The News
Before I hit the road, I asked Americana readers to submit their questions about this latest crazy leg of the presidential cycle. None of us have lived through an election like this, but some of the facts of the Trump v. Harris race are knowable. And since we’re nearly 100 days out from the election, it felt like a good time to check in and see what people were most curious about.
Thanks to everyone who submitted questions. Ask anything, anytime — and hopefully, our first answer session helps you figure out what’s going on.
The Mailbag
GARY COHEN: The press was all over Biden for not giving press conferences, and rightfully so. When will Donald Trump answer questions from the press? And do presidential nominees during their campaigns traditionally do press conferences?
AMERICANA: Do you remember the Hillary Clinton press conference ticker? In 2016, the fact that Clinton rarely held press conferences, where any reporter could ask a question, became a quasi-scandal. Big news organizations had assigned people to cover her, paying tens of thousands of dollars to travel around the country, consuming the toxic contents of airport vending machines. They were on hand at every public appearance. And for more than 200 days they never got to ask her questions in an open format.
You are right: Biden barely held press conferences. The NATO presser that ended up being his last, as a candidate, was for the White House press corps, not the campaign press. (There’s a lot of overlap, but not total.) Trump and Biden both answer questions, if they feel like it, from reporters who are present when their campaign planes land. But Trump hasn’t held a traditional press conference all year. Both candidates do (and in Biden’s case, did) most of their talking in sit-down interviews with individual outlets. And Trump has done far fewer with non-conservative outlets than he did in 2016 or 2020. The last extensive, anything-goes one was Time magazine’s cover story, in April (Biden also talked to them later). He did do an economy-focused sitdown with Bloomberg Businessweek more recently that generated plenty of policy news.
JACK STEPHENS: It seems like all the polling shows Biden doing as good or better than Kamala vs. Trump. What was the “undeniable” data that showed that he could not win?
AMERICANA: We know that Biden read ominous polling data before deciding not to run, conducted by his campaign. Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, longtime Biden advisers, showed him that polling last weekend, and Biden pulled the plug on Sunday.There’s no polling since the switch that shows Harris doing worse than Biden was, but the improvement has been marginal, not a flipped switch going from L to W. Biden was aware of that, too; polling before the candidate swap showed Harris losing to Trump, which was a reason why so many well-connected Democrats fantasized about replacing her with someone who’d start with lower negatives.
Biden hasn’t detailed everything that went into his thinking that Harris had a chance, and he didn’t. Maybe he never will. But the theory I heard most from Democrats was that the potential of a Harris nomination was bigger than polls could measure. That seems right to me. If you’d told someone two months ago, “Harris would raise $100 million in a day if Biden quit,” would you have believed it?
CORY COLLIGAN: Does Bob Menendez get to keep his pension or is he forfeiting it? What’s to prevent him from stealing national security documents (a la Trump) before he leaves?
AMERICANA: Menendez will likely lose both of his pensions. He spent six years in city government and five years in New Jersey’s state legislature, entitling him to a $1,066 monthly pension. If he had not been convicted this month, he was set up for a $11,600 monthly pension from his House and Senate career.
But he was convicted, and that deprives him of the congressional pension, thanks to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. He’s got the state pension until and unless the state disqualifies him from holding office again, which is likely, after he’s sentenced. That could take a while, as Menendez is planning to appeal.
In the meantime, by resigning on Aug. 20, he’s going to collect one more month of his current salary — six ounces of gold, though it’s typically paid in dollars. If he did decide to steal national security documents on the way out, that would be a bad idea, because only presidents can unilaterally declassify documents. Anyone else takes them, it’s a crime. (Thanks to David Wildstein for the pension facts.)
NICK FIELD: Would Chuck Schumer be opposed to Kamala Harris choosing Mark Kelly as her VP nominee? And more to the point, does Schumer have enough sway with Harris to convince her not to do so?
AMERICANA: Officially, he has no position on that, but I see what you’re getting at — Kelly is the only potential running mate who’d have to give up a Senate seat to run. If he stays put, Democrats don’t have to defend that seat until 2028, and with an incumbent who mints money. If he takes the job, and wins, Gov. Katie Hobbs will appoint a replacement who may or may not run for the rest of Kelly’s term in 2026 — and would then have to run, again, in 2028 after that. You’re talking about tens of millions of dollars of campaign spending, if recent Arizona races tell us anything.
Schumer doesn’t have the pull with Harris to dissuade her, but unsentimental vote-counting matters more to her than to most politicians. One reason that Bernie Sanders isn’t in the Biden cabinet — he was in the mix for Labor — was that if he’d left the Senate, his seat would have remained vacant until a special election, and Mitch McConnell would have remained majority leader for the first crucial months of Biden’s presidency. No Democrat who’d be replaced by a Republican is on the Harris list. But Kelly would force a special midterm election in Arizona, and even the most optimistic Democrats don’t want that.
TORR LEONARD: Can you please explain to me how exactly it will be decided who Kamala’s running mate will be? Do delegates vote on who should be the VP? And does the VP have to be picked at the convention, or can it wait until after the convention? And please settle the current “debate” about whether the VP can be someone who is registered to vote in the same state as Kamala.
AMERICANA: Harris gets to choose her running mate, and Democratic delegates will have to affirm it. The party wants a virtual vote before the DNC itself, for reasons too tedious to get into again; the ticket will probably be nominated by Aug. 7, if they keep that schedule. The stated reason for that rush is getting right with every state’s ballot deadline. No state has a barrier to a Harris/TBD ticket if it’s nominated by Democratic delegates next month. Some would pose problems if the ticket was chosen later.
The debate about residency is nice and settled: Article II of the Constitution states that presidential electors will vote “for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.” This has never been litigated, and nobody seriously wants to litigate it. Trump publicly said fellow Floridian Marco Rubio brought some potential residency headaches as a running mate, though, and there was reportedly discussion of him moving in order to get ahead of a legal challenge if necessary.