Will Harris excite the Democratic base? She has a chance of reviving her party’s fortunes

WITH US President Joe Biden exiting the presidential race, Vice-President Kamala Harris is now regarded as the Democratic Party’s likely pick to take on former president Donald Trump.

That could give the 59-year-old Harris a chance to make history by notching several firsts – becoming not just the first female president of the United States, but also the first woman of colour (first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent) to be elected to the high office.

Harris has earned endorsement from President Biden, as well as from other leading Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton and the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But Harris isn’t guaranteed the nomination, and she herself noted that she would have to “earn” the required delegates to take Biden’s place at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August.

But the expectation in Washington is that none of the other Democrats mentioned as possible presidential candidates, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and California Governor Gavin Newsom, are going to challenge the VP and that she would become her party’s presidential nominee.

Harris – whose mother was an Indian biomedical scientist and father a Jamaican-American economist – was born in Oakland, California in October 1964. She served as a California attorney-general and then represented the state in the US Senate before being selected by Biden as his running mate after failing to win the nomination in the 2019 Democratic presidential primaries.

Harris got off to a rough start in office, struggling in interviews and failing to leave a major mark on the Biden presidency. At one point, Biden assigned her to manage the administration’s response to the waves of illegal immigrants at the southern border. But she failed to advance any coherent strategy to deal with the issue.

And she has left a scant impression on the general electorate, with opinion polls indicating that her favourability ratings are lower than that of Biden as well as Trump’s.

Now she has 105 days of leading the Democrats’ presidential ticket in their quest to beat Republican candidate Trump at a time when the polls indicate that he is now leading the race in major battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and seems to be on a trajectory to win.

On the plus side, Harris could give the Democrats a sense of momentum by exciting the party’s electoral base, in particular key constituencies such as younger voters, Blacks and women who seemed to be wavering in their support for Biden but are expected to be energised by her historic candidacy.

On the negative side, at a time when one of the key challenges of the two major parties is to win the support of blue-collar workers in the Midwest, Harris is tagged as a well-to-do “San Francisco liberal” whose views, especially when it comes to socio-cultural issues, are antithetical to those of working-class voters in middle America.

Yet, as a female candidate, Harris could rally women on the issue of abortion, noting that as president, Trump had nominated the Supreme Court justices who ruled to reverse the law that legalised abortion. She is expected to charge that a President Trump could move to promote a national ban on abortion.

As a former prosecutor, Harris would be running against a convicted felon and will be in a position to advance the case against Trump who was found guilty of 34 criminal charges in New York.

And then there is the age issue. The cloud that has hung over Biden, particularly in recent weeks, now looms over the 78-year-old Trump too who would be facing a younger Democratic presidential candidate who represents a new generation.

In fact, the Republicans will now have to reassess their campaign strategy that has been focused on Biden, and target Harris.

They are expected to paint her as being a part of the same disastrous administration that is supposedly responsible for the rise in inflation, the waves of illegal immigration, and the upsurge in crime in big cities.

The spotlight, too, will now turn to the person that Harris will choose as her running mate.

Much of the speculation is that she would pick one of the governors of the battleground states.

In addition to Shapiro and Newsom, others on the list of Harris’ VP contenders include North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.