This is how Kamala Harris plans to win the White House

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. It’s great to be back with you. For today, let’s get into:

• Harris’s path to victory

• Murdoch’s diminishing political influence

• Democrats ponying up

Now that Kamala Harris almost has the Democratic nomination in the bag, she can turn to strategising what her path to the White House would look like.

She’s got a lot of momentum and excitement around her right now, and she’s betting that this surge of enthusiasm will fuel her White House bid. [Free to read] 

Harris still needs to pick a running mate (donors say Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly and Roy Cooper are the frontrunners), but she’s hitting the campaign trail, making her pitch to voters — and distinguishing it from Joe Biden’s. 

While the president often talked about Donald Trump’s threat to democracy, Harris is focusing on the risks to individual freedoms she says are under threat from Republican extremism. She’s made it clear that she’ll emphasise abortion rights, voting rights and safety from gun violence.

Her broader messages are also emerging: that she brings generational change, while Trump would take the country backwards; that as a former prosecutor she can take on a convicted felon; and that economically she’s a better steward for the middle class. 

The way her campaign sees it, “this shift in the race opens up additional persuadable voters” that the Democrats can scoop up, according to a memo from campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.

Earlier this week, Trump told reporters that Harris “won’t be too tough” to beat in November, given her unsuccessful 2020 campaign. But Trump’s own strategist Tony Fabrizio said in his own memo that he expected Harris to get a polling bump in the coming weeks.

Fabrizio said a “Harris honeymoon” would come from largely positive “wall-to-wall” media coverage that “will certainly energise Democrats and some other parts of their coalition, at least in the short term”.

That energy is certainly palpable. In just over 24 hours, nearly 60,000 people volunteered to help elect her. And Vote.org reported a 700 per cent spike in daily voter registrations, totalling more than 38,500 in the 48-hour period after Biden ended his re-election bid and endorsed Harris — a record for the 2024 campaign cycle.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• JD Vance and Harris have scrambled US dealmakers’ election strategies, as a realignment of antitrust positions shakes up corporate expectations. [Free to read]

• In Biden’s first public remarks since he announced he would not seek a second term, the president said he would “pass the torch to a new generation” to save US democracy.

• Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Biden, Harris and Trump later this week after defending his country’s war in Gaza during an address to a joint session of Congress, for which Harris was notably absent.

• Harris is receiving financial backing from Silicon Valley donors, quelling fears that the tech sector’s upper echelons would be pulled to the right. (Bloomberg)

• Here’s how the vice-president invests her personal portfolio. (WSJ)

Behind the scenes

Longtime conservative powerbroker Rupert Murdoch has fallen out of favour on the right now that the Republican party has remade itself in Trump’s image.

For decades, politicians have been willing to travel long distances for a sit-down with Murdoch, the media baron whose transcontinental news empire includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. But last week, Murdoch had to do the travelling.

He had not been to a Republican convention in decades — if ever — according to Murdoch watchers. So some saw his presence at the Milwaukee Republican National Convention as a conciliatory gesture to Trump, who has never been Murdoch’s top presidential pick.

But others, including former executives in the mogul’s orbit, said Murdoch’s presence showed just how much his influence over the party had dwindled.

“Trump is no longer beholden to Murdoch’s empire as he once was,” one former Murdoch staffer told the FT’s Daniel Thomas and Christopher Grimes. “There are viable [media] alternatives with younger demographics that mean more.”

Datapoint

Harris has reinvigorated Democratic fundraising — and it’s not just megadonors cutting big cheques. Grassroots contributors are excited, too.

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ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democratic politicians and groups, brought in roughly $67mn on both Sunday and Monday, more than three times the amount raised on any other day so far this year. 

This is extremely important for the party, since Trump had recently overtaken Biden in campaign fundraising.  

Within the first 24 hours of Harris’s candidacy, her campaign said it raised $81mn — that’s now surpassed $100mn. (That figure includes funds raised across the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees.)

For some perspective from the FT’s Alex Rogers, that’s more than the totals raised from:

• The first quarter that Biden’s re-election campaign reported ($72mn)

• A Biden fundraiser in Los Angeles featuring Barack Obama, Julia Roberts, Jimmy Kimmel and George Clooney last month ($30mn)

• What Obama and Bill Clinton raised for Biden at a Radio City Music Hall event in March ($26mn)

• The total Biden brought in the 24 hours after his fiery State of the Union speech ($10mn)

• And what Trump’s campaign said it brought in after the former president’s felony convictions ($53mn)

It’s also double the total amount that Harris raised during her 2020 White House bid. That figure stood at $40.3mn, according to OpenSecrets.

The Harris campaign said that from Sunday through to Tuesday, 1.1mn individuals donated — 62 per cent of whom were first-time donors.

Viewpoints

• The 2024 race is suddenly a gender election, writes Ed Luce — but Harris has advantages in taking on Trump that Hillary Clinton lacked in 2016. 

• Katie Martin reminds us that Trump can’t weaken the dollar without trashing the economy along the way.

• Harris is a Gen X woman with Gen Z appeal, injecting novelty into the race after years of “deadening predictability” in US presidential elections, says Sarah Churchwell.

• The vice-president won’t have much room to shift away from Biden’s industrial intervention and import tariffs, according to Alan Beattie.

• Hannah Murphy tells us about the conspiracy theories being baked into US politics. 

• As Trump continues to rage against migration to the US, Martin Wolf looks at the data to declare immigration both essential and impossible.