Kamala Harris says she has ‘not yet’ chosen her running mate – live | US elections 2024

Martin Pengelly

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump released dueling campaign ads on Tuesday, as the reshaped presidential election began to grind into gear with 98 days to go.

The vice-president’s ad, Fearless, was her first since she became the de facto Democratic nominee, after Joe Biden halted his re-election campaign and endorsed her. “Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said.

To give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act. But we are not going back.

The former president’s ad, I Don’t Understand, used a snippet of Harris answering a question about immigration policy to bolster a hardline message about drugs, crime, terrorism and the southern border.

Showing footage of her dancing, Trump’s ad called Harris “failed, weak, dangerously liberal”.

Kamala Harris was asked if she had chosen her running mate yet while boarding a plane to Atlanta, Georgia.

Harris replied:

Not yet.

Paul Dans, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 presidential transition project, has stepped down from his role, according to reports.

The move comes after pressure from the Trump campaign leadership, and an ongoing power rift over staffing control for a potential second Trump administration, the Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberg writes.

Semafor’s Kadia Goba reports that this does not mean that Project 2025 is shutting down.

Joanna Walters

Journalists at the White House media briefing have been hoping to draw the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, about whether Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are discussing her forthcoming choice of who will be her running mate.

Now that the US president has passed the torch for the election campaign to his vice-president, making her the presumptive presidential nominee, with the support of the rest of the top echelon of senior Democrats, who’s she talking to about the second slot on the ticket for November?

Jean-Pierre said: “The president has been in public service for more than 54 years, he was vice-president for eight years, president for 3.5 years and six more months, and I think as a leader of the Democratic party he always offers up advice, a little bit of wisdom that he has, on multiple fronts.”

In her role as White House press secretary, Jean-Pierre cannot speak on election campaign matters, so is obliged to be careful and cryptic.

She added: “That’s a role he plays, as well, with the vice-president. I’m not going to speak to the campaign …When she became vice-president herself, he offered his advice as a mentor to her, but I’m not going to go beyond that.”

Roughly 7% of w​​omen of reproductive age in the US have attempted to induce their own abortions outside the formal healthcare system, a new study has found, up from 5% before Roe v Wade fell in 2022.

The study, published on Tuesday in the Jama medical journal, determined how many people reported ever “self-managing” their own abortion in 2021 and again in 2023 – a timeline that allowed researchers to examine how Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the supreme court case that overturned Roe, has affected self-managed abortions. People of color and LGBTQ+ people were more likely to report having ever attempted to end their own pregnancies.

“We think because it’s getting more difficult to access facility-based abortion, that self-managed abortion will increase,” said Lauren Ralph, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research group at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a really important piece of the puzzle, as we try to understand the full impact of the Dobbs decision on people’s reproductive lives.”

Since Dobbs, 14 states have enacted near-total abortion bans. On Monday, Iowa became the fourth state to ban the procedure past about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant. Full report here.

Hello US politics blog readers, it’s been a lively morning and there’s more to come, we’ll keep you up with the news as it happens. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is about to brief the gathered media in the west wing.

Here’s where everything else stands:

• Kamala Harris and her yet-to-be-named vice-presidential running mate will travel to a series of battleground states next week, Reuters is reporting, citing sources.

• Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, is being vetted by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a potential vice-presidential nominee pick, NBC is reporting, citing sources.

• The Secret Service’s acting director, Ronald Rowe, has told lawmakers he was “ashamed” by the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Rowe, appearing before a meeting of the Senate judiciary committee and homeland security and governmental affairs committee, said he considered it indefensible that the roof used by the gunman was unsecured, during the former president’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month.

• Trump on Monday repeated his weekend remarks to Christian summit attendees that they would never need to vote again if he returns to the presidency in November. Trump, in a n interview with Fox News that aired last night, was asked to explain what he meant when he told a crowd on Friday to “get out and vote, just this time. “That statement is very simple, I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not gonna have to do it ever again’,” he said.

• Kamala Harris’s campaign has responded to Trump’s first major ad attacking her handling of the issue of immigration.

• Harris’s campaign has announced a $50m advertising blitz ahead of the Democratic national convention next month with a television ad that portrays the presumptive Democratic nominee as “fearless”. The 60-second ad will be the first in a series of paid media efforts ahead of the convention, which begins 19 August in Chicago.

• A Zoom call meant to rally “white dudes” in support of Kamala Harris’s run for the White House raised more than $4m from about 190,000 participants, including numerous celebrities, according to the presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign. Showing up were a bunch of top Democrats and stars including Jeff Bridges, Mark Hammill, Mark Ruffalo, and others.

• Harris will announce her running mate “in the next six, seven days”, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, said.

Rachel Leingang

Republican primaries across Arizona today will test whether the far-right cadre focused on election denial still can win among their base, despite major losses in the 2022 primaries.

The state has been gripped with fights over elections for years, with candidates like Donald Trump and Kari Lake refusing to concede their respective races. These general election losses in 2020 and 2022 ended decades-long Republican dominance, delivering the governor’s office and other top spots to Democrats.

The results could foretell whether Arizonans, particularly Arizona Republicans, are ready to move on from election denialism and the far-right flank that controls the state party. And that lesson could carry into November in the swing state, which Biden narrowly won in 2020 in an upset.

Lake, who lost the governor’s race in 2022, is now running for Senate. She faces Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal county, but she is expected to win the Republican contest on Tuesday. The winner will face the Democratic representative Ruben Gallego. The seat is open after senator Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic party and decided not to run for re-election, making it a top race to watch nationally for control of the chamber.

Kamala Harris and her yet-to-be-named vice-presidential running mate will travel to a series of battleground states next week, Reuters is reporting, citing sources.

The exact details on which states – and when – Harris and her running mate have not yet been firmed up, CNN is also reporting.

John Giles, the Republican mayor of Arizona’s third largest city and a previous thorn in the side of his party for endorsing Democrats, has thrown his support behind Kamala Harris for president.

Giles, who since 2014 has been mayor of Mesa near Phoenix, also rebuked Donald Trump in an opinion piece for the Arizona Republic published Monday.

Our party used to stand for the belief that every Arizonan, no matter their background or circumstances, should have the freedom, opportunity and security to live out their American Dream.

“But since Donald Trump refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, Republicans have yet to course correct,” he continued.

The Republican party with Trump at its helm continues down the path of political extremism, away from focusing on our fundamental freedoms.