Elections 2024 updates: Kamala Harris’ VP search enters final hours as she turns down Trump’s debate proposal

A reality TV star, former president and convicted felon is taking on a career prosecutor, former senator and vice president.

Here’s Gustaf Kilander on their respective records.

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed that she “did not call one person” in the weeks before President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race – despite widespread reports that the powerful Democrat had been key in his decision to step down.

Here’s John Bowden on what she had to say.

Kamala Harris’ campaign has launched “Republicans for Harris” with endorsements from former Trump administration officials and prominent conservatives.

The initiative is “a grassroots organizing program to further outreach efforts to the millions of Republican voters who continue to reject the chaos, division, and violence of Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda,” the Harris campaign said in a statement on Sunday.

Notable endorsements include former White House press secretary and Melania Trump chief-of-staff Stephanie Grisham and former homeland security and counterterrorism advisor to Mike Pence, Olivia Troye.

The Republican has insisted that he and running mate JD Vance aren’t “the weird ones” as the presidential candidate fights to combat Democrat messaging to the contrary.

Trump made the remarks Thursday on the The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a conservative political podcast, following days of messaging from Kamala Harris’s campaign dubbing her rivals “weird.”

“Well, they’re the weird ones, and if you’ve ever seen [Harris] with the laugh and everything else, that’s a weird deal going on there,” he said.

“They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not and I’m up front, and he’s not either, I will tell you, JD is not at all. They are.

“You notice the evening news, every one of them talk, you know, they introduced the word weird, and all of a sudden they’re talking about weird.

“Now, we’re not weird people. We’re actually just the opposite. We’re right down the middle.”

Still sounds weird to me.

Here’s Katie Hawkinson with more.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is once again firefighting a bizarre story from his past after he wildly confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade ago.

Seemingly attempting to get ahead of the publication of a forthcoming article in The New Yorker magazine, RFK Jr posted a video on X recounting the wild tale to former sitcom actress Roseanne Barr.

Over on his social media platform, the Republican is sounding desperate indeed as he claims the markets are spooked by Kamala Harris and that an economic crisis is coming if she wins in November, another tired old gambit he’s wheeled out many, many times before.

He’s also been claiming, bizarrely, that the Biden administration “hates farmers” (why?) and that the media is trying to cover up his assassination attempt, rather than naturally losing interest a month after it happened, with a great deal else going on.

Kamala Harris held last interviews on Sunday to compare and contrast her chemistry with each of the final contenders to be running mate as she gears up to announce who will be joining her on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro all met with Harris at her Washington DC residence,The New York Times reported.

They all hail from states considered to be battlegrounds this November, giving them an edge in the selection process.

John Bowden has this report.

The Arizona Senator rather muddied the waters around his candidacy to be Kamala Harris’s running mate last night when he posted and then swiftly deleted a tweet in which he declared, “Now my mission is serving Arizonans,” seemingly suggesting he is no longer in contention, going on to replace it with something far vaguer and more innocuous.

A former US Navy pilot and astronaut who turned to politics after the near-fatal shooting of his wife Gabby Giffords, Kelly would be a popular choice for the role, not least because of the efficiency he could deliver on the campaign trail if he chose to enlist his identical twin Scott to help cover more ground.

Lindsey Graham has warned Donald Trump against devolving into birtherism-like attacks against Kamala Harris during the 2024 race for the White House.

The South Carolina senator appeared on Fox News Sunday on August as the Trump campaign continues to search for an effective message to run against Harris after she became the formal Democratic nominee.

Graham made the remarks after Trump broached the issue of Harris’s racial background during an interview at a conference hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists this week. In front of the largely Black audience, Trump insisted that Harris had only recently decided to identify as Black — drawing groans from the crowd.

John Bowden has the full story…

Last week, at a speech in Florida, Donald Trump warned that a Kamala Harris presidency would “forcibly impose crazy San Francisco liberal values on Americans nationwide.”

San Francisco, population 808,437, has long been a punching bag for conservatives nationwide — but Trump neglected to mention that his own running mate, JD Vance, also has deep ties there.

Perhaps more than any other time in US history, both sides of the ticket include people with fundamental ties to the Bay Area.

First, there’s Vice President Harris. This week she became the first Californian Democrat to secure the presidential nomination. Growing up in Oakland, she methodically rose through local and then state politics, bridging the region’s long activist tradition and its old-school local Democratic machine.

Io Dodds and Josh Marcus have the full story…