Even with Harris’s momentum, Hill Dems know they have to run their own races
Plus: What’s next for the Harris campaign and the latest in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire-hostage negotiations.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. The general election is in 71 days and the 2024 Democratic National Convention is in the books. I’m off the rest of this week, so I’ll return to your inbox after Labor Day.
Vice President Kamala Harris emerged from the DNC backed by a unified party energized by her dignified acceptance speech and an opponent in former President Donald Trump who is crashing out at the realization that the electoral landslide he thought was inevitable last month before President Joe Biden passed the torch to Harris is unlikely to materialize now that she’s at the top of the ticket.
A senior aide to a congressional Democrat told me it was too soon to reckon how much the DNC would help candidates as the party faces the herculean task of holding the Senate and the less-daunting assignment of winning back the House. But what was evident as members dispersed from Chicago was that the DNC didn’t hurt members.
A House Democrat explained that the Harris campaign and the congressional races are separate and synergistic.
“It will be hard for her to be successful with Speaker [Mike] Johnson [(R-LA)] as her partner,” the member told me. “Democrats know that and want her to have all the tools she needs and the country deserves.”
Another top Hill Democratic operative I checked in with last night agreed with that assessment.
And as was on full display last week, Democrats are unified just as much around Harris’s candidacy as they are by their contempt for the former president.
“Democrats want to win the House,” the member added. “Frontliners want to come back. Everyone sane wants to keep Trump out of the Oval Office.”
This week, The Harris campaign will focus on ensuring that the DNC-generated momentum is a launchpad into the final sprint to November and not a blip that evaporates as summer turns to fall.
The vice president and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota will travel to southern Georgia on Wednesday for a two-day bus tour across several rural, suburban and urban communities rich with the Black and working-class voters the campaign wants to connect with.
It will be Harris and Walz’s first time campaigning in the state together and the vice president’s seventh trip to Georgia this year.
The vice president will hold a rally in Savannah to close the bus tour, her first since the DNC. Harris was in Atlanta a week after she launched her campaign for a rally headlined by rapper and gun safety advocate Quavo and rapper Megan Thee Stallion.
Harris and Walz held a bus tour through Western Pennsylvania during the campaign’s week of action ahead of the DNC. They stopped by a field office and participated in a phone bank before speaking at a campaign canvass kickoff event there. Harris also stopped at a firehouse and a local high school football practice on the tour before grabbing a few snacks at a gas station.
Harris Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo on Sunday that the campaign has raised $540 million since its launch, the most for any campaign in history. The campaign crossed $500 million before Harris’s acceptance speech last Thursday night and enjoyed its best fundraising hour since launch day immediately after her speech. One in three of the donations were from first-time contributors. One-fifth of those donors were young voters and two-thirds were women.
The campaign isn’t just flush with cash: O’Malley Dillon said the convention also marked its biggest week of organizing since the campaign started.
Nearly 200,000 volunteers have signed up for shifts since last Monday. 45 percent—or 90,000—signups came on Thursday and Friday following Harris’s acceptance speech. In the week leading up to the DNC, volunteers completed 10,000 shifts and contacted more than one million voters. 2,800 volunteers in Wisconsin, a critical Blue Wall battleground state, signed up for shifts last Tuesday following a Harris-Walz rally in Milwaukee at the same venue Republicans held their convention at a month earlier.
President Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden spent the week in Southern California following his DNC speech last Monday before traveling to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where they will spend this week.
The president has kept a low profile to give Harris and the DNC the spotlight. But he’s been working behind the scenes to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas under the so-called bridging proposal. The US, Egypt and Qatar say the proposal is consistent with the principles Biden outlined in late May and builds on areas of agreement during recent negotiations while bridging the remaining gaps in a manner that allows for a swift implementation of the deal.
Israel launched what its military called preemptive strikes against Iranian proxy group Hezbollah over the weekend in Lebanon, the southwest Asian country that shares a border with Israel and serves as Hezbollah’s headquarters.
The Iran-backed group carried out its own attacks in response to the killing of a top Hezbollah commander in an Israeli airstrike last month.
Biden spoke with the leaders of Egypt and Qatar on Friday to discuss the latest developments in the region as they work to prevent a broader regional war from erupting.
In a statement this weekend, National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said that the president was closely monitoring events in Israel and Lebanon and has been engaged with his national security team.
“At his direction, senior US officials have been communicating continuously with their Israeli counterparts,” Savett said. “We will keep supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, and we will keep working for regional stability.”
When asked how the ceasefire talks were progressing, the president gave reporters traveling with him in California on Saturday a thumbs-up.
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