Morning Report — Harris surges, Trump recalibrates

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The race for the White House is down to the double digits.

With 99 days until Election Day, Vice President Harris is in the second week of her candidacy, working to maintain enthusiasm among Democrats while positioning herself as a strong opponent to former President Trump. Trump, after months of campaigning against President Biden, is racing to define Harris.

Harris’s presidential campaign prompts questions about the duration of her honeymoon, write The Hill’s Al Weaver and Alex Gangitano. With three months remaining until November, Republicans expect her bid for office to follow the laws of political gravity. But Democrats are bullish that Harris’s success is sustainable.

“There’s no limit on a honeymoon. She obviously is at this moment the right person to unify the Democratic Party, and when you unify the Democratic Party, that creates a lot of wind in your sails,” said Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), pointing to the polls showing voters were frustrated with the choices of Trump and Biden. “She’s got a lot of momentum and I think that’s going to keep up for a good while.”

While Democrats have united around Harris, there are still concerns in the party about whether she can appeal to voters in key battleground states. Polling released Thursday by Emerson College Polling and The Hill found Harris trailing Trump in both Pennsylvania and Michigan, but tied with him in Wisconsin.

“She’s done an amazing job not only uniting the base but exciting the base, but the key question right now is, can she appeal to the voters Democrats have always needed to put us over the top?” one Democratic strategist told The Hill’s Amie Parnes.

Other members of her party acknowledge that Harris has little time to establish her brand, especially on economic policy. The Hill’s Niall Stanage in The Memo explores Harris’s first attack ad against Trump, and the former president’s quick campaign efforts to hit back by casting the vice president as ultra-liberal, “a lunatic,” and wrong on immigration and border security.

▪ The Hill: Most Democratic senators think Harris puts them in a better position to keep the White House, but Democratic lawmakers are concerned about GOP efforts to exploit voter biases over race and gender.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: As detailed in a Washington Post op-ed, Biden wants the Supreme Court to be on the ballot in November. Today, he’ll unveil his ideas to overhaul the high court, including proposing a constitutional amendment that has no chance of clearing Congress during the remainder of his term. It would overturn the court’s recent decision giving Trump and other former presidents immunity for crimes they allegedly commit while in office and will urge Congress to establish term limits for the justices.

Harris’s rapid rise poses challenges about political approaches to gender-related issues when wooing voters. Since 2016, women have been in large part responsible for Democratic gains up and down ballots and are focused on the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Harris faces new political terrain.

“The loss of Hillary Clinton motivated a lot of women,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. “We saw record numbers of women running and winning for Congress. We have record numbers of women now serving in Congress. And then in 2020, we saw for the first time multiple women on a debate stage.”

The Hill: Trump briefly called for national unity after a would-be assassin shot him in the ear in Pennsylvania before the gunman was killed by a Secret Service sniper. Trump’s entreaties to join together quickly evaporated and he returned to attacking Democrats and his new opponent.

Trump and his campaign team experienced a wobbly week, which they want to get beyond. They’re determined to drive up Harris’s negatives and repair some of the second guessing expressed by some Republicans about the choice of running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). There are new downsides to Trump’s status as the oldest candidate to seek the White House. And Vance’s inflammatory (Democrats call them “weird”) statements from his past (“childless cat ladies”) may not be wearing well with some voters, although he’s not backing down.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), interviewed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, said Trump’s selection of Vance is “one of the best things” the former president has done for Democrats.

The former president criticizes Harris as soft on crime and to blame for an immigration crisis. Trump has complained about Harris’s media coverage and falsely accused Democrats of staging a “coup” to remove Biden, who withdrew from the contest a week ago.

“They took him out of the fight, and they put in a new fighter. We have a new victim now, Kamala,” Trump said Saturday in St. Cloud, Minn. “We have a brand-new victim. And honestly, she’s a radical left-wing person.”

3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY

▪ 🔥Firefighters are battling wildfires across the western United States and Canada, including the largest wildfire in California this year. Millions of people found themselves under air quality alerts over the weekend.

▪ 🔎Harris’s policy record, scrutinized by corporate executives in categories such as tech, regulation, taxes and trade, fuels both optimism and uncertainty.

▪ 📉The Federal Reserve won’t lower interest rates this week.

LEADING THE DAY

CAMPAIGN POLITICS

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, interviewed Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” said his party is now focusing on states it believes will be competitive, such as Florida and North Carolina, because of voter enthusiasm for Harris. “I have never seen this type of energy, this type of organizing, grassroots organizing, in all my years of being involved in politics,” Harrison said.

Fact check: Republicans’ response to Democrats about Florida, Trump’s home turf, is “dream on.” The last Democratic presidential ticket to capture the Sunshine State was in 2012 and Florida has evolved into a reliably red state since then.

Separately, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff (D), up for reelection in 2026, said Harris’s bid for the presidency puts his state in a better position for Democrats in November and he predicts she will win Georgia. Biden and Harris captured the state in 2020 following decades of losses there for Democratic presidential tickets. In 2016, Trump carried the Peach State by 5 points.

2024 Roundup

▪ Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has risen to near the top of the list of possible running mates. A veteran and former astronaut, Kelly enjoys strong popularity in his purple battleground state of Arizona, one that could help decide the winner of the November election.

▪ Harris has maintained professional bonds with three men who served as state attorneys general and they’re on her list of potential running mates.

▪ Trump will hold a campaign rally Wednesday in Harrisburg, Pa.

▪ Today, Iowa’s restrictive abortion ban goes into effect and as a result, Minnesota expects to see a surge of abortion patients.

▪ With Republican Kari Lake and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) on a glide path toward their respective primaries on Tuesday, both parties are watching closely to see how the recent shakeup at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket could alter the Arizona Senate race in November.

▪ Harris’s campaign in its first week raised $200 million and signed up 170,000 volunteers.

▪ Elon Musk, who backs Trump, shared a video that used AI to manipulate Harris’s voice in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

▪ Misinformation online shadowed July’s tsunami of political news. Experts warn parsing information will be harder for voters as the 2024 race heats up.

▪ Within the circle of associates around billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a Vance proponent, are big investors who stand to benefit if Trump’s running mate makes it to the White House.

▪ One of the main drivers of fruitless challenges to voter rolls is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories.

▪ Ohio’s Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno likes to portray himself as a political outsider in his race against Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). But his wealthy family is politically connected.

WHERE AND WHEN

The House will meet for a pro forma session at 1 p.m. Tuesday. Members are out of Washington until after Labor Day.

The Senate will convene at 3 p.m.

The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 11 a.m. Biden will fly to Austin, Texas, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at 3:30 p.m. CDT during a visit to the LBJ Presidential Library. He will travel to Houston to pay his respects to the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) at 7:30 p.m. CDT. The longtime lawmaker died last week from pancreatic cancer. Biden will return to the White House.

The vice president has no public schedule.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling in the Indo-Pacific through Aug. 3 and is in Tokyo today.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be in Martha’s Vineyard to headline a fundraiser for the Harris campaign.

ZOOM IN

© The Associated Press / Leo Correa | In the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, people on Sunday lit candles in memory of children and teens killed Saturday in a rocket strike at a soccer field at the village of Majdal Shams. Suspected in the attack is Hezbollah, although the group has denied involvement.

INTERNATIONAL

ISRAELI RETALIATORY STRIKES IN LEBANON this weekend are raising fears of a wider regional escalation. Israel’s military said it struck Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanon on Sunday after a rocket strike from Lebanon killed 12 people, mostly children and teenagers, on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The U.S. blamed Hezbollah, which denied involvement. Diplomats worked to blunt Israeli retaliation over the weekend, and Lebanon’s government, which would suffer from any escalation, asked the U.S. to urge restraint from Israel (The Washington Post and Reuters).

But there are expectations a stronger response could follow a security cabinet meeting convened Sunday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. After the meeting ended, Netanyahu’s office said the cabinet “authorized the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister to decide on the manner and timing of the response.”

The strikes came as senior officials from Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the U.S. met in Rome to continue negotiations over a cease-fire in Gaza. Despite progress in recent weeks, the negotiations remain stalled over several key issues, particularly the extent to which Israeli forces would remain in Gaza during a truce (The New York Times).

▪ ABC News: Ukraine says it attacked and struck an oil depot in southern Russia that supplies the Kremlin’s troops as Russia struck in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

▪ Los Angeles Times: “Once-in-a-lifetime caper”: How did the U.S. catch “El Mayo,” Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel’s top boss?

▪ NPR: Electoral authorities claimed Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s deeply unpopular president, won a third term in Sunday’s election, sparking accusations that his regime had committed fraud to steal victory from opposition candidate Edmundo González.

▪ ABC News: Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has “serious concerns” about the announced result of Venezuela’s hotly contested presidential election.

ELSEWHERE

CONGRESS

A final report by a bipartisan House task force established last week to investigate the July 13 attempted assassination of Trump could be released by the end of 2024, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” McCaul said he did not know if he would be on the task force but said he would serve on it if asked.

The gunman who took aim at Trump, Thomas Crooks, 20, was often one step ahead of the Secret Service on July 13. He was seen at the rally site by law enforcement before the shooting, text messages confirm (The New York Times).

Roll Call: The Senate this week tees up votes on two measures to protect children online. A bipartisan measure would require tech companies to design online platforms in such a way as to prevent or mitigate harms to users, including sexual exploitation and online bullying.

LOOKBACK: Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that it was a “mistake” for Democrats to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speechWednesday to a joint session of Congress. Van Hollen is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel and the U.S.’s support for the country.

“I think Prime Minister Netanyahu accomplished his goal of using Congress as a prop to boost his support in Israel, especially among his right-wing extremists. If you saw the people who gave two thumbs up to his speech, they were Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. These are very right-wing extremists,” he said, referring to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

OPINION

■ My plan to reform the Supreme Court and make sure no president is above the law, by Joe Biden, opinion contributor, The Washington Post.

■ Kamala Harris’s laugh is a campaign issue. A comedy critic weighs in, by Jason Zinoman, The New York Times.

THE CLOSER

And finally … 🏅 Every Olympics includes hiccups and controversies in addition to the athletic prowess packed into each competition. As of early today, U.S. competitors have accumulated 12 medals: three gold, six silver and three bronze — with a long stretch ahead until closing ceremonies in Paris Aug. 11.

In the meantime, there was a kerfuffle about identifying the South Korean team by North Korea’s name during the opening ceremony (the International Olympic Committee apologized). A theatrical set piece that some saw as mocking religion during the opening ceremonies offended some observers (including Republican Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana) and at least one major Olympics advertiser reacted by pulling its support. That produced another statement of regret from Paris organizers. And Canada landed in hot water for allegedly deploying a drone to spy on the New Zealand women’s soccer teams in practice. The IOC ordered some Canadian soccer coaches out of France. And there were other penalties ordered by FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association.

Stay Engaged

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