Vice President Kamala Harris has secured the support of enough Democratic delegates to be named her party’s 2024 presidential nominee, according to a tally late Monday night.
Several state delegations met late Monday to confirm their support for Harris, including Texas and her home state of California. By Monday night, Harris had the support of at least 2,574 delegates, according to an Epoch Times tally of delegates—more than the 1,976 majority of delegates she’ll need to win on a first ballot.
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., on July 22, 2024. Erin Schaff/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
However, as delegates won’t cast their official nomination until August at the Democratic National Convention, there is still a chance for new candidates to emerge and challenge Harris. The Associated Press reported that no other candidate had been named by a delegate as of Monday.
Many top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have rallied around Harris as their party’s preferred candidate to take on GOP presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), in November. Biden stepped aside on Sunday, saying he supports new party leadership going into 2025.
Some of the first major endorsements came from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who both backed Harris in a joint statement on Sunday.
She was also endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and by many of the names floated as potential rivals if the party opted for an open convention.
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Democrats include Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
There are key holdouts among Democratic elites in endorsing Harris for president, including former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a major Biden campaign donor.
“The decision is too important to rush because the election is too important to lose,” Bloomberg said in a statement posted to X.
Several of the people who were floated as potential running mates for Harris, including Moore and Whitmer, said they were not interested in being vice president.
There are other Democrats rumored as potential vice presidential candidates for Harris, including Shapiro, Beshear, Cooper, and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).
The Harris campaign said on Monday that it had raised $81 million in the first 24 hours since the vice president announced her presidential bid the day before, although there could be legal challenges over the money she inherited from the Biden campaign.
Some legal experts suggest the money raised by Biden was under his own name and that there is no “legal mechanism” for it to be raised jointly with Harris.
Federal Election Commission spokeswoman Judith Ingram said the FEC “has not directly addressed this situation in the past.”
During a meeting with her campaign staff on Monday, Harris outlined her vision for a White House term.
“Together, we [will] fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care, where every worker is paid fairly, and where every senior can retire with dignity,” she said.
–Jacob Burg
THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT THE VICE PRESIDENT
With Joe Biden’s tectonic announcement that he will not run for re-election, Kamala Harris appears on the path to clinch the nomination, having won endorsements from the president and many key Democrats.
If she becomes the nominee at the Democratic National Convention next month, she will face Donald Trump in November.
Here are a few things to know about the presumptive Democrat nominee.
A 59-year-old, Harris is mixed race, with an Indian mother and a black father.
Her parents were both renowned academics. Her father was an economist and her mother was a pioneering biologist.
Harris’s parents were of different faiths: her father was a Christian and her mother was a Hindu. Harris currently identifies as a Baptist, but she’s made clear that she’s familiar with Hinduism as well.
She married entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff in 2014. She’s a stepmother to Emhoff’s two children, Ella and Cole.
Harris has a degree in economics and political science at Howard University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Washington. She obtained her law degree from University of California, Hastings. She was admitted to the state bar in 1990.
After working a series of legal and political jobs since 1990, Harris in 2004 mounted an ultimately successful bid to become San Francisco District Attorney.
She promised in that race to be “smart on crime,” condemning her opponent—and previous boss—for his low conviction rates.
In 2010, Harris set her sights on the state attorney generalship. She narrowly defeated Republican Steve Cooley for the position, winning by just a 0.8 percent margin.
After around 6 years in the position, Harris in 2016 defeated Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) in a Senate race, winning with more than 20 percent of the vote.
One of her most well-known moments in the Senate came during the 2018 confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
During those hearings, Harris gained national attention for her questioning of the judicial nominee.
In a 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Harris asked Kavanaugh a series of questions regarding an allegation of sexual assault, including encouraging him to take a polygraph test and asking him to request an FBI investigation into the allegations.
“I’ll do whatever the committee wants,” Kavanaugh replied to both questions.
No corroborating evidence was put forward in relation to the claims against Kavanaugh. He denied the allegations.
In 2020, Harris mounted an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the presidency, dropping out before the Iowa Caucus due to persistently low polling.
She became Biden’s running mate in part to fulfill Biden’s promise that he’d name a black woman to the spot.
But before then, Harris had been critical of the man who would become her boss, condemning Biden’s past statements in opposition to desegregation busing programs.
During the 2020 election season, Harris came under fire from Republicans for encouraging her followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. The group paid the bail of those arrested in connection to illegal conduct in the protests and riots that followed after George Floyd’s death.
Upon her election in 2020, Harris broke a series of firsts: she was the first woman, first black person, and first Indian-American to accede to the vice presidency.
Since taking office, she’s helped lead the administration’s messaging on abortion.
She was also named Biden’s “border czar” at the start of her term in office—a fact that Republicans are already using as a key line of attack against her 2024 presidential bid.
Should Harris win, she’d be the first woman to occupy the Oval Office.
—Joseph Lord and Jackson Richman
BOOKMARKS
Pro-Palestinian student protesters in Canada have begun dispersing after being issued a trespass warning by the University of Victoria. The demonstrators were calling on the university to completely divest itself from any association with Israel.
China and the Philippines have reached a provisional agreement allowing for resupply shipments to a Philippine outpost in the South China sea. It is hoped that the agreement will de-escalate rising tensions between the two nations over the maritime region after China had interfered with previous resupply missions.
A lawsuit Donald Trump filed against the Pulitzer Prize Board will proceed after a Florida court refused to throw out the case on Monday. The suit accuses the board of defamation after it awarded prizes to The New York Times and The Washington Post for reports related to the Russian-collusion case.
Joe Biden has announced a $4.3 billion grant package to fund climate change projects across 30 states. The initiative targets a wide range of projects from carbon sequestration to electric vehicle incentives.
—Stacy Robinson
