The substitution of Harris at the top of the ticket had an immediate impact on the money front, with the campaign saying it collected a record $100 million from more than 1 million individual donors in barely 24 hours. The campaign also said it recruited 58,000 new volunteers as the operation changed its name to “Harris for President,” even as staff continued using Joe Biden email addresses.
“The name has changed at the top of the ticket, but the mission hasn’t changed at all,” Biden said in a Monday night call to an all-staff meeting in Wilmington, Del., before Harris spoke there. “Trump is still a danger to the community. He’s a danger to the nation.”
Biden’s endorsement of his vice president quickly met with statements of support from other prominent Democrats who had been considering their own possible White House bids, clearing her path to a nomination by default next month rather than a rushed and messy mini-primary at the party’s national convention. By late Monday she secured enough pledges from delegates to clinch the nomination, according to a survey of delegates by the Associated Press.
Her dominance expanded on Tuesday with a nod from the two top congressional Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “We are brimming with excitement, enthusiasm, unity,” Schumer said.
Speaking to her campaign aides in Wilmington, Harris previewed her case against Trump. She noted that as a former prosecutor who served as the San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds,” including “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers” and “cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”
“Hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to cheers, alluding to the former president’s continued efforts to fight several criminal indictments and his conviction on 34 felony counts in a hush money trial in New York. “In this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”
The Trump campaign, in turn, signaled it will attack Harris by tying her to Biden’s record on core issues of inflation, crime and immigration. The campaign also signaled it would press to expand the battleground map, announcing a Saturday rally with Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), in Minnesota, which has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1972.
On Tuesday, Trump counterprogrammed Harris’s debut event by hosting a conference call with reporters to hammer on her role overseeing the current administration’s response to surges of undocumented migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump has brooded over how the race was suddenly upended. In a flurry of social media posts on Monday, he complained that Republicans had already invested in running against Biden, attacked him as much as Harris, complained about Democratic guests on Fox News and denied ever considering JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon for a cabinet post, as he himself floated in June interview.
Vance, in solo rallies on Monday in Ohio and Virginia, assailed Biden as a “quitter” and Harris as “a million times worse” for the role she has served in the administration.
In the environs of Milwaukee — the same city where Republicans held their national convention this month — Harris intended to highlight the plans outlined in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency that he has tried to disavow. She also will stress Trump’s support for overturning Roe v. Wade and a constitutional right to abortion, his proposals for tax cuts that primarily benefit wealthy Americans and the threat that Democrats believe Trump and Republicans pose to Social Security and Medicare.
A huge crowd packed into a suburban high school gymnasium here in advance of her Tuesday afternoon appearance, hoisting letters spelling out “YES WE KAM!” Harris arrived to boisterous applause and an equally boisterous introduction by Gov. Tony Evers.
“On the Tony Evers excitement scale that goes from ‘holy mackerel’ and maxes out at ‘heck yes,’ I am jazzed as hell to be welcoming our next presidential nominee to Wisconsin,” he said.
Harris spoke for about 20 minutes. And at her mention of the former president, the gymnasium resounded with chants of “lock him up!” — an echo of the chant heard for years at Trump events when he talked about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
“The path to the White House goes through Wisconsin,” Harris said. “And to win in Wisconsin, we are counting on you right here in Milwaukee. You all helped us win in 2020. And in 2024, we will win again.”
Many who turned out to hear her lauded Biden’s decision to step aside and said they believed she will be a stronger candidate against Trump.
“I think he did the best thing for everybody, and she’s amazing,” said Tammy Calnon, 50, a project manager from Sussex, Wis., who supported Harris’s primary campaign in 2020 and expects her to better outline the differences between Democrats and Trump than Biden had been doing.
For women and women of color in attendance, the candidate’s sudden elevation is especially meaningful. Sukanya Misra, 39, a writer from Milwaukee, is fully embracing her ascent: “I did not think that a woman of Indian descent would ever be a serious contender for the highest office in America. It makes me emotional thinking about it.”
Yet some women expressed concern about the sexism and racism they expect Harris to face.
“I know that the Republicans are going to pivot from ageism to sexism and racism in their attacks, but I think she’s got tough skin and she can deal with it,” said Anne Matthews, 56, a physician assistant from Menomonee Falls who pointed to particular aspects of Harris’s resume. “I like that she’s a previous prosecutor who has prosecuted sexual offenders, and she’s going to be running against someone who’s been convicted of that. I think we need a new face, and I like her energy and everything about her.”
Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, but Biden flipped it back to blue in 2020, and his campaign leadership argued that wins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were the clearest path to victory in the electoral college this fall.
In recent public polling, however, the president trailed Trump here. An AARP poll this month found Biden down six points to Trump in a five-way race that included third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein. A Times/Say24 poll released last week found Biden down five points in the state in a five-way race.
There has been little polling in Wisconsin since Harris became the front-runner for the nomination. A CBS News poll released Monday found that 45 percent of Democratic registered voters believe their chances against Trump are better without Biden and that 83 percent approved of his decision to step aside.
A Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the mood shift since Biden’s announcement, said “people are super fired up.” What had been a grim atmosphere is now an energized one: “The vibes three days ago were awful, and the vibes yesterday were phenomenal.”
Michael Scherer and Amy B Wang contributed to this report.
