| | | | |  | | By Ryan Lizza and Garrett Ross | | Presented by |  | | | |  David Plouffe is set to join Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. | Getty Images/Noam Galai | |  | THE CATCH-UP | | MAJOR STAFFING NEWS FOR HARRIS — DAVID PLOUFFE is joining KAMALA HARRIS’ campaign as a senior adviser, a person familiar with the move tells Ryan. Plouffe was BARACK OBAMA’s 2008 campaign manager and in 2012 served a similar role in Obama’s reelection from his perch in the White House as a senior adviser. Related read: “‘People Thought Heads Would Roll’ — Kamala Harris’ New Campaign Is Learning to Live With Biden’s Old One,” by NOTUS’ Jasmine Wright: “In conversations with more than a dozen Democrats, some described tension and lingering resentment between Biden and Harris loyalists. But with a compressed timeline, the camps are trying to press on.” CUTS TO THE CHASE — The latest economic reading delivered a blow to Biden and Harris as they gear up for a rocky run-in to the election. Unemployment rates unexpectedly rose last month with slowing job gains, “fueling concern that the economy may be headed for a recession,” Victoria Guida and Katy O'Donnell report. The details: “The jobless rate rose to 4.3 percent in July — its highest level since late 2021, the Labor Department reported Friday. Though that number is still low by historical standards, it comes after more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent – the bright spot in an economy battered by rising prices. “More concerningly, the data suggests that the job market is now weakening more quickly as high interest rates bite into spending and investment, raising questions about whether the U.S. might be entering a downturn — something few economists were worried about just a couple of months ago. “That’s bad news both for Harris as she aims to pitch voters on her candidacy for president, and for the Federal Reserve, which opted this week not to ease off on the economy even as inflation has cooled to below 3 percent.” Sen. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-Mass.) was out quick to thrash Fed Chair JEROME POWELL in a sharp post on X this morning, saying he “made a serious mistake not cutting interest rates. He’s been warned over and over again that waiting too long risks driving the economy into a ditch. The jobs data is flashing red. Powell needs to cancel his summer vacation and cut rates now — not wait 6 weeks.” Republicans are continuing to push their tag tying Harris to the downturn: “Kamalanomics.” THE VEEPSTAKES — As the world waits to see who Harris selects as her running mate — with a final decision expected as early as this weekend — our colleague Adam Wren ticks down the potential VP short list to lay out the pros and cons for each pick. More veep reads:
- With Pennsylvania Gov. JOSH SHAPIRO emerging as one of the top contenders, some skittish Democrats are “wondering whether the US would really be ready for a Jewish vice president,” CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports. “Among even many Jewish Democrats who are Shapiro fans, excitement about the prospect of his being the pick is mixed with pride, anxiety and fear of what sort of divisions and conspiracy theories his selection could set off.”
- To wit: A 20-year-old Shapiro back in 1993 for his college newspaper wrote “that peace ‘will never come’ to the Middle East and expressed skepticism about the viability of a two-state solution, describing Palestinians as ‘too battle-minded’ to coexist with Israel,” the Philly Inquirer’s Anna Orso reports. A spox for the governor noted that Shapiro’s view “has changed over the last three decades” and pointed to his support for a two-state solution now.
- A few dozen top Chicago-area executives sent a letter to Harris yesterday “urging her to select Gov. JB PRITZKER as her running mate,” our colleague Shia Kapos reports. “The business leaders praised Pritzker for his ‘ability to navigate complex challenges and deliver tangible results’ and his leadership ‘during times of crisis.’” Read the letter
HOW WE GOT HERE — “How JD Vance Brought the Culture War to Helping Kids,” by Victoria Guida for her latest Capital Letter column: “Helping kids is pretty popular, as priorities go. But enacting policy is all in the sales pitch. And punishing people for not having kids? That’s not a great way to sell anything, as Vance was reminded over the past week.” Happy Friday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. Drop me a line at gross@politico.com.
| | | | A message from Wells Fargo: Wells Fargo is proud of the role we play for our customers, communities and the U.S. economy. We serve 1 in 3 U.S. households and more than 10% of small businesses in the nation. We serve customers digitally and in-person, with 4,000 locations across the country, operating in 24 of the 30 largest markets. We cover more rural markets than many large banks, and nearly 30% of our branches are in low- or moderate-income census tracts. See how. | | | | | 7 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW | | |  Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi meets with Donald Trump in 2019. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo | 1. WOWZA: Just before DONALD TRUMP was inaugurated in 2017, an unusual request from an organization linked to Egyptian intelligence made its way to a bank in Egypt that would later set off alarms in the U.S., WaPo’s Aaron Davis and Carol Leonnig report. “It asked the bank to ‘kindly withdraw’ nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.” “Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier with classified U.S. intelligence indicating that Egyptian President ABDEL FATAH EL-SISI sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign, a Washington Post investigation has found. Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. “Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money. Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found. … The case ground to a halt by the fall of 2019 as Trump’s then-attorney general, WILLIAM P. BARR, raised doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe of Trump.” 2. WHEN THE STORY BECOMES THE STORY: “Everybody Is Mad at Bloomberg News for Its Embargo-Breaking Gershkovich-Is-Free Scoop,” by N.Y. Mag’s Charlotte Klein: “According to multiple sources at the Journal and other major outlets, the Bloomberg scoop left journalists and government officials fuming. With a prisoner swap, you don’t know if it’s going to happen until it happens. (As one Journal reporter put it: ‘We literally had YAROSLAV TROFIMOV on the ground with binoculars waiting to see EVAN [GERSHKOVICH] come off the plane, and we pubbed as soon as that happened.’) “Which means that Bloomberg’s story proclaiming Gershkovich was free was inaccurate, given that the Russian plane was still in the air at the time of publication. That plane could have just turned around and gone back to Moscow, which is why the Journal and other publications had agreed to hold off.” Back in Russia: “Russia Released 16 Prisoners. Hundreds of Others Were Left Behind,” by NYT’s Ivan Nechepurenko 3. PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Ian Ward takes a peek inside the Heritage Foundation for POLITICO Magazine, spending time with the leadership behind Project 2025, which has sparked a firestorm across the 2024 race and resulted in the ouster of Paul Dans, the project director. “What I discovered — during my visit and in my conversations with conservatives involved in the project — was a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation and questionable leadership. Project 2025 had set out to turn Trumpism into a well-oiled machine; instead, it had created an engine of the same sort of political disorder that defined the first Trump White House.” The gears are still turning: “Out of sheer necessity, the Trump transition team may end up relying on the project’s resources, especially its personnel database, given Trump’s stated ambition to ‘dismantle the deep state’ and replace it with conservative loyalists. But in the end, it may have been Heritage’s self-generated hype — which at times exaggerated Project 2025’s scope and overlooked internal fissures — that led to its sidelining.” 4. MUSK READ: A PAC with ties to ELON MUSK is deploying a sleight-of-hand tactic to harvest valuable data from would-be voters, CNBC’s Brian Schwartz reports. “If a user lives in a state that is not considered competitive in the presidential election, like California or Wyoming for example, they’ll be prompted to enter their email addresses and zip code and then directed quickly to a voter registration page for their state, or back to the original sign up section. “But for users who enter a zip code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different. Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cell phone number, and age. If they agree to submit all that, the system still does not steer them to a voter registration page. Instead, it shows them a ‘thank you’ page.”
| | | | DID YOU MISS IT? On Tuesday, POLITICO and McKinsey convened three conversations in D.C. with policymakers and space experts, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The discussions also featured a panel of experts, an interview with Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) and an executive conversation with McKinsey's Ryan Brukardt.
The conversations focused on the next great innovation frontier – the space industry, including deeper discussion around which sectors of the global economy see their growth arc in space and what the role of government leaders is in expanding and regulating the growing number of orbital ideas. CATCH UP AND WATCH HIGHLIGHTS HERE | | | | | 5. SWING-STATE HEADLINES: “Wisconsin Voters Seethe Over Out-of-Control Housing Prices,” by WSJ’s Rachel Wolfe and Andrew Restuccia in Milwaukee: “With median sale prices up 8% in the past year, according to Redfin, Wisconsin is the unhappy winner of the biggest price jump among the presidential battleground states. Prices are up here at double the U.S. average. Some voters here said their frustration over housing could determine how they will vote in November’s election. … In the Milwaukee metro area, residents spoke of feeling a dual cost-of-living and identity crisis in a city that has long prided itself on affordability, especially compared with its down-lake cousin, Chicago.” 6. THE LANDS OF OPPORTUNITY: “Trump Cites Opportunity Zones as a Triumph. Their Success Is Middling,” by NYT’s Lydia DePillis: “Birmingham and the rest of Alabama are a window into how money has and hasn’t soaked into the ground designated as opportunity zones over the past six years. Congress is taking a closer look as it considers extending the incentive, which expires in 2026 along with most of the 2017 tax law. … The incentive has not worked as well as backers had hoped for new and existing businesses, largely because of restrictions on how businesses qualify. So far, there is no concrete evidence that poverty has declined more in opportunity zones than elsewhere.” 7. WILL LEWIS LATEST: “Washington Post C.E.O.’s Last Company Lost Millions Betting on Gen Z,” by NYT’s Benjamin Mullin, Katie Robertson and Justin Scheck: “The News Movement may provide a cautionary tale about how difficult it is to make money from the oceans of viewers who consume news on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Since it was founded in 2021, The News Movement has struggled to wring profits from its more than one million followers on social media, according to interviews with current and former employees and documents obtained by The Times. In 2023, Mr. Lewis’s last year at the company, it lost millions of dollars and slashed its staff, and this year it did not renew an important partnership with The Associated Press.”
| | | | SUBSCRIBE TO GLOBAL PLAYBOOK: Don’t miss out on POLITICO’s Global Playbook, our newsletter taking you inside pivotal discussions at the most influential gatherings in the world. Suzanne Lynch delivers the world's elite and influential moments directly to you. Stay in the global loop. SUBSCRIBE NOW. | | | | | | | PLAYBOOKERS | | Peter Navarro is keeping the lights on for Steve Bannon. Tony Evers is enjoying a different type of brat summer. Kamala Harris is big with the Deadheads now. FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Adrienne Jacobs is joining the Alliance for International Exchange as assistant director and head of advocacy and government relations. She most recently was senior program officer for the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, a program sponsored by the State Department. WHITE HOUSE DEPARTURE LOUNGE — Ami Fields-Meyer is now a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. She most recently was senior policy adviser to VP Kamala Harris. TRANSITION — Dylan St. Agathe is joining SKDK as CFO. He previously was CFO at Terri & Sandy Solutions. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath. Corrections: Yesterday’s Playbook PM misstated Stacey Plaskett’s title and the territory she represents. She is a delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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