Washington: Kamala Harris has attracted the support of enough delegates to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, US media outlets reported Tuesday, as the vice president received a wave of endorsements from potential rivals, lawmakers, governors and influential advocacy groups.
Harris, who is of Indian and African heritage, has received the backing from more than the 1,976 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic Party’s nomination on the first ballot, CNN reported on the first full day of her campaign.
“I look forward to formally accepting the nomination soon,” Harris, 59, said in a statement late Monday, a day after President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the race for the White House November 5 and endorsed Harris.
As party officials were preparing to finalise the process for formally nominating a candidate ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago from August 19-22, it was already clear that the biggest remaining question about the 2024 Democratic ticket is who Harris will choose as her running mate, media reports said.
Harris, who will hold a campaign event in Milwaukee Tuesday, staked her claim to the party’s standard-bearer role with an electric speech Monday evening, as she visited the campaign’s headquarters in Delaware.
“We have 106 days until Election Day and in that time, we have some hard work to do,” she told them and assured them that those who had been working for the Biden-led campaign would remain on board.
The vice president also laid out her case against her 78-year-old Republican rival Donald Trump, invoking a host of the former president’s scandals and legal woes.
She pointed to her time as a district attorney and California attorney general, saying that she “took on perpetrators of all kinds.”
“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game,” Harris said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
She also noted President Biden’s accomplishments, saying her time serving as his vice president was “one of the greatest honours of my life”.
Harris noted the “roller coaster” of “mixed emotions” they’ve all been on because “I love Joe Biden, and I know we all do”. She promised she’d work hard to earn the nomination for president and unite both Democrats and the country as a whole.
Meanwhile, in her first day as a candidate, Harris raised USD 81 million, the campaign announced Monday, saying it was the largest 24-hour raise by any candidate ever.
The huge haul emphasised grassroots enthusiasm for a shake-up to the Democratic 2024 ticket after 81-year-old Biden quit the race. According to the campaign, more than 880,000 “grassroots supporters” donated, with 60 per cent making their first contributions of the 2024 cycle.
Four governors of must-win Midwestern states — Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Wisconsin’s Tony Evers and Illinois’ JB Pritzker — have endorsed Harris. They join endorsements from Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, California’s Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. Some of those governors could be considered for the party’s vice presidential nomination in the coming days.
Harris has the support of more than 40 Democratic senators and nearly 100 House members. The most significant one came from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said in a statement that her “enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris for President is official, personal and political.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the top-ranking Democrats in each chamber, were set to endorse Harris soon, CNN reported.
Harris also has the support of the political arms of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus, as well as two key labour unions, Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Teachers.
Harris was a senator from California, the country’s most populous state, before Biden picked her as his vice-presidential running mate in 2020.
Harris was born to immigrant parents — a Black father and an Indian mother. Her father, Donald Harris, was from Jamaica, and her mother Shyamala Gopalan was a cancer researcher and civil rights activist from Chennai.
She had been running for reelection for another four-year term as Biden’s second in command before he on Sunday relented to a growing number of calls from Democrats to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate performance against Trump in late June.