DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
We are now 100 days away from November 5. And there are plenty more campaign stops, rallies, and speeches to go. Joining me now to talk about the state of the presidential race is NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Debbie.
ELLIOTT: So on Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris secured the support of enough delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. When does it become official?
LIASSON: Well, Democrats are going to take a virtual roll call vote on August 7. That's to avoid any ballot challenges that would stop her name from getting on state ballots. Then, of course, the Democratic Convention is August 19. You just heard J.D. Vance say that somehow this process is not democratic. In fact, the process is being done by Democratic Party rules. Each party gets to decide how it nominates its presidential candidates, and delegates have a right to vote for who they want. I think what you're hearing Vance say is trying to lay the groundwork to contest the 2024 election results if they're not to their liking. You know, Trump has never said he'd accept the results of an election if he loses. It's kind of head I win, tails you cheated. And last time they said that the process was also undemocratic. So I think that's why you're hearing Republicans attack the Democratic Party's process.
ELLIOTT: So how else has Trump been talking about Harris?
LIASSON: Well, you heard him do a little bit of that. He has called her Lying Kamala. He's called her a bum. He has called her a lunatic, an ultra liberal, pro criminal. But he also went off message this week with that other clip you just played, where he suggested that maybe this would be the last election. This goes in the category of other things he's said and done, trying to overturn the 2020 election results, refusing to rule out violence from his supporters if the 2024 election didn't go his way. He's talked about terminating the Constitution and now maybe the end of elections if he wins.
ELLIOTT: What about Harris' campaign messaging thus far?
LIASSON: Harris' campaign messaging has taken a real shift away from Biden's. Biden's messaging was pretty abstract. Trump is a threat to democracy. That isn't very meaningful for most voters. Instead, she's leaned into Tim Walz's comments that Trump is just weird. It's a more relatable way to talk about him. He first made those comments on MSNBC. He repeated them in various interviews. And by the end of the week, Tim Walz's comments had become the Harris campaign mantra. She was sending out...
ELLIOTT: He's the governor of Minnesota, we should...
LIASSON: The governor of Minnesota. And now she says her opponents are weird and creepy. And I think she's going to stick with that. This is a more relatable way to describe Donald Trump as extreme. Of course, she also has to characterize herself and define herself in the next couple of weeks before she is defined by Republican attack ads against her.
ELLIOTT: You know, not only does she need to define herself, but with the roll call August 7, not far off, it seems she needs to be nailing down who she's going to pick for her running mate. What can you tell us about that contest?
LIASSON: We know - sources have told NPR that she is vetting a number of candidates. Actually, former Attorney General Eric Holder is ahead of the vetting process. Most of the names you hear are white male moderates, most of them from battleground states - Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. He is not only from a battleground state, but he was an astronaut, a naval aviator. His wife, former Congressman Gabby Giffords, was grievously wounded in an assassination attempt. You hear about Kentucky Governor Andy Bashir and Roy Cooper from North Carolina - governor there.
ELLIOTT: A couple of governors in red states. A couple of Democratic...
LIASSON: That's right.
ELLIOTT: ...Governors who are in red states. So before we let you go, Mara, I want to ask you a little more about Vance. There's been some chatter that Republicans are having a bit of buyer's remorse following some of the media blowback this past week. And it's not just from the cat ladies and the people who love them. Do you think there's any regret on the part of the Trump team over Vance?
LIASSON: Well, there has been some regret. Some Republicans are saying maybe he wasn't vetted well enough, that the pick was made to further energize the MAGA base, but not to expand the coalition. Some Republicans I've talked to have said, what if Nikki Haley were on the ticket? Things would look different now. You know, the Vance pick was made not just because of overconfidence but because when you are a minority party, like the Republicans are, and you know you can win with fewer votes than your opponents, you really don't have much of an incentive to appeal to moderate voters, swing voters, women voters. You just want to juice up your base and turn them out. And in a lot of ways, the new Republican Party, the Trump party, is not really a traditional political party. It's more of a movement. It wants to change the world. And in many ways, it acts almost like a revolutionary vanguard. And I think that's what the pick of Vance was. And certainly, Donald Trump has not shown any remorse at all. He says Vance is doing a great job.
ELLIOTT: That's NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Thank you, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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