As the Democratic Party gears up for its mid-August convention in Chicago, where it will officially name its candidate for president, questions remain about whether Harris — or another presidential hopeful — can access hundreds of millions of dollars raised by the Biden reelection campaign and other groups.
In fact, former president Trump has already signaled that he will contest Harris’ use of the funds,
submitting a complaint to the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.
But according to
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard and an expert in election law, the Trump filing isn’t likely to block Harris — if she is selected as the party’s nominee — from using the Biden reelection campaign funds. “Harris has the keys to the account right now and any complaint about that is not going to be resolved by the FEC” before the election, he says.
In an interview with Harvard Law Today, Stephanopoulos explains how the party nomination process will work, why Harris should have no trouble accessing campaign funds, and why other legal challenges to Biden’s replacement as candidate will likely fail.
Credit: Jessica Scranton
Harvard Law Today: Given that Biden was chosen as the nominee by voters through the primaries, is the Democratic Party allowed to just change its nominee? If so, practically, how does that work?
Nicholas Stephanopoulos: So, it’s important to remember — Biden was not the actual, official nominee of the Democratic Party yet. He was just the presumptive nominee because he had accumulated enough pledged delegates to get a majority of the total number of delegates. But the convention hadn’t happened. The delegates hadn’t voted. And, so, he hadn’t yet become the nominee.
Once President Biden dropped out, the party was free to identify a different nominee.
The ultimate bar for becoming the Democratic Party nominee is just having an outright majority of delegates voting for you at the convention in August.
Now it appears that Kamala Harris is going to have an outright majority of delegates backing her. If so, under the pre-existing standard Democratic Party rules, she’ll receive the official nomination.
Things might have been a lot trickier if Biden had pulled out after becoming the official nominee. But because he pulled out before the convention, things are a lot simpler.
