Foreign
Replacing Biden with anyone but Harris would be a real headache for Democrats
Democrats would have a practical and political nightmare on their hands if President Joe Biden drops out and they decide to push Vice President Kamala Harris to the sidelines instead of the top of the ticket.
On Wednesday, Biden and Harris jointly proclaimed to campaign aides that they would press on in the face of growing criticism following Biden’s disastrous debate, according to the Associated Press.
“I am running. I am the leader of the Democratic Party. No one is pushing me out,” he said, according to the AP.
No one, least of all Biden’s running mate, can be seen publicly pressuring Biden to give up now.
Harris gets the money — probably.
In the event that Biden does call it quits, the focus will quickly turn to Harris. She is by far the best-positioned of Biden’s potential successors to take over. Most importantly, according to campaign finance experts, she would have the easiest path to accessing the Biden campaign’s $240 million war chest.
While nobody is quite sure what would happen to the millions should Biden step aside, Harris would probably control the cash — but only if she became the nominee.
“If Harris succeeded Biden as the presidential nominee, she would maintain access to all the funds in the campaign committee and could use them to advance her presidential candidacy,” Saurav Ghosh, the director for federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, told Business Insider in an email.
That’s because she shares a campaign committee with Biden, Ghosh said. Given her initial involvement with the Biden money — and the presence of her name on FEC filings related to his candidacy — she is likely the only one who could use the money without much issue.
Yet the same rules wouldn’t apply if Harris remained the vice presidential candidate or dropped off the ticket altogether.
According to Ghosh, federal contribution limits stipulate that candidate-to-candidate transfers don’t exceed $2,000 per election. While the Biden camp could convert the money into a political action committee if someone else was the nominee, there’s a catch — PACs can only donate a maximum of $3,300 per election to a different candidate.
“So in either case, there’s no legal way for Biden to transfer to a new candidate the $90 million dollars that his campaign currently has on hand,” Ghosh told Business Insider.
In a massive return-to-sender effort, the Biden campaign could also refund donations and donors could redirect their money toward the new candidate, campaign finance experts told NBC. Or, in yet another version of the future, the Biden campaign could transfer the funds to the national party.
All things considered, Harris soaring to the top of the ticket if Biden steps aside seems like the simplest solution with regards to the cold hard cash.
But money, of course, is not the only question — though many heads are turning in Harris’ direction, longstanding questions about her viability as a candidate remain.
Harris has major support among the Democratic Party’s core.
Pushing Harris aside could risk a firestorm. The vice president has repeatedly declared that she’s standing behind Biden, but already, influential voices in the party are lining up behind her. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, whose backing helped Biden win the state’s 2020 primary, has said he would want Harris if Biden drops out.
“We should do everything we can to bolster her, whether it’s in second place or the top of the ticket,” Clyburn said on MSNBC on Tuesday.
In Washington, where the optics are never far out of sight, it would be impossible to ignore passing over the first female vice president for a man, or the first Black vice president for a white candidate.
Black voters remain the core of the modern Democratic Party. No single group is a monolith, but none of the major Biden challengers come close to Harris’ support in the Black community. According to a recent Economist-YouGov poll, 66% of Black voters view Harris favorably. In comparison, only 47% of Black voters view California Gov. Gavin Newsom favorably; slightly fewer view Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the same light.
The same survey found that voters still don’t know enough about Whitmer to have an opinion about her, underlining another potential headache. Harris is one of the most-known politicians in the country. Any potential replacement will likely need to introduce themselves to the American people and on the national stage.
This doesn’t mean Harris has every advantage. Her notoriety comes with the White House’s baggage. Republicans would likely tag her with the same attacks on the economy and immigration that they’ve used against Biden. Unlike a potential replacement outside the beltway, Harris would struggle to show any major daylight with the president.
Already, Republicans are preparing for a potential Harris bid should she get the nomination and, with it, the campaign money. On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee released a digital ad calling her the “enabler in chief” and blaming her for chaos at the border.
Against ominous music, the ad asks, “Is this who we want to be president?” It seems the Democratic Party, and its donors, have to answer that question, too.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday, at the White House, offered to extend Elon Musk’s advisory role within his administration.
The 53-year-old tech billionaire attended the first Cabinet meeting since President Trump marked his first 100 days in office.
In what resembled a farewell message, Musk said the American people “voted for secure borders, safe cities, and sensible spending, and that’s what they’ve gotten.”
Musk observed that “a tremendous amount” had been accomplished in the first 100 days—more, he claimed, than any previous administration.
He stated that this achievement “portends very well for what will happen for the rest of the administration,” and opined that it could be the “greatest administration” in America’s history.
Musk, a senior presidential adviser who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, confirmed that $160 billion had been saved since January.
The Tesla CEO, however, expressed concern about the attacks on his company, adding: “They do like to burn my cars, which is not great.”
In response, President Trump thanked Musk for his contributions, noting that he has “sacrificed a lot” and has also been “treated unfairly.”
Trump added that the vast majority of people respect and appreciate Musk for opening “a lot of eyes to what could be done.”
“We just want to thank you very much, and you are invited to stay as long as you want,” the President added.
Musk reportedly no longer operates from the West Wing, but his DOGE team continues to work from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building within the White House complex.
Foreign ministers of military-ruled Sahel states of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger said on Monday they endorse an initiative offering them access to global trade through Morocco’s Atlantic ports, Reuters reported.
The foreign ministers expressed their countries’ position during a meeting with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI in Rabat, it said.
The West African nations, run by military leaders who took power in coups in recent years, withdrew from the regional grouping ECOWAS last year and formed an alliance known as the Confederation of Sahel States (AES).
Morocco, a major investor in West Africa’s financial and agricultural sectors, announced its trade access initiative in November 2023, after ECOWAS imposed trade restrictions on the three states.
The initiative is conducive to “diversifying our access to the sea,” Mali’s foreign minister Abdoulaye Diop told state media.
The meeting “is part of the strong and longstanding relations of the Kingdom with the three brotherly countries of the Alliance of Sahel States,” Morocco’s news agency said.
The visit takes place as relations between the AES and Algeria, Morocco’s regional rival, deteriorate.
Algeria has cut ties with Morocco and backs the Polisario Front which seeks an independent state in Western Sahara, a territory Morocco considers its own and where it is building a port worth $1 billion.
The new AES grouping expelled French and other Western forces and turned towards Russia for military support.
In December, Morocco mediated the release of four French spies held in Burkina Faso, five months after Paris recognised Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.
A massive power outage paralyzed Spain and Portugal on Monday in an incident with no immediate explanation.
“It’s best to not speculate. We will know the causes soon. We are not discarding any hypothesis, but right now, we just focus on what’s most important: returning electricity to our homes,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said at a news conference Monday.
The stoppage, which occurred about 12:30 p.m. Madrid time, caused chaos across the Iberian Peninsula and showed the vulnerability of Europe’s electrical grid — even on days without extreme weather or spiking demand.
Trains stopped running. Hospitals canceled surgeries, according to news agencies, and depended on backup generators. Business ground to a halt as machines were unable to process credit card transactions. The outage even suspended several Madrid Open tennis matches, with photos showing a court with nonfunctioning scoreboards and darkened stands. Sánchez urged citizens to restrict cellphone use and to call emergency dispatchers only “when it is really necessary.”
By about 5:30 p.m. Madrid time, Red Eléctrica, the corporation that operates Spain’s electricity grid, said some power had been restored across corners of the peninsula, including parts of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Andalusia. About two hours later, the utility provider said more than a fifth of the peninsula’s power had been recovered. Full recovery may take up to 10 hours, Red Eléctrica told Spanish news outlets, which means the country’s power could be restored some time late Monday.
“Causes are being analyzed, and all resources are being dedicated to addressing the issue,” Red Eléctrica said in a statement.
More than 50 million people live on the Iberian Peninsula, but authorities did not provide an immediate estimate for the number of people affected by the outage. Portugal’s national grid operator described it as a “massive cut” in electricity supply across the peninsula. Data from Red Eléctrica showed a sudden plunge in electricity demand from about 27,000 megawatts to less than 13,000. Levels remained abnormally low two hours later.
Spain’s Energy Ministry said in a statement that Sara Aagesen, a deputy prime minister, visited the Red Eléctrica control center to “learn about the situation firsthand and monitor the incident.”
“All necessary measures will be put in place to restore normality as quickly as possible,” the statement said.
Prime Minister Sánchez also held a meeting at the control center, with Aagesen and several other ministers present, the Spanish newspaper El País reported, and Spain’s National Security Council called a meeting to address the outage.
Portugal’s Lusa News Agency said the country’s cybersecurity center had seen no evidence so far that the blackout stemmed from a cyberattack. Separately, the Reuters news agency quoted unnamed officials as saying a cyberattack had not been ruled out.
The Spanish grid also connects with Morocco, France, Andorra and Portugal. Spain and France experienced a major blackout on July 24, 2021, but it lasted less than an hour.
Previous power outages in Europe have been caused by technical problems, lightning strikes and damaged cables. In 2003, Italy faced a huge blackout because a tree was too close to a power line, resulting in a flashover, or a jump of electricity from the line to vegetation.
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