The Democratic Party’s likely presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has delivered her first speech since President Joe Biden’s dramatic exit from the race.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said at her campaign headquarters on Monday, after making anentrance to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom.” “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know [former President] Donald Trump’s type.”
Just hours later, Harris picked up enough Democratic delegate support to become her party’s nominee. The Democratic National Committee plans to hold a virtual roll call to officially select its new standard-bearer ahead of the party convention, which is scheduled to run Aug. 19-22 in Chicago.
There will be many developments before then, as the Democratic Party navigates uncharted waters. Read on for the answers to your biggest questions.
How does the race move forward?
The DNC on Monday debuted a new virtual process for picking someone to replace Biden at the top of the ticket.
While Harris is favored to become the party’s nominee, the process, expected to be completed by Aug. 7, is open to any candidate who receives 300 electronic signatures from convention delegates; no more than 50 can be from a single state.
“We are committed to an open and fair nominating process,” Jaime Harrison, the chair of the DNC, said on Monday.
Above all, Democratic officials want to avoid an open convention, where potential nominees jockey to gather support from individual delegates. This dynamic can lead to disarray, dividing a party at a time when it ought to be coalescing around a nominee.
The last time the Democratic Party had an open convention was in 1968. Seven months before the election, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he wasn’t going to seek reelection. His second-in-command, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, eventually replaced him, and he lost to Richard Nixon.
Many high-profile Democratic leaders — from U.S. Reps. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Lucy McBath of Georgia to former President Bill Clinton — have already followed Biden’s lead and endorsed Harris.
A pro-Nikki Haley PAC has also thrown its weight behind Harris.
“I think that the officials and leaders who have come out in support of Harris early on are saying, ‘We’re going to stop overlooking Black women,’” Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a visiting practitioner at the Center for American Women and Politics where she advises on election analysis, told Capital B.
These endorsements are “a tremendous statement — not just for the vice president but for all Black women who are running for office and, in Shirley Chisholm’s words, fighting for their seat at the table,” Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a visiting practitioner at the Center for American Women and Politics where she advises on election analysis, told Capital B.
A virtual gathering of some 44,000 participants — largely Black women — raised more than $1.5 million for the Harris campaign on Monday. A similar gathering of Black men on Tuesday raised more than $1 million.
What is her track record in key policy areas?
Reproductive justice: Harris is well known for her position on abortion rights. She kicked off a “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour at the start of the year, traveling across the country to be the White House’s voice emphasizing the importance of protecting the right to abortion.
“I think it is clear. If Donald Trump were to win in November, he will continue to sell out working families, he will continue to attack reproductive freedom, and he will continue to undermine our democracy,” Harris said at a campaign stop in North Carolina this month.
Harris has knocked U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, for supporting a national abortion ban.
Trump nominated three of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. He and some of his allies have sought to distance themselves from their anti-abortion stances, which have cost them at the ballot box.
Harris has been an exponent of reproductive justice for years, pushing to make Black maternal health a national priority.
In 2021, she hosted the first federal Maternal Health Day of Action at the White House, where she issued a call to improve health outcomes for parents and infants.
And when she was a senator, she co-sponsored legislation that would have banned specific restrictions on a state level, such as requiring doctors to perform certain tests or obtain hospital admitting privileges to provide an abortion.
Criminal justice reform: Harris’ track record on criminal justice reform is less clear cut.
Following the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, in 2022, the Biden-Harris administration signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. It was the most significant piece of gun control legislation in three decades, partially closing the “boyfriend loophole” and allowing the U.S. Department of Justice to more aggressively target arms trafficking.
When it comes to the issue of police accountability, Harris is more vulnerable to attacks from the left. The administration has yet to sign the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which continues to flounder in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats have only a wafer-thin majority.
The administration has run into a similar problem on the voting rights front.
Harris’ career as a “top cop” — she was the attorney general of California and the district attorney of San Francisco before she joined the U.S. Senate in 2017 — also continues to loom over her. Her critics question her bona fides as a “progressive prosecutor,” insisting that her work in California fueled the mass incarceration of low-income people of color. Her supporters say that she was “a very progressive D.A.” for her time, pointing to her creation of a reentry program called “Back on Track” that was ahead of the curve.
The economy: Harris has been in lockstep with Biden on issues related to the economy.
Just this month, for instance, the administration called on Congress to pass legislation that would help renters by forcing landlords to cap rent increases at 5%. Additionally, the legislation would sustainably repurpose public land for housing. Given that Black Americans are more likely than their white counterparts to be renters, the legislation would have an outsized impact on Black communities.
Harris also has championed student debt relief, which disproportionately helps Black borrowers. She was the face of the administration when it decided in 2022 to cancel all remaining student loan debt for those who had attended Corinthian Colleges.
She may inherit some of Biden’s messaging challenges around communicating the administration’s policies as many voters feel the burn of higher prices.
Could she win?
In a word: yes.
“If we’re able to get past the sound bites and get into her vision for this country — she’s been very vocal about abortion, maternal mortality, and gun control — and observe her energy for this race, people will see that Harris is viable,” Peeler-Allen said.
What the vice president offers is an opportunity for voters to radically change the narrative about what leadership can look like.
“We’ve never seen a Black woman candidate who could have access to an almost $100 million campaign war chest and who already has a nationwide, state-based operation on the ground and ready to go,” Peeler-Allen added. “This is a chance to see what she can do with a level playing field, with the resources that white men running for office have traditionally enjoyed.”Crucially, Harris appears to be generating a level of voter enthusiasm that was conspicuously absent when the race was a rematch between Biden and Trump.
Theodore R. Johnson, a senior adviser at New America, a public policy think tank, told Capital B that one of the biggest questions when Biden was at the top of the Democratic Party ticket was this: Who will show up on Election Day?
“When Black folks weren’t excited about Biden or didn’t feel confident that he could win, they were more likely in that situation to stay home rather than vote for Trump,” Johnson said. “And in a lower-turnout election, if Trump gets 12% of the Black vote and does better than expected in places such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, he can win.”
This story has been updated.