Morning Report — Harris, mystery running mate eye Tuesday debut

In a presidential contest already chock-a-block full of surprises, Vice President Harris will produce another headline by Tuesday night in Philadelphia: a running mate whose No. 1 job will be to help her win a razor-close race against former President Trump and his pick to be vice president, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

Harris met Sunday at her residence in Washington with top candidates, some of whom she knows personally and others she knows by reputation and through the accelerated vetting process required after President Biden withdrew from the contest last month.

Making the final cut for interviews at her Naval Observatory residence: Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.

Whether other candidates were scheduled to talk with Harris or had already been interviewed was opaque late Sunday. CBS News reported that sources advised not to overemphasize in-person interviews because Harris was speaking to other candidates who have not been publicly confirmed as possible picks.

The conventional wisdom is that Harris, experienced in the peculiar demands of being vice president, seeks a balanced ticket (that is, a white man with governing experience). She’d like help to trounce Trump and Vance in battleground states in which the election may turn on grassroots organization, voter registration, massive advertising and the decisions of what could turn out to be a few hundred thousand voters.

For those reasons, she plans to unveil the Democratic ticket in the city of Brotherly Love, where Democrats are intent on running up the Pennsylvania score.

Harris will appear in Eau Claire, Wis., on Wednesday, then in Detroit with the United Auto Workers. She’ll headline another campaign event in Michigan Thursday, followed later that day with an event in Raleigh, N.C. To try to dominate news coverage to round out the week, the vice president will campaign Friday in Savannah, Ga., and Phoenix and fly to Las Vegas where she will appear Saturday before rallying in San Francisco.

Democrats, riding adrenaline and optimism, re-scripted their four-day Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which starts Aug. 19, with a new opening speech from Biden, plus prime-time oratory from the party’s popular former presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and a unifying Democratic narrative about what’s at stake.

Harris earned a majority of delegate votes last week and officially becomes the Democratic presidential nominee when voting closes today.

A unifying message may be harder than it first appeared. Democrats are splintering in advance of Harris’s first big decision, her running mate, The New York Times reports.

She’s running ahead of where Biden was in polls when he left the race, reports The New York Times’s Nate Cohn, but “she’s still short of hitting traditional Democratic benchmarks.” To hold the White House, she’s being advised to focus on those polling gaps, vulnerabilities with voters and Trump’s weaknesses.

“We have to work hard to define her,” Trump said during an Atlanta rally Saturday, before quickly catching himself and adding, “I don’t want to even define her, I just want to say who she is: She’s a horror show.”

Trump’s decision to question Harris’s racial identity and intellect rather than focus on her experience and policy revisions is seen by many Republican strategists as an unforced error. The former president lampoons Harris’s name rather than contrast his economic policies with hers. His conservative base may admire his identity-politics takedowns, but independent and younger voters do not.

“Ultimately the core of this election is about economic issues. Every time you’re not talking about that, you’re missing an opportunity to engage independent voters,” GOP pollster David Winston told The Wall Street Journal. “Independents always decide who wins elections.”

The Hill: GOP senators say Trump was caught “off guard” by Harris’s strength after Biden’s withdrawal.

Trump, who pledged to debate Biden Sept. 10 on ABC News, has backed away from sparring with Harris on stage unless it’s hosted by Fox News. He’s unhappy about the news media attention the presumptive Democratic nominee is attracting and the evident voter enthusiasm that helped Harris outraise Trump and Vance in July.

3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY

▪ 🏅 The United States has captured 72 total medals, including 19 golds, as of Sunday during the Paris Olympics. Find the latest athletic highlights HERE, including sprinter Noah Lyles’s 100-meter victory by .005 seconds, or five-thousandths of a second.

▪ ⚖️ Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is promoting a new, co-authored book, to be released Tuesday. In interviews for “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” he is eager to discuss Americans he says are hurt by laws and regulations and warned the administration to “be careful” about proposals for Supreme Court reforms. But he’s mum about specific high court ethics. His book advance was $500,000.

▪ 🚗 The Commerce Department, concerned about national security, will likely propose barring Chinese software in autonomous and connected vehicles.

LEADING THE DAY

© The Associated Press / Mariam Zuhaib | Progressives fear that Tuesday’s primary between Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Wesley Bell, a Democratic prosecuting attorney, could result in a high-profile defeat.

CAMPAIGN POLITICS

PRIMARY WATCH: Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington will be heading to the polls this week with fewer than 100 days to go before Election Day.

In Missouri, a high-profile House primary is highlighting divides among Democrats over the conflict in Gaza and threatens to oust Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a member of the progressive Squad facing Wesley Bell, a Democratic prosecuting attorney from St. Louis County. Many progressives see Bush as the potential underdog, especially after Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-N.Y.) loss revealed problems for liberal incumbents.

“I am having flashbacks to my races in 2021 and 2022,” former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, who twice tried to win blue-district primaries as an insurgent, told The Hill. It’s “going to be a nail-biter to the end.”

“There are a lot of undecided out there,” Turner said. “If they swing her way, she could win this race. But it should’ve never come to this.”

In Michigan, November matchups will be set in the race to replace retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) as Democrats battle to hold onto the upper chamber. The Hill’s Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil break down five races to watch on Tuesday.

2024 Roundup

▪ The Harris vs. Trump ground games present an interesting political experiment this year. The vice president’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee are using more traditional methods, while Trump World, eliminating legal barriers, is relying on a cluster of loosely coordinated outside groups to run turnout operations.

▪ The Trump campaign’s intense pushback to Project 2025 amid sustained attacks from Democrats is frustrating conservatives who worry that the disavowal will result in him alienating his most loyal supporters in a new administration. “There’s been a lot of talk in MAGAworld about whether Trump has learned from the personnel mistakes of his first term,” one former Trump official told The Hill. “Disavowing Project 2025 is a signal to his base that he has not learned those lessons.”

▪ Meet Harris’s closest confidants on Wall Street. The vice president’s inner circle of Wall Street rainmakers has been working overtime since Biden dropped out of the race.

▪ Amid the debate over whether Biden should drop out, Democrats questioned whether Harris could win against Trump. Their minds immediately went to 2016. “We went to the dark place and a lot of us thought: Hillary Clinton couldn’t win. What makes us believe Kamala can?” said one Democratic strategist. But Harris is proving to be a different candidate.

▪ Trump is reopening an old feud with Republicans in Georgia. Just before rallying supporters in Atlanta on Saturday, he unleashed a tirade on the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp.

▪ In The Villages, Florida’s retirement mecca, pro-Trump residents have been galvanized by a surprising showing of support for Harris.

WHERE AND WHEN

The House and Senate are out until after Labor Day.

The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 10 a.m. in Delaware. Biden will speak with Jordan’s King Abdullah II at 11 a.m. Biden and first lady Jill Biden will head to the White House from Wilmington, Del., arriving at 2 p.m. The president will meet at 2:15 p.m. with his national security team to discuss tensions in the Middle East.

The vice president will join Biden and national security advisers this afternoon in the Situation Room for an update about the Middle East.

ZOOM IN

© The Associated Press / Leo Correa | As Middle East tensions ratchet up, Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted missiles from Lebanon over the weekend.

INTERNATIONAL

TENSIONS RISE IN LEBANON: The U.S. Embassy and other Western governments over the weekend encouraged their citizens there to leave on “any ticket available” as tensions rise in the region between Israel and Hezbollah. Most major airlines have halted flights to the country, making it difficult for some people to leave.

Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, each said on Sunday that it had fired at targets in the other’s territory. But the attack from Lebanon, intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome, did not appear to be the major retaliation that Hezbollah threatened after the Israeli assassination of one of its senior commanders last week.

As Iran and its proxies plan an attack on Israel, frantic diplomatic efforts are underway to contain the damage and prevent a wider war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke Sunday with the G7 Foreign Ministers to discuss the urgent need for de-escalation in the Middle East and warn them that an attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israel could start as early as today, Axios reports.

▪ The Hill: More than 30 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes on a pair of schools in Gaza on Sunday.

▪ The Times of Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided not to seek normalized relations with Saudi Arabia prior to the U.S. elections in November, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

▪ The New Yorker: Editor David Remnick reports on the past and present of Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, in “Notes from Underground.” “No event in the seventy-five-year history of Israel had undermined the nation’s sense of security and military superiority like Sinwar’s attack did” on Oct. 7.

DESPITE THE U.S. recognizing Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González as the winner of the country’s contested elections, condemning apparent election fraud in Venezuela has turned out to be difficult for major multinational organizations. Key member states are playing defense for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU) top that list – both organizations were barreling toward full-throated censure of Maduro until the Venezuelan regime’s allies stepped in. The willingness of democratically elected governments to block or slow an international response highlights the regional influence of the authoritarian model spearheaded by Russia, China and Iran, but also a historical unwillingness to fall in line with the U.S.’s wishes.

“I think that it’s more than anything, not a hug or an embrace of Maduro, but an arm’s length relationship that they maintain with the United States,” Carl Meacham, a former senior staffer on Latin America for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Hill.

▪ The New York Times: Does anyone have leverage over Maduro?

▪ The Associated Press: An AP review of Venezuela opposition-provided vote tallies casts doubt on government’s election results.

▪ Politico: Seven European Union countries press Venezuela to release voting records of the contested election.

▪ The Hill: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the first F-16 fighter jets have made it to his country after a lengthy delay.

ELSEWHERE

© The Associated Press / Charles Dharapak | The Veterans Affairs Department, pictured, is struggling with a $3 billion budget shortfall as the fiscal year comes to a close in late September.

CONGRESS

SENATORS FLED WASHINGTON until after Labor Day last week following seven months that yielded few significant legislative results and plenty of politics. The House recessed the week prior. The Hill’s Al Weaver reports on frustrations expressed by some senators as funding bills and other legislative checklist items still loom.

“Abysmal,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said about the chamber’s “work” this election year.

Ahead of the recess, Congress failedto pass legislation before leaving town to address a roughly $3 billion budget shortfall for the Department of Veterans Affairs, as officials warn millions of veterans’ benefits are at risk in the coming weeks. Some senators hoped to pass legislation to patch the shortfall as a Sept. 20 funding deadline looms. But that effort fell short amid increased scrutiny over what some Republicans have alleged is mismanagement at the agency.

“We have been told for a long time that we have sufficient funds … We’re only learning this now,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (Kan.), a top Republican on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “I’m unconvinced that the Department of Veterans Affairs was incapable of knowing a problem at that point in time, and the [Office of Management and Budget] has never said anything.”

The VA cites the PACT Act, a landmark 2022 law strongly supported by Biden and Congress, as the key driver behind the budget shortfall, pointing to increases in enrollment in department health care, appointments and applications for benefits (The Hill).

Meanwhile, a little-known law forced more than 120,000 veterans in the past 12 years to return money they received to leave the military when it needed to downsize, according to new data. For many, the law resulted in sudden financial hardships as the government recently began to claw back years of overpayments. “Nobody realizes that they are doing this to so many people,” said Vernon Reffitt, who was recently told to repay the $30,000 he received to leave the Army more than 30 years ago. The VA apparently caught an error, discovering that thousands of veterans erroneously received separation pay together with disability benefits (NBC News).

STATE WATCH

HURRICANE DEBBY: A major Gulf of Mexico storm is now a Category 1 hurricane expected to make landfall today in Florida near Cedar Key. Biden on Sunday approved an emergency declaration for the state. The storm will become the second hurricane of the season after Hurricane Beryl became the earliest Category 5 hurricane in history in late June and early July (The Hill).

A RELENTLESS WAVE of dry heat, coupled with a recent outbreak of wildfires, is fueling a summertime scourge of the Mountain West: the near-daily spikes in ozone and other air pollutants, collectively known as smog. Experts attribute Colorado’s continued seasonal surges in this colorless gas, which affects respiratory and cardiovascular health, to a combination of factors: climate change, population expansion and the region’s unique geography.

“There have been a lot of efforts to reduce pollution through making cars cleaner, through better regulations of oil and gas,” Anthony Gerber, director of pulmonary research at National Jewish Health, told The Hill. “At the end of the day, we’re only treading water because of issues with climate and then the growth of the Front Range.”

Educators in Oklahoma are refusing a state order to incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans, setting up an inevitable showdown with the start of the school year just weeks away. State Superintendent Ryan Walters last week released guidelines to schools for how they should be integrating the Bible into classrooms, saying educators who are against the initiative “will comply, and I will use every means to make sure of it.” The message from some schools in the state: Bring it on (The Hill).

OPINION

■ Trump seems to forget it’s not 2016 anymore. And he’s frustrated, by E.J. Dionne, Jr., columnist, The Washington Post.

■ Our unelected Supreme Court has ruled that courts are the ultimate deciders, by Samuel Simon, opinion contributor, The Hill.

THE CLOSER

© The Associated Press / Tim Larsen | U.S. roller coasters are summer travel favorites, including Kingda Ka in Jackson, N.J., promoted as the tallest and fastest when opened years ago.

And finally … 🎢 Summer travel and roller coasters go hand-in-hand for many Americans. Around the country, the heart stoppers break records for speed, sheer drops, height and the costs of construction, according to Fox News, which ranks four thrill rides in detail, including two in New Jersey (Kingda Ka in Jackson and the indoor TMNT Shellraiser in East Rutherford), The Beast in Mason, Ohio, and Orlando’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind. Size them up!

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