It’s raining coconuts
“There are years when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. This was one of those decades-long weeks,” Wisconsin Democrats chair Ben Wikler tweeted on Friday.
Politico at the start of a new week:
Kamala Harris pulled in $200 million in her first week as a presidential candidate, a staggering figure the campaign points to as evidence of the intensity surrounding her nascent bid with 100 days to go before Election Day.
What a difference a week makes, Politico not-so-trenchantly observes.
With Harris ascending to the top of the ticket, the party saw mammoth fundraising, including topping the $100 million mark in her first full day as the Democrats’ likely nominee. The campaign soon announced she had secured enough verbal commitments from delegates to secure the party’s nomination ahead of the Democratic National Convention next month.
Of the seven-day haul, two-thirds of the donations came from first-time donors, something the campaign pointed to as evidence of overwhelming grassroots support for her historic White House bid.
The energy behind Harris, who is of Black and South Asian descent, is also showing up in the polls, with Harris closing the deficit that had widened in the final weeks Biden was the presumptive nominee.
According to a CNN/SSRS poll published last week, Harris trailed 46 percent to Trump’s 49 percent, a statistical tie since those figures were within the poll’s margin for error.
So now the horse-race press has a new horse race to blather about 24/7. And a new veepstakes.
Speculation about the Harris pick for running mate is a beauty pageant for national pundits, by their pick of favorites more about cosmetics than calculation. It’s about who looks good, has rhetorical chops, etc. But unless this race shifts dramatically in Harris’s favor, 2024 will be another close one.
States don’t send popular votes to Congress. They send electoral votes. So teasing potential VP picks from states that might not add to the Harris electoral totals misses the point. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is an excellent politician. Perhaps he can help shore up the ‘blue wall’. But can he bring electoral votes with him that Democrats don’t already expect to win? Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is the sharpest-witted politician I’ve ever seen. But seriously, is the former mayor of South Bend ready to step into the presidency? Will his being on the ticket give Harris a shot at Indiana’s 11 electoral votes?
I can’t wait until the VP beauty pageant ends and we get on to the real business of electing the Harris ticket and seeing the MAGA movement consigned to the ash heap of history.
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