Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris were preparing for their first public appearance as running mates on Wednesday afternoon, after President Trump, his Republican allies and conservative hosts on Fox News unfurled a string of sexist attacks on Ms. Harris.
Mr. Trump followed up on Wednesday morning with a racist tweet claiming that Mr. Biden would put another Black leader, Senator Cory Booker, in charge of low-income housing in the suburbs. That tweet did not mention Ms. Harris, but it continued Mr. Trump’s tactic of playing into white racist fears about integration efforts as he declared, “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me.”
“They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge!”
The president did not explain why he referred to Mr. Booker, whose first name he misspelled. But the salvo came after a chorus of Fox News hosts on Tuesday night assailed Ms. Harris, attacking everything from the pronunciation of her name to Mr. Biden’s selection process for focusing on women of color.
Over and over on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, mispronounced her first name, even growing angry when corrected. “So what?” he said, when a guest told him it was pronounced “Comma-la.”
Mr. Carlson said that there were “time-share salesmen you could trust more” than Ms. Harris and “payday lenders who are more sincere,” alluding to an institution long accused of exploiting poor communities of color.
Martha MacCallum, the Fox anchor, said that focusing the search for a running mate on women of color “takes away” from the selection process overall. The Fox News host Sean Hannity called Ms. Harris a senator with a “radical extremist record” whose selection “solidifies what’s the most extreme radical far-left out-of-the-mainstream ticket of any major political party in American history.”
Jeanine Pirro, another opinion host on the cable news channel, threw in a wildly conspiratorial twist, asking viewers, “Who really picked this woman to be the vice-presidential candidate?’
Ms. Harris ran her own presidential campaign and was widely seen as the most obvious choice for Mr. Biden: at once a conventional and groundbreaking choice. But when he finally announced her selection on Tuesday, Mr. Trump and his allies appeared to be caught without a coordinated game plan, lurching from one attack to another.
After Ms. Harris was chosen, Mr. Trump described her four times as “nasty” or “nastier,” using some of his favorite terms for female opponents, and complained that she had not been nice to his Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings.
Hours after calling Ms. Harris the “most liberal” member of the Senate, the Republican National Committee sent out an email blast saying that progressives hated her because she was not progressive enough.
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said Mr. Trump’s tweet about suburban housing amounted to “clumsy, bigoted lies” and showed the president was “dumbfounded after Joe Biden’s selection of a strong running mate.”
WILMINGTON, Del. — The Democratic ticket is finally complete. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris, two Democrats from opposite coasts and different generations, are expected to make their first appearance as running mates in Wilmington shortly before 4 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.
Ms. Harris made an unannounced appearance at the Hotel du Pont, a grand old Wilmington hotel, shortly before 1 p.m., waving to a smattering of cheering fans who had gathered on the street corner before walking indoors to a ballroom that workers had been preparing for days.
As the new Democratic ticket prepares to step into the spotlight, here are four tasks they face:
Show they are simpatico. Mr. Biden was fond of saying that he wanted a vice president with whom he was “simpatico” on how to confront the major challenges facing the nation. Now is the chance for him and Ms. Harris to demonstrate that.
After all, it was less than 14 months ago that Ms. Harris unleashed a scorching debate-stage attack on Mr. Biden, and some Biden allies harbored hard feelings toward her throughout the search process. How will they show that they are truly on the same page on the central issues of the campaign?
Demonstrate how they will take it to Trump. Ms. Harris, a former state attorney general and district attorney known on Capitol Hill for her pointed questioning style, liked to talk about prosecuting the case against President Trump. Now she will have her biggest platform yet. How will she be deployed to make that argument, and how will it differ from Mr. Biden’s approach?
Team up on selling an agenda that can win. Neither Mr. Biden nor Ms. Harris ran primary campaigns that revolved around policy plans, but they still will need to get on the same page. Some differences are evident, such as their split on health care, and Ms. Harris has appeared more comfortable speaking the language of the left than Mr. Biden has (though progressive activists have often viewed her skeptically).
But they are now joining forces in a radically changed political environment compared with when they were primary rivals, with the coronavirus and the economic recovery as dominant issues, as well as an intensified national focus on racial justice after the killing of George Floyd. Can Ms. Harris engage new constituencies around their shared agenda — and if so, which voters?
Figure out Harris’s role in the campaign. One big unknown is what the final months of the campaign will look like given the pandemic. Mr. Biden has made in-person appearances rather infrequently, and his critics sneer about how he is running for president from his basement. It remains to be seen how often and where Ms. Harris will campaign.
Mr. Biden has said he wanted a running mate who “has some qualities that I don’t possess.” How will the campaign use Ms. Harris’s strengths — as a historic candidate, a skilled public speaker and someone who represents the generational and racial diversity of the Democratic Party — to add fresh value to the ticket?
By choosing Ms. Harris as his running mate, Mr. Biden opted for a time-honored model in which running mates are not just governing partners but political understudies of sorts.
Pegged as a rising star for a decade, but with less than four years of experience in the Senate — she was 8 years old when Mr. Biden was first elected to the chamber — Ms. Harris, 55, reflects a traditional archetype in an election year that has been anything but normal.
She is also a thoroughly establishment-friendly figure, as is Mr. Biden: Both have hewed closely to their party’s mainstream for years, shifting left with the times but always with an eye on the broader electorate and higher office.
Progressive Democrats now find themselves led by two moderates with relatively cautious political instincts, even as activist energy courses through the party and left-wing challengers unseat some incumbents. The party establishment is hoping that the mostly young protesters filling the streets of nearly every American city to denounce police brutality and Mr. Trump will rally behind two figures who have offered sympathetic words and proposals but whose careers have been shaped by their relationship with law enforcement.
“She’s not of the far left of the party, she’s a former prosecutor,” Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Homeland Security secretary, said of Ms. Harris. “And when you’re a prosecutor, you have to make some tough calls.”
Mr. Biden also chose Ms. Harris to help inject excitement into his campaign. He is leading in the polls, but mostly because he’s the genial alternative to the most divisive president in modern history, who is presiding over a pandemic and economic collapse.
Mr. Biden also turned to Ms. Harris to bring a fresh perspective to the West Wing should they win — a similar calculation, but with the roles reversed between ticketmates, that propelled him to the vice presidency 12 years ago.
Mr. Biden spurned those progressives who wanted their consensus-oriented standard-bearer to elevate a liberal like Senator Elizabeth Warren, instead picking a prominent leader from the demographic that resurrected his campaign in the Democratic primary. By doing what Hillary Clinton did not do four years ago and choosing a Black running mate, he may give the party’s most loyal voters a reason, beyond animus toward Mr. Trump, to work for and elect the ticket.
President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, met privately last weekend with Kanye West, the rapper who has filed petitions to get on the November ballots for president in several states.
The meeting took place in Colorado, where Mr. Kushner was traveling with his wife, Ivanka Trump, those familiar with the meeting said. Mr. West had been camping in Colorado with his family, and afterward flew to Telluride to meet with Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, but was not accompanied by his wife, Kim Kardashian West, those with knowledge of the meeting said.
After an inquiry, Mr. West tweeted Tuesday evening: “I’m willing to do a live interview with the New York Time about my meeting with Jared,” adding that they had discussed a book about Black empowerment called “PowerNomics.” He did not elaborate on his meeting with Mr. Kushner in a brief follow-up interview. He instead expressed anger about abortion rates among Black women and said he didn’t reflexively support Democrats.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The meeting came at a notable time. Mr. West recently criticized Joseph R. Biden Jr. in an interview with Forbes. He did not deny that he is acting as a spoiler to damage the Biden campaign with his effort to get on several ballots in states like Colorado, where he will appear. It’s less clear that his name will be on the ballot in Wisconsin, where his signature petitions are being challenged.
Silicon Valley and Wall Street cheered the selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate who would reinforce Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s moderate policy stances. Mr. Biden had already been gaining traction among tech and finance executives, and his pick is likely to strengthen that support.
In Ms. Harris, Silicon Valley sees a familiar face: She got her start in the Bay Area and has been a fixture in fund-raising circles there for decades. Tech executives appear reassured by her circumspect stance on things like breaking up the sector’s dominant companies.
During her presidential primary run last year, when asked by The New York Times whether she would break up tech companies, she didn’t answer directly but said her “first priority” was regulation that gave consumers better control of their privacy.
For Wall Street, Ms. Harris was a moderate choice, in contrast to more left-leaning candidates in the Democratic primary race who called for a tougher line on finance firms. That said, during her presidential primary campaign, Ms. Harris said that she would pay for her health-care plans with taxes on financial transactions, an unpopular move in bank boardrooms.
Although Mr. Biden has vowed to raise some taxes and has signaled that he will crack down on corporate America, many of the details remain vague. Traders and financiers have donated more to Mr. Biden’s campaign than to President Trump’s by a factor of nearly five to one.
“I think she’s the perfect partner for Biden,” said Marc Lasry, co-founder of Avenue Capital and a supporter of Mr. Biden’s campaign. “She’s smart and extremely experienced.”
Wall Street was likely to look favorably on almost any moderate running mate, said Michael Novogratz, who runs a cryptocurrency investment firm and has been a big Biden backer. Stock market futures rose after Mr. Biden announced his pick.
But given his expectation that a Biden administration would raise taxes and adopt a more conservative approach to spending, Mr. Novogratz said, “I think Wall Street is out of their minds, thinking the Democrats are going to be good for the stock market.”
Climate activists praised the selection of Ms. Harris, saying the move signaled a sustained Democratic focus on environmental justice.
Ms. Harris was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, an expansive plan to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions while also addressing economic inequality. She supports abolishing the Senate filibuster if Republicans stand in the way of passing climate change legislation. And she has called for a $10 trillion increase in spending over a decade as well as a price on carbon dioxide pollution, with a dividend that is returned directly to households.
Ms. Harris’s core environmental focus has consistently been on how poor communities are disproportionately affected by polluting industries.
A former prosecutor, Ms. Harris vowed to maximize the power of the legal system to punish corporate polluters. Last year she laid out specific plans for protecting vulnerable communities, including establishing an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability and scoring environmental regulations or legislation based on how they affect low-income communities.
“I’m super hopeful,” said Catherine Flowers, a senior fellow at the Center for Earth Ethics. The choice of Ms. Harris, she said, “is elevating the conversation and making it a priority.”
A Republican candidate for Congress in Connecticut who dropped out of the primary race at the last moment after being arrested Monday night was in a virtual tie with his opponent as of Wednesday afternoon.
The candidate, Thomas Gilmer, trailed his opponent, Justin Anderson, by just four votes out of more than 17,000 votes cast. Mr. Gilmer, 29, was charged Monday with strangulation and unlawful restraint in connection with a “possible domestic assault,” the authorities said.
State officials said on Tuesday that if Mr. Gilmer won the primary, he would remain on the November ballot unless he formally withdrew. Republicans might be able to nominate someone to replace Mr. Gilmer if he wins and withdraws, depending on the timing, the Connecticut Secretary of State’s office said.
Whoever ends up as the Republican candidate faces long odds in November against the seven-term Democratic incumbent, Representative Joe Courtney, who was re-elected with 62 percent of the vote in 2018.
Here are results from some of Tuesday’s other races:
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In a Georgia runoff between two Republicans to replace Representative Doug Collins, Andrew Clyde, a gun dealer and a Navy veteran, beat Matt Gurtler, a state legislator. Mr. Collins, also a Republican, is leaving his seat to challenge Senator Kelly Loeffler in November.
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Republicans in Minnesota’s Seventh Congressional District chose Michelle Fischbach, a former lieutenant governor, to face off in November against the longtime incumbent Representative Collin Peterson, a conservative Democrat in a rural district that leans heavily Republican.
When Mr. Trump announced that he was unilaterally deferring payroll taxes to bring economic relief to struggling Americans, he and his aides thought it would allow them to frame him as pro-worker.
But the move comes with political risks. Eliminating the payroll tax could jeopardize the funding stream for Social Security, which is one of the government’s most popular programs, providing benefits to about 65 million people.
The president has given Democrats an opening to raise Social Security cuts as an issue in the final months of an election in which his support among older voters already appears to be shaky.
On Monday, Mr. Biden capitalized on the opportunity. “Donald Trump said that if he’s re-elected, he’ll defund Social Security,” he tweeted. “We can’t let that happen.”
The Democratic National Committee amplified the line of attack the next day, blasting out a statement that highlighted “At Least 7 Times Trump Said He Will Permanently Eliminate Funds To Social Security And Medicare.”
Beyond the complicated legal questions about whether Mr. Trump can circumvent Congress by using executive actions to create his own tax-and-spend policies, and the economic debate about whether a payroll tax even helps the right people (it does nothing for the unemployed), the proposal leaves Mr. Trump juggling political priorities.
He is now balancing the potential benefits of giving working people more money in their paychecks — at least temporarily — versus undercutting his own pledge from the 2016 campaign that he would protect entitlement programs.
If Kamala Harris becomes vice president, her ascension would leave an opening in January for her seat in the Senate. The pick would be made by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In this morning’s California Today newsletter, The Times’s California correspondents Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Medina tossed around names of possible successors. One is Representative Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who was herself on Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s short list for vice president and is the former speaker of the State Assembly. Another is the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti.
Here’s more of our reporters’ thinking:
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Jennifer Medina: “Within minutes of the announcement, I had texts from politicos around the state throwing out names that included Ms. Bass, Mr. Garcetti, as well as State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, former Senate majority leader Kevin de Leon and Attorney General Xavier Becerra (who was appointed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown after Ms. Harris won her Senate seat). Needless to say, there will be a lot of jockeying in the coming months.”
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Adam Nagourney: “Here’s a conspiracy theory for you. Mr. Newsom picks Mayor Eric Garcetti, just to make absolutely sure Mr. Garcetti doesn’t think of primary-ing him in a few years.”
As a nation unpacks the political implications of Kamala Harris’s selection on Tuesday as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, at least one sizable constituency could stand to benefit: those who enjoyed Maya Rudolph’s star appearances as the California senator on “Saturday Night Live.”
The former “S.N.L.” cast member shined in three guest appearances lampooning the Democratic primaries, depicting Ms. Harris as a “fun aunt” who “will give you weed, but then arrest you for having weed.” The performances earned Ms. Rudolph an Emmy nomination for guest actress in a comedy series and an approving tweet from Ms. Harris herself.
Ms. Rudolph, who was in the cast of “S.N.L.” on NBC from 2000 to 2007, was in the middle of recording an “Entertainment Weekly” panel discussion on Tuesday when Ms. Harris was announced as Mr. Biden’s pick. She did not commit to playing Ms. Harris when “S.N.L.” returns for its scheduled 46th season in the fall, but seemed intrigued by the idea.
“I love going to the show,” Ms. Rudolph said. “Any excuse I can get, I love.”
Ms. Harris appeared to have little problem with the impersonation. In October, before she dropped out of the race, she told MSNBC, “I plan on keeping Maya Rudolph in work for the next eight years.”