Many Democrats back Harris in 2024 race, but Obama silent.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he thinks Vice President Kamala Harris will be easier to defeat in November’s election than Democratic President Joe Biden, who earlier in the day stepped aside as his party’s candidate.
”Harris will be easier to beat than Joe Biden would have been,” Trump told CNN.
Trump and his campaign later also attacked Biden and Harris on social media while saying Biden was unfit to continue serving as president.
Biden ended his reelection campaign on Sunday after fellow Democrats lost faith in his mental acuity and ability to beat Trump. Biden endorsed Harris to replace him as the party’s candidate.
Biden had faced growing doubts about his reelection chances after a weak and faltering performance in a televised debate against Trump late last month.
On his Truth Social platform on Sunday, Trump said Biden “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve.”
Other top Republicans, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, also said Biden was not fit to serve as president and finish his term if he was stepping aside as the Democratic presidential candidate. Johnson explicitly called on Biden to resign.
Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, said: “We will suffer greatly because of his (Biden’s) presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.”
Trump and Biden had been mostly tied in polls, but after the debate, some polls showed Trump narrowly ahead of the president in a match-up for the November elections.
The Trump campaign had already begun discussions about how it would redeploy campaign resources for the possibility of Biden’s dropping out, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Sunday.
Given that any alternative Democratic candidate would likely have different strengths and weaknesses than Biden, that person said, the president’s dropping out would require rethinking where to spend ad dollars and where to deploy resources more generally.
Publicly, Trump campaign advisers and allies have been telling reporters they are not worried about facing Harris because they can simply tie her to Biden’s record in office, particularly on immigration and inflation. They say they will try to portray Harris, and any of the other candidates being suggested as alternatives for the Democrats, as being to the left of Biden on various policies.
In a statement after Biden dropped out, the Trump campaign said Harris was Biden’s “enabler in chief.” The campaign said Biden and Harris owned each other’s records and “there is no distance between the two.”
The official Republican National Committee YouTube channel published a two-minute video on Sunday afternoon attacking Harris over immigration policies, alleging she neglected that issue.
In recent weeks, Trump’s campaign and some of his allies have launched pre-emptive political attacks on Harris to try to discredit her amid talk she could replace Biden atop the party’s 2024 presidential ticket.
In March 2021 Biden said Harris would lead efforts with Mexico and Central American nations to address illegal immigration.
Republicans have seized on that to accuse her of failing to stem the flow of millions of migrants crossing illegally into the United States, although she was never directly responsible for securing the southern border.
Meanwhile, many Democrats today quickly backed Harris to run as the party’s presidential nominee against Trump, but some powerful party members, including former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, stayed quiet.
After weeks of fighting among Democrats on whether Biden should stay in the race, a rush of support coalescing behind Harris, if she is to be the nominee, is crucial with just over 100 days before the November election.
But there are plenty of doubts inside the Democratic Party about whether Harris can beat Trump. Some Democrats have suggested that the party should hold a mini-primary before the August convention.
All 50 Democratic party state chairs will support Harris as the party’s new presidential nominee, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing multiple sources.
Former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of State under President Barack Obama, also endorsed Harris in a statement.
Still, others, including Pelosi and Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president for eight years, thanked Biden for his patriotism but did not yet throw their support behind Harris or any other candidate.
“We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead,” Obama said in a statement. “But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”
Just as he did in 2020 once Biden earned the Democratic nomination, Obama believes he will be uniquely positioned to help unite the party once it has a nominee, said a source familiar with the matter.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who praised Biden’s decision to step aside, also was silent on who should be the Democrats’ nominee.
US Senator Peter Welch, the first Democratic senator to call on Biden to drop his reelection run, called for an open nomination process.
The Democrats should have “an open process so that whoever our nominee is, including Kamala, has the strength of having a process that shows the consensus position of the party,” Welch said. “The debate in the Democratic Party is who can carry on the legacy of President Biden and defeat Trump.”
One Democratic donor told Reuters they would support a ticket for Harris as the presidential candidate and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her vice president, as a way to gain votes in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state. It is not known yet whom Harris would pick as her vice president if she does become the nominee.
And a group appealing to supporters of former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley who had been backing Biden under the name Haley Voters for Biden, changed its name on Sunday to Haley Voters for Harris.