Since that horrific debate performance sent her boss out of a sure 2024 candidacy, Kamala Harris has been on a yo-yo string with Democratic Party bigwigs.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!After Joe Biden wore his frailty on national TV just over three weeks ago, the vice president became the most sensible successor for him at the top of the ticket.
Allies spread a rationale for why Harris would be the natural successor: She could easily inherit the campaign’s massive war chest; her law enforcement experience is best suited to prosecute the political case against Republican Donald Trump; polling indicates she can win; and having been the first multiracial and woman VP could inspire a fresh generation of younger progressives.
From the beginning, however, there has been a reluctance to fully accept the nation’s second-in-command; some Democrats have even publicly disregarded her. Harris was not mentioned when 24 former House Democrats wrote Biden last week advocating an open convention in August.
Harris was asked to reassure black women, the party’s backbone, that the U.S. wouldn’t regress in this election on issues they care about, including economic and reproductive freedom, the day Biden found himself battling for his future in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. Her message could have been more comforting.
“Here’s the thing about elections,” Harris said to a moderator at the Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans on July 6, under a conversation headed “Chief to Chief.” “Those at that level of decision-making usually pay close attention to either who writes the checks or who votes. That is a grim, chilly reality.
Apart from a generational change, the 59-year-old Harris is the clear strategic page turn for the party. Her life has been an acrobatic turn full of personal obstacles and successes, including political testing in her own California akin to those she and the nation currently endure.
Some, however, question whether a nation now seems set to bring Donald Trump back to power is ready for a woman of color to occupy the Oval Office, severely split by cultural problems around race, gender, and family.
Aimy Steele, creator and CEO of The New North Carolina Project, which aims to increase voter involvement and access in the Tar Heel State, said, “Black women are judged more harshly by the right, by the left—by everyone.”
Beyond race and gender, Steele said, Harris’s background includes aspects that liberal allies would overlook or criticize: she is a professional woman who went single much of her life and put her work first without having biological children.
Steele, who unsuccessfully ran for the North Carolina assembly in 2020, said, “I think we’re kidding ourselves to really believe that we are, even on the progressive side, in a post-racial democracy or a place where these types of things don’t matter.”