Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic presidential nominee, but Donald Trump is continuing to describe the vice president’s elevation to the top of her party’s ticket as “unconstitutional” and accusing her of taking part in a “coup.”
No serious effort to challenge Harris’ status as the Democratic nominee is underway. 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 at which they’ll rally around Harris as their new standard-bearer after President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection.
The Democratic National Committee made it official last week: Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are the party nominees for president and vice president, respectively. Convention delegates held a virtual roll call ahead of the convention, with Harris receiving 99% support from the participating delegates.
Republicans have acknowledged that after the DNC vote, there is no longer any path to challenge Harris’ placement on ballots.
“When the DNC nominated her they were still within the timeframe to submit the required documentation to each of the states to place her name (and Walz’s) on the ballot. The fact that the DNC nominated her has ended any challenge in this regard,” a person familiar with the Trump campaign’s plans told CNN.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump – now facing a much closer race, polls show, than the one he’d led against Biden – from complaining about Harris’ ascension, which took place after Biden had swept the Democratic presidential primaries earlier this year.
One of Trump’s intraparty foes said the former president’s efforts to question the legitimacy of Harris as the Democratic nominee could be a way to lay the groundwork to question the legitimacy of this year’s election.
“We know one thing for sure: Trump never loses. And so if he’s not declared the winner of 2024, as in 2020, it must be because he was treated unfairly yet again; it was stolen yet again,” John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser and has since become a vocal critic of the former president, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week.
“I don’t think he knows exactly what his theory is going to be this time to explain how he was denied winning the election, so he’s trotting out a number of things,” Bolton said. “And I think this is 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 and 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’ elevation was “a scam” and accused top Democrats of forcing Biden out of the 2024 race.
“This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way,’” Trump claimed.
He also criticized Democrats in a news conference last week, stating that Harris taking over from Biden “seems to me, actually, unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly claimed that Harris would face legal hurdles that have not materialized.
The Louisiana Republican told CNN’s Jake Tapper on July 21 – the day Biden dropped out – that Democrats would face “real problems” and “legal hurdles” that would be litigated in a number of states.
“In some of these states, it’s a real hurdle. They have a real problem with replacing the nominee at the top of the ticket,” Johnson said.
The next day, as it became clear that Harris would face no serious opposition on her path to the Democratic nomination, Johnson would not specify which laws Democrats would allegedly break with Harris atop the ticket.
“I said that we have 50 different systems in each of the states when it comes to presidential elections and choosing electors and all the rest, and in some of the states, there are impediments to just switching someone out like that,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.
“This is not the way the system is supposed to work,” he said. “There’s a reason it’s unprecedented. You don’t just, you know, steamroll the rules in the process because you decide that your candidate is no longer suitable. That’s what’s happened here.”
According to a CNN survey in July, however, election authorities in at least 48 states, both Republicans and Democrats, said that there were no obstacles that would prevent Harris from getting on their ballots once she became the Democratic nominee. Election authorities 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 Harris is not likely to face an issue there either.
Legal experts also told CNN that the courts would be unlikely to go along with lawsuits that sought to challenge the addition of a new name on 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 on courts deferring to the party’s choice for its nominee and then giving the voters the choice,” Ben Ginsberg, a Republican campaign attorney who has served as general counsel for several previous GOP nominees, said last month.
