Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic presidential candidate in the United States, but Donald Trump continues to describe the vice president’s rise to the top of his party’s ticket as “unconstitutional” and accuses her of participating in a “coup”.
No serious effort to challenge Harris’ status as the Democratic nominee is taking place.
But some of Trump’s critics warn that the former president could be laying the groundwork to question the outcome of the 2024 election if he loses a second time.
Democrats are set to gather next week in Chicago for a national convention where they will support Harris as their new standard-bearer following President Joe Biden’s decision not to run for re-election.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) made it official last week: Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz are the party’s nominees for president and vice president, respectively.
Convention delegates held a virtual roundtable before the convention, with Harris receiving 99% support from participating delegates.
Republicans have acknowledged that after the DNC vote, there is no longer any way to challenge Harris’ placement on the ballot.
“When the DNC nominated her, they were still within the deadline to submit the necessary documentation to each of the states to get her (and Walz’s) name on the ballot. The fact that the DNC nominated her ended any challenge in that regard,” a person familiar with the Trump campaign’s plans told CNN.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump — who now faces a much tighter race, according to polls, than the one he led against Biden — from complaining about Harris’ rise, which came after Biden won the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year.
One of Trump’s critics said the former president’s efforts to question Harris’ legitimacy as the Democratic nominee could be a way to set the stage for questioning the legitimacy of this year’s election.
“We know one thing for sure: Trump never loses. And so, if he is not declared the winner of 2024, like in 2020, it must be because he has been treated unfairly once again; he’s been robbed once again,” John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser and has since become a voracious critic of the former president, told Kaitlan Collins of CNN last week.
“I don’t think he knows exactly what his theory will be this time to explain how he was denied victory in the election, so he’s putting forward a number of things,” Bolton said.
“And I think that’s why people need to start thinking more now about how to deny Trump the ability, the day after the election, if he loses, to try to throw the process into chaos again.”
In a conversation with X owner Elon Musk that was broadcast on the social media platform Monday night, Trump said Harris’ promotion was “a sham” and accused top Democrats of forcing Biden out of 2024 race.
“This was a coup by a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do this the legal way, or we can do it the hard way,’” Trump alleged.
He also criticized Democrats at a news conference last week, saying that Harris taking over for Biden “seems to me actually to be unconstitutional. Maybe it’s not.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson also stated that Harris would face legal obstacles that did not materialize.
The Louisiana Republican told Jake Tapper of CNNon July 21 — the day Biden dropped out — that Democrats would face “real problems” and “legal obstacles” that would be litigated in several states.
“In some of these states, it’s a real hurdle. They have a real problem replacing the nominee at the top of the ticket,” Johnson said.
The next day, when it became clear that Harris would face no serious opposition on her path to the Democratic nomination, Johnson did not specify what laws Democrats would allegedly break with Harris at the top of the ticket.
“I said we have 50 different systems in each of the states when it comes to presidential elections and choosing electors and everything else, and in some states, there are impediments to just swapping someone like that,” he told Manu Raju of CNN.
“That’s not how the system is supposed to work,” he said. “There is a reason this is unprecedented. You don’t just, you know, run roughshod over the rules in the process because you decide your candidate is no longer a good fit. That’s what happened here.”
According to a survey of CNN in July, however, election officials in at least 48 states, both Republican and Democratic, said there were no obstacles that would prevent Harris from getting on their ballots once she became the Democratic nominee.
Election officials in the other two states, Florida and Montana, did not respond to requests for comment, but a review of those states’ ballot access rules suggests that Harris is unlikely to face problems there either.
Legal experts also told CNN that the courts would be unlikely to accept lawsuits seeking to challenge the inclusion of a new name at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“As a legal matter, it is up to the convention to nominate a candidate. And all the legal precedent is about courts deferring to the party’s choice of its nominee and then giving voters the choice,” Ben Ginsberg, a Republican campaign lawyer who has served as general counsel for several of the party’s previous nominees, said last month.
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