents who “don’t feel comfortable in this society bringing new life into the world” — a “catastrophic problem.” He then accused Democrats of responding to this issue by suggesting that American children be replaced with immigrants.

“If your society is not having enough children to replace itself, that is a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing,” he said.

Trump’s running mate also reiterated his support for in-vitro fertilization, adding that promoting fertility treatments was a moral good that benefited society — and citing how his own kids were born thanks to IVF. The treatment has become a centerpiece of Democrats’ defense of reproductive rights after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that embryos created through the procedure are children.

While Vance joined Senate Republicans in blocking a Democrat-backed bill to protect IVF, he supported IVF protection legislation sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama.

Still, Vance’s response is unlikely to quell the swift criticism of those original comments from many Democrats, in which he told Fox News, “We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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.”

He also asserted that parents should have “more power” than those without children, of whom he named Harris alongside several other politicians. But in his conversation with Kelly, Vance sought to distance himself from direct criticism of Harris’ family.

“I wish her stepchildren and Kamala Harris and her whole family the very best,” Vance told Kelly. “The point is not that she's lesser. The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child.”

Still, the clipped remarks have served as another distraction for a Trump campaign that was reportedly caught off guard by Harris’ sudden ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket — and the ensuing attention on Trump and Vance’s past comments on Harris. Many contenders for Harris’ running mate, who would face Vance on the debate stage and on the campaign trail, have also piled on.

“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey," Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who was singled out by Vance alongside Harris, said in a CNN interview this week. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”

Vance added that he has “nothing against cats.”

Vice President Kamala Harris is pledging not to raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year if elected in November, her campaign told POLITICO on Friday.

That extends a promise that President Joe Biden made central to his administration’s economic agenda, arguing that corporations and the wealthy should instead pay a greater share of the tax burden. And it effectively rules out the prospect that Harris could embrace far more progressive policies as a candidate — such as massively expanding Social Security benefits — that would require raising taxes on a wider swath of Americans.

Biden had sought to use the tax pledge to bolster his appeal to working-class voters during his campaign. Now, as Harris builds out her own economic platform — including possibly breaking on some issues from Biden, who has suffered from low approval ratings on his handling of the economy — she is planning to keep that core commitment intact.

“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead,” Harris said at a campaign rally earlier this week in Wisconsin. “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”

The vow comes as Democrats attempt to make taxes a key contrast point with former President Donald Trump, who passed a major tax cut package during his first term in office and has voiced support for further slashing the corporate tax rate.

The 2017 tax law proved unpopular at the time. And with major portions of that package now up for renewal next year, Harris in her first week of campaigning has mirrored Biden’s rhetoric on the issue, portraying herself as a champion for the middle class while attacking Trump over his support for policies that would benefit the wealthy.

“He intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and make working families foot the bill,” Harris said on Thursday at an American Federation of Teachers convention event in Houston. “America has tried these failed economic policies, but we are not going back.”

Harris has yet to lay out a detailed economic platform of her own since becoming the likely Democratic nominee, and she is widely expected to adopt much of Biden’s broader agenda amid a truncated, three-and-a-half month sprint to Election Day. Biden throughout his term focused his economic policies on bolstering the working class, including efforts to expand safety net programs and cut health care costs.

Biden nevertheless struggled to win over voters who blamed that agenda for rising prices, and remained deeply skeptical of giving him credit for the country's post-Covid recovery. But early polling indicates Harris may not face as much entrenched opposition during her own presidential run. A poll from the Democratic firm Blueprint earlier this week showed Harris ahead or even with Trump in terms of voter trust on several economic issues. On which candidate respondents trusted to implement "fair taxes," Harris was tied with Trump. Forty percent of respondents said Harris shares responsibility for Biden's pledge to raise taxes on the wealthy, a position that prior polling has shown is among the more popular elements of the president's platform.

During her unsuccessful 2020 presidential run, Harris backed a handful of economic proposals that went further than Biden’s current agenda, including increasing the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. Biden has called for raising that tax on corporations to 28 percent, from its current 21 percent level. At the time, she also suggested taxing certain stock trades and other financial transactions.

Harris' campaign did not detail which specific tax policies she would make part of her platform.

But maintaining Biden’s $400,000 pledge means Harris is unlikely to take up more progressive ideas that would require hiking taxes on a broader segment of the population, such as a Sen. Bernie Sanders-led proposal for boosting Social Security benefits by $2,400 a year.

The policy, which Sanders had pitched to the White House earlier this year, would apply a payroll tax to all Americans’ earnings above $250,000 per year. But Biden declined to take it up in part because it would violate his tax promise, instead advocating for strengthening the program’s solvency through higher taxes on wealthy individuals.

Congress gave Biden a historic sum to green the economy, revive manufacturing and fix crumbling infrastructure. But most of it is unspent.

A definitive guide to the key players and legal risks in the four criminal probes of the former president.

Former President Donald Trump’s effort to cement his candidacy with the cryptocurrency industry – and shake it for campaign cash — is starting to be complicated by a new X factor: the ascension of Kamala Harris.

Trump’s Saturday appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville is the latest sign that a second Trump term would likely usher in policies friendly to digital asset firms. It comes as major crypto companies and their investors are poised to spend tens of millions of dollars to influence this year’s elections.

Industry players expect Trump’s speech this weekend to focus on boosting bitcoin mining in the U.S. and preventing the Federal Reserve from creating its own digital currency — both in line with the GOP platform released earlier this month. Some crypto enthusiasts are hoping Trump will go even further by endorsing a plan for the government to establish a strategic reserve of bitcoin.

“It gives the Trump embrace of crypto increasing bona fides,” said J. Christopher Giancarlo, who earned the name “CryptoDad” when he served as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Trump.

But a potential new challenge looms from the rise of Harris. Trump has framed his crypto pitch as an attack on President Joe Biden, whose regulators have cracked down on the industry. Now with the campaign undergoing a big reset, crypto-friendly Democrats are hopeful that Harris will usher in a softer approach. Though she hasn’t taken a position on digital asset regulation as VP, crypto advocates point to her age and roots in tech-friendly California as reasons to be optimistic.

“I'm hopeful,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a pro-crypto New Jersey Democrat, said. “I think she understands the space, being from California.”

Ron Conway, a venture capitalist and top Democratic donor whose firm has invested in crypto companies, posted on X this week that he has “known Kamala for decades, and she’s been a fighter, a leader, and an advocate for the tech ecosystem since the day we met.”

Harris is broadly expected to run on the Biden administration’s record, and speculation about her position on crypto could be a projection. But before Biden dropped out of the race, his camp appeared to be taking a more open-minded approach to crypto concerns, with senior adviser Anita Dunn meeting with industry leaders in Washington.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats remain divided over the issue. This week, the party’s top crypto skeptic, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), criticized a bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer signaled he wants to advance.

In anticipation of a possible shift, crypto critics are already pushing Harris to hold the line on the issue.

Rep. Brad Sherman, a fellow California Democrat and leading crypto basher on the House Financial Services Committee, said he has “already urged Kamala to stick with the positions of the Biden-Harris administration on crypto.”

He said Harris should use the issue to attack Trump, a former crypto skeptic who once called bitcoin a “scam.”

“I don’t think the people of the country want a slot machine president — you put in the money, you pull the handle, you get what you want,” Sherman said, referring to the crypto industry’s campaign spending. “And that’s clearly what Trump is.”

Trump’s crypto embrace didn’t come out of nowhere. Pro-crypto policies have become a big push for the GOP since he left office in 2021. But he has cashed in extensively on his newfound support for digital assets. Crypto billionaires who have backed Trump — including the Winklevoss twins and the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — have cited the issue in explaining their support for him. And his campaign has collected millions of dollars in crypto donations since it began accepting digital assets in May.

Before his speech in Nashville on Saturday, Trump will host a fundraiser where the asking price is $844,600 to attend a VIP reception, a roundtable and get a photo with the former president, according to an online invitation. (A lower-tier ticket that goes for $60,000 per person or $100,000 per couple allows attendees to just attend the reception and get a photo with Trump.)

When Trump takes the stage afterward, he is expected to try to turn crypto into a weapon against his new opponent.

“Crypto innovators and others in the technology sector are under attack from Kamala Harris and the Democrats,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement. “While the Biden-Harris Administration stifles innovation with more regulation and higher taxes, President Trump is ready to encourage American leadership in this and other emerging technologies.”

Eleanor Mueller contributed reporting.

For better or worse, the Washington village tends to understand its own history through the prism of presidencies.

“At five o’clock, when the library closed, I would come out into the sunlight and heat of the Washington of Franklin Roosevelt,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote, describing his early experience of the capital, where he came to do 19th century historical research but wound up transfixed by the excitement of FDR’s New Deal capital.

Fifty years later, and on the other side of the political spectrum, Peggy Noonan experienced a similarly president-centric city: “We came to Washington because of him,” she wrote in her memoir of young conservative dazzlement in Reagan-revolution D.C. “He moved us. We loved him.”

Like park rangers contemplating the rings on a tree trunk, old-timers talk about the Georgetown smart-set cosmopolitanism of the Roosevelt years or the suburban federal-contracting opulence of the Reagan presidency. Social-scene veterans detail how JFK upended the dress code, LBJ prompted hostesses to start serving barbecue, and the Clintonites turned Bombay Club into a dining hotspot. It’s not so different from the way archaeologists distinguish the paleolithic era from the mesolithic.

When it comes to the capital’s current moment, this presents a problem: Just what the heck was the Joe Biden era?

The 46th president’s admirers have spent the week crowing about how significant his single term has been for the whole country. But on the more parochial question that obsesses this particular city, few people can point to much legacy for the way the capital lives, works and plays. “They brought almost nothing new with them,” says Sally Quinn, the writer and longtime convener of the city’s power class. “Except calm.”

Unlike predecessors, Biden didn’t introduce Washington to any freshly arrived dramatis personae a la Jimmy Carter’s “Georgia Mafia.” His White House didn’t kick start any lifestyle trends the way the Obama’s did with its Michael Pollan-endorsed veggie garden. His administration wasn’t associated with any particular think tank (the way Ronald Reagan’s team elevated the old Heritage Foundation) or ideological cohort (the way the George W. Bush years were the age of the neocons) or pop-culture archetype (the way the Bill Clinton administration enshrined “the wonk” as a Beltway icon).

In the world of boldface names, Biden’s victorious campaign never enshrined a new hotshot strategist to follow in the media footsteps of James Carville, Karl Rove and David Plouffe. His subsequent stumbles didn’t elevate a new cadre of star reporters the way Richard Nixon’s scandals did with the likes of Woodward and Bernstein. In fact, it was the first administration in 44 years without a Bob Woodward tell-all. Tellingly, the revelation that doomed Biden’s re-election wasn’t delivered via holy-shit scoop from a journalist destined for Washington-legend status; despite an array of underappreciated reports, the effects of his age were only made inescapable by Biden himself at the disastrous June debate.

On the bestseller lists, Biden books didn’t sell. In the souvenir aisle, liberal merch celebrated other heroes. If you wanted to go out on the town, there certainly wasn’t a buzzy in-crowd hangout like the Trump Hotel. About the only neighborhoods his administration put on the map were in Delaware, where the first couple spent a vast number of their weekends.

“Even Kennedy only got 1,000 days but got to define an era,” says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and longtime chronicler of Washington’s intellectual and cultural trends. “But it is just very hard to define the Biden era.”

It makes for a strange paradox. Biden took office as the most Washington president in decades, a 50-year fixture at insider weddings and funerals, even if he hopped the Amtrak back to Wilmington afterwards. Yet he’ll leave behind a smaller cultural footprint than any president since George H.W. Bush — ironically, the last longtime Beltway hand to win the White House.

The contrast between the two is noteworthy. The elder Bush essentially ran for Ronald Reagan’s third term, presiding over the happy end of the Cold War without engendering either the passionate devotion or the intense fury that attached to his predecessor. Biden, by contrast, ousted Donald Trump from the White House and took over at a time of multiple national crises, just the sort of backdrop that might help a pol put his mark on the capital. So why didn’t it happen?

For one thing, there were the specific circumstances of Biden’s ascent. For at least the first year, the Covid epidemic shut down normal life in the capital. Even a president in the mood to be everywhere wouldn’t have had much chance.

For another, there’s the fact that his term involved so many figures from his predecessor’s government. “Just about every significant person in the Biden administration was in the Obama team,” Troy says. As familiar figures, they didn’t engender a lot of fascination, or strike presidency-obsessed Washington as being part of a specifically Biden cast of characters. (The low starpower of his cabinet can be seen in the fact that the Biden administration may be the first one in which the Secretary of Transportation qualified as a genuine Beltway celeb.)

“We’re seduced to thinking about the individual,” says Steve Clemons, the longtime media-political fixture who just left Semafor to focus on his own events firm. “I’ve thought for a long time presidencies are franchises of people.” And while Clemons says he sees Biden’s inner circle around town “all the time,” that inner circle remains unusually small. The rest of the team isn’t especially defined by their ties to Biden.

Above it all, in ways we may ultimately need historians to sort out, is the age factor. Biden surely came into office with as many cronies as any other backslapping pol. But because he was 78, many of his peers were actually no longer in the job market, depriving him an opportunity to launch a Friends of Joe generation of power brokers.

More troublingly, Biden’s age — and the desire to limit public interactions — likely explains the low profile and impossibly tight inner circle that defined his administration. In a city that rates presidents’ impact by their command of the public conversation, and evaluates their legacies in part by how many former proteges are still in the game decades later, this structure inevitably lessened any sense that the administration was shaping the hometown (even if it seemed like an effective way to run this particular presidency).

What’s not clear, though, is whether a light capital footprint is actually a bad thing.

As a native Washingtonian, I’ve always found it a bit embarrassing to watch the civic elite take food, fashion and real estate cues from schlubs who’ve done nothing more than win an election. It’s unbecoming of the world capital the city claims to be.

Rather than evidence of feebleness or ineptitude, Biden’s limited impact on company-town D.C. is also the result of a number of intentional choices, some of them pretty sensible.

Biden’s theory of the case in 2020 was that Americans wanted to not have to think too much about who was president. After four successive presidents who served as lifestyle icons and lightning rods, he would be boring. To this way of looking at the world, the lack of Biden bestsellers was a good thing, since most hot White House books depict chaos and grievance. The absence of a Biden dining trend or A-list neighborhood or au courant artist was good because people might like a normie with unspectacular tastes.

Washington might call him a man out of time, but the country, they figured, would appreciate that.

Similarly, the lack of an era-defining Biden-appointee archetype — like Kennedy’s Harvard Yard whiz kids, or Clinton’s hyper-networked boomers — was a side effect of something the administration rightly viewed with pride: a professionalized HR apparatus that yielded a remarkably diverse cast of junior hires. This meant, of course, that this cohort never became the sort of sociologically classifiable group that, years later, might star in gushy memoirs like Schlesinger’s or Noonan’s. Team Biden saw this as a feature, not a bug.

Did it make governing easier? It’s a mixed bag. That non-elitist hiring process, for instance, yielded a White House intern corps that was less reliant on Joe superfans or cronies’ children. Those ethically-sourced interns promptly rewarded Biden by signing an embarrassing public letter whining about his Israel policy. When things got hot, a Washington with fewer Biden-specific loyalists proved a lot more willing to give POTUS the shove.

Yet it’s also easy to forget how radical it seemed, after the fury of the Trump term and the violence of Jan. 6, to have a president who wanted to simply hit the stations of the cross on Washington’s social calendar. “Everybody in town was hysterical,” Quinn says. “I mean, people were just tearing their hair out and desperate. And then they came in and suddenly all the January 6 stuff just kind of went away.”

“After four years of Trump, Biden brought back a reminder of how leadership and a team acquits itself with decency and loyalty,” says Juleanna Glover, a former Republican consultant and longtime connector of Washington insiders. “Especially from a generational perspective, where you have young people coming to the city all the time, you had a clear contrast of what it meant to work for Biden versus what it meant to work for Matt Gaetz. You’re inculcating future operatives with values that they’ll operate with in the future.”

The flip side of that discipline is the sense that Biden’s team managed to chill conversation about what turned out to be the defining reelection issue. It’s a legacy that will live as an object lesson in newsrooms, and a rallying cry for those who see the capital as a self-protecting liberal ecosystem.

The Washington communications maven Tammy Haddad notes that Biden staged the first White House wedding in years and showed up at Cafe Milano. It was normal and unspectacular stuff, a big break from the status quo under his predecessor. “In a way he gave permission for the rest of the community to engage with the city again,” she says. But because it wasn’t a new thing, it wasn’t going to go down as a Biden innovation, or even seem newsworthy once memories of the chaos faded.

“In his mind, what he was doing was just the regular order of the presidency,” says Franklin Foer, whose book-length account of the Biden White House was one of the rare Biden books to crack the bestseller list. In Foer’s book, this regular order yielded a string of surprisingly ambitious proposals and unlikely legislative successes for a president whose party enjoyed the puniest of Congressional majorities — something that’s being noted this week by Biden’s allies (as well as by fellow Democrats heaping praise to cover up their role in his exit).

Yet when it comes to the question of how Washington works, the true impact of all those return-to-normal vibes in 2021 and 2022 may ultimately involve stuff that didn’t happen.

In the post-Watergate eras of Ford and Carter, the aftermath of trauma led to reforms that permanently altered the way the town’s business gets done. But in the Biden era, proposals to turn shattered Beltway norms into living federal laws mostly came to naught. The GOP fought them, of course. And the Biden administration, focused on doing normal-president things like passing economic measures, had other stuff on its plate, too.

The upshot is that if Trump comes back, there will be no new restraints on his ability to force major change that could upend the way permanent Washington goes about its life. That leaves the capital, once again, looking at a presidential election in panicked, existential terms, worrying that their familiar routines may be swept away. It’s a 21st century variety of abnormal that Biden, the last 20th century statesperson in the White House, never banished.

“If you want to control the age or era designation, the best way to do it is to get reelection,” Troy says.

SAN FRANCISCO — On the presidential campaign trail Kamala Harris has leaned into her prosecutor past, saying she protected children from sexual predators as a district attorney even as she glosses over other parts of the job that hurt her with progressives.

How successfully she can manage that tension could determine whether she can capture a broad base of voters in November: moderates who are worried about crime and liberals who distrust the criminal justice system.

The nuanced approach to the larger issue of crime the Harris team is considering carries political risk — even as Republicans waffle on how to attack a Democrat whom progressives once derisively nicknamed “Copala.”

Harris’ aides and allies are still refining the young campaign’s message on crime, but they argue her past record shows she was a middle-of-the-road prosecutor who supported some progressive criminal justice reform, while taking tough action on serious infractions.

“She’s very pragmatic,” said Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator in California. “She has strong core values, but she’s not an ideologue. She wants the trains to run on time.” Wiener, a longtime Harris ally, volunteered on her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney when she defeated a more progressive incumbent.

How voters perceive Harris’ public safety record could be crucial to shaping the election, as both parties try to appeal to swing-state voters frustrated with crime and urban decay. Harris will have to overcome decades of voters trusting Republicans more on the issue as Trump pushes the portrayal of California and other blue states as dystopian beds of lawlessness — even though many categories of reported crimes have fallen in recent years.

The GOP-led effort to rebrand Harris, from aggressive prosecutor to effete liberal, was illustrated in a tweet Wednesday from Trump campaign adviser Steven Cheung, who called her record on crime “SOFT AS CHARMIN,” a post that was embellished with emojis of toilet paper.

Wiener said the attack shows the Republican Party is worried she is an effective messenger on crime: “You have a prosecutor running against a crook, so they’re peeing their pants right now.”

The “Prosecutor versus Convicted Felon” narrative has quickly become a dominant theme that Harris and Democratic surrogates have used to hit Trump on the campaign trail.

Harris’ aides say her resume will help beat back one of the caricatures being crafted by the right — that she’s a soft-on-crime progressive who’s personally responsible for the rampant theft and open-air drug markets on the streets of San Francisco where she was once district attorney before becoming California attorney general. And the campaign will continue to remind voters of Trump’s first term, which ended with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and his proposals to cut federal funding for police.

At the same time some Trump campaign supporters have also tried to highlight how the tougher parts of Harris’ record could alienate voters on the left. “She put a lot of Black men in jail for small stuff, small ball,” said California RNC National Committeemember Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and Trump ally.

Leaning into the “Kamala the Cop” persona that Harris tried to downplay during her first run for president when progressive reformers held sway in the Democratic Party is risky. The flip flop invites critics to redeploy the familiar charge that she puts political expediency over personal values.

“She’s always been pandering with her eye on the next prize,” Dhillion said in an interview. “I would call Kamala Harris an empty vessel, and that is scary because who’s going to pour their dollars and views into her next?”

Dhillion pointed to the fact that Harris embraced law and order rhetoric and even prosecuted people for marijuana possession as DA, but pivoted to a softer approach as a senator and during her 2019 presidential campaign.

Harris’ record on crime is hard to define in purely ideological terms. She was aggressive in sending people to prison for violent crimes and drug possession, a stance that continues to alienate some justice reform advocates who accuse her of perpetuating the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the early 2000s.

Yet Harris was a vocal opponent of the death penalty and created diversion programs for non-violent drug and petty-theft offenders who accepted guilty pleas. And she later endorsed progressive DA’s like now-embattled George Gascón of Los Angeles County.

It’s an approach Harris outlined in her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer,” in which she calls for prosecutors to embrace a dual mentality: use tough enforcement tactics on the most violent criminals while, at the same time, adopting reform-minded programs to help lower-level offenders better their lives.

Harris is promoting her prosecutor roots on the trail after spending the last several months sharpening her message against Trump as a convicted felon.

Her law-enforcement resume wasn’t a major focus for her after joining President Joe Biden’s ticket in 2020, when the nation was reeling from the death of murder of George Floyd. But now, with Trump running again, after being found guilty on 34 felony counts himself, Harris’ aides believe her credentials bolster her authority on the issue. They also believe now is the time to highlight her credentials in a way she hasn’t been able to before.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” Harris told a rowdy crowd at her campaign debut in Milwaukee this week. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But Trump campaign advisers say they are confident they can cast Harris’ record in a harsher light, arguing that voters across the nation will see her resume — while moderate by San Francisco standards — as extreme to people outside of the West Coast. Still, the GOP has struggled to hone its attack in the days since Harris became the Democratic frontrunner.

Some Republicans have cautioned the party about giving too much air to the left’s critiques of Harris. In a tweet this week, the conservative think tank America 2100, which is led by Sen. Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff, warned it’s a mistake for the party to “run to Kamala's left on crime.”

Lateefah Simon, a friend of Harris and a Democratic candidate for an Oakland House seat, burst into laughter over the phone when POLITICO asked her about the soft-on-crime characterization. Simon worked under Harris for nearly four years when she was San Francisco DA, and launched a division to support rehabilitated offenders.

“She’s tough. Her ideals were, ‘If you break a social contract, there needs to be accountability,’” said Simon, a progressive who is favored to win retiring Rep. Barbara Lee’s seat this fall. Simon said she occasionally disagreed with the hard edges of Harris’ policies.

But, Simon added, she also saw a softer side. Many times, she watched Harris embrace weeping mothers whose sons, often Black and Latino, were killed from gun violence in the 2000s.

“I would hear those wails from those mothers,” said Simon, who worked in an adjacent office. “It’s one of those moments where it’s like, ‘This woman really loves our people.’”

The Biden-Harris campaign had been playing offense on crime and immigration in recent months, in an effort to flip the script as Republicans seized on both issues. Biden, who endorsed Harris Sunday, has warned advisers that scenes of chaos at the border and crimes in cities could turn off independent and suburban voters. The White House was banking on the idea that voters would reward them for efforts to crack down on the border and boost spending on law enforcement.

In her new place atop the ticket, Harris too is expected to tout those policies despite her past fizzled efforts during the Biden administration to work with Central American countries to address the root causes of migration.

Whether voters buy into the message could also trickle down to swing races in largely blue states like California and New York that could determine which party controls the House next year.

Also on the ballot in California this November is a measure to roll back parts of a decade-old state initiative that reduced prison sentences for some low-level drug and theft crimes. Republicans have tried to cast Harris as an architect of that measure, known as Proposition 47, which reformed tough sentencing laws from the 1990s.

Harris, however, didn’t take a stance on Prop 47 when it was on the ballot during her tenure as attorney general in 2014, a move that infuriated some liberal Democrats. Republicans still argue the ballot summary her office prepared didn’t warn of the potential consequences.

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Ben Petersen told POLITICO the party is eager to have a debate about crime on California’s November ballot — and to tie the top of the Democratic ticket to it.

“Kamala Harris would drag the nation down a dangerous path until everywhere looks like the worst of San Francisco,” he said in a statement.

On Sunday, President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, effectively kicking off one of the shortest campaigns in modern political history. With only three full months to go before Election Day, Harris has an ultra-compressed timeline in which to build a policy platform, refine her message and define herself as a candidate to voters.

How do you run a three-month campaign in an era when presidential campaigns have become yearslong affairs? We gathered three top campaign managers to ask just that. We spoke with Patti Solis Doyle, who ran Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign; Robby Mook, who ran Clinton’s 2016 general election campaign; and Stuart Stevens, lead strategist in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

In an hourlong roundtable discussion, the three drew on decades of campaign experience to hash out how Harris should define herself in opposition to Trump; how she should attack rather than go on defense or respond if Trump resorts to racist and sexist attacks; what her path to 270 electoral votes might look like; and who her VP pick should be. On that last one, all seemed to point in the direction of one governor in a key battleground state. “If I were on the campaign and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro brought me half a point,” Mook said, “I really want that half a point, because that might be the half a point you win the state by.”

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What should Kamala Harris do differently in this campaign than in her unsuccessful 2020 campaign?

Patti Solis Doyle: I feel kind of odd offering any advice because she seems to not really need it. The last 72 hours have been unbelievable in terms of rollout. She locked up the nomination. Within 36 hours, she got the delegates. She got the endorsements from Congress. She got the money. And her first events have been through the roof.

I think she’s doing it. I think she is being forceful in her prosecution of Trump. I think she’s offering a hopeful view of the future. I think she’s doing the politics right.

Robby Mook: Your question is interesting because my initial reaction is, a primary campaign and a general election campaign, particularly one only 14 weeks out, are just totally different. But she’s brilliantly set up here because the staff were hired; the fundraising apparatus is in place; the politics are done; the nomination is secured. It’s like she turned the first 10 months into two days.

There’s a paradox here. This is a really short campaign, and that is great, because she is rested. She is ready to go. I think time is often your enemy on these, particularly as a quasi-incumbent. But on the other hand, time is short, so the imperative is to lock in, first of all, who is she? And second of all, what is her vision?

I think she’s done a very good job rolling that out right out of the gate. But there’s a question about calcifying that and pushing it deep. And we know that these — they used to be called double-haters but I think they’re just persuadable-again or either-way voters — we know that they have the least information about her and they get their news disproportionately from social media. One advantage she really has that we didn’t have on the Clinton campaign, and I don’t think Joe Biden really had, is the internet is a really safe space for her right now. It’s a great safe space for people to express support for her. So that’s great.

But the Harris campaign has got to drive that advantage because we’re already seeing the GOP going on TV. It’s almost like it’s March 15th — it’s after Super Tuesday, she’s secured the nomination. What can happen? The incumbent, which in this case is Trump, is going to try to go in and define you right away. And the Harris team has got to resist that. They’ve got to have that strategy, get it on the air and drive it in. And that’s the test, I think, over the next month.

Stuart Stevens: I think I would challenge the premise of the question that she didn’t run a good campaign because she didn’t win. Because most people don’t win. And she did end up on the ticket, which is the next best thing you can do. She won a very tough race for attorney general. She’s vice president of the United States, and now she’s the Democratic nominee for president. So how far would she have gone if she was a good politician?

Defining the narrative

By virtue of her position as vice president, many voters still don’t actually know her. How should Kamala Harris define herself?

Robby Mook: I think the challenge for her is going to be there’s this really tricky dynamic with the electorate right now. On one hand, the economy is doing really well. And on the other hand, people, particularly the folks she needs to bring in to win this election, are really unhappy with the economy. They’re very on edge. And the world has become much more seemingly dangerous and volatile. And she’s sort of an incumbent, but not totally. So she’s going to have to really address head-on that agitation in the electorate, because it’s very easy for Trump to say, “If you don’t like the way things are, time for a change,” right? And while Trump’s policies caused inflation, he wasn’t president when the inflation that his policies caused came into effect. So I think that’s going to be the maze she’ll have to navigate.

Patti Solis Doyle: My first presidential campaign was Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. And for a lot of reasons, he didn’t actually get the nomination until very, very late into the primary process. Which meant we had a very short general election. And that was a blessing in many, many ways.

Stuart Stevens: I think this is a chance to really pose the question of, “Who are we?” To say that there are two competing visions of what America should be — a guy who wants to ban Muslims and says immigrants are murderers and rapists, or someone who embodies what the American dream is about.

I’ve always felt that when President Biden was still in this, that there had to be two things that needed to be accomplished that were critical to winning. One was that the Democratic candidate needed to represent the future. And it’s clear that the Harris campaign understands that. I mean, you’re running against a guy who’s against all mandatory vaccines in schools. So, like, that’s the pro-polio camp, the pro-whooping-cough camp, pro-measles. I think that’s a pretty small group. And the Democratic candidate needed to be the safe choice.

I think the model for this in a lot of ways is the Obama campaign in ’08. They did a magnificent job in setting it up so that when you voted for Barack Obama, it said something about who you were and what you wanted the country to be, not just who you wanted to be president. And I think that’s the challenge that Harris should run right into.

And I think the Trump campaign is completely ill-equipped to deal with this. Trump hates women, JD Vance hates women. They don’t know how to talk about women. And I think tonally, they’re going to be completely off as they have been in the past 72 hours.

Patti Solis Doyle: Robby and I have had the experience of trying to elect the first woman president of the United States and failing. With Hillary, she was predefined, and she came with a lot of baggage. Harris doesn’t have that burden. And it’s a real, real opportunity. And I couldn’t agree more with Stuart that they’re not going to know how to handle her. They’re just not going to know how to approach her, how to engage with her, how to define her. Hillary was a lot easier to do that with. And I think they’re not going to know what to make of her.

Attacking Trump’s weaknesses

 
What are the biggest vulnerabilities that you see in terms of how Trump will attack her? And is there anything specific in the Biden record that her campaign will want to avoid or should avoid?

Robby Mook: We’re seeing change elections everywhere around the globe right now. In Britain, it was from conservative to Labour, and in France, we saw the two poles against the center. In India, we saw change. So I do think they’re going to have the wind at their back on this question of change. I do think that’s an opportunity for Harris because I think she is her own person. She can both reach back to the accomplishments of the administration and talk about what’s worth protecting, but she can also propose a new direction. We’ve already seen that: She talked about pre-K and elder care and so on — new ideas that weren’t really associated with Biden.

I also just can’t emphasize enough how we’ve had so much change coming from the right via the Supreme Court, particularly the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So I think also this question of change is an opportunity for her to say there’s been a lot of really bad changes, and we need to push back on that. And we saw her doing that, just in the last two days.

Patti Solis Doyle: The two issues the Trump campaign is going to drive hard — and I would, too, if I were them — are the economy slash inflation slash cost of living and the border and immigration. It’s going to be very difficult for her to sort of disassociate herself from the Biden administration and the Biden record on those two issues, particularly the border because she was ostensibly put in charge of that early on in the administration.

But at the same time, I agree with Robby that she can pivot. She absolutely can pivot to her vision of the future. I think we’re going to see inflation get much better between now and the election.

The third issue that is very prominent is women’s reproductive rights. And she can just own that and really drive it all the way through the general election. So on the issues, I think she’s fairly well positioned. But ironically, this has been sort of an issue-less campaign thus far. This has been all about Biden being too old and Trump being a criminal. And we haven’t really talked about our vision for policy priorities, et cetera. I think Kamala will be able to pivot there as well.

Stuart Stevens: If I were on the Harris campaign, I would attack Donald Trump on his record with immigration. It was a total failure. Barack Obama deported more people than Trump. Trump said he was going to have Mexico pay for a wall. I would go in and say he’s the greatest failure that we’ve had. And that’s what the Biden administration handled. I would not defend; I would attack on that. But the bottom line is that if this is a referendum on immigration, it’s not going to be a great day for the Harris campaign. So you have to switch.

And if you look at that 100-day plan that the president rolled out in Michigan after the debate, which I thought was beautifully done and timed … and if you take Project 2025 and what Republicans were talking about at that convention … I mean, one tests about 80/20 to the good, and the other tests about 20/80 to the bad. So it’s not hard to take that 80/20 and run it against the 20/80. And do that all day. And I would attack, attack, attack. I think I’d run maybe one positive ad and the rest would be contrasts.

So what’s her strongest message here then? Is it the anti-Trump focus or is it pro-abortion rights? Is it something else? Change?

Stuart Stevens: To me, her strongest message is, “I am more like America than Donald Trump is,” which is true. Republicans keep getting into these culture wars, and they lose. They attack Nike and Colin Kaepernick. What happens? Nike makes $9 billion. They get in a fight with Disney? The happiness company? They’re sort of at war with the modern world, and I think you have to just bet on that. There’s more of her than there are of them. I would make that bet and take that bet.

Robby Mook: I think she’s going to need to talk to people’s pocketbooks at least somewhat. I think any presidential candidate ignores that at their peril. I think you’re going to start to hear her talking more about how Trump went in front of a bunch of oil executives and said, “You give my campaign $1 billion, I’ll give you whatever you want.” We’ll hear more about that, but also more about what she’s done for people. There’s a lot in the IRA — at least hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been created. I would put abortion in a special lane. I think that issue transcends in a way. It was such a rupture in our national policy. And it is so powerful that I think it deserves a special place in the messaging of the campaign.

On the other side of that coin, how hard should Harris be going after Trump? And how should she be responding to his more caustic attacks, particularly the ones that are going to have racist or sexist undertones, either from Trump or surrogates for his campaign?

Patti Solis Doyle: I think she should attack him and contrast with him every opportunity she has. Every day, 20 hours a day. In terms of how she reacts to his racist, sexist, misogynist attacks on her, I would just not even go there. Do not take the bait.

Robby Mook: I think Patti brings up an important point there, because I think sometimes when you do, it makes it about you. But she can have surrogates, certainly, push back on that.

On campaigns, there’s positive advertising and there’s negative advertising. I do think in many ways, this is shaping up to be a contrast campaign. It is not enough to just say, “Well, here’s what I think,” and then you wait. It’s really, “Here’s what I think, and here’s what the other person thinks, and here’s why I have a better deal.”

Stuart Stevens: Yeah, I mean, I think she just shrugs and says: “Is that all you got?” and just makes fun of it. That is a base play when they’re doing that. They’re basically telling jokes that they think are funny, that most people don’t think are funny, and you can’t make them think that it’s not funny. You just have to bet that most of the people don’t think it’s funny.

Patti Solis Doyle: I’m going to lose my Hillary card on this one. But Hillary was a very polarizing figure. So when Trump called her a nasty woman, half of the country was kind of like, “Oh, yeah, she kind of is,” and that’s not the case with Kamala Harris. She doesn’t have that sort of polarized perception from the American people. I think she can bring more people into the tent if he chooses to attack her in that way.

Gaming out a path to 270

I wonder if I could change directions a little bit here and talk a little bit about the Electoral College and the best map to 270 for Harris. One could argue that Harris has particular strengths that might reopen the Sun Belt path that seemed to be closed for Joe Biden. Am I off-base there?

Robby Mook: I do think there’s potential for the Sun Belt to open up a little bit. I think Arizona has remained in the hunt. I think the question was really more about Georgia and North Carolina and where they stood. And if Harris is able to drive up support with African American voters, that’s really key to pulling those states back in. To state the obvious, they’re so important because those states can replace losing, for example, in Wisconsin. But, and this is, to me, the key to the Electoral College: I don’t see a way that either candidate probably wins without winning Pennsylvania. It’s 19 electoral votes. I don’t see where else you get those. So I think we’re going to definitely see a focus on the so-called Blue Wall and on the Sun Belt. But gosh, if I were sitting in that campaign, Pennsylvania is a must-win.

Patti Solis Doyle: Almost immediately, with the Harris announcement, I think two things happened. One, it stopped the hemorrhaging. It was a tourniquet on all the support we were losing in the Blue Wall. The second thing she’s done is shore up the base and our coalition of Black people, brown people, young people, women. And by bringing those folks in — we won’t know until we see some credible polling in the next week or 10 days — but I believe strongly that we’re going to close the gap in those Rust Belt states as well, which gives us more paths to 270. It was very nerve-wracking to only have one path to 270 when we had Biden at the top of the ticket. And I think Harris, with whoever her VP selection is going to be, gives us more optionality and opportunity.

Stuart Stevens: Republicans have won Pennsylvania once since 1988. And that was with Trump. So I don’t think there’s anything that’s happened inside Pennsylvania politics that has made it more likely that Trump would win now. I think it’s the opposite. This Trump-like candidate ran for governor and got crushed. You have a very popular governor who seems to be pretty good at politics. Demographically, the state has not trended in a way that would be unfavorable, I think. And you have a very fractured Republican Party in that state. So I like the odds Democrats can win it.

How about from a campaign mechanics standpoint, within this compressed time frame, what doesn’t the vice president have time to do that a normal campaign would? What can’t she do now because of the nature of the time left?

Robby Mook: You could argue they lost some time in fundraising in July, and time matters for fundraising. But, gosh, I’d like to think that was made up for in the last few days when they broke $100 million. So I’m not concerned about that.

She has a staff in place. It was a prepared, capable campaign that had plenty of time to get set up. The DNC and the party were in good shape. She is vastly outmatching Trump on ground game right now. The only things I could point to is it would be nice to have more time to think about a VP, but I think the ones she’s looking at are excellent. And I just don’t think that’s really going to have much impact.

I don’t see a lot of downside, personally.

Patti Solis Doyle: I agree with you. She’s not starting from scratch; she inherited a campaign apparatus and structure. I don’t think she really has the burden of not having enough time. I like the sprint to Election Day from now until November. I think it works to her advantage.

The stakes of the veepstakes

Okay, let’s talk about vice presidential options. Who do you think has the biggest upside for Kamala Harris? And are there any prospective candidates out there who haven’t been mentioned that might have a catalytic effect?

Patti Solis Doyle: I think you’ve got to view it from the prism of what do you actually need? What are the goalposts that you need to be able to clear? First, obviously the person has to be able to do the job, should something happen. I think all the people that she’s looking at check that box. Then there’s who helps you electorally. I think all the people she’s looking at check that box. And then, there’s the chemistry. I don’t put a lot of stake in that just because the very nature of the relationship is that there’s just tension there, right? I mean, I don’t think Bill Clinton and Al Gore got along very well, and I don’t think Barack Obama and Biden got along very well. There’s just natural tension in that dynamic. Then there’s the balancing of the narrative. For Kamala in particular, I think you’re looking for someone who’s a little more moderate, who’s a little whiter, who’s a little maler. I think all the people on her list do that.

Robby Mook: We were talking about Pennsylvania being paramount to the math of the Electoral College. I’m in the camp that doesn’t believe the VP choice makes a whole lot of difference, but if I were on the campaign and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro brought me half a point, I really want that half a point, because that might be the half a point you win the state by, right? It was won and lost by so little in the last two cycles. So that I just find interesting. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to me is also interesting. Unfortunately, his wife was the victim of an assassination attempt. He is such a unique American. And his military service, being an astronaut. But any of the people being talked about I think would be very solid.

Stuart Stevens: You know, if you held a gun to my head and said who to pick, my heart would say Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And my brain would say Shapiro.

Patti Solis Doyle: That’s what heart and head would say, too.
 

What it will take on Election Day

If you had to guess who wins the presidency, and you could have just one post-election data point to make that call, what would that data point be? I’m talking about, is it turnout in Philadelphia? In Detroit? Is it turnout in Madison? Is it TV spending? Is it fundraising? What would that one data point be that you’d want to have in making that call, if you could have only one?

Robby Mook: I would say Bucks County, Pennsylvania. If that’s just not where it needs to be, then that’s probably a pretty good bellwether.

Patti Solis Doyle: I’m shocked this is coming out of my mouth because two weeks ago, I was despondent, but I think Kamala Harris is going to win this election. And that’s because the double-haters now have an alternative. They don’t have to hold their nose and either vote for Trump or hold their nose and vote for Biden. They have an alternative that is pretty amazing. The way they shift in the battleground states is going to call it.

Stuart Stevens: The one data point I’d look at is the white vote. Trump has to get 58 or north of the white vote to have a chance in this race. His coalition was 85 percent white in 2020 in a country that is 60, 59 percent white — less so since we’ve been talking. If Trump gets 54 percent of the white vote, this thing is going to be a rout. He’s got to get closer to 60. There’s one dynamic I think we don’t focus on enough here: He lost by 7 million votes in 2020. He needs new customers. So where is he getting those new customers? And I don’t think he is. And I think that’s why he keeps getting stuck at this number. This guy has won one election in his life with 46.2 percent of the vote. Romney lost with 47.2 percent of the vote. He would have to crush numbers with white turnout. And I think he’s not because I think he’s going to lose the higher-educated white voters who would have voted Republican in a lot of local races and can’t stomach Trump.

Robby Mook: I need to mark the tape. I do believe that Harris will win, but Stuart brought up an important point here, which is back in the day, if there was exceptionally high turnout, that was really good for Democrats. And I think that equation is starting to change. And so, Stuart, I hadn’t thought about it this way until you said this, but I think his best source of new customers is turnout. And you were alluding to that.

I think that’s part of why he picked Vance. If on Election Day we’re seeing exceptionally high turnout, that’s a bellwether that’s helpful for Trump. We saw this in 2016; Florida looked like it was in the bag for Hillary going into Election Day. And then the turnout on Election Day was exceptionally high.

More people vote early now than in 2016. That really changed over Covid. But we need to be careful about making too many predictions before Election Day, because that in-person turnout is Trump’s secret weapon — if it exists for him, I don’t know. We have to assume the worst always until it’s over.

Stuart Stevens: It can’t be overemphasized what Trump has done gutting the RNC. There is no Trump organization out there. Of any magnitude. And they’re not going to create it. I just don’t know where he gets more white voters.

What is Trump’s biggest advantage against Harris right now?

Robby Mook: Inflation — that’s the drum that he’s going to beat. And as we all know, he opposed a very conservative bipartisan agreement on immigration and killed it for the express purpose of perpetuating what’s happening at the border. So those are two cudgels that he can use.

In this new era where particularly the kinds of voters that are harder to turn out are really getting their information and living their political life on social media. Trump’s superpower is marketing. I think it’s fraud, but it’s marketing, and he’s good at it. If he were to win — I don’t think he will but if he were — it’s going to be because he was able to turn people out just through this.

Even more important than the money that Harris raised over the last 72 hours was this explosion of online content and this community that’s been built around her, the memes about her, that you cannot buy, you cannot hire someone to create. It’s priceless. And so, my hope is that she will compete just as much as he can in that space.

Patti Solis Doyle: People aren’t happy. I think that’s his strongest advantage. If people aren’t happy, why are they unhappy? In presidential politics, it is always a referendum on the sitting president. I think that’s the advantage that Trump has. But we’ve just sort of switched it up 72 hours ago, so I think that very clear advantage on issues and the mood of the country is flipping on him a little bit.

Stuart Stevens: I’d say Trump’s greatest advantage is that there are still a lot of racists in America. For all the talk we have about how race impacts our politics, I don’t think we talk about it enough. In 1964, Goldwater got 7 percent of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 8 percent. That’s one point every 56 years. So, when I see these polls where, you know, he’s getting north of 14, 15 percent of the Black vote, I can’t tell you how many times and races with really good pollsters, I saw those numbers right up to the end of Republican races. But I can tell you how many times it happened. And that was never. So I’d take any of these polls, I would model it at 8 percent of the Black vote. I’d give him 34 percent of Hispanic vote. And that’s what’s going to happen. There still are a lot of racists in America. And this is going to be a referendum on that.

Here’s a lightning-round question: Do you expect we’ll have a presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?

Robby Mook: I’m going to dive in and say yes, but it will be negotiated directly with the networks; that would be my guess.

Patti Solis Doyle: I hope so, because I think Harris will be very effective against Trump, and he’ll fall for some foolish traps. I think yes, because Trump won’t want to look like he’s dodging it.

Stuart Stevens: Yes. Almost absolutely. Donald Trump would come and appear at your kid’s birthday party if you invited the guy. He can’t say no. I wouldn't be surprised if there’s more than one debate.

Three years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a pitch for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda by highlighting ambitions to use federal dollars to make life easier for caregivers.

“For far too long, investments in care have dropped to the bottom of the priority list,” she said in a virtual town hall in October 2021. “It is time to make corporations pay their fair share and pass our agenda, because care cannot wait.”

As history would have it, those items did drop off the priority list and weren’t included in Democratic legislation that boosted clean energy and aimed to reduce prescription drug prices.

But with Harris’ late entry into the presidential race, that vision has been given a sudden bolt of electricity, and her 2021 pitch is a window into her potential economic agenda if she inherits the Oval Office.

“I think she will prioritize these issues in a more authentic and enthusiastic way than we’ve seen before,” said Vicki Shabo, a longtime care policy advocate at the left-leaning think tank New America.

This has the potential to set Harris apart from President Joe Biden in an important way. Biden focused his campaign efforts on convincing people that the economy is doing well, pointing to low unemployment and rising wages. But he spent little time at all talking about what else needs to be done over the next four years, even as he acknowledged that an affordability crisis is still weighing on people.

Notably, neither Donald Trump nor Biden ever answered a question about what they’d do to make child care more affordable in the disastrous debate that ultimately ended the latter’s presidential run.

That’s not to say the White House didn’t have plans of what they’d like to do — not just on care issues, but also in other areas like housing and universal pre-K. But very few voters were going to scroll through the president’s proposed budget to find it.

While the vice president hasn’t been a leading voice on economic issues, she’s consistently supported paid family and medical leave from her earliest days in the Senate.

She’s also advocated for more funding for child care facilities and been a vocal proponent of the administration’s push to enhance the child tax credit, after a pandemic-era expansion led to a dramatic reduction in child poverty. In her first appearances since her candidacy began on Sunday, she made reference to all of these policies, including in a pitch to teachers.

These are all parts of boosting what the Biden administration calls “the care economy,” which refers to the labor — often unpaid — done by people taking care of vulnerable populations like children or the elderly.

While any initiative faces long odds of clearing Congress — particularly while the politics of inflation puts greater pressure on elected officials to offset the cost of new spending with higher taxes on at least some portion of the electorate — it’s worth noting: Having someone in the White House with a penchant for these issues could shake up the politics and give them a fighting chance of being enacted.

There is a macroeconomic pitch to making child care more affordable. According to an annual survey conducted by the Federal Reserve, nearly 40 percent of unemployed mothers in their prime working years said child care responsibilities contributed to their decision to not have a paying job — reducing the available supply of workers.

But Harris doesn’t tend to speak in macro terms.

And beyond specific positions she’s taken, it feels hard to extrapolate what her views on any given issue will be, since she’s never really articulated an overarching policy vision.

Allies of Harris say her style isn’t revamping the entire system but rather looking for targeted solutions to problems that people — particularly disadvantaged people — face.

It’s a stark contrast with Trump, who had and still has much more enthusiasm about economic policy than any other 21st century president and talks regularly about policies like putting 10 percent tariffs on all imported goods or lowering the corporate tax rate further.

Harris tends to gravitate toward issues that are more granular; she’s been a vocal player in the Biden administration’s policies that are aimed at helping minority-owned businesses get access to capital or that would eliminate medical debt from people’s credit scores.

“One of the questions she always comes back to is ‘Do these policies give people more freedom, choices, and ultimately autonomy over their own lives?’” Rohini Kosoglu, who previously served as domestic policy adviser to the vice president and as chief of staff to Harris when she was in the Senate, told me. “She is fighting for Americans to be empowered.”

Whatever her precise platform, Democrats and allies are hoping she’ll make a renewed effort to sell a forward-looking agenda for the economy.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) agreed when I asked her about the Democrats’ economic messaging outside the House floor on Tuesday, ticking off three priorities immediately, which she called “the largest pain points”: health care, housing and child care.

“We really need to have a vision of the future,” she said. “And we need to talk about what we’re gonna do once the American people hand us the keys.”

Democrats have had a bright spot after several months of fretting about their electoral prospects: Their House candidates are flush with cash.

Both parties have sought to stockpile money as they’ve prepared for a heated fight for control of Congress, and incumbents on both sides have raised large amounts. But Democrats in particular — despite being battered and bruised from weeks of chaos — have seen marked success in fundraising.

Democratic challengers last quarter outraised their incumbent Republican opponents in 17 of the 29 GOP-held districts that either party considers competitive, according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission data. In races with settled primaries, those Democratic challengers raised an average of $1.2 million — compared to a $965,000 average raised by the Republicans they’re looking to oust.

That fundraising advantage, revealed in FEC reports last week, was a rare glimmer of hope for Democrats facing tough battles for the White House and Senate. They need to gain just a few additional House seats to win back a majority, but Democrats have in recent weeks feared that President Joe Biden’s deep unpopularity would torpedo their chances.

Then Biden ended his bid, Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in and tens of millions of dollars began pouring into Democratic coffers. How much of that money ends up helping the dozens of battleground House races remains to be seen, and there’s no guarantee that jolt will continue through the cycle, especially as Republicans aggressively look to define Harris and tie down-ballot Democrats to her.

Republicans say they’re used to being outraised, but the fundraising gap has not grown big enough to worry them. Plus, the GOP incumbents benefit from larger war chests on average compared to their Democratic challengers.

But Democratic candidates and groups, warily breathing a sigh of relief, are emboldened by what they’ve seen in recent days.

“It’s the new beginning, different faces, fresh moment. That’s true in New Jersey, but it’s also now true nationally,” said Sue Altman, a first-time candidate running against Republican Rep. Tom Kean in New Jersey’s battleground 7th District. “For a while there, our campaign was providing hope when other places in the country hope was hard to find, and that’s including the presidential mess. I think now, however, it’s even more so the snowball is rolling down the hill because now there’s hope everywhere you look.”

Democratic challengers — but not Republican ones — are raising a lot of money

At the party committee level, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee outraised its Republican counterpart by $7 million last quarter. And more than a dozen non-incumbent Democrats brought in more than $1 million from April through June.

Many of those were repeat candidates and benefited from name recognition and fundraising infrastructure from their previous runs — but others, like Altman and Oregon state Rep. Janelle Bynum, who’s challenging Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, posted impressive hauls as first-time congressional candidates.

Four Democrats in Republican-held districts targeted by DCCC raised more than twice as much as their GOP opponents in the second quarter:

• Rudy Salas, who is challenging Rep. David Valadao (Calif.) in a district Biden won by 13 points in 2020;
• Adam Gray, who is challenging Rep. John Duarte (Calif.) in a district Biden won by 11 points;
• Josh Riley, who is challenging Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) in a district Biden won by 4 points;
• And Janelle Stelson, who will face Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) in a district Trump won by 4 points.

Salas, Gray and Riley all ran in 2022. Stelson, a former TV anchor, is running for the first time.
What makes the Democratic challengers’ strong fundraising particularly notable is that Republicans looking to take down Democratic incumbents in battleground districts did not show the same strength.

Across 34 swing districts Republicans are targeting or Democrats have said they’re actively protecting, only one incumbent, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), was outraised — and he’s fending off a challenge from former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores, who held the seat in 2022 and 2023. In races where the primary is settled, the average Republican challenger raised $404,000, compared to $984,000 raised by the average incumbent Democrat.

The average Republican challenger had less than $500,000 cash on hand as of the end of June, compared to $2.5 million for Democratic incumbents.

There are still real challenges for Democrats

Democrats will still need to convert their strong fundraising into electoral wins, and they’ll continue to face real obstacles to doing so.

For one thing, Democratic challengers have some catching up to do when it comes to their cash reserves. That’s the money that will be important heading into the most active stretch of campaigning, and while Democrats have narrowed the gap in recent months, GOP incumbents continue to hold an advantage, with a bit shy of $2.7 million cash on hand on average compared to more than $1.9 million on average for Democratic challengers.

It’s difficult to oust an incumbent, and money doesn’t guarantee a win. And it takes money for non-incumbents to erase the built-in advantages of those already in Congress, who have higher name ID, and get their message out to voters.

Republicans dismissed the Democratic fundraising numbers, saying GOP candidates remain in a strong position heading into the final months of their races.

“Democrats traditionally always raise more money than our team does,” National Republican Campaign Chair Richard Hudson told POLITICO last week.

He noted that the NRCC’s second-quarter fundraising was its best ever for April-June of an election year and said he’s “pleased” with the amount of money they have raised.

“Our $37 million to $44 million, if we can keep that close, I’m not concerned about it,” Hudson said. “We can’t let them get so far ahead that they can kind of blow us out of the water, so we’ve got to continue this pace, we’ve got to continue to raise the money.”

The NRCC has also boasted other statistics, like its candidates who are backed by Speaker Mike Johnson outpacing their top recruits from the midterms in fundraising and cash on hand. The Republican incumbents designated as top defensive priorities by the NRCC slightly outraised DCCC’s endangered incumbent Democrats by just under $20,000 last quarter.

Republicans are also poised to be buoyed by big outside spending: The party’s chief House super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund, had nearly $111 million in the bank as of the end of June, compared to $88.6 million for its Democratic equivalent, House Majority PAC.

Democratic hopes spiked after Harris took over the Biden campaign

Down-ballot Democrats have been touting gains — from interest in their campaigns to hard dollars — in the days immediately following the launch of Harris’ campaign for president.

In the aftermath of Biden endorsing Harris, DCCC had its single best online fundraising day of the cycle. Democrats’ Senate campaign arm saw a boost, too — also coming off of a strong quarter for Democratic Senate candidates compared to their Republican challengers. And the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which marshals the party’s strategy for state legislative races, also posted record-breaking days in the Harris aftermath.

A full picture of post-Biden fundraising won’t be clear until all congressional campaigns file their third-quarter FEC disclosures in October, but several Democratic congressional candidates reported significant surges. Some House and Senate campaigns saw an 800 percent increase in daily donations in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s decision. ActBlue, the major Democratic donation processing platform, said that small-dollar donors gave more than $154 million to Democratic campaigns and groups, from the presidential race on down, in the 48 hours after Harris’ campaign launch.

“Donors have clearly gotten the message that we need to flip the House because the presidential is expected to be close,” said Brian Derrick, co-founder of Democratic donation processor Oath.

He said the enthusiasm for Democrats with Harris at the top of the ticket can help down-ballot candidates in states that aren’t presidential battlegrounds, but have competitive House seats, like California and New York.

Dave Min, a Democratic state senator running for California's open battleground 47th District, said the days since Harris’ campaign launch on Sunday have seen an acceleration of the fundraising momentum he saw in the second quarter, when he raised about three times as much as his Republican opponent.

“Normally we see a cyclical trend in our fundraising: It’s kind of static for most of the quarter, and toward the end of the quarter it picks up significantly,” Min said. “In the last few days, we’ve seen numbers that look more like the end of the quarter. … It tells us there’s a lot of excitement around the change at the top of the ticket.”

And Will Rollins, a fellow California Democrat who’s running for a second time to unseat Republican Rep. Ken Calvert and raked in more than $2 million in the second quarter, said he raised six figures online since Sunday with more than 2,000 unique donors.

“I think it’s more than just a sigh of relief,” Rollins said. “It’s feeling fired up.”

Vice President Kamala Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in private Thursday and followed it with a strikingly forceful call on his government to get a cease-fire deal done and ease the suffering of civilians in Gaza.

Harris, as she works to define herself as her party’s new likely nominee, did not diverge from Biden administration policy except perhaps in the directness of her message.

“Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” she said.

Harris, standing in front of a row of American flags, delivered on-camera remarks soon after the meeting ended. She told reporters that she had a “frank” conversation with Netanyahu.

The vice president said a two-state solution is the only path to ensure it remains a “secure, Jewish and democratic state,” while providing Palestinians with the “freedom” they “deserve.”

She pleaded with Americans to understand the complexity of the foreign policy issue, urging them to condemn acts of hate, antisemitism, Islamophobia and violence, a day after some protesters burned American flags and voiced support for Hamas in Washington

She addressed head-on the Democratic unrest that has been facing the Biden administration for months.

“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent,” Harris said. “So to everyone who has been calling for a cease-fire, and to everyone who has been calling for peace, I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war. Let’s bring the hostages home, and let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people.”

The substance of the vice president’s remarks didn’t diverge from President Joe Biden’s past comments, but her delivery was notable and offered the clearest picture of Harris’ views on the conflict to date.

Just days into her young campaign for president, Harris faces the political challenge of defining herself on one of the country’s most fraught foreign policy issues, while continuing to serve under Biden as he works to finalize a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas.

It remains unclear if and how the vice president might try to distance herself from Biden’s Israel-Gaza policy, though there has been some daylight between the two leaders in the past. In December, Harris told administration officials, including the president, that she wanted the White House to show more public concern for the humanitarian devastation in Gaza — Biden sharpened his public criticism of Israel in the months after. And she also argued at the time that the administration needed to begin making “day after” plans for how to handle the aftermath of the war.

Biden met with Netanyahu ahead of Harris’ meeting, urging the Israeli prime minister to secure a cease-fire deal in Gaza — and the Israeli leader committed to hostages’ families that he would step up negotiations with Hamas. They held their high-stakes meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday, the leaders’ first meeting since October and after months of growing frustration in the White House about Netanyahu's approach to the war.

No longer worried about his political future after ending his reelection bid, Biden pledged to take a tougher tone with Netanyahu — with whom he has frequently clashed — to reach an agreement with Hamas to free the group’s hostages and end the fighting that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

The slow pace of negotiations has angered both Biden and the families of the hostages still being held in Gaza. After the president and prime minister met for 90 minutes, they then spent another hour with the families of Americans still being held captive by Hamas — and the anguished loved one said they felt some new hope.

"After the meeting we feel more optimistic than we have at any point since the previous hostage deal last November," said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of Sagy Chen, told reporters. "Biden and Netanyahu pledged that they understand that time should not be wasted and that the current deal on the table should be completed with as few changes as possible.”

“With each passing day bringing our loved ones back alive becomes less likely," he said.

Dekel-Chen stressed that the families told Biden and Netanyahu that a deal must be concluded to return all the hostages and end the suffering in Gaza. The families said that Netanyahu denied he was slow-walking the negotiations for his own political benefit and vowed to send a new proposal to Hamas in the coming days.

The war started when Hamas surged across the border on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s invasion of Gaza, including many civilians.

After bowing out of the presidential race, Biden vowed to make a cease-fire deal a centerpiece of his remaining time in office. National Security spokesman John Kirby, who spoke to reporters as the men met, said that the president believed “strongly that it was time to get a hostage deal in place.”

“The president is reaffirming to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we need to get there and we need to get there soon,” Kirby said. “There are gaps that remain. But we believe that they are of a nature that can be closed, and we can achieve a deal. But it will require, as it always does, some leadership, some compromise, and some effort to get there."

U.S. officials have said that negotiations in the region would resume next week and that a deal could be struck before long.

Netanyahu is also slated to visit Trump at the Republican nominee’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Friday.

SACRAMENTO — The Supreme Court’s effort to dig itself out of the ethics hole it finds itself in would be greatly aided by some kind of oversight that isn’t provided by the justices themselves, Justice Elena Kagan argued Thursday.

Kagan publicly endorsed calls for a system to enforce the code of ethics the court adopted last year after a raft of bad publicity about ethics issues involving her colleagues led to outrage from Congress and tarnished the court’s prestige.

“The thing that can be criticized is: Rules usually have enforcement mechanisms attached to them, and this set of rules does not,” Kagan told a meeting of federal judges and lawyers.

Kagan said she welcomed the code the court announced last November but that the absence of any means of enforcing it was a glaring omission.

“It's a hard thing to do to figure out who exactly should be doing this and what kinds of sanctions would be appropriate for violations of the rules, but I feel as though we, however hard it is, that we could and should try to figure out some mechanism for doing this,” the liberal justice appointed by President Barack Obama said.

Kagan said there was no simple answer to who should oversee the conduct of the members of the nation’s highest court, but she ruled out the idea that the justices should sit in judgment of each other’s conduct.

“I think it would be quite bad … for us to do it to each other,” she told the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference.

Kagan said the best choice would likely be “judges lower down the food chain,” even though that “creates perplexities” by inverting the usual process of the justices overseeing subordinate federal courts.

Kagan suggested that Chief Justice John Roberts could establish a committee of lower-court judges to tackle complaints against the justices. She also did not rule out the possibility that Congress could pass a law requiring something similar, as many Democrats in Congress have endorsed. In her remarks to the same conference last year, Kagan disputed her colleague Justice Samuel Alito’s public claim that Congress has no role to play in policing ethics at the high court.

Kagan made no direct reference Thursday to the ethics claims that have swirled over two of her conservative colleagues over the past couple of years: Alito was accused of failing to report a private airplane flight to Alaska paid for by a wealthy Republican donor, and Justice Clarence Thomas faced stories disclosing that he’d vacationed by private yacht with another major GOP donor. Alito and Thomas also faced calls to recuse themselves from cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, after their wives seemed to show solidarity with those who sought to overturn the election.

Creating an enforcement mechanism, Kagan suggested, would be preferable to the current system where justices basically decide for themselves whether they are guilty of violating the code.

“It would provide a sort of safe harbor. … Sometimes people accuse us of misconduct where we haven't engaged in misconduct. And, so, I think both in terms of enforcing the rules against people who have violated them, but also in protecting people who haven't violated them, I think a system like that would make sense,” she said.

A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the chief justice, but Kagan said she was by no means suggesting any consensus on the court in favor of any enforcement regime.

“I’m doing no intimating here,” said Kagan. “This is one person’s view.”

During an hourlong onstage interview conducted by a judge and an attorney at a convention center a few blocks from the state Capitol, Kagan also lamented what she described as a current tendency by the justices to splinter in significant cases — sometimes largely agreeing on a result, but laying out very different rationales for reaching it.

“We don’t seem to be able to coalesce all that easily on some cases,” Kagan said. “There is a lot of separate writing that the court is doing right now. … It’s not a good thing for the court. It prevents us, I think, from giving the kind of guidance that lower courts have the right to expect and that the public has the right to expect. It muddies the waters.”

Kagan also complained that some of her colleagues use concurring opinions to try to recast the majority’s view. She noted that in a major gun rights case decided last month, the decision was nominally 8-1, but the court produced seven opinions. Kagan, who joined a concurrence by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said some mischief was afoot in the plethora of opinions.

“Everybody sort of tries to spin it one way or another,” Kagan said. “Often people use separate opinions to pre-decide issues that aren't properly before the court and that may come before the court in a year or two and try to give signals as to how lower courts should decide that, which I don't think is right.”

Kagan said efforts by individual justices to offer their own take on what the court decided create confusion. “I don’t know how lower courts are supposed to deal with it really. Mostly, I think they should deal with it by ignoring it, basically,” she said.

Kagan acknowledged profound disappointment with some of the rulings the court issued in the current term, as the three liberal justices often found themselves outvoted by the phalanx of six conservatives they now face on the bench. However, she said she doesn’t retreat to her office and cry as Sotomayor, speaking to an audience at Harvard in May, said she has sometimes done in recent years.

“I’m not much of a crier, myself,” Kagan quipped. “I get where the frustration comes from. I’m more of a wall-slammer.”

Kagan said the cases that trouble her the most are where she believes her colleagues aren’t adhering to principle or are straying beyond what she views as the proper role for judges.

“Courts shouldn't use individual cases as vehicles to advance some broader agenda or some broader project to change our governance structure or our society,” she said. “Hopefully, it doesn't happen much, but there have been cases in the last few years in which it has happened to my lights, at least.”

Kagan did not discuss the largely 6-3 decision the court issued earlier this month upholding much of former President Donald Trump’s arguments that he and other presidents enjoy immunity from criminal charges for their official acts.

However, she struck a theme she has in some other appearances where she’s suggested that there is a degree of banality and even misdirection in anecdotes some of her colleagues offer about the social interactions among the justices.

“I get frustrated sometimes when people talk about the collegiality question,” Kagan said. “Some of my colleagues share a great love of baseball. Some of my colleagues share a great love of golf. … That’s good for the court, but I can’t imagine why the public should care.”

Kagan said the social engagement matters only if it means the justices are engaging with each other’s legal arguments and trying to reach consensus where possible.

“Sometimes going to the opera together might produce that result; sometimes not,” she said.

The only ruling from this term that Kagan addressed in detail was the Supreme Court’s decision overturning a 40-year old precedent, known as the Chevron doctrine, that required judges to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of relevant congressional statutes when those interpretations were reasonable. The court’s ruling last month, which split the justices 6-3 along ideological lines, said judges should interpret the law as they see fit in most instances where agency actions are challenged.

Kagan dissented from that decision and would have left the longstanding doctrine in place, but she said it’s not clear whether federal agencies will actually find their authority gutted as a result.

“I’m not exactly sure how it's going to play out,” she said. The justice noted that judges still have to pay “appropriate respect” to agency expertise, and Congress still has the power to explicitly grant agencies discretion about the scope of their authority. She also said some judges may struggle to resolve issues that are more about policy than law.

“The dictionary is not going to tell you much,” Kagan said. “There’s going to be a lot of uncertainty and a lot of instability on that front.”

While some critics have faulted the court for taking many fewer cases each term than it used to decades ago, Kagan said she still finds the workload pretty heavy, largely due to an increasing volume of emergency applications presented on what some call the court’s “shadow docket.” She said the court probably brought the tsunami of urgent applications on itself by granting several such petitions blocking Trump administration actions, but that the phenomenon means there’s no real time off for her or her clerks.

“Our summers used to be, actually, summers,” Kagan said.

As Republicans rev up their anti-Kamala Harris campaign, they’re having a hard time finding a consistent line of attack.

In recent days, Republicans have slammed the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean” demeanor. On Wednesday, Donald Trump called Harris a “radical, left lunatic,” then branded her “nasty” in a Fox News interview the following day — an echo of insults Trump leveled against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump’s allies, meanwhile, have argued she is actively engaged in a conspiracy to hide Biden’s apparent decline or that she’s just another Biden altogether. Some have engaged in explicitly racist and sexist attacks, calling her a “DEI hire” or bashing her for not having biological children. Others say she laughs too much. More criticized her for endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat. And none of her rivals seem willing to correctly pronounce her name.

“They are literally grasping at straws,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “Republicans desperately wanted to run against Joe Biden. … The introduction of Harris into the race, I think, has upended their attacks and their strategies.”

The breadth and lack of cohesion in the Republican assault on Harris reflects the newness of her candidacy — but also the difficulty GOPers are having adjusting to a contender who cuts a different profile than the 81-year-old, white, male incumbent they’d been planning a run against for years.

On the day Biden bowed out and Harris announced her campaign, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley suggested on Fox News that the change would not alter Republicans’ broader messaging.

“We are not going to be changing our plans because President Trump is going to run his race, and whether it is Kamala Harris or anyone else, they are going to run on the exact same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been running over the last four years,” he said.

But once Harris got in, Republicans were all over the map. Just hours after she announced her candidacy, Trump’s super PAC released an ad attacking Harris, claiming she “covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline” and that she “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it” herself. (The White House has disputed reports that aides insulated Biden to hide signs of decline.)

Then, the attacks pivoted to Harris’ identity.

A 2021 clip of Trump’s now-running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) calling Harris and other Democrats “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” began recirculating on social media. (One of Harris’ two step-children, Ella Emhoff, responded Thursday on Instagram, writing: “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I … I love my three parents.”)

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) both called Harris a “DEI hire” in interviews. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said, “a lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background.”

By Tuesday, House Republican leaders issued members of the caucus a warning in a closed-door meeting to focus on Harris’ record, not her race. The call came after Trump prompted a false birther conspiracy about Harris’ eligibility in 2020.

Other Republicans, avoiding issues of race and gender, have focused on defining Harris as an ultra-progressive politician from San Francisco who is “SOFT AS CHARMIN” on crime and other issues. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas repeatedly called Harris a “San Francisco liberal,” Cotton continued, hitting Harris for her approach on crime, accusing her of opposing the death penalty, supporting rioters and freeing felons from prison when she was California’s attorney general.

That’s a shift in approach from Trump’s 2020 campaign, which pushed competing messages on Harris’ record on crime, simultaneously accusing her of being too tough and too lenient on prosecuting criminals.

“They’re road testing a lot of different messages, have not really narrowed down what resonates, what people care about,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in the battleground state of Michigan. “She’s still pretty undefined, and I think there’s a whole lot of definition yet to be provided.”

He added: “Republicans are throwing everything to see what works,” and he suggested there will be more to come.

“We haven’t really gotten to her time as senator or attorney general or San Francisco D.A.,” Roe said, predicting “there’s going to be some good red meat in her record there.”

One thing Republicans have seized on nearly universally is Harris’ handling of immigration, after the first year of her vice presidency was dominated by an assignment she received from Biden to handle the root causes of migration to the United States from countries in Central America. The White House described Harris’ charge as a “diplomatic” one in a press conference Thursday — and not one for her to become the administration’s “border czar,” as many Republicans have labeled her.

But keeping a disciplined message against Harris on immigration has proven difficult for both Trump and his allies, too. The former president did not mention her handling of the border once during an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday, though he was quick to accuse her of wanting to “defund the police”; describe her as “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean”; and call her a “San Francisco radical.” Neither Biden's nor Harris’ campaign platform described support for defunding the police, though Harris has been in favor of broader criminal justice reform.

Trump then tried to flip the emerging “prosecutor-criminal” contrast sought by Harris, arguing that she is too lenient on some but harsh on punishing her political enemies.

“They say, ‘I'm a prosecutor. He is a criminal.’ They are the ones. Every case is started by them, and I'm winning the cases,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”

Despite claiming an intent to focus on policy rather than personality, a memo released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on Monday includes a category about Harris simply labeled “weird.” The NRSC memo criticizes Harris for “laughing at inappropriate moments,” loving Venn diagrams and electric school buses, and endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat.

The roots of some of these attacks — including the use of Harris’ laugh in campaign ads — have been repurposed by Democrats designed to make her seem relatable to a mass audience. The Trump campaign has even tried to capitalize off some of the Charli XCX and coconut-themed videos that have made Harris into a viral meme.

At the same time that the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania was praised for an ad tying his opponent to Harris’ liberal ideology, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung was telling reporters that Trump was not “brat” — referring to the artist’s neon-green, hyper-pop album that has become associated with the vice president.

“President Trump is a truth-teller, and there is nothing more unifying than telling the truth about a weak, failed, incompetent, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris and her destructive policies,” Cheung wrote in response to a request for comment.

Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican political consultant, described the lack of a settled attack line on Harris as a reflection of insufficient data so early in her campaign about what hits will resonate.

But that’s a problem Democrats have, too, he said, especially around how aggressively to define Harris as a prosecutor.

“This is probably not a complete control-alt-delete, but it does reset the data that everyone has been focused on for this election, and I think it’s true of both sides,” Stutzman said.

What the data ultimately says about how best to define Harris, he said, is “as much a D issue as an R issue.”

The Secret Service was already facing its biggest crisis in decades following the narrowly avoided assassination of Donald Trump. Now it has a major new task: protecting Kamala Harris not just as the sitting vice president, but as the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

And the security risks facing Harris are indeed greater simply because of who she is, as a woman and person of color — and the agency is almost certainly taking that into account.

That’s according to Jeff James, who worked in the Secret Service for 22 years and resigned in 2018 after rising to the rank of assistant special agent in charge. Over the course of his career at the agency, James served on President George W. Bush’s protective detail and pitched in from time to time to protect Trump while he was in office. James is now the president of Capitol Security Consultants, a firm that provides risk assessment and security training.

“I think you’d be surprised,” he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, “how many people in 2024 still have a very closed mindset and think the president should be a white Christian male, and anything outside of that is unacceptable.”

James also talked about the difficulties of allocating blame for the attempted assassination of Trump given what we currently know — and don’t know. He’s not convinced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle should have resigned despite the growing bipartisan pressure to do so, even as he refused to downplay the incident.

“We almost had a situation where we would be talking Butler, Pennsylvania, in the same breath as Dallas and Ford’s Theater,” he said, “so somebody needs to be held accountable.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This week, Kamala Harris went from being the sitting vice president to the Democrats’ likely nominee for president. What kind of changes to her protection detail would you expect or want to see given that transition?

Well, her protective detail is in a pretty high stage by virtue of her being the vice president.

I think what you may see is that since she’s going to start going to so many cities to campaign — and I’ve seen candidates in the past hit five cities in a day — what they’ll probably do is augment the vice president’s detail with people from CNOS, the Candidate Nominee Operation Section, to do the advance work. Just because the vice president’s detail doesn’t have the people to support five advance teams as well as her day-to-day protection.

What does the CNOS do?

A year ago, the Secret Service put together multiple details [in preparation for the election]. I remember there being as many as a dozen leading up to the campaign season. All they do is number them: “You’re detail one. You’re detail two. You’re detail three.” As candidates would qualify for Secret Service protection, the details would get activated.

What’s happening now is these details are sitting and waiting to be activated. One was just activated last week for JD Vance, when Donald Trump named him as his running mate. They’re going to use them for whoever Vice President Harris picks as her running mate. They’ll wait and they’ll activate them when she names somebody.

There were some years that almost every detail was used because there were so many people under protection. It was Ben Carson and Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton, and there were so many, but this year, there was really no need for activation because the two main people who were running were under protection already. The only activation that was needed was for Mr. Vance.

For Harris in particular, how concerned would you be in terms of the threats against her? Are they bigger or different because she’s a woman and a person of color?

I will tell you throughout my career, I saw people hate candidates for every reason.

They hated Mitt Romney because he was Mormon. They hated Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. They hated the second George Bush because he was the son of privilege, and it was an unfair advantage. They hated Barack Obama because he was African American.

But being that Kamala Harris is both a woman and a person of color, I’m sure the Secret Service is prepared for the heightened threat against her.

I think you’d be surprised how many people in 2024 still have a very closed mindset and think the president should be a white Christian male, and anything outside of that is unacceptable. I don’t have any access to the intelligence surrounding Vice President Harris, but if my experience is any indicator, it is going to be a heightened level of concern for sure.

Are there any specific lessons you think the agency can take away from protecting Barack Obama as president and Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic nominee?

You need to look at the intelligence that’s right in front of you.

We got guilty for a little while after Sept. 11 of only being worried about people who fit the profile of that Middle Eastern male. Not that we forgot about things like militia groups and homegrown terrorists, but we got so focused on that one thing for a while that we had to remember, “Hey, we’ve got to stretch our legs and look at everything here.”

The Secret Service is the consumer of intelligence. We really don’t go out there and develop our own. We don’t have assets out there developing intelligence for us. We take it from the NSA and the CIA and our intelligence partners.

When they come to us and say, “We’ve got this militia group where we have somebody on the inside. They say they’re plotting a hit against Vice President Harris,” that’s actionable intelligence that we can move on. They’re just going to need to make sure that they view all actionable intelligence as the possibility that this might happen tomorrow rather than saying, “Well, she’s not going to that part of the country. This militia group is in Georgia, and she’s going to New York, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

They need to make sure that they still worry about it.

That’s a very concrete, interesting example. Does the Secret Service have to worry about things like crazy people posting on the internet?

We take every threat seriously, and we run it to the ground.

It can come to us in several ways. One is somebody contacts [the protectee] directly — sends an email to the vice president’s office: “I’m going to kill her before she gets a chance to be elected.” Alright, we move on that.

Sometimes it comes to us through our intelligence partners, as I mentioned, but other times it comes to us through citizens. Say someone calls and says, “Hey, I was in a bar the other night, and this guy was sitting at the end of the bar. They showed Kamala Harris on the news, and he said, ‘If she gets elected, I’m getting my rifle and I’m going to D.C. and I’m going to fix the problem.’”

Now, we go out, we interview everybody. If that person tells us, “Look, I was drunk, I just lost my job, I’m frustrated, my wife says she’s going to take the kids and leave me,” and he doesn’t have any specific training, he doesn’t own weapons — alright, that’s someone whose name is going to be with us the rest of their life, but it’s not somebody we have to actively surveil or anything like that.

But if we do some research and we find out that they’re posting a lot of negative stuff, they have military training, they have access to weapons, the ability to travel — that’s something that’s actionable, that we’re going to move on pretty quickly and maybe even move toward prosecution for that.

What’s interesting, though, is that if you go all the way back to Lee Harvey Oswald, everyone who either shot a president like John Hinckley did, or like [Thomas Matthew] Crooks did, or tried to kill someone under Secret Service protection, we had never heard of any of them prior to the attack, except for one person.

That was Sara Jane Moore. She came on the Secret Service radar, and she was interviewed by an agent who deemed her not to be a threat. A couple of weeks later, she took a shot at President Ford.

 Let’s turn to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which, remarkably, was less than two weeks ago. We’re talking the day after Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned as a result of that attempted assassination.

People in Washington love a high-profile scalp. But was this resignation actually justified given what we know so far about what happened?

I would have rather seen the results of the FBI investigation before any heads were put on the chopping block. What we’re hearing now reported is that yes, the Secret Service did assign local law enforcement to be on that roof. And local law enforcement walked off post.

Now, do people go back and apologize to Director Cheatle in a month when that [FBI] report comes out? Probably not.

I would have rather seen the report, and if we found out that this is systemic and the I’s aren’t getting dotted and the T’s aren’t getting crossed [in the agency], then maybe she deserves to be fired. But if we find out it was the fault of someone outside the agency, and the agency put a contingency in place to stop that, and it just wasn’t fulfilled, then I think we have a different story.

I will point out too that after the greatest intelligence failure in U.S. history — Sept. 11 — the CIA director, the FBI director and the NSA director all kept their jobs. Robert Mueller kept his [as FBI chief] for another 12 years.

Look, I get it, they’re hungry, especially the people who are fans of former President Trump. As a citizen, I want answers too, but I’m willing to wait for the answers. Let me hear what actually happened, because I don’t want to have to speculate. I don’t want to have to guess.

What are the big outstanding questions that you have at this point about failures or missteps at the Secret Service that may have occurred? Should more people lose their jobs? What are you looking for answers on?

We know dominoes fell that led to that young man being able to get on that roof. I’d like to know what dominoes fell. Who wasn’t where they should have been, and why weren’t they there?

Like I said, if it’s just that the Secret Service was negligent and didn’t assign anybody to a position that obviously posed a threat to someone under protection, then yeah, Secret Service people need to go. But if we find out that the Secret Service asked somebody to cover that and the other agency just failed to do it, then maybe someone in the other agency needs to pay.

We almost had a situation where we would be talking Butler, Pennsylvania in the same breath as Dallas and Ford’s Theater, so somebody needs to be held accountable. Absolutely. And the Secret Service is ultimately responsible for the whole ball of wax that is that protection bubble.

But you also need to be able to give someone an assignment and walk away and do your assignment and trust that they’re going to fulfill the mission you gave them. If we find out that’s what happened, it’s kind of hard to blame that site agent, it’s kind of hard to blame the director if they put the mitigations in place, but the people who they were depending on to do it had a failure.

If the policy is right but the execution is wrong, that’s a different type of thing.

Right. That’s a great way to put it.

The Secret Service has now reportedly asked the Trump campaign to stop holding large outdoor rallies</b>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/23/trump-rallies-secret-service-change/","_id":"00000190-ef77-d4ed-add3-ef77955e0002","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000190-ef77-d4ed-add3-ef77955e0003","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}">stop holding large outdoor rallies. Do you think that should have happened sooner?

I certainly don’t know this, but you might see everybody — the president, the vice president, candidates — stop these outdoor rallies.

I understand, you can fit 15,000 people into an arena, but you can fit 25,000 into a fairgrounds. They want to be in front of as many people as they can. The picture looks great when the place is full.

But they are the hardest thing I did in 22 years.

Everybody now is talking about the perimeter. Where should your perimeter stop? Heavy mortars can fire from 9,000 yards away. Medium mortars can be 4,000 yards away. And you have no mitigations for that. There’s nothing you can do except try to run when you hear it come in.

When your site has thousands of yards of sight-line and trees and buildings — that’s the other thing. This little map they keep showing on TV of the building where the shooter was — if you were to expand that out on Google Maps, you’d see there are dozens of buildings. So people were saying, “Oh, the snipers just had one job to watch this one building.” No, they had dozens of buildings to look at.

I wouldn’t be shocked if you saw candidates and other people under Secret Service protection saying, “You know what? We’re just not going to do that anymore.”

I’m curious why the Secret Service would not have encouraged candidates to hold off on these large rallies — to tell them it’s not a great idea.

The thing is that they’ve just been happening forever. I walked in a couple of parades with people I protected. I walked in one of the St. Patrick’s Day parades with President Bush in Chicago, and it was just a sea of humanity on both sides of the street, just colors and people holding up their phones to take pictures.

It makes you fatigued in a way that nothing else does. You are just looking so hard for that one thing that stands out — somebody getting ready to throw something or a gun coming up over the crowd. Those outdoor events are a monster. They really are.

On Jan. 6, 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to preside over Congress and count the electoral votes that will make either her — or Donald Trump — the 47th president of the United States.

And like her predecessor Mike Pence, who resisted enormous pressure from Trump to upend the 2020 election results, Harris says she won’t interfere.

Harris believes that her role in the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress is purely ceremonial — to simply tally up the electoral votes certified by the states — according to spokesperson Kirsten Allen. Though she has long praised Pence’s actions, and Democrats have widely repudiated Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president, it’s the first time Harris’ team has made that explicit commitment in the run-up to the 2024 election.

Harris’ advisers pointed this week to 2022 legislation signed by President Joe Biden affirming the vice president’s “ministerial” role in the process.

And her view accords with the deeply rooted understanding that the vice president has no constitutional authority to decide which electoral votes to count. Under the 12th Amendment, the vice president’s power is limited to simply opening envelopes delivered by the states and tallying the results.

Yet after the 2020 election, Trump and his allies, in a last-ditch effort to remain in power, devised a fringe legal theory claiming the vice president could unilaterally reject or refuse to count electoral votes, or delay the count altogether.

Pence refused to take those steps, drawing Trump’s fury and inflaming a mob that stormed the Capitol to interfere with the transfer of power. Some members of that mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they ransacked the building on Jan. 6, 2021, forcing Pence and Congress to flee for safety. Harris herself — at the time a sitting senator and the vice president-elect — had left the Capitol earlier in the day and was inside the Democratic National Committee building when a pipe bomb was discovered outside, a fact first reported by POLITICO a year after the attack.

Next Jan. 6, Harris will sit in the same chair Pence occupied — an irony that isn’t lost on the aides and advisers who helped Pence reject Trump’s pressure campaign. They spent the days before Jan. 6, 2021, invoking Harris’ name and urging Trump and his allies to consider what would happen if Pence embraced their fringe proposal — and set a precedent for the future.

“There was never an acknowledgement of the symmetrical situation you could find yourself in if the Democrats were in power,” Marc Short, a longtime Pence adviser who served as his chief of staff, said in a phone interview this week.

Harris’ acknowledgment, through her aides, that she intends to reaffirm the vice president’s traditional role in the electoral vote count carries even greater significance now that she is all but certain to be the Democratic presidential nominee. She is set — like a handful of her forebears — to preside over a process that will confirm her win or loss. In addition to Pence in 2021, several recent vice presidents have overseen their own ticket’s defeat during the Electoral College vote count, including Al Gore in 2001 and Richard Nixon in 1961. George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, presided in 1989 over an Electoral College victory that made him the 41st president.

Trump has never renounced the failed theory about the vice president’s role, even as he and many of his allies face criminal charges over their attempts to deploy that theory and use other tactics to subvert Biden’s victory. In fact, he has pointed to Biden’s decision to sign the 2022 law updating the electoral count procedures as evidence his initial plan was correct. And Trump’s 2024 vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has said he would have obeyed Trump’s commands — and perhaps even gone further — to disrupt the transfer of power in 2021.

The stark contrast by Harris may not be surprising, but it’s significant, said Matthew Seligman, a fellow at Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center.

“The Democrats have said and seem to genuinely believe that the stakes of this election are extraordinarily high both on policy and the rule of law. Even then, Vice President Harris is saying she won’t seize unconstitutional powers,” Seligman said. “She’s not going to burn the system down in order to save it.”

The details of Trump’s 2020 gambit were defined by attorneys like John Eastman and Ken Chesebro — both of whom have faced criminal prosecution alongside Trump. They argued after the election that Pence had the authority to simply refuse to count dozens of Biden’s electors. Pence, they said, could order that the contest be returned to states with Republican-controlled legislatures to consider whether they should be replaced with pro-Trump alternatives.

Pence and his allies vehemently resisted the effort, in part by noting that it would set a precedent that could be used by none other than Harris should she be in the chair in 2025. For many reasons, including Harris’ recent ascent to become the likely Democratic nominee, they see their decision as vindicated.

“The logical absurdity of the argument that the vice president can choose which slates of electors to accept or reject is that the same proponents … wouldn’t want to consider the consequences of a Democrat vice president,” Short said. “That’s exactly the situation we face now.”

Harris, as vice president, holds the title of “president of the Senate,” a largely ceremonial role that is best known for breaking ties on legislation and executive branch or judicial nominees. But the position also empowers her to lead the counting of Electoral College votes during a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress that is required to occur on Jan. 6 following the presidential election. Barring any unexpected developments — such as a decision to recuse from the process, kicking it to the Senate president pro tem — Harris is slated to fulfill that duty.

Days before Jan. 6, 2021, Short and Greg Jacob, Pence’s former legal counsel, warned of the risk of empowering Democrats to similarly overturn future elections. It wasn’t their primary point; rather, they contended that Pence simply lacked the authority to take such radical steps to upend the election and that the framers of the Constitution never envisioned vesting such extraordinary power in a single person.

But in testimony to the House’s Jan. 6 select committee, both men said that Trump and his allies declined to grapple with the possibility of a future scenario in which Democrats could turn the tables.

“Are you really saying, John, that Al Gore could have just declared himself the winner of Florida and moved along?" Jacob recalled of a Jan. 4, 2021, conversation with Eastman.

"Well, no, no, there wasn't enough evidence for that,” Jacob recalled Eastman replying. “It wasn't clear how he drew the line that that worked … if indeed it did mean that the vice president had such authority, you could never have a party switch thereafter. You would just have the same party win continuously if indeed a vice president had the authority to just declare the winner of every state … He acknowledged that he didn't think Kamala Harris should have that authority in 2024.”

Eastman told POLITICO this week that his arguments about Harris’ potential power was narrower than Jacob described, saying it was only about whether she could “unilaterally reject electors in a context where there was only one slate of certified electors, and I took the same position against that as I had taken with Pence.”

He noted that some experts had called the vice president’s involvement in the electoral count a “constitutional flaw” and suggested the role should have been granted to the chief justice of the Supreme Court instead. He also noted that a vice president could recuse from the process when there is a “direct conflict,” as some Trump allies proposed Pence should do in 2021.

“Of course, anyone asserting that the VP has such a role would have to concede that my interpretation in 2020 was valid or at least debatable,” Eastman added.

The 2022 law that Biden signed, called the Electoral Count Reform Act, was intended to underscore the “ministerial” role of the vice president in counting electors. The law also makes it harder for members of Congress to lodge challenges to states’ certified electors, and it details procedures for resolving conflicts. The law was the most significant update to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which laid out the procedures that have governed every presidential election since. The Trump-Harris contest will be the first election certified under the updated law.

Under Eastman’s theory, any laws limiting the vice president’s discretion are unconstitutional, and he urged Pence to refuse to abide by the Electoral Count Act. Investigators and courts have cited that request to violate the law as proof of potential criminality. Eastman argues that there is precedent for vice presidents exercising judgment to count disputed electors, such as Thomas Jefferson’s decision to resolve an issue with Georgia’s ballots in 1801. Other constitutional scholars dispute that premise.

Eastman is currently fighting a California judge’s disbarment recommendation following a months-long series of hearings analyzing his 2020 legal theory.

Vice President Kamala Harris is moving into the lead role of selling the U.S. economy to voters just as the pitch is getting easier to make.

The government said Thursday that GDP increased at an annualized pace of 2.8 percent from April through June, far better than expected, even as a key measure of inflation has dropped below 3 percent.

That means the economy has stayed resilient without further stoking price spikes, leaving open a path for the Federal Reserve to begin cutting rates in September — a process that could lead to lower borrowing costs on everything from cars to homes.

“Overall, it’s a strong economy, and if you look at the different political forecasting models, the fundamentals are on the side of Harris,” said Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University who previously served as chief economist to President Barack Obama.

Yet with just over 100 days until the presidential election, it’s unclear whether Harris will have any more luck than President Joe Biden did in boosting Americans' sentiments about the economy. While the U.S. has been experiencing steady growth and modern-era lows in joblessness for years now, that positive news has been dwarfed by widespread concerns about affordability amid multiple years of price spikes. But as inflation cools, people might begin to adapt to new higher cost levels, particularly as wages are now rising faster than prices.

One possible ray of hope for Harris: Polling firm Blueprint recently found only 23 percent of voters associate her with inflation.

The economy's growth in the second quarter was bolstered by robust consumer spending and business investment. Biden issued a statement after the report saying it “makes clear we now have the strongest economy in the world” and giving credit to “my and Vice President Harris’s economic agenda.”

In the meantime, Republicans continued to hammer Harris and other Democrats about how much prices have risen over the course of Biden’s presidency.

“The damage from Democrats’ reckless spending and the Biden-Harris Administration’s failed economic policies is done,” House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington said in a statement. “The goal should be to bring down the stubborn inflation that is crushing the American people and the high interest rates that are fueling the cost-of-living crisis.”

Although the topline GDP increase in the second quarter was much higher than the first — 2.8 percent vs. 1.4 percent — the underlying rate as measured by spending and investment showed that growth in the first half of the year held steady at about 2.6 percent.

Of course, the outlook is not without risks, even as the economy has held up much better than expected in the face of the Fed’s rate hike campaign.

Furman said there was “a little bit of an asterisk” on inflation, which hasn’t been tamed entirely, and economic growth at these levels could still keep prices rising faster than the Fed wants.

On the flip side, borrowing costs this high are weighing on economic activity, and the job market could weaken unexpectedly. The unemployment rate has increased from lows of 3.4 percent to 4.1 percent, but both the slow speed of the rise and the still-low level of joblessness — layoffs remain low — don’t suggest a recession is imminent.

“Rising unemployment and slowing wage growth will both scare people into saving more and constrain the spending power of people who remain unworried about the job market,” Pantheon Macro said in a note to clients.

Corporate investments have steadily risen over the past three quarters, suggesting that the private sector remains optimistic about the economy’s future prospects. But Pantheon said that trend isn’t guaranteed to continue.

“Business [investment] too is likely rise only modestly, given the severe financing constraint on small companies and the uncertainty over the economic outlook,” according to the firm, noting that President Donald Trump’s trade policy is also a concern: “An election campaign in which the current front-runner is threatening massive import tariffs is a disincentive to invest too.”