Kamala Harris to pick a young, white male as running mate
On the first full day of her campaign for president speculation swirled the current vice president Kamala Harris would opt for a younger male Democrat governor from a battleground state to help her take the fight to Donald Trump
Kamala Harris has put Obama-era attorney-general Eric Holder and his law firm in charge of vetting her potential vice-presidential choices amid anticipation the presumptive Democratic Party nominee will pick a young male governor from a battleground state to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance.
As the ruling party’s grandees heaped praise on Joe Biden’s decision to stand aside from the top of the Democrat ticket, the party coalesced around his deputy, handing her the power to pick the man or woman to face off against Senator Vance, whom Mr Trump unveiled as his running mate at last week’s Republican convention.
Practically all of the leading Democrat governors who had been canvassed as possible challengers to Ms Harris quickly endorsed her following Mr Biden’s call for the party to back his deputy on Sunday (Monday AEST). And no credible candidates to challenge Ms Harris have since come forward publicly ahead of the party’s nominating convention to begin on August 19 in Chicago.
Ms Harris had separate phone calls with the three leading contenders on Sunday (Monday AEST) to join her ticket – Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper and Andy Beshear of Kentucky – according to The Wall Street Journal.
The 59-year-old, set to be the first woman of colour to lead a presidential campaign, would be conscious of needing to balance her ticket to include a more mainstream, typical candidate, amid increasingly strident Republican attacks on her record over her alleged far left history and elevation by Mr Biden as a “diversity, equity and inclusion” candidate, Democratic Party strategists have suggested.
Mr Shapiro, the 51-year-old first-term Governor of Pennsylvania, a populous state Democrats need to win to keep the White House in November, was the bookies’ favourite on Monday night to become Ms Harris’s running mate.
The moderate governor, who, like Ms Harris, was previously a state attorney-general before being elected governor during the failed Republican red wave of November 2022, would only say it was “a deeply personal decision” for the Vice-President, when asked if he would join her.
“She will make it on her own timetable and her own timeline. She needs to choose someone that she’s prepared to govern with, campaign with. And someone that she feels most comfortable with, and that decision should be made free of any sort of political pressure,” he said in Pittsburgh.
Ms Harris’s choice of Democrat powerbroker Holder to handle her vice-presidential vetting will fuel Republican arguments that former president Barack Obama, who worked behind the scenes to convince Mr Biden to stand aside, would continue to wield outsized influence in any future Harris administration.
Mr Shapiro’s fellow next generation contender, 46-year-old Andy Beshear, a second-term governor of typically Republican Kentucky, was talking up his unifying credentials on CNN in prime time, adding the options Ms Harris was considering “would eat JD Vance’s lunch every day” in debate.
“(We need to) stop the right and left, everything isn’t Democrat or Republican, we can’t view the world through a red or blue lens, people just want a better life,” he said.
Mr Beshear blasted Senator Vance after the freshly minted vice-presidential candidate made fun of his pedigree, being the son of a former governor of Kentucky.
“He’s phony, he’s fake. I mean, he first says that Donald Trump is like Hitler, and now he’s acting like he’s Lincoln,” Mr Beshear said.
The third of the three favourites, Mr Cooper, 67, said he “appreciated people talking about me”.
“She needs to concentrate on making sure that she secures this nomination and gets the campaign ready to go,” he said.
Other potential candidates include Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, 42, who lasted significantly longer than Ms Harris in the 2020 presidential nomination race, and 52-year-old Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who, as a woman, is considered a less likely choice, and former astronaut and current Arizona senator Mark Kelly, 60.
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