Vice President Kamala Harris is at an inflection point that months ago seemed almost impossible: With President Joe Biden exiting the race on Sunday and endorsing her to succeed him, she has a wide-open door to take the mantle as the Democratic presidential nominee.
After campaigning in 2019 for the title, Harris is in the running again.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said in a statement.
The first Black and South Asian woman vice president, she now has a chance to break the highest glass ceiling. If she becomes the nominee, she will certify herself as the next generation’s party bearer. If she wins in November against former President Donald Trump, she will change the face of who wields power in America.
It’s not yet clear if any other Democrats will challenge Harris for the nomination. The fact that she has Biden’s support may make that path particularly narrow.
“My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made,” he said on X. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
While the future is uncertain, if Harris became the nominee, she would reportedly receive his campaign funds. Hours after Biden’s announcement, the Biden campaign filed notice with the Federal Election Commission to rename itself ‘Harris for President.’ Theoretically, she would have access to the campaign’s deep war chest. Harris has spent the last few weeks as a partner to Biden, shutting down any replacement chatter that overtook Washington after repeated calls from Democratic lawmakers, celebrities and pundits for Biden to step down following his debate in late June.
The vice president has already begun to make calls to Democrats, two sources familiar told NOTUS, looking to shore up her support among party leaders. One such call was with the Congressional Black Caucus’ chair Rep Steven Horsford.
A source told NOTUS that Harris called to talk through which members of the caucus had “stood by the president” and had been “behind her from the very beginning.” Harris said that she “intends to earn it and win the nomination. Harris was a member of the CBC while a senator. And the political arm of the CBC has already endorsed her.
The chairman recounted Harris sounding calm, measured and “clear-eyed and resolved” during their conversation, per the source.
She’s been making the case across the country of just how high she sees the stakes of this election.
“Nearly every time we say, ‘This is the one.’ Well, this here is the one. This is the one: The most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime,” Harris said in Las Vegas in July. “Fundamentally, this election will come down to this. President Biden and I fight for the American people. Donald Trump does not.”
And Biden himself has repeatedly talked up Harris’ ability to govern.
“I wouldn’t have picked her unless I thought she was qualified to be president from the very beginning. I made no bones about that. She is qualified to be president,” he told reporters at a July 11 press conference after the NATO summit.
And he said it again days after, as the low drum of lawmakers continued to call for him to leave the race.
“And, by the way, she’s not only a great vice president; she could be president of the United States,” the president said in Las Vegas.
Harris’ allies, a staunch group of advocates who have come to her aid over the past years, warned Democrats loudly after the debate that skipping over her for other options — particularly white ones — would lead to electoral disaster. Black voters, Democrats strongest voting bloc, would take it as a slight and would tune out of the election, they warned.
“How dare you leapfrog over the woman that has been side by side with him, working hard,” actor Yvette Nicole Brown told NOTUS. “Her place in this conversation, from start to finish, is not where it should be.”
Quickly after Biden officially endorsed Harris, other major Democratic players followed suit including former president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, as well as longtime Biden ally Rep. Jim Clyburn, Sens. Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren and more.
There are still some high-profile Democrats who don’t believe she could be president and have repeatedly called for an open convention. And over the last days, as pressure for Biden to drop intensified, coalitions of former Democratic campaigns have banned together to support the vice president in case it was her time to be the nominee. Still, this moment also represents a 180-degree turn from the fraught first years of her vice presidency, when she struggled to keep her head above water following a deluge of damaging stories about the mismanagement of her staff, tensions with the West Wing that left her sidelined and gaffes that led to constant Republican attacks.
The vice president’s fortunes began to turn around when she became the administration’s top messenger on reproductive rights after news that the Supreme Court would almost certainly overturn Roe v. Wade.
The former prosecutor was initially reluctant to take up the mantle but quickly launched into that role, sources said at the time. She fine-tuned her message after crisscrossing the country on listening tours with policy experts, state legislators, advocacy groups, scholars and more — ultimately settling on a focus on abortion, access to contraception and the threat to privacy.
Once the court overturned Roe officially, it galvanized her. She was involved in hours of White House conversations and policy discussions on the way forward, sources said. As Biden, a devout Catholic, seemed to struggle even to use the word “abortion,” Harris shined.
“We all know one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body,” she said in July. “And make no mistake, if [Trump] gets the chance, he will sign a national abortion ban to outlaw abortion in every single state. But we are not going to let that happen.”
A California native born in Oakland, Harris was primarily raised by her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an immigrant from India who became a breast cancer researcher. Her father, Donald Harris, was an immigrant from Jamaica. Harris cites her upbringing in the civil rights movement as a major influence over her fight for justice now.
Harris was elected in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco before being elected as California attorney general in 2010 and then a U.S. senator in 2016. She was picked as Biden’s running mate and then sworn in as vice president in 2021 — a meteoric rise in national politics.
Biden selected Harris as his running mate after she left the 2020 race, following a turbulent campaign. While she enjoyed a 20,000 person rally in January to announce her candidacy, and had several viral moments on the trail — including one that landed a major punch on Biden over his position on busing — the campaign failed to gain enough momentum and money in the end. She left the race in December of 2019, before any of the voting actually began.
On the campaign trail, the vice president has focused on rallying and attracting Black, young and women voters — three constituencies with whom campaign advisers view her as particularly strong. In a recent NBC News poll, taken pre-assassination attempt, the vice president ran nearly 10 points ahead of Biden, in support from Black voters, in a head-to-head with Trump.
Now, after Biden’s numbers faltered post-debate, Harris is polling higher than Biden in some surveys. A CNN poll pitting Harris against Trump in early July put her 2 percentage points behind him, whereas Biden trailed the former president by 6 points in a matchup. The poll also showed Harris’ strength with nonwhite voters — she was 29 points ahead of Trump, while Biden was 21 points ahead — and winning with independents.
But the vice president would still face significant headwinds if she joined the race. Her approval ratings are weaker than those of other modern vice presidents. And recent polling has weakened the claim that she would be the best alternative to Biden. Meanwhile, Republicans are pumping out new attack ads to discredit her.
The vice president’s name was brought up repeatedly over the course of the Republican National Convention, including mocking her efforts to address the root causes of migration. And Republicans have also attempted to tie her to their criticism of Biden’s economic policy. The uptick in mentions of Harris at the convention was a clear-cut foreshadow of what Republicans would focus on if Harris was the nominee.
“Whatever else can be said about crooked Joe Biden, you have to give him credit for one brilliant decision, probably the smartest decision he ever made,” Trump told supporters in a July rally in Florida. “He picked Kamala Harris as his vice president. No, it was brilliant because it was an insurance policy. Maybe the best insurance policy I’ve ever seen.”
He added, “If Joe had picked someone even halfway competent they would have bounced him from office years ago, but they can’t because she’s gotta be their second choice.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.