Kamala Harris faces crucial week ahead in 2024 presidential showdown with Donald Trump

The – It’s been mostly smooth sailing for Vice President Kamala Harris in the two weeks since she replaced President Biden at the top of the Democrats’ national ticket.

A party eager to keep former President Trump from returning to the White House quickly unified behind Harris. The vice president experienced a surge in contributions and more than doubled Trump in July fundraising, and volunteers flocked to Biden-turned-Harris campaign offices.

And the small lead that Trump has built over Biden in the weeks following the president’s disastrous late June debate performance instantly vanished, as the latest national and key battleground state polls indicated a margin-of-error race between Harris and the former president.

But Harris faces a consequential week ahead, starting with a decision in the coming hours on whom she’ll choose as her running mate on the Democratic Party ticket.

Harris stayed in the nation’s capital this weekend, meeting with some of the roughly half-dozen running mate contenders, Democratic sources confirmed to Fox News.

Among those on the list are Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. Also in contention, according to sources, are Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and JB Pritzker of Illinois, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The vetting, screening and interview of running mates normally takes months. But these are far from normal times for the Democrats, and Harris is facing an extremely compressed process.

While Harris and her team have remained mostly quiet about the naming of a vice presidential nominee, allies of the contenders have been advocating and interest groups within the party have been making their wishes known.

The announcement by Harris in the coming hours will likely disappoint some of those supporting candidates who weren’t named as the running mate, and could exacerbate policy divisions within the party that have been papered over the past two weeks.

Harris and her to-be-named running mate will team up on Tuesday at a rally in Philadelphia to kick off an ambitious and jam-packed swing state tour through Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, the seven battlegrounds that will likely determine the outcome of the presidential election.

The vice president drew over 10,000 at her first major rally since taking over for Biden at the top of the Democrats’ ticket, last week at the Georgia State Convocation Center in Atlanta. 

It was the first time this cycle that the Democratic ticket drew a crowd comparable to the large audiences Trump has been regularly drawing for much of his more than year-and-a-half long campaign to return to the White House. And the size and energy of Harris’ crowds during this week’s swing state tour will be closely monitored.

Trump and his running mate – Sen. JD Vance of Ohio – held a rally at the same venue in Atlanta on Saturday, where the former president continued his relentless attacks and insults of Harris.

In social media posts earlier on Saturday and at the rally, Trump charged Harris had a ‘low IQ’ and was ‘dumb,’ and accused her of lacking ‘mental capacity.’

The Harris campaign, firing back on Sunday morning, claimed that Trump was ‘weak… struggling… panicking… and Donald Trump is running scared.’

Harris has yet to sit for a major interview since taking over for Biden, and the Trump campaign is turing up the criticism.

‘It’s been 13 days since Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party and she still hasn’t sat for a single interview with the media,’ Vance highlighted in a social media post on Saturday.

Harris will start the week by formally landing the party’s presidential nomination, as a virtual roll call run by the Democratic National Committee concludes at 6 p.m. ET. But there’s no drama, as the vice president was the only candidate to qualify for the roll call.

The roll call kicked off on Thursday and DNC Chair Jaimie Harrison announced on Friday that Harris had clinched the nomination by winning the votes of a majority of delegates to the party’s nominating convention, which gets underway in two weeks in Chicago.

While the past two weeks have been smoother than many expected, the Harris campaign is well aware there are still three months to go until the November election.

Battleground states director Dan Kanninen emphasized that ‘it is the task of the Harris campaign to turn the unprecedented energy behind the Vice President into action.’