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- cross-posted to:
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Kamala Harris has launched her campaign for the White House, after President Joe Biden stepped aside Sunday under pressure from party leaders.
The vice president has Biden’s endorsement, and is unchallenged as yet for the Democratic nomination, which will be formally decided at the Aug. 19 convention in Chicago.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” Harris said in a statement. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda. We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”
In her statement, the vice president paid tribute to Biden’s “extraordinary leadership,” saying he had achieved more in one term than many presidents do in two.
If anyone is concerned that there is only 4 months until the election, remember Jacinda Adern became opposition leader 3 months before the 2017 election and won - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41675801
She was a kind, empathetic leader and was great at uniting the country in crisis… multiple times.
Unfortunately she was distinctly average as a stable environment politician. Wouldn’t want her as PM now but would be great if we could hire her out on call when everything does hit the fan again.
I worked at a Sydney airport shop years ago and she would come through our area from time to time. She was approachable, easy to talk to and despite having big spooky security guys around, was happy to just go shopping and wait for her flight.
The Fijian PM at the time used to come through, crack jokes, run up a bill and then jokingly ask one of his security guys to buy all the stuff for him. He was a really funny bloke and he made our day.
Jacinda Adern wasn’t just a good leader for New Zealand, she was a good leader for the world in the covid crisis. She’s the reason several of my elderly relatives are still alive. Under Boris Johnson, the UK policy was initially “herd immunity” which basically means wait till everyone gets infected and then those that survive will be immune and it’ll stop spreading and die out.
They actually moved covid patients from hospitals into care homes, which seems stupid on the face of it, but was at least consistent in persuing the maximum death policy. The Conservatives had heard that non white people, poor people, people with preexisting health conditions (who cost a lot in the UK’s free health care system) and elderly people (who cost a lot in state pensions and state supported places in care homes) we’re worst affected. I think they saw whole scale death as a cost cutting measure and we’re never fans of ethnic minority folk or poor folk.
Anyway, along comes Jacinda Adern and implements lockdowns and travel restrictions and it works and it’s seem as sensible, then the Scottish leader at the time, Nicola Sturgeon, does the lockdown thing and it’s seem as responsible and then a fortnight later, Boris Johnson does it for England and Wales. We might not have abandoned our death first policy of it weren’t for the international leadership of Jacinda Adern.
Meanwhile, Boris copied another policy from abroad where you give vast sums of picnic money to drug companies to jump the queue on vaccines. This worked out well for us and was the best thing he ever did in his entire self-serving lying life. Of course he lied about it by claiming that being in the EU would have prevented it (it didn’t, and a few EU states went their own way on vaccines, facts never got in the way of what Boris wanted to say).
The whole VIP lane for masks and gowns, if you didn’t hear about it was the most bold faced corruption enabling scheme the UK has done in my life. No tendering process, no checks, no process, you don’t even have to be in a related industry, just, and I’m not kidding or exaggerating at all, literally if your company was recommended by a conservative mp, they were in the VIP lane and the government would order as much equipment as your company claimed you could supply. Guess what happened!
Anyway, I’ll always be grateful to Jacinda Adern. I credit her with not losing any close relatives to covid.
Does the New Zealand system have a restricted 3 month official campaign period the way the UK does? A lot of Kiwi government shares similar structure with the British system.
The US doesn’t, and normally campaigning spans a substantially longer period of time.
kagis
Yeah, this sounds like they do. Three months.
https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/historical-events/2023-general-election/key-dates/
https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2023/09/04/how-did-the-us-presidential-campaign-get-to-be-so-long/
You can argue whether the US should or shouldn’t restrict the campaigning period (though I’m almost certain that doing so would violate the First Amendment and thus require a new constitutional amendment permitting it to put into force).
But the thing is, Trump doesn’t have that restriction, the American system doesn’t normally expect it, and Harris is going to be trying to run a British-length campaign with no lead time for prep in the American system when her opponent has no such restrictions. She is gonna have to hit the ground running.
Also, American presidential campaign spending and fundraising is very large compared to the European levels I’ve seen. Dunno what things are like in New Zealand, but I remember that when Hillary ran against Trump in 2016, each campaign spent about a billion dollars.
EDIT: I don’t know if this is directly comparable, because it sounds like Kiwi rules don’t have parties declare donations under $1,500 (and I don’t know if these aggregate figures include individual contributions that don’t have to be reported individually). I think so, because this is measuring spending, not donations. The Kiwi system is parliamentary rather than presidential and so the race for the executive is the same as the race for the legislature, whereas the spending above is only for the executive race in the US, excludes all legislative campaign spending. And I’m not clear on whether this includes donations to individuals, which apparently can differ from party donations, though the Westminster system is more party-centric than the American one, where candidates need to do a lot more of their fundraising and spending thenselves. But without my digging much more, some Kiwi numbers:
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/350220141/labour-spent-1m-more-national-lose-2023-election
Also, those are Kiwibucks, not American dollars, so the USD numbers are only something like 60% of that. Accounting for that, if the numbers are comparable, that’d be the largest-spending Kiwi party doing $1.6 million USD across all of their seats compared to the US presidential campaigns alone doing about $1 billion.
Harris has got to raise some – or all, not sure whether she can get funds from the Biden-Harris campaign warchest – of that in the time remaining, which means that she’s gotta convince people that she is who they want to be president enough to pitch into the war chest so that she can spend that to sell herself to the public. She has to build a campaign, plan to spend the money, and do so to target voters. Not much time to iterate doing that.
And keep in mind that the first Republican presidential debate mentioned above, 444 days before the election, isn’t when those people started campaigning, and certainly isn’t when they started planning their campaign. It’s just an early milestone in the campaign. Harris is gonna have to pull all of this off in about three and a half months.
The US presidential election is an awfully large and expensive marketing fight for voter minds.
EDIT2: One positive sign for her: this person says that she believes that Harris most likely can get access to the funds that the Biden-Harris campaign has, so that’ll help get her some of the way there:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/21/kamala-harris-fundraising-surge.html
And she picked up a little more after announcing:
Lucky for her she also has a significant national and international threat as her opponent. She isn’t an unknown going in to try take 50% - she’s already got all the votes for those who see what Trump is.
I mean, that’s true. But she’s a not-terribly-high-profile veep. The regular crowd has been campaigning for over a year. Hell, Trump served as President, and he’s got the visibility from that; he started campaigning for Trump-for-President like a decade ago.
Yeah, okay, Harris ran for Senate and California Attorney General, maybe they can draw some material from those campaigns or something, though running for President and targeting specially the Midwest isn’t quite running to be a senator for California in terms of what material will work best, but they’re gonna have to start getting people to put together a lot of content and to get it out there.
Harris has no campaign website, no volunteer network, no…like, I’m assuming that she has to be expecting to get at least a substantial chunk of the Biden-Harris campaign infrastructure, and hoping that Biden’s endorsement will result in his volunteers volunteering for her.
checks
It looks like Biden’s 2024 campaign website, joebiden.com, just redirects to ActBlue, a Democratic donations website, with a plain text message put up by him. They don’t even have a graphic, campaign logo, anything. Like, they didn’t have all this lined up and ready to go hot, or I expect that it would have redirected to a Harris campaign website.
looks further
They haven’t even taken down the old website’s content, just had the main page redirect.
Well, this is gonna be a historic campaign, win or lose.
She can campaign on access to abortion, healthcare and if she wants to really get radical, weed.
Who?
Prime Minister of New Zealand. I have a comment on it in response.