Campaigning on patriotic vibes, Harris touts $540mn fundraising haul

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. Today let’s get into:

• The Democrats’ rebrand

• China’s US election wariness

• What happens to RFK Jr’s voters?

Kamala Harris is trying to recast her party as the US’s patriotic champions [free to read].

With American flags everywhere in the US, our flavour of patriotism might seem odd to those abroad. But the Republican party, with a firmer political grasp on the concept than Democrats, has long relied on it to win over voters.

So it was surprising that at the Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago, event organisers supplied “USA” placards for attendees to hoist high in the air and chant accordingly. (“U-S-A” chants are more common to hear at a Donald Trump rally.)

Harris also framed a vote for her, over Trump, as a country-loving act: “It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done,” Harris said as she accepted the nomination before a lively crowd that cheered her as the candidate of change, “guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love”.

It’s unclear whether the Democrats’ rebrand will be as successful as Abercrombie & Fitch’s, but for now they can add it to the plethora of vibes that seems to be propelling Harris’s policy-light campaign.  

Still riding high from the DNC’s energy, Harris’s campaign on Sunday touted the $540mn the vice-president has raised since she took Joe Biden’s place at the top of the party’s ticket. A total of $82mn flowed in during the convention week alone.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo that there had been “unprecedented grassroots donations” during the past week, with a third of donations coming from first-time contributors. Of those new donors, 20 per cent were young voters and two-thirds were women.

Meanwhile, as Trump tries to get back in the spotlight, he has bashed “comrade Kamala Harris” as a “communist” candidate, while his campaign hit out at her for the US’s “botched” withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago this week.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

• Despite anti-immigration sentiment in the Republican party, a number of US cities led by Republican officials are eager for an influx of migrant workers. [Free to read]

• Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration pressured Meta to “censor” certain Covid-19 content, adding that he would be politically “neutral” this election cycle.

• Making it more affordable for people to raise children is a central part of the vice-president’s economic message, but she faces an uphill battle.

• Meet the 50 top donors of the 2024 election cycle, who have pumped $1.5bn into races across the country. (The Washington Post)

• With uncertainty over subsidies and tariffs, the US election is complicating investors’ hunt for infrastructure deals. 

• Trump has started to acknowledge that he is at risk of losing the election and needs to make some changes to how he campaigns. (Politico)

Behind the scenes

China has yet to decide whether it wants to see Harris or Trump take office in 2025. 

Beijing has been watching Harris’s rise carefully, and we can be certain that it is parsing her statements and records for hints about what her potential administration’s stance would be towards the US-China relationship.

“Trump and Kamala Harris are two bowls of poison for Beijing,” Zhao Minghao, a professor of the Institute of International Studies and Center for American Studies at Fudan University, told the FT’s Joe Leahy, Wenjie Ding and Demetri Sevastopulo. “Both see China as a competitor or even an adversary.”

Most Chinese academics think that her record as vice-president is not as important as who she might keep from Joe Biden’s foreign policy team, which has been key to hawkish China policy.

“What really matters is who she trusts because she is not an expert on foreign affairs,” said Wang Chong, a foreign policy expert at Zhejiang International Studies University, who added that Harris’s nomination came as a “surprise” for many in China.  

It will also be interesting to game out what role her running mate Tim Walz might play in China policy. He could bring a personal touch to bilateral relations, some Chinese analysts say, since he spent time teaching in the country — though he has been very critical of the Chinese Communist party.

Datapoint

Robert F Kennedy Jr dropped his White House bid on Friday and endorsed Trump — but will the independent’s supporters actually flock to the former president?

Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.

In a memo on Friday, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio wrote that the endorsement is “good news,” claiming that Trump’s internal polling data shows that RFK Jr voters favour the former president in every swing state.

But whether Kennedy’s backers will shift their allegiance to Trump, go for Harris, or stay home on election day is rather unclear.

On aggregate, polls excluding RFK Jr (before he dropped out) showed a similar bump for both Harris and Trump. When Kennedy was removed from the mix, the Democrat gained 1.96 percentage points while Trump’s support increased 1.51 points, according to an FT analysis.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released earlier this month did show that Trump had a slight edge nationally, with 35 per cent of Kennedy supporters saying they would vote for the former president and 34 per cent saying they would back Harris in a head-to-head match-up.

But the survey also showed that Harris gained ground among Kennedy backers before the ex-Democrat dropped out: in July, 48 per cent said they would vote for Trump compared with 23 per cent for the vice-president.

Viewpoints

• Harris is a blank slate on China, and we can’t assume much since “we know very little about her foreign policy philosophy” generally, writes Edward Luce in the latest FT Swamp Notes newsletter. [Available for premium subscribers]

• Politicians in rich countries forget about upward mobility — something the US does well — when they attempt to perform the immigration balancing act, according to Stephen Bush.

• Jen Harris, former National Economic Council member, explains how Kamala Harris’s “we’re not going back” slogan could include a new brand of economics. (NYT)

• Brooke Masters notes that “no matter who wins in November, US watchdogs will almost certainly have to pull in their horns”. [Available premium subscribers]

• History suggests that Elon Musk’s infatuation with Trump will backfire, says Tevi Troy (Politico Magazine)