Joining us now, NBC News White House correspondent Mike Emily,
NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles, and New York
Times chief White House correspondent and MSNBC political analyst Peter
Baker.
So, Mike, Kamala Harris is going to be going to
Delaware.
She's going to be visiting the campaign staff.
What do we know about that visit and what do
we know about any interactions she's been having with President
Biden in these last 24 hours?
Well, Katie, any minute now, we should see some pictures
of Vice President Harris boarding Air Force 2 for that
very short flight from the Washington area into Wilmington, DE
And from there, she'll head to the campaign headquarters.
What was the Biden Harris campaign headquarters?
Now the Harris to be determined campaign to headquarters.
And this is an important visit because since last April
when the president announced he was seeking a second term,
his campaign has raised 10s of millions of dollars, built
a behemoth of an organization across the country and hired
10s hundreds of staff to such a staff, the battleground
states, but especially to staff the campaign headquarters.
And they were rather uncertain yesterday, in fact, learning just
as we all were publicly when that announcement came from
the president, that he would not seek a second term.
So it was important, we're told, for the vice president,
for her to go as soon as she could to
speak to those employees directly.
The the leadership of the campaign has made it clear
to them that this was a campaign that was designed
and built to win across the country and to beat
Donald Trump.
And it remains that and that everyone who was employed
on the campaign will continue to be.
But it's also an important opportunity for Harris to meet
with the campaign leadership and as she wants to her
own stamp on this campaign.
Every campaign is a reflection of the candidate it represents.
And there is clearly as much as Biden and Harris
were a close knit team over the last three plus
years, really almost four years since she joined the ticket
in the summer of 2020, she does now leave the
ticket and was going to want to have a campaign
that represents her more fully.
So there will be conversations as well about potential changes,
ways in which her team will be layered into this
operation and what if anything is going to change now
as she moves forward with the imperative of having to
win an election with 100 plus day Sprint.
Reminder, she is not the Democratic nominee just yet.
But as more and more leaders across the party have
come out today to make their endorsement of her official,
it does appear clear that whatever process unfolds to determine
that nomination is one that is going to be much
more of a coronation in the end for Kamala Harris.
Also, what the party and the campaign, whichever campaign it
ends up, will do with the nearly 100 million that
has been raised in just the past day.
All right, Ryan, let's talk about what's happening on Capitol
Hill.
Leader Jeffries and the Majority Leader Schumer were supposed to
be meeting with Kamala Harris.
Jeffries said shortly.
Have they already met with her?
Are they going to be meeting with her after the
visit to Delaware?
We don't exactly know the time frame of when that
meeting will take place, Katie, just that we know it's
going to happen soon.
And while both Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have had
a lot of good things to say about Kamala Harris,
they've stopped short of giving her their outright endorsement.
They do at least want the opportunity to meet with
her, look her in the eye, have a face to
face conversation before they take that step.
And I think that is reflective of this concern that
this be somewhat of an open nominating contest, that there
be the opportunity for others to put their hat in
the ring if they are so willing to do so.
And and Schumer and Jeffries don't want to put their
thumb on the scale until they absolutely have to.
But listen to what Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader,
had to say about Kamala Harris in this race just
a few minutes ago.
Leadership and I are scheduled to meet with Vice President
Harris shortly.
The House came back into session today.
The Senate does not come back into session tomorrow.
I'm excited for that meeting.
And let me say this, that Vice President Kamala Harris
has excited the community.
She's excited the House Democratic Caucus and she's exciting the
country.
And so I'm looking forward to sitting down with her
in person in short order with Leader Schumer.
And we'll have more to say about the path forward
as soon as that meeting.
And that, of course, classic Hakeem Jeffries shortly does not
give us any kind of specific idea as to when
that meeting will take place.
But you can't read between the lines.
He's mentioned that the Senate is not in back in
session till tomorrow.
So there's the realistic possibility that Chuck Schumer's not even
in Washington yet.
So I would not be surprised if that meeting doesn't
take place until tomorrow.
There's probably not a lot of suspense here.
It seems very likely that Schumer and Jeffries will join
the rest of the Democratic power base that is getting
behind the the Kamala Harris campaign.
And I think a big reason for that, Katie and,
and, and Chris, is that we've seen the last three
weeks of turmoil, of angst, of a divided Democratic Party.
The Democrats I talked to are just sick of that.
They want to move on.
They want to unite behind a candidate.
They want to take on Donald Trump.
And I think that's part of the reason why you're
seeing everyone be so swiftly willing to get behind Kamala
Harris's campaign.
And and Peter, we were just watching as Kamala Harris
at JBA Joint Base Andrews was getting on to a
flight that's going to take her to Delaware where she's
going to meet be meeting with campaign staff like the
rest of us.
Many of them caught on the very last minute of
being shocked by what happened.
It's it's possible just a little more than 24 hours
ago.
Now talk about her role in these early hours with
so many people getting behind her to really shore things
up, to shore things up with her campaign, to shore
things up with the folks in Congress and frankly, to
move forward.
Yeah, she's obviously done a lot of the things that
she needs to do in this 1st 24 hours.
She spent 10 hours on the phone after yesterday's announcement,
we're told, making phone calls to congressmen and senators and
governors and other Power Party figures.
And that's paying off because, in fact, the road does
seem clear.
The nomination for her, no.
But you can't beat somebody with nobody.
And nobody seems to be running at this point.
So she seems to basically have it locked up.
Obviously, anything could still happen, but if they are not
announcing by the end of the day, it's hard to
see how in this very truncated.
Anybody else could even mount a credible campaign, much less
actually take her on.
So she's already looking ahead to the fall, to taking
on Donald Trump beyond the campaign, beyond the convention.
She has to to raise money, as she's already showing
that she can do, as she has to consolidate the
party behind her.
And she has to demonstrate that she can be a
national leader in a new way.
Because while a lot of Americans know her, people don't
know the vice president the same way they know a
president.
She's going to have that chance now to reintroduce herself,
make clear who she is and how she fits into
this political moment and what she wants to make the
priorities of her of her campaign.
What do you expect we should see in the next
couple of days from her?
I mean, there's there's a sense that this introduction has
to, you know, just show people that she's up to
being the leader of the free world.
We've been hearing from a lot of folks out in
battleground states who clearly are not tremendously familiar with her,
who have not been following the news day-to-day.
How high is is the level of challenge and what
do we expect to see?
Yeah.
I mean, she's been playing the inside game for the
last 24 hours.
We haven't seen her in public except for a brief
appearance on the South Lawn to congratulate NCAA sports champions,
which is kind of an odd first appearance for a
person, you know, debuting as a presidential candidate.
So presumably in the next few days, she'll start to
make the public case, which she hasn't done yet.
You're right to say that there is obviously, you know,
some disconcerted Democrats in places like the Midwest, where they
worry about whether she can, you know, she can sell
to their constituents.
They don't know.
Obviously, there's a concern that, you know, she hasn't proven
to be a great campaigner in the past and that
her own campaign in 2020 didn't even make it to
the first vote.
But I think there's such an excitement about a fresh
face, right?
I think Americans, broadly speaking, were really sick of the
choice.
They didn't want to have a rerun of 2020.
They didn't want to have Biden and Trump as the
only possibility.
That's the reason why you see people like RFK Junior
doing reasonably well as an independent.
They wanted a fresh face, and she now can present
that to them.
Take the generational argument, flip it on its head and
make it about Trump being age 7878 and suffering from
his own cognitive issues.
And hopefully, from her point of view, energize younger voters,
Black voters, women, others who might not have been necessarily
all that excited about Joe Biden but were part of
his coalition.