Key events
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told families of the estimated 116 hostages still held in Gaza that a deal that would secure their loved ones’ release could be nearing, his office has said.
“The conditions are undoubtedly ripening. This is a good sign,” Netanyahu told the families on Monday in Washington, where he is expected to meet Joe Biden later this week after making an address to Congress.
It will be Biden’s first meeting with a foreign leader since he opted not to run for reelection and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris as his successor as the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris is to meet Netanyahu, who is under increasing pressure from much of the Israeli public to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, this week separate from Biden’s meeting.
Efforts to reach a Gaza ceasefire deal, outlined by Biden in May and mediated by Egypt and Qatar, have gained momentum over the past month.
Israeli protesters are calling for a deal with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, which would free the hostages in exchange for a pause in fighting. Negotiators from Israel’s the Mossad intelligence service are expected in Qatar later this week, continuing talks that have dragged since early this year.
Democrats are urging Kamala Harris to consider choosing her potential running mate from the so-called battleground states, which this year are: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“That is the first presidential decision that vice president Harris has, so she’s got a lot of good choices ahead of her,” senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told reporters at the Capitol, according to the Hill.
He listed a number of Democratic governors as possible choices – Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, alongside transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg (who has deep ties in Michigan) and senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. Here is a useful explainer on who else could be Harris’ running mate for the November election:
Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth is in Washington for the Guardian, and has this analysis on how Kamala Harris will tread a careful path on Israel and Gaza while Benjamin Netanyahu is in the US:
For much of Monday, no meetings between Benjamin Netanyahu and either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris had been confirmed, even though the Israeli PM had already departed for the US and was scheduled on Wednesday to address a joint session of Congress at the request of the House leader, Mike Johnson.
Harris appears likely to skip that session, where she would have sat directly behind Netanyahu as the president of the Senate. She will be out of Washington for a public event at a college sorority in Indiana.
Late on Monday, an aide to Harris said that both she and Biden would sit down with Netanyahu in separate meetings at the White House and denied that her travel to Indianapolis indicated any change in her position towards Israel.
Harris backers and insiders say that she is more likely to engage in public criticism of Netanyahu than Biden and to focus attention on the civilian toll among Palestinians from the war in Gaza – even if she would maintain US military aid and other support for Israel that has been a mainstay of Biden’s foreign policy.
“The generational difference between Biden and Harris is a meaningful difference in how one looks at these issues,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group that has endorsed Harris’s presidential bid.
Read more of Andrew Roth’s analysis here: As Netanyahu arrives in Washington, Kamala Harris treads a careful path on Israel and Gaza
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. My colleague Yohannes Lowe will take it from here.
Archie Bland
In a fascinating profile of Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles this month, the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta laid out just how deeply their strategy depended on having Biden as their opponent.
The race would be “a contrast of strength versus weakness”, Alberta wrote. “Trump … would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel … their campaign has been engineered in every way – from the voters they target to the viral memes they create – to defeat Biden.” Wiles said cheerfully: “Joe Biden is a gift.”
Now that gift has been snatched away. “Their campaign was constructed from the ground up in November 2022 to beat one man,” Hugo Lowell said. “And now their principal enemy has disappeared, and they’re trying to pivot very quickly. It’s difficult to articulate just how big a problem this is for them.”
On the other hand, he added: “They’re good at this.”
The campaign started preparing opposition research dossiers on Harris in recent weeks, Hugo reported. So did Maga Inc, a Trump-supporting political action committee run independently of the campaign. A wave of new attack ads against Harris are ready to be released in key states, including an immediate $5m (£3.9m) ad buy from Maga Inc.
They have also tested messages about Harris with voters to see what works – but any such effort is inevitably less robust than the Biden playbook was. “They spent months poll testing, strategising, and then repeating the same lines again and again,” Hugo said. “That messaging – the court cases as a partisan witch-hunt, crooked Joe Biden – is engrained. Everyone knows it.
“They don’t have those pithy messages in the electorate’s mind about Harris. When I talk to them privately, it’s all very broad brush – they will eventually settle on a few, but they haven’t figured it out yet.”
Here is where Harris stands on the issues of Gaza, immigration, abortion, and inflation:
Democrats will be hoping that Harris, if she is the nominee, will have gender in her favour among Democratic voters, particularly since Roe v Wade was overturned by a supreme court with three judges appointed by Trump, who boasted this year: “We broke Roe v Wade.”
Beginning in late 2023, Harris has embarked on a national tour to highlight the threats to reproductive rights posed by a second Trump administration – an issue that Biden has been criticized for shying away from. Biden has defended Roe v Wade, but has said he is “not big on abortion”.
“As a woman on the ticket and the first woman VP and a woman of color, and then secondly, as an AG, she is strongest when her profile is fighting and prosecuting the case. People really like her in that mode,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic party strategist and a lead pollster on the 2020 Biden campaign, told the Guardian in March. “She’s so comfortable saying the word ‘abortion’. She’s so comfortable leaning in and speaking to the repercussions.”
Trump has run against and defeated a woman before – Hillary Clinton. After Roe v Wade, more people may be motivated by the possibility of a female president who is clearly in favor of abortion rights. It will probably also motivate people who are anti-abortion to vote for Trump.
The New York Times has also taken a look at whether Harris can beat Trump where Clinton failed to do so. It reports:
In the eight years since Hillary Clinton failed to win the American presidency, the work force for the first time grew to include more college-educated women than college-educated men. The #MeToo movement exposed sexual harassment and toppled powerful men. The Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.
…
A presidential contest pitting Ms. Harris against former President Donald J. Trump would represent a rematch of sorts: Mr. Trump would again have to run against a woman who held a top administration position and served in the Senate. He defeated Mrs. Clinton in 2016 in spite of her winning the popular vote by a wide margin.
But the dynamics would be unquestionably different. Ms. Harris has neither the political legacy nor the baggage of Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump, having served a turbulent term in office, is now a known quantity. Ms. Harris is Black and of South Asian descent.
If Harris takes up the mantle for the Democratic party, one of her first major decisions as a candidate will be choosing a running mate. Harris has not indicated who she would consider, but here are some of the names Democrats are floating, so far, as possible vice-presidential candidates:
Here is Biden calling into campaign headquarters and urging staffers to “embrace” his vice-president, Kamala Harris. Biden, who is isolating with Covid-19 at his Delaware home, vowed he is “not going anywhere” and said he will be “out on the road” for Harris:
If you’re just tuning in: Shortly after securing the support of enough Democratic delegates to become her party’s nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement that she is looking forward to formally accepting the nomination while also making her case against a second Donald Trump presidency.
“Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee, and as a daughter of California, I am proud that my home state’s delegation helped put our campaign over the top,” Harris said.
The 2024 election is about two different visions for America’s future, Harris said.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country back to a time before many of us had full freedoms and equal rights,” she said. “I believe in a future that strengthens our democracy, protects reproductive freedom and ensures every person has the opportunity to not just get by, but to get ahead.”
It took 32 hours from Biden’s announcement that he would step aside to Kamala securing support from enough delegates. In that time she also raised record funding – possibly matching the total raised by the Biden campaign in months, though the most recent figure is $81m dollars, $15m shy of Biden’s total – which Harris has also inherited.
Tatum Watkins, a 19-year-old college student from southwest Iowa and a delegate to the DNC, told the AP she appreciates as a young woman that Harris is speaking out on issues like reproductive rights and is “far closer” in age to a whole new generation of voters.
“She is very much leaning into what’s popular right now,” Watkins said. “I’ve seen already her branding is what I can best describe as brat summer.”
Watkins said that has energized and excited her and other young Iowans, making what will be her first experience voting in a presidential election “even better.”
CNN commentator Van Jones says he thinks that if the Republicans focus on race in their attacks on Harris, they will lose the Black men they have worked so hard to attract to the party:
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients on Monday urged aides to keep their heads down and remain focused on the work that remains, AP reports. He listed lowering housing and health care costs, implementing the administration’s key legislative achievements, and safeguarding democracy as among Biden’s top priorities for the final months of the administration.
The message is being echoed throughout the administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told senior State Department officials that Biden wants his team to remain laser focused on carrying out his foreign policy agenda. Blinken noted that there is still “one-eighth” of Biden’s term to go, according to State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
Biden, who is scheduled to meet with Israel’s Netanyahu later this week, said during his call to campaign staff that he was focused on getting a cease-fire agreement and expressed optimism that a deal was close.
“I’ll be working really closely with the Israelis and with the Palestinians to try to work out how we can get the Gaza war to end and Middle East peace and get all those hostages home,” Biden told campaign staff. “I think we’re on the verge of being able to do that.”
Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, said that a cease-fire deal appears closer than it has been through the conflict.
Though Harris has technically toed Biden’s line on Gaza, she is viewed as being more forceful when it comes to criticising Israel, and expressing empathy for Palestinians. When she delivered a speech in March in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, her comments on Gaza were followed by sustained applause.
“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” she said. “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire.” She added, after stopping for the applause, “for six weeks”.
In the presidential primaries, more than 101,000 Michigan Democrats, about 13% of those who voted, cast ballots for “uncommitted”, after campaigning by anti-war organizers, winning two delegates to the Democratic national convention and awakening a modern anti-war movement that forced the president’s attention to Gaza.