Biden picks Harris as running mate
Democratic presidential hopeful makes history by selecting Black woman for a major party’s presidential ticket for first time
WILMINGTON, Del. — Joe Biden named California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate Tuesday, making history by selecting the first Black woman to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket and acknowledging the vital role Black voters will play in his bid to defeat President Donald Trump.
In choosing Harris, Biden is embracing a former rival from the Democratic primary who is familiar with the unique rigor of a national campaign.
The 55-year-old first-term senator, who is also of South Asian descent, is one of the party’s most prominent figures. She quickly became a top contender for the No. 2 spot after her own White House campaign ended.
She will appear with Biden for the first time as his running mate at an event Wednesday near his home in Wilmington, Del.
In announcing the pick, Biden called Harris a “fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.” She said Biden would “unify the American people” and “build an America that lives up to our ideals.”
Harris joins Biden at a moment of unprecedented national crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed the lives
— she was 8 years old when Biden was first elected to the chamber — Harris, 55, reflects a traditional archetype in an election year that has been anything but normal.
She is also a thoroughly establishment-friendly figure, as is Biden: Both have hewed closely to their party’s mainstream for years, shifting left with the times but always with an eye on the broader electorate and higher office. He long said he wanted someone “simpatico” with him and, in Harris, he found that person, at least when it comes to ideology.
Progressive Democrats now find themselves led by two moderates with relatively cautious political instincts, even as activist energy courses through the party and leftwing challengers unseat some incumbents. The mostly young protesters filling the streets of nearly every U.S. city to decry police brutality and President Donald Trump are represented by two figures who have offered sympathetic words and proposals but whose careers have been shaped by their relationship with law enforcement.
“She’s not of the far-left of the party; she’s a former prosecutor,” Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Homeland Security secretary, said of Harris. “And when you’re a prosecutor you have to make some tough calls.”
While it may repel some younger liberals, Harris’ history as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general may be more asset than liability for more moderate voters, as it has been for Napolitano and so many women in politics who began their ascent as prosecutors.
That law enforcement pedigree, which Harris also shares with Biden’s late son Beau, is only part of the reason he turned to her, though.
He also chose her to help inject excitement into his campaign, which is leading in the polls but mostly because he’s the genial alternative to the most divisive president in modern history who is presiding over a pandemic and economic collapse.
Having started his career in a capital consumed with Watergate and controlled by white men, Biden also turned to Harris to bring a fresh perspective to the West Wing should they win — a similar calculation, but with the roles reversed between ticketmates, that propelled him to the vice presidency 12 years ago.
Biden spurned those progressives who wanted their consensus-oriented standard-bearer to elevate a liberal like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, instead picking a prominent leader from the demographic that resurrected his campaign in the Democratic primary. By doing what Hillary Clinton did not do four years ago and choosing a Black running mate, he may give the party’s most loyal voters a reason, beyond animus toward Trump, to work for and elect the ticket.
Harris comes to the ticket having started her career in the crucible of San Francisco politics, won statewide office in America’s largest state and sought the presidency herself. She has a relationship with many party donors, lawmakers and activists. She has been scrutinized far more than some of the runners-up, who have either never been elected outside a House district or had never been on a ballot at all, as was the case with Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser.
This is not to say that Biden simply made a politically safe choice.
Biden is now taking direct aim at Trump’s brand of racial grievance politics by making his political partner the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. In doing so, he passed over candidates like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan who might have been more appealing to some white moderates and even Republicans in traditional battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Harris is also, like Biden, a candidate some Democrats may be glad is running in a coronavirus campaign free of rallies and short on spontaneity: While she can be extraordinarily effective when she’s well prepared, Harris is less formidable and at times gaffe-prone when she’s off-script.
Most consequentially of all, though, is what Biden’s decision may mean to the future of his party. Even though some of his own advisers expressed unease about any running mate who might quickly begin eyeing a future presidential bid, even in 2024 if he does not run again, Biden decided to give Harris a head start on becoming the country’s first female president.
In some respects, the Biden-Harris pairing represents the fulfillment of what many party activists hoped and expected would be their 2020 ticket, which they continued to whisper even in the tense days after the first Democratic debate last year when she sharply criticized him over his 1970s-era opposition to school busing.
Across the spectrum of the Democratic Party — former elected officials, grassroots activists, swing-state moderates, and even much of the progressive wing — the reaction was largely a sigh of relief.
Many were energized about the selection of Harris, and at minimum, they felt she fulfilled many of the requirements their slice of the electorate preferred. More controversial picks were avoided. The overarching rule of “do no harm” was satisfied.
And for Black women in politics, Harris’ elevation was especially sweet — even if they acknowledged the somewhat conventional nature of her selection.
“Oftentimes do-no-harm choices are not exciting — this is an exciting one,” said Leah Daughtry, a decadeslong veteran of Democratic campaigns, sharing that women were calling her in tears. “She is the stand-in for Black women. We are on the ticket.”
At times, it seemed Biden was being pulled in opposing directions: a governing pick ready to lead at any moment and one whose life experiences spoke to the country being torn apart by race and racism. In Harris, Biden and Democrats believe they have both.
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said Biden’s selection proved that he is prioritizing the Black electorate in the general election, and rewarding them for supporting him in the primary.
“It will energize Black voters because they can now see themselves in the ticket,” Johnson said. “By supporting Biden in the primary, the question was now how will they be reflected in his administration. And what VP Biden is saying is we’ll have a voice at the highest levels.”
But the reaction was strongest among Democratic women, who have known for months that Biden would select a woman as a running mate — but were nonetheless excited about the announcement. In Harris, the party has someone who made outreach to women a key aspect of her presidential run.
Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, the organization seeking to flip the Southern state by registering new voters, said that “we all know that Black women have been the backbone of the Democratic Party, and our leadership has gone uncredited for far too long.”
She invoked the name and words of Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who was the first Black woman to mount a national campaign for president. When Harris announced her presidential run in 2019, she chose the same week of Chisholm’s announcement as an homage, basing her color scheme and logo after her political hero, whose famous mantra was “unbought and unbossed.”
Nearly 50 years after Chisholm’s run, Harris carries Black women a step closer to the Oval Office — and reflects the evolution of Black Americans from political outsiders pounding on democracy’s doors to consummate insiders ushered into the clubhouse.
“Shirley Chisholm is smiling today,” Ufot said. “This is only the beginning, as there are many more of us bringing folding chairs to the table of democracy.”