With President Biden throwing his support to Vice President Kamala Harris to take over his campaign for the presidency, all eyes are on the Oakland native who worked her way through California politics to become next in line for the nation’s top job.
Unless Democrats instead call for weighing other candidates at the Democratic National Convention next month — a possibility former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi floated earlier this week — Harris, 59, would be the heir apparent.
To her close friends and supporters who walked precincts in San Francisco when she was running for district attorney, raised money to help get her elected to state attorney general and the U.S. Senate, and knocked on doors in swing states to help the Biden-Harris ticket win in 2020, Harris is ready to lead the country.
“There’s no one more seasoned. There’s no one tougher,” said Lateefah Simon, a superdelegate to the Chicago Democratic National Convention who is running for Congress to fill Rep. Barbara Lee’s seat in Oakland. She considers herself Harris’s mentee since her early San Francisco days in the District Attorney’s office. “Everyone who has worked with her, from the young 20-year-olds to the very seasoned politicians will tell you that she runs a tight ship and really, only the strong survive at that level.”
She withstood Trump’s attacks during the 2020 election when he called her “nasty” and “a monster” and put off Mike Pence during the vice presidential debate with the withering line “I’m speaking” — a comment that turned into a t-shirt slogan. She became the first woman and first woman of color to hold the vice presidency.
But Harris’s tepid polling numbers, her sometimes lackluster speeches and her delayed ability to distinguish her role as vice president has some Democrats worried she can beat Trump and the building MAGA movement. Her own primary campaign for president in 2020 was disorganized and short lived.
“I hear very few people arguing that Harris shouldn’t be the nominee,” said political analyst Dan Schnur. “The much more frequent argument is that she should be one of several candidates to compete for the nomination, rather than having it simply given to her.”
In announcing he was ending his campaign, Biden praised Harris, calling his decision to choose her as his 2020 running mate “the best decision I’ve made.”
“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.”
Trump in his first post on his Truth social media platform about Biden ending his campaign didn’t mention Harris, saying only that “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was!”
Harris, whose parents met during protest rallies in Berkeley, was born in Oakland and raised in an upstairs Berkeley apartment, where neighbor Regina Shelton with posters of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas on the wall often babysat Harris and her sister. Harris was sworn in as vice president on Shelton’s family bible.
She’s distinguished herself as a fighter on the abortion issue and an advocate for Biden’s policies for the war in Gaza, campaigning for Biden across the country in recent months. Since Biden’s disastrous June debate performance, she had refused to indulge in speculation she might take his place on the November ballot.
That didn’t stop the speculation.
In a hypothetical national matchup, a CNN poll conducted in early July before the assassination attempt on Trump, still showed Harris trailing Trump, 45% for Harris to 47% for Trump, but by such a small margin that Harris could be within striking distance. She also received stronger support from women and independents than Biden, the poll showed.
But is there anyone with a better chance than Harris to beat Trump, especially with only four months left before the November general election?
Surveys ranking other Democrats whose names have been floated as possible Biden replacements show them all trailing slightly farther behind Trump than Harris, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom at 43% to Trump’s 47% and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at 42% to Trump’s 48%.
Although Newsom has appeared to posture for the presidency over the past year, debating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, sitting for a no-holds-barred interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity and calling for a constitutional amendment to enshrine gun safety laws, he has said he would not challenge Harris. They are longtime friends and political allies often seen together through the years rubbing elbows at political events and surveying the aftermaths of California wildfires.
Newsom in a social media post Sunday on X said Biden “will go down in history as one of the most impactful and selfless presidents.”
Any effort to push Newsom to the top of the ticket — or anyone else — could throw the party into disarray, pundits say.
An open or brokered convention would be disastrous, said Sonoma State political science professor David McCuan. But he wouldn’t put it beyond the Democratic Party.
“At a convention you often display the fissures or fractures within the party,” he said. “Republicans don’t worry about those fractures until after they win. They’re all about winning. Democrats like to go through the process of group therapy in front of the television cameras that display all of their fractures, and that family looks pretty dysfunctional.”
As he puts it, “they’re more worried about grieving their weaknesses in front of the cameras than they are about winning.”
A competitive convention would be “absolute chaos,” said Schnur, a former GOP strategist. “The question is would the chaos irreparably fracture the party or energize it?”
Each scenario comes with numerous risks.
“Black female voters have been the most loyal Democratic constituency for many, many years,” Schnur said. “There’s an open question as to whether many of those voters would stay home if they felt that Harris had been unfairly passed over.”
At the same time, “if you believe that this election is going to be decided by a small number of working class, blue collar voters in three Rust Belt states, there are a lot of Democrats who worry that the former district attorney of San Francisco might not be the best candidate to reach those voters.”
Amelia Ashley-Ward, publisher of San Francisco’s oldest black newspaper the Sun-Reporter, downplayed critics who say Harris can’t beat Trump.
“I don’t know why they keep saying she can’t win because she’s demonstrated time and time before that she can,” Ashley-Ward said.
She remembers chartering a cable car during Harris’s 2003 District Attorney campaign, when she beat a two-term incumbent.
“We rolled for four hours across the city while she would jump on and off and introduce herself to people. We had bullhorns. It was magnetic,” Ashley-Ward said. “They went crazy over her.”
What exactly happens at the August convention remains to be seen. But Simon, the super delegate, said she’d be ready to support her party. And if Harris is the nominee, “I will be with the biggest Kamala Harris sign in the crowd.”
