That little girl from California joins Biden on a historic Democratic ticket
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were fierce rivals just a year ago. Now they are running against Donald Trump together.
Five months after pledging that he will pick a woman as his vice president, Joe Biden announced California senator Kamala Harris as his running mate on Tuesday. Harris can become the first female, the first African American and the first Asian American vice president of the United States. She was considered among the favorites for the job from the very beginning despite their rivalry during the earlier stages of the Democratic primary. It is plausible that Harris won’t have a huge short-term impact, but she has the ability to define the Democratic agenda for the next decade.
As a daughter of immigrants Kamala Harris embodies the American dream. She was born to an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father in 1964. At the age of 39 she became California’s first African American district attorney. Seven years later she made history again as the first woman and the first African American to serve as California Attorney General. In 2016, Harris became only the second black woman elected to the United States Senate and the first African American senator from California.
She was considered among the favorites to become the Democratic presidential nominee after she announced to run for the position in January, 2019. However, no matter how highly the pundits spoke of her, her poll numbers only rose above 10% for a few weeks in February and March.
Harris’s big moment arrived at the second night of the first primary debate. She finally got the chance to make her case for the nomination and she did not disappoint. The California senator attacked the former vice president for opposing busing and for speaking highly of the time he worked together with two segregationist senators in the 1970s and 1980s. As one Politico Magazine expert put it, Joe Biden, the front-runner, who at the time of the debate was almost twice as popular as any of his opponents, “was eaten alive by Harris’s ‘that little girl was me’ line”.
That one sentence almost ended Biden’s campaign and skyrocketed Harris’s, who managed to double her support overnight. However, the senator didn’t manage to keep up the momentum. Harris tried not to choose a side in the party’s ideological feud between liberals (lead by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and moderates (lead by Biden), which turned out to be the wrong strategy. It also didn’t help that her policies and campaign messaging changed frequently. Her newly gained supporters disappeared over time and she dropped out of the Democratic presidential race two months before the Iowa caucus. In the meantime, Biden bounced back and secured the nomination which he will officially accept next week at the Democratic National Convention, which will be held virtually due to the coronavirus.
Biden announced at the last debate, on March 15 that he will pick a woman as his running mate. Kamala Harris was seen as the favorite from the very beginning.
Biden’s decision to pick her makes a lot of sense. Harris might not be ‘the perfect candidate’ but her nomination certainly has less downsides than the others’.
She is one of the best known among those who were considered for the job, she is black, she is a second-generation immigrant and she has a great relationship with Biden. This might be surprising to hear after their infamous clash at the first debate, but it’s true. The two politicians got to know each other through Beau, Joe Biden’s late son. Beau’s death in 2015 had a vast impact on Biden, who has been very open about the pain his son’s death has caused him. Harris was close with Beau, too. She served as the attorney general of California at the same time that Beau Biden held the same position in Delaware. According to the senator’s memoir, there were periods, when Beau and Harris “talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day”. Although, Harris’s relationship with Biden was tried by the Democratic primary, especially at the first debate, it seems that the pair’s relationship has recovered since, despite the criticism she received from Biden’s inner circle.
According to Politico, former Sen. Chris Dodd, a close friend of Biden, and a member of his vice presidential search committee, was not happy when Harris told him, she has no remorse about her attack on Biden at the first debate. While Biden’s wife, Jill called the attack “a punch to the gut” after the debate.
Harris also received criticism during her presidential campaign for her record as a prosecutor, which might cause headaches for the Biden campaign in the run-up to the election. Harris has emerged as a strong voice on issues of police misconduct in the past months. However, according to The New York Times, since becoming California’s attorney general in 2011, she had largely avoided intervening in cases involving killings by the police. According to the BBC, as San Francisco district attorney and as California’s attorney general, Harris has sided with police over suspects, even in cases where those suspects may have been wrongfully convicted. Although she’s expressed personal opposition to the death penalty, she’s supported its use while she’s been in office. Harris was accused of hypocrisy during her campaign as she oversaw more than 1,900 marijuana convictions in San Francisco and her prosecutors appear to have convicted people on marijuana charges at a higher rate than under her predecessor (to be fair, most defendants arrested for low-level pot possession were never locked up), even though, she admitted that she smoked marijuana while she was in college.
Partly due to these criticisms, she isn’t very popular among black voters. When she dropped out of the race back in December, only 6% of African Americans supported her according to a Quinnipiac University Poll. Even Bernie Sanders (10%) and Elizabeth Warren (8%) had more support among black voters, not to mention Joe Biden (44%). According to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, 73% of blacks would vote for a Biden-Harris ticket, while 71% would vote for a Biden-Warren ticket. According to the same poll, 19% of blacks have an unfavorable opinion of her.
Despite all these problems, she was probably still the ‘least problematic’ candidate for the VP nomination. Susan Rice would have been the perfect target for the Trump campaign. Republicans and the president himself have criticized Rice’s involvement in the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, as well as her role in ‘unmasking’ of Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, from intelligence reports.
Tammy Duckworth has an impressive backstory (the Illinois senator lost her legs in the Iraq war where she served as a helicopter pilot), but she is lesser-known than Harris and has not been scrutinized by the public eye like the California senator was during her presidential campaign. The same can be said of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Florida Representative Val Demings and California Representative Karen Bass, whose hopes of becoming the vice president were over when a few weeks ago information emerged of her communist connections as well as a video of her praising Scientology.
Amy Klobuchar withdrew her name from consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate back in June after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis reignited criticism for her criminal justice record during the seven years she spent as a prosecutor in Minnesota.
Elizabeth Warren, the best-known and most popular candidate for the VP nomination was dropped likely because of fears that her leftist views will alienate moderate and conservative voters as well as wealthy donors and also because of the immense pressure on Biden to choose a black running mate after the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests.
Vice presidential nominees have rarely made a large impact in previous elections and it’s unlikely that Harris will be an exception.
However, she has the ability to define the Democratic agenda for the next decade. 77-year-old Joe Biden is the oldest major-party nominee in American history. He will be the oldest US president ever if elected. He will be 86 at the end of a potential second term, nine years older than the current record-holder, Ronald Reagan was at the end of his. Therefore, it is no surprise that Biden is floating the idea of being a one-term president. In that case, Harris has a great chance of becoming the Democratic nominee in 2024 and if elected, she might serve until 2032. Since the Second World War Biden is the 8th politician who became the presidential nominee of his party after being vice president and Harris has a great chance to become the 9th.
Of course, for this to happen, they have to win on November 3rd. At the moment the Biden is the front-runner in the race for the presidency. If the election were being held today, Biden would win 353 to 185 against Trump according to the current polling averages.
However, there are still 83 days to go until the election and the twists and turns of the campaign are more unpredictable than any time before. Although, no presidential candidate has lost from such a good position before (Biden is leading Trump by 8,3% nationally), a lot can happen until November. The result of the election can depend on whether Trump manages to stop the spread of the coronavirus disease or on Biden’s performance at the debates for example, where the fight against COVID-19 and racism will definitely be talking points.
