President Joe Biden announced Sunday he’s no longer seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination, saying his exit from the race was in the best interests of his party and the country. He then threw his support to his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris. But is it as simple as that? Will Harris receive her party's nomination? Is she the best person the Democrat's have to take on Donald Trump? And does the market's mild response to the news suggest many think a Donald Trump victory is still the most likely outcome?
Hosts Stephanie Flanders and Adrian Wooldridge explore those questions. Plus, we bring you an episode from our sister show the Big Take -- Gregory Korte and Laura Davison, who cover money and politics for Bloomberg, discuss Kamala Harris’s fundraising edge and how Democratic donors are reacting to the news.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Welcome to voter Nomics, where politics and markets collide. This year, voters around the world have the ability to move markets, countries, and economies like never before, so we created this series to help you make sense of it all. I'm Stephanie Flanders.
And I'm Adrian Woodridge.
And as I know we all know by now, President Joe Biden has confirmed he will not seek nomination for the twenty twenty four presidential campaign. That statement was released on Sunday afternoon US Time, led to an outpouring of respect and thanks to him for making this decision, which an awful lot of people have been begging him to make for several weeks since that terrible performance in the debate. Going to try, Adrian to avoid telling people loads of things that they already know, but we did think we should focus this episode on this major change in the US presidential race and start to think about some of what might happen next. But your first thoughts on what happened on Sunday and the path forward.
Well, I think the crowning of Joe Biden has sort of Cincinnatus as this great figure who has sacrificed himself for on his sword for the good of the republic. Is rather annoying, I must say, because he fought as long as he could and as hard as he had to be virtually leave it out of the position. But he was inevitable. It was just a matter of time. And it does seem as though the script is playing itself out in a fairly controlled way, in the sense that Kamala Harris will be the nominee in as something very strange or very unpredictable happens, and the Democratic Party will unite behind her. And she does look on paper at least like quite strong candidate, partly because she's a woman, partly because he's ethnic minority, partly because he's young. She's fifty nine against a seventy year old seventy eight year old Trump. So it'll be the Democrats playing the age card, which that the Republicans have been playing, and partly because the Democratic Party does sort of have a spring in except at the moment the money is pouring in. There's a lot of good will towards her, and the sense that they looked at defeat and decided that victory was a better.
Option, and We're going to say more about the situation with donors a bit later on. It were certainly stunning. There was just under fifty million dollars in grassroots do nation in the less than twenty four hours since Joe Biden made that statement, and we know that there had been a very much, very little money coming in over the last few weeks as we saw this debate over his performance play out. The interesting thing, though, I mean, when a lot of the big donor I had heard saying over the last few weeks that they were nervous about the Carmela stage of the process, that they quite wanted to get to an open process. They wanted to get to those exciting, new, shiny candidates who had less of the baggage of the Biden administration hanging off them. You know, it now seems you know a lot of those candidates that get talked about, whether it's Gavin Newsom or the Michigan governor Gritch and Whitmer immediately said that they were came out in support of Carmela when Biden endorsed her, and a lot of that seems to be shut off. There are certainly some sort of significant senior voices who've not endorsed her, not least former President Barack Obaba, but there does seem to be a head of steam around app the sort of wild cards for the next few weeks, if you think about the sort of barely four weeks till the Democrat convention in Chicago. There is a lot of talk on the Republican side about legal challenges. The Heritage Foundation that the conservative think tank has been saying for a few days that there will be grassroots challenged to removing Biden from the ticket. Very hard to see how those get very far, given that he's not the formal nominee yet in any state, but that doesn't mean that they won't happen and maybe delay things a bit. I think more concerning, perhaps for the Democrats, will be the worry that the sort of continued pressure and accusations from the Republican side about how long President Biden's condition was kept from the public and who is implicated in that, not least Vice President Kamala Harris, and whether or not you know, questions about whether President Biden should stay as president until November or indeed January, if he is unfit as he appears to be. Do you think either of those have legs.
I think the Republicans have two very powerful arguments to make. One is the argument that if he's not capable of running for the job, he shouldn't be doing it now. And the second is that this is a sort of establishment stitch up which is excluding ordinary people and is a sort of an elite conspiracy. And we have, you know, back the Republican Party is now a populist party, and that's a very good populist case to make. I don't think it will get anywhere in terms of the legal challenges. I think the legal challenge cites me is nonsense. I mean, a candidate has the freedom to withdraw their name, and you know they're part of a ticket, and the funds should go to the other part of that ticket. That strikes me it's a very difficult thing to challenge. I think she's now the inevitable candidate. I don't think the Democratic Party can say to a black woman who has been serving as vice president, we don't want you to run. However, I think she's a weak candidate. She she shouldn't have been the vice president for an aging, aging president. She's not very ocular, she's not got a very substantial political career. She's not done very much as vice president. Her team's around her seemed to disappear or fall out. She's not really good at managing people. She's not an impressive debater. She may surprise us all, but when she ran for president in her own right, it was a disaster.
Okay. So the pushback to that, which obviously we've heard more of in the last few weeks as a lot of Democrats have sort of thought about the implications of going further, going beyond Carmala Harris. One is, even if we think on paper that they're a better candidate scretch on Whitma, for example, or Gavin Newsom, is the incremental benefit of those lesser known but fresh faces large enough to justify the risk of sort of chaos on the path to getting that. I think the answer that's probably now. I think there's also if you look back at the sort of Carmela's underrated argument says, if you go back to that campaign, that was indeed a very weak campaign and she didn't get very far in the primaries. Remember that the twenty twenty election campaign was a very peculiar one. It was dominated by not least COVID, but black lives matter, and she had this reputation as a prosecutor who'd been very tough on crime, was controversial in California as a prosecutor in that feverish environment, in that kind of anti police environment, and so she was in a peculiarly kind of weak old position as an African American in that in that she never quite hit her stride in that campaign. The other argument is she's got a lot better. You know, people say she's learnt in office. She was inexperience then, so she's become a more seasoned campaigner.
Sure, but she's had sometimes as vice president, and as vice president a record is quite dubious. She's not very articulate, she's repeatedly you know, underperformed in public fora and she's not very good at running things. You know, her staff seemed sort of disappeared like the snow on a hot summer's day.
It's a pretty awful job. It's a it is awful dog.
But you know, Dick Cheney did it in where that made a big made a big difference. It is possible to do it well, particularly if your president is somebody who is somewhat tiring in the job. However, you know, to say something positive about her. At the moment, she's two points I think behind in polls for what they're worth at the moment. In Donald Trump she has she could improve that by a lot as the party unites behind her and starts talking about her. Her merits, she does mobilize important demographics for the party and above all, it looked as though this election was going to be a referendum on Joe Biden and his various failures. Now it's much more a referendum on Donald Trump. You know, she she is not the person in the spotlight. Trump will be the person in the spotlight. He will be the galvanizing figure, and he has a lot of weaknesses. There's no doubt about that that she will be able to exploit.
She is quite strong and has been campaign on the abortion issue and with jd. Vance, he's in favor of abolishing abortion and in Trump's vice presidential nominee has also said previously been negative about even IVF, so that she could be a very strong campaigner against that if he continues to have that role. I think I know a very big argument against her and a challenge she will have is is the close connection to the Biden administration if in so far as the Biden administration has not made a strong economic case to the electorate, particularly in swing states where economics perhaps features more heavily than things like abortion or indeed sort of democraphea of democracy with president. With a President Trump coming back in, she will have the same problems that Biden had in making that it proving to people that things have been better than they thought.
Absolutely, the mood at the moment is anti incumbent right across the world's We've seen again and again in Britain, in India, to some extent in France. And she has the problem not only of being tied to the incumbent, but also as being tied to what the Republicans would no doubt called the cover up. You know, she was there saying he's perfectly all right, He's as sharp as attack he can. He can dance and sing and do and do everything imaginable. Well, it now seems that he's had a problem with cognitive awareness and with physical fitness, and that cover up will be something that Republicans will keep going on about. Biden I think had no chance of winning. She certainly has a significant chance of winning, but I'd still put the betting on Trump rather than her. And I just wanted to add one more thing which worries me, and that is this, so long as the Europeans thought that Trump was pretty bound to win, they were really getting their act together in terms of taking a more responsible role in funding NATO, in PROD, in funding their own defense, in acting as though the world's you know, as though they were responsible for the stage of the world. Now I'm worried that they'll say, well, Trump might well not win. Camala may may may may easily not easily win, but may may well come out on Trump on top of the old world may be preserved. They might They like to do that. They like to delay, and they may take this as an excuse to delay on important things light defense spending, and I think that would be a very bad thing. They should act as though Trump is a certainty, even if he isn't, partly because I think he's more likely than not, Partly because the MAGA straining in Republicanism is important in Congress it will remain important, But partly because I think that the Democratic Party cannot be relied on to be the sort of internationalist party that it was perhaps perhaps traditionally, the protectionist wing is very strong. Biden pushed through quite a lot of protectionists measures, tariffs and things like that. The shift away from taking responsibility for Europe's defense goes back to to to Obama in some ways, the pivots to as things like that, this is a more isolationist country, whoever is on top. Obviously Trump would be a massive game changing, but we cannot rely on America for our defense anymore. Europe needs to take a more responsible role, and in some ways rightly so.
Well, that is a very good note of warning from you to Europe, which I hope Europe will listen to. They certainly should. I would have a bit of a sort of related warning to the sort of Trump traders. You know that we've had a lot in the last few weeks, in particularly as it's become apparently more and more inevitable, certainly more higher probability that President Trump would be re elected. We would have we've seen this kind of optimism in the market. The market reaction since Biden said he wouldn't run has been muted, I think probably because as you suggest, that President Trump winning is still the most likely option if you just look at the world, but also if you look at the betting of But I think there should also be a sort of growing understanding that there has to be a ceiling to this bill market, even nor even especially with Donald Trump, because you look at what his tariff policies mean for inflation, what his approach to renewing his very expensive tax cuts means for US borrowing, certainly, what all of that means for further interest rate cuts. If you think that a large part of the Trump, large part of the enthusiasm around the equity market has been around the prospect of money getting cheaper again. That's not going to happen in a Trump administration where inflations are going up again. The only beneficiary of all that, arguably, which is possibly the strongest Trump trade, is a stronger dollar. But that's precisely what neither Trump nor especially JD. Vance has said he would favor. He thinks that it's been a terrible cost to the nation to have had the currency sort of over strong over these years. So I think all of that ought to play into market considerations, business can considerations, and I know it plays into donor considerations over the next few weeks, and that's something that we want to get into a bit more with our sister podcast, The Big Take in DC. Gregory Corte and Laura Davison are two journalists who cover money and politics for Bloomberg, and they have done a special episode out today trying to answer the question of how much Harris's campaign could cost, what kind of edge she has in fundraising, and how Democratic donors are reacting to the news. We hope you enjoy that. Thank you for joining me, Adrid, giving your wisdom and listen on.
After mounting pressure from members of Joe Biden's own party in Congress, and finally reportedly from his former running mate and former President Barack Obama, Biden released a state meant saying he'd drop out of the twenty twenty four US presidential race.
Suddenly, on a Sunday afternoon, the dam broke that.
Damn broke Via tweet, I called up Gregory Cordy, a White House and Politics reporter, to get his reaction to the news.
The decision isn't a surprise, but the sudden timing of.
It was, and Sarah, we got an answer to that big question, would Biden drop out? But that only raised more questions.
In addition to the decision not to run for reelection, there are a lot of decisions baked in that decision. Does he tap an air apparent? Does he endorse Kamala Harris?
Who would donors back to replace him? Where does the Democratic Party go from here?
And not long after his first announcement, Biden tweeted an endorsement of Harris. But that endorsement now kicks off an entirely new phase of the election, which means there are even more unknowns.
The Democratic National Convention is just one month away. Voters will go to the polls in less than four months. Even if Harris clinges the nomination in Chicago in August, is there time for her to fundraise and advertise herself to the American people? How much money does a candidate really need to campaign successfully if they're taking over the ticket so late in the year.
Well, my first thoughts was it's gonna be a long three or four months. Now.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
I'm David Gerratt and I'm Sarah Holder. Today on the show, I dig into these questions with Gregory and with Money and Politics editor Laura Davison. As of Sunday evening, just hours after President Biden's announcement, not much was known about how he made the decision and how he thought about timing its release. I asked Gregory Cordy and Laura Davison about that.
It's hard to say because he kept counsel only with a very small inner circle of aids on this. We're getting reporting that even his own campaigns was blindsided by this announcement. He may have been waiting until after the Republican Convention for things to settle. He was in seclusion for the past few days recovering from a COVID infection, so he may have been waiting to see if he could ride that out and come back.
But it's really important to note that in the past, you know, essentially three weeks since the debate that really sparked all these concerns, Democratic donors have basically said, look, we are freezing contributions to your campaign. There have been a handful of donors we've come out and said I'm still with the president, but most folks said, look, we're not going to throw good money after bad. We want this guy out, and our leverage is donors is money. So you saw, you know, a bunch of different efforts. You know, some donors start different super PACs that they said, would you know, start collecting money that would go to whoever the eventual new nominee is. And this all came at a very critical moment when Trump had a ton of new donor support. You know, folks like Elon Musk and Timothy Mellon were coming in with really large donations, and they realized that, look, this is not a tenable situation here, this.
Moment feels unprecedented, and people are already reacting all around the world. How do you expect markets to react?
We do know that in the past couple weeks, as Trump has seemingly grown stronger in his bid, that markets has started to price a Trump win in. So that looks like, you know, a potential increase in tariffs, particularly targeted Chinese goods, but all sorts of goods. Markets are also anticipating a pretty large tax cut if it's Trump. Anytime there is a seismic shift in what US leadership looks like, there will be market reactions.
So as part of his announcement, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee. Does it mean Biden's campaign is shutting down immediately and Harris's is now jumping into action. What happens next, Gregory?
Presumably if Biden has his way and Vice President Harris has hers, she will take now the top spot of that ticket and recommend to the delegates at the convention next month who her choice for vice president would be her running mate. She would get to keep that sizeable war chat that Biden has built, but he started to burn through cash in the past month or so and it's not quite as formidable as they would like. So the first order of business is to rebuild that war chest, get some big donors on board through super packs, and then it will be up to the Vice president, if it is her as a nominee, to decide how she wants to structure her campaign. But there's really not a whole lot of time right to completely blow up the campaign. It already has field offices, it's already bought a lot of ad time. That strategy is going to have to change very quickly, of course, now that there's a new Canada the top of the ticket, so a lot of these things we're going to just have to see in the coming days. How that all comes to pass.
Just how much money is currently in the Biden campaign coffers compared to Trump.
So just on the raw dollar total, they're not too far apart. So the Biden campaign has ninety six million dollars. The Trump campaign has one hundred and twenty eight million dollars. So Trump is ahead, not a massive amount. The thing think that's the real differentiator here is that Biden's fundraising has totally fallen off a cliff. The other thing is just how much they're spending. In the month of June. This is even you know, before a lot of the debate stuff started percolating, Democrats spent ninety three percent of the money that they brought in compared to Trump, who was spending less than half. So just the burn rate, there is a massive difference.
The Trump forces have been spending next to nothing. They have a super pac that spent money in Pennsylvania, Georgia and now has just gone into Arizona. But they've been marshaling their resources, really sort of hoarding their cash, while Biden has gotten out early. All that money. Now, I don't want to say it's wasted money, because it helped perhaps the Democratic brand, but it was money that was spent to promote Biden. And now Democrats have to figure out a new branding, a new message now that the nominee will be somebody else.
And Laura, how is the Trump camp reacting to this news.
There's a couple different schools of thought within the Trump campaign. Just last night he had a rally in Michigan where he talked about some of the array that was happening with Democrats. Of course, this was before Biden announced that he would be dropping out. But Trump, at the top of his rally essentially like pulled the crowd and said, you know, basically, who do you want to be? You know our opponent. Do you want it to be Joe Biden? Do you want it to be Kamala Harris? And so the crowd overwhelmingly, by a show of voices, indicated that they wanted Biden to be the nominee. You know, a clear sign that at least, you know, Trump supporters think that he is an easier candidate to be. However, we know that the Trump campaign for weeks has been preparing that it may be Kamala or it may be someone else in the race that they're running against So they've started working on messaging.
What are we hearing about how Democratic donors are reacting to Biden's announcement and whether they'll rally behind Kamala Harris versus someone else.
So there's really two camps of donors right now. One some of the major donors who are coming out and saying, look, we support Harris. These are folks like George Soros and his son Alexander Soros saying we're going to support Harris and you know what, she needs to run. There's another group of donors. I'll note that these are less made donors. These are people who give maybe up to a million dollars but still have an influential voice within the party and are very vocal, and they're saying, hold on a second, we want to make sure there's some sort of open nominating process. We want to have either a primary or an open convention. And this is going to be a debate that plays out over the next couple of days and whether those loud vocal voices saying they want some sort of way to choose the nominee versus have it just going to Harris automatically. If they went out, this could be very messy, and you could have a lot of different candidates rise to the four, you know, each siphoning off a little bit of donor money, but not having donors unite behind one candidate. This is the exact problem that Republicans had on their side of after twenty twenty two, the major party donor said, we don't want to have Trump as our nominee. We should all pick a candidate and you know, give to that candidate and we could defeat Trump. That never happened. First looked like it might be DeSantis, then maybe Nikki Haley, but Trump at that point was too powerful and had enough support within the party base. A similar thing could happen with Harris if donors don't decide and that it is clear that the party leadership and the base of the party is moving with Harris, she could be the nominee and donors are going to have to line behind because they just won't have any options at that point.
After the break, we dig into what an open convention could look like and the financial problems that could face the eventual nominee, including how much money a new candidate would need to launch a successful campaign in under four months. We're back I've been talking with White House and Politics reporter Gregory Cordy and Money and Politics editor Laura Davison about what we currently know about President Biden's decision to drop out of the twenty twenty four race. But what comes next? The open convention scenario sounds chaotic perhaps, but could any of this upheaval actually energize donors. Could donors who have thus far sat on the sidelines get activated to actually start donating more to the Democratic Party.
That's the argument that some of these donors make and say, look, you know, they're particularly arguing for a more moderate candidate. Have someone who's maybe a little bit more business friendly, Have someone who appeals to some of those people who are never Trumpers on the Republican side. You could bring a lot of money in right now. That's all theoretical. There's no one who's coming forth and saying, look, I'm going to pledge you know, X million dollars if it is a certain candidate. Everyone is sort of seeing where the political wins are blowing, and just the way that the calendar moves, these decisions have to be made soon. This is not something that can play out over a couple weeks. Or months. You know, it's almost a first mover advantage here.
One of the games that modern campaigns play is that they try to raise a lot of money around events to kind of signal that they have the momentum. So I would expect the Paris campaign, now that there is one, to come out in the next few days and give us a total of exactly how many millions of dollars she's raised in a very short period of time to kind of give the impression that there's a snowball effect that people are rallying around her campaign, that she does have the ability to raise that small dollar donor, and sometimes small dollar donors follow small dollar donors. If people see that there is momentum behind a candidate, that might encourage even more people to jump in.
Already, we're seeing that tactic in action. As of nine pm Eastern on Sunday night, the Democratic fundraising platform Act Blue announced it received over forty six million dollars in donations from small dollar donors just since Biden officially endorsed Harris Laura. Supporters of Harris have been saying that one of her biggest assets is her access to Biden's war chest that ninety six million dollars we were talking about earlier. How does the process work now? Does the Harris campaign inherit all that money automatically or could it go to another nominee.
If it is Harris as the nominee, yes, she would be able to inherit the ninety six million dollars or so that is left in the account. She's able to operate a lot more seamlessly than if it's another candidate, So she is able to keep on staff, people could keep their email addresses. If in fact it is another candidate, they have to start a campaign committee, essentially the thing you file with the FEC to say hey, I'm running for president. They have to start a brand new campaign. That campaign will have zero dollars in it. The ninety six million that's left in the Biden campaign. They can either donate that to the Democratic National Committee or to a super pack, which presumably would then go to support that new candidate ultimately, but you know, at least in their campaign account they'll have zero dollars, so they'll immediately have to start fundraising. There are a bunch of fundraising limitations, so for just an individual donor, the most they could give to that campaign is just a couple thousand dollars, so that you've got to go out and bring in a lot of money. You need to bring in a lot of grassroots money. You'd need to have all of the super PACs working with you. Imagine a startup. This is what the campaign would be doing of just you know, getting staff hired, getting off a space, doing all of these things. And it would take them weeks to just get up on the ground and running you know, stuff that the campaign when a normal year would have been doing, you know, a year or even two years ago.
How much money will they need to run an effective campaign over them the next few months.
So Biden and his team you know and kind of allies we're talking about that they need at least a billion, if not more to run this campaign. Biden and his you know, allies raised about a billion dollars in twenty twenty. So far the Biden campaign you know, to date, and you know, along with the DNC, you know, has spent just a little bit over three hundred and fifty million dollars. But of course the spending really really ramps up, you know, as you head into election day. The Democrats have created a strategy that's pretty expensive. They have a lot of field offices with a lot of staff. They are running a lot of advertising, you know, tens of millions of dollars. You know, in any given month or week. They're going to need a lot of money if they're going to continue the strategy. And because they're going to be introducing a new candidate and a new vice presidential candidate to the public, they're going to need to continue that money.
Bloomberg has reported that Harris has been having meetings with Wall Street executives recently, and from her days in California politics, she has her own ties to Silicon Valley and the tech industry. How might to leverage those relationships.
Harris is very lucky because she comes from California, which is called a donor state in that you know, it's California really funds democratic runs across the country, So she has close ties to Silicon Valley. She is a known entity there. People know her name being vice president. She's also been able to operate a little bit more under the radar than Biden. So she's been taking these meetings with folks on Wall Street to explain some of the Biden policies. She started to build those relationships.
You know.
Remember she's only fifty nine years old, so she's always had an eye to what she would do after she was Biden's vice president, knowing that she needs to have Wall Street support, she needs to have some of these ties to the business community, at.
Least among some of the Wall Street donors. There is an ideological divide here that Harris is perceived as perhaps to the left of Biden. When she ran in twenty twenty, there was a concerted effort among some Democratic donors to find a more moderate candidate. Remember, Bernie Sanders was in that race, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris was somewhere on the spectrum between Biden and those more liberal candidates, probably a little bit more towards the progressive side. She was for Medicare for all, for example. She was for a number of different policies that she's now had to subsume Biden's policies as his vice president. But there might be some concern from some Wall Street donors of what they're going to get in a future Harris administration.
In recent weeks, new packs have popped up that are open about fundraising for a non Biden candidate. Do we know how much money those packs have raised?
At this point, we don't know exactly how much money is in them, because they've just sprung up in the past couple of days or weeks. One of the ones, Mike Novagrats of Galaxy Digital his pack, this is a couple weeks old now at this point, but said it raised about two million dollars sort of in the initial days after forming. In the next twenty four to forty eight hours, I anticipate we'll see a lot of donors come forward, either with actual money or with commitments to give to whether it's Vice President Harris or another candidate. Should someone else throw their hat in the ring, and that will be a key determiner of who really has the juice to mount to run.
Here I've been talking about. A Harris candidacy is not a foregone conclusion. Despite Biden's announcement that he will endorse her. The Democratic National Convention is in one month. Is there still a chance that Democrats might choose someone besides Harris at the convention?
Gregory, That's absolutely possible under the convention rules, But practically speaking, it seems to me that any other candidate would have to get out there relatively quickly before the institutional Democratic Party really rallies around Harris. We're already seeing endorsements from former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. We're starting to see the Congressional Black Caucus and other really important stakeholders rally around Harris. She has important support from important constituencies in the Democratic Party, and so it would take a lot for somebody to dislodge her from that perch. And somebody's going to have to come in with a pretty aggressive campaign and a lot of money pretty soon to signal that this is going to be an open process. Otherwise I would expect Democrats to really circle the dragons around Harris.
Assuming Harris gets the nomination, what is the process for Harris to choose her running mate and how much you try to leverage that decision to bring in additional funding.
We saw this on the Republican side just this past week when Donald Trump chose jd Vance as his running mate, and he did so really at almost a last possible moment before the roll call even happened. So there is time for that to happen. We might expect for Harris to wait until close to the convention when it's cleared that she has the votes, although she could come up with a ticket earlier than that to kind of try to figure out how to unify the party, maybe pick somebody from a different wing of the party, maybe a governor. Andy Basheer, the governor of Kentucky's name has come up. The governors from Michigan and Maryland and Pennsylvania and California, all of whom could be potential running mates. One potential path would be to let as a running mate somebody who is already independently wealthy and can write the campaign a big check. You can self fund your campaign, it's not subject to limits. And one name that could come into play in that kind of a scenario as JB. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who is independently wealthy, is a billionaire inherited a lot of money from his family's hotel and real estate empire, worked in venture capital, and was very influential in getting the convention to come to Chicago in his home state by helping to support that effort monetarially, and could do the same if he were on the ticket.
For more on the political fallout from Biden's decision, the market reaction and the next steps for the Harris campaign. Head to Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to The Big Tig podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was mixed by Alex Zugera and fact checked by Adriana Tapia. Naomi Shaven is a senior producer and edited this episode. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole beamsterbor is our executive producer, and Stage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts.