No surprises...

According to CNN’s Jamie Gangel, these are the names Kamala Harris is considering to pick as her running mate:

-Arizona Senator Mark Kelly
-Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear
-NC Governor Roy Cooper
-Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro

Marianne Williamson astrally projects back into the race....

Illinois Democrats holding back official support for Harris

DOW opens up 110.....

Apparently the weekend’s developments aren’t spooking the market

Playbook: The Kamala Harris juggernaut

INSIDE THE HARRIS BLITZ — In a matter of hours yesterday, VP KAMALA HARRIS garnered endorsements of a majority of House Democrats (153 as of this morning), most Senate Democrats (32), and twelve of the nation’s 23 Democratic governors. Two key unions — SEIU and AFT — are on board, and four state delegations to the Chicago convention (New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee) have voted to back her.

The widespread and immediate outpouring of support, which will continue to trickle in today, is a testament to the Democratic Party’s eagerness to move on from the last 25 days of infighting, as well as Harris’s own underrated skills as a backroom coalition builder.

She put those chops to work yesterday: Harris had multiple phone conversations with President JOE BIDEN before he announced at 1:46 p.m. that he was stepping aside. Then she got busy.

Harris spent the rest of Sunday at home with family and staff in the vice president’s mansion in her Howard University hoodie and sweats grinding through calls to over 100 Democratic leaders over the course of 10 hours. The speedy, unglamorous work seems to have scared most of the potential challengers out of the race. We’re told she dined on pizza with anchovies for dinner.

Meanwhile, what is now the Harris for President campaign took in $49.6 million in grassroots donations since yesterday’s announcement, according to campaign spokesperson LAUREN HITT. That includes the proceeds from ActBlue’s biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/07/22/the-kamala-harris-juggernaut-00170254

Our first prospective VP nominee...

Kamala Harris sees surge in big money support after Biden drops out of race

An email from the Biden campaign...

Dear National Finance Committee Members,

As you likely have heard, President Biden released a statement earlier this afternoon announcing his decision to withdraw from the 2024 Presidential election. His letter is included below for anyone who has not yet seen it.

Shortly after the President’s announcement, he endorsed Vice President Harris to be the Democratic Party’s new nominee to take on Donald Trump this fall, and the Vice President has since officially filed paperwork to declare her candidacy. Her statement is also included below.

First, and most importantly, we want to offer our sincere thanks for your extraordinary support of the Biden-Harris ticket. It is because of you that we are in a position to move forward together from this unprecedented moment to beat Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans, and their extreme Project 2025 agenda this November. We truly can’t do any of this without you, and we look forward to continuing to work with you toward electing Kamala Harris and Democrats across the country this year.

We will plan to hold an NFC call mid-week to share some exciting updates with everyone about the way forward.

For now, however, in response to many of your questions, we wanted to share that all active links and fundraising pages in use by you and your networks will remain active and usable and funds raised toward them will go toward supporting the Vice President’s campaign to support Democratic victories up and down the ticket this November.

As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your regional or coalition teams, or the NFC team, with any questions you may have. As the transition to the Harris Victory Fund is developing and ongoing, we will share updates with you as we are able.

Again, thank you so much for all that you do.

All the best,

Michael & Colleen

The support for Harris rolls in.....

Can we have a brief discussion about....."the Billionaires"?

...who seem to be the preferred choice for emnity as President Biden's enemy in the shadows?

First a bit of pedantry: I know none of "them" who are actually billionaires. Most of the billionaires have been publicly supporting Trump.

Second. the "mega-donors", as the preferred terminology goes, are.....DEMOCRATS. And more importantly they're.....DONORS. These people have already given substantial sums to the campaign and the DNC.

How, you may ask, do I know this? Because I'M ONE OF THEM.

The DNC has a fundraising entity called the National Finance Committee, which consists of everyone who gives (or raises from others) a threshold amount. I have met -- and exceeded -- that threshold. I'm way at the lower end in comparison to others (example: Jeffrey Katzenberg, the "K" in Spielberg's "SGK Dreamworks" ) but I'm still a member. As such, I attend briefings and events with these people. I've gotten to know them. They WANT Democrats elected. The WANT their taxes increased. They WANT reproductive rights protected and the environment saved.

But they, like other Democrats (activists, elected officials, large and small donors) saw President Biden at risk of losing to a second -- and worse -- Trump term, and expressed their concerns as many others did. And while many had already maxed out their own contributions, they had seen other wealthy DEMOCRATS whom they reached out to, express reluctance to providing financial support to what was seen as a lost cause.

That didn't mean "blackmail". It meant people who would consider directing their available funds to the House and Senate races as a firewall, rather that putting the funds into the Presidential race.

(I'll observe that the media reported that grass-roots donations were also dropping off after the post-debate spike)

You may disagree with the roll these mega-donors play. You may wish for publicly funded elections. So do I. But we don't have them, and in their absence I and others won't unilaterally disarm. The Biden campaign had built its funding model around a large influx from mega-donors (hence the NFC and other fundraising strategies). That's why there were THREE calls in the past two weeks with these mega-donors (as reported in the media and which I attended) to try and reassure them of the campaign's future success. These people care as much for the future of Democracy as you do. They didn't threaten or blackmail. What they did was lay out cold hard data that the campaign and Party leadership took into account in evaluating President Biden's prospects going into November.

"Politics ain't beanbag"