Thomas Gilmer (R) holds a slim lead in the Republican primary in Connecticut’s second congressional district even though he dropped out of the race after being arrested on Monday for a violent altercation with a former girlfriend, the Hartford Courant reports.

President Trump tweeted congratulations to Marjorie Taylor Greene (R), the QAnon conspiracy theorist who won the Republican nomination in Georgia’s deep-red 14th Congressional District runoff last night.

Mike Allen makes three good points:

1. “She was always at the top of his list… It says something encouraging about these dire times for America that Joe Biden could both make history by naming the first Black and South Asian woman to a major-party U.S. presidential ticket — and fulfill conventional wisdom at the same time.”
2. “With some of the best connected reporters in the land obsessing about the choice, there was no definitive leak, even at the end — something Biden’s high command is super-proud of.
   Amid the chaos and improvisation of the Trump Show, Biden ran an old-school, by-the-book process. His White House would be a similar Return to Normal.”
3. “Biden’s selection process raised the profiles of several other women of color who are now set up to star in a new chapter of American politics.”

Sen. Kamala Harris released a new video about how her mother inspired her decision to become a lawyer and then a politician.

It also includes the moment when Joe Biden offered her the job of being his running mate.

New York Times: “By selecting the junior senator from California, a state that Democrats have captured in every presidential election since 1992, Mr. Biden embraced the modern imperatives of Democratic coalition building that have made the days of choosing running mates who could deliver their home states a relic of the past.”

“Ms. Harris, who is half Black and half Indian-American, is not expected to scramble the electoral map, nor was the Biden campaign looking to do so. The former vice president leads in polls of most of the crucial battlegrounds.”

“Instead, ever since Black voters resurrected his primary candidacy in South Carolina, Mr. Biden and his campaign team have made the pursuit of Black voters in November a centerpiece of his bid for the White House. And he had said from the start of the process that he would chose a woman as his running mate.”

The new FiveThirtyEight forecast — just launched this morning — gives Joe Biden a 71% chance to defeat Donald Trump in the presidential election.

Nate Silver: “If these numbers give you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016 … when Trump also had a 29 percent chance of winning! (And Hillary Clinton had a 71 percent chance.) So if you’re not taking a 29 percent chance as a serious possibility, I’m not sure there’s much we can say at this point, although there’s a Zoom poker game that I’d be happy to invite you to.”

“One last parallel to 2016 — when some models gave Clinton as high as a 99 percent chance of winning — is that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast tends to be more conservative than others.”

“Joe Kennedy was once thought to be such a lock to defeat Sen. Ed Markey that there was widespread speculation in Massachusetts that Markey might just retire to avoid a humbling end,” Politico reports.

“But Markey is piling up endorsements and closing in on the young congressman in the polls by running a policy-heavy campaign that seems tailored for the moment. There’s growing sentiment that Kennedy underestimated the backlash he’d face for challenging the veteran incumbent, who has become beloved among progressives for his work on the Green New Deal.”

Associated Press: “Biden, too, regularly discussed his potential pick with his sprawling network of friends and advisers. He used Obama in particular as a sounding board, though confidants to both men say the former president was careful not to tip his hand in those conversations as to whom he preferred. But in private, Obama suggested to others that he believed Harris was the favorite.”