Democrat rally behind Kamala Harris for president lines up to endorse her: A response to M.D.Beshear at the DNC
Democratic lawmakers, organizers, and potential rivals rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy less than a day after President Biden stepped out of the race and put his support behind her for as the presidential nominee. She appears ready to get the nod when the delegates meet in Chicago next month.
Beshear told MSNBC Monday morning that he was endorsing her candidacy. He said the vice president is smart and can be a good president.
Fellow Democratic Govs. The democrats will be in Chicago in four weeks for the DNC and there are no plans for anyone to try to challenge Harris.
There is no appetite for a vigorous fight to take on Donald Trump in the Democratic primary, and any potential challenge was not likely to be significant.
“A lot of people would like to see a mini-primary. That’s the process to find out if you have the strongest candidate, whether it be Kamala or someone else, to get behind,” longtime Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia told CBS on Monday.
“I mean, [the Democratic Party has] gone to the left. But let’s see if she comes back. A person can change direction or position whenever they please. He would like to see that direction change.
Biden’s campaign war chest isn’t just a gift to the FEC, but a new perspective on a trump campaign
Harris is also likely to benefit from the $240 million the Biden campaign reported it had on hand in the most recent disclosure, but there is some dispute over whether campaign finance laws allow for Biden to just hand it all over to Harris’s campaign.
These are not normal times. Harris had a text solicitation on Monday asking for donations, and he stated that the election would be different.
Regardless, practically speaking, the question may be moot in the short term because of how long the Federal Election Commission takes to adjudicate complaints. Harris would almost certainly have access to the funds through the compressed campaign, and there’s little to nothing the FEC can do about it because of the timeline.
On Sunday, Cooksey shared a piece of campaign finance law stating that if a candidate is not running in the general election, contributions made to him will be returned or redesignated.
If the Trump campaign files a complaint with the FEC or requests for an opinion on Biden’s efforts to hand over his campaign war chest to Harris, he might have to consider his interpretation.
There are only about 100 days until the presidential election, so Democrats could have their efforts challenged in court.
Biden’s exit from the race upends Trump’s campaign too. Republicans are well-versed in campaigning against Harris, but the elevation of the first multiracial woman will inject new elements of race and gender into a contest that previously was between two elderly white men.
“Kamala Harris will not be able to outrun the Harris-Biden record or her radical Leftist record from the California days,” said a spokesman for Trump.
Specifically, Republicans are already highlighting Harris’s more liberal immigration positions and will argue that she “covered up” for Biden’s mental acuity. Chris LaCivita, a senior trump campaign official, said “You lied about it every day.”
Speculation quickly fell to contenders in must-win swing states such as Shapiro, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, where Harris has already traveled frequently in this campaign.
Mark Kelly, a US senator from Arizona, is in a position to put the state back on the map after Democrats believed it had largely slipped away from Vice President Joe Biden after he exited the race.
Accessing Campaign Money: Can Harris — or any Other Democrat — Access Biden Campaign Fundance? The Case of the 2016 Democratic National Committee
With just four weeks until the convention, Democrats will have little time to vet a potential running mate and voters won’t have to wait long to find out: the running mate is historically announced in the days prior to the convention.
The Biden campaign had $240 million on hand at the beginning of July. Now that President Biden is out, there is a question as to whether other candidates should have access to that money or not.
The lack of resources and partisanship has long hampered the FEC’s ability to address these kinds of matters in timely ways. Campaign violations are often penalized years later, and monetary penalties are usually relatively nominal to the millions, if not billions, of dollars spent on campaigns.
“One of the problems with those processes is they can take a lot of time,” Cooksey said on Morning Edition, “and we don’t have a lot of time until the election.”
I believe that clever lawyers can come up with things. They are in the business of doing that. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tried to challenge it.
The bottom line is that the committee is the same. “She’s always been part of that committee; she never had a separate contribution limit apart from this committee that her name’s already on. It’s not just me. Lawyers all over town seem to be saying the same thing. Someone could undoubtedly come up with a technical argument, and I would keep an open mind, but it doesn’t seem all that complicated to me.”
She points to the fact that Harris’ name was always on the statement of organization for the Biden presidential campaign committee as one of the candidates.
Source: Can Harris — or any other Democrat — access Biden campaign money?
Cooksey: Why the Biden Campaign is a Double-Dimensional Bose-Einstein Conjecture?
Sean Cooksey, the chairman of the FEC, is a Republican appointed by former President Donald Trump. He’s one of three Republicans on the commission, along with three Democrats.
Some right-leaning campaign finance lawyers think it’s more complicated and don’t think it’s a slam dunk that Harris has access — despite the Biden campaign already changing its name to the Harris campaign.