Joe Biden has officially chosen Kamala Harris to stand by him as his running-mate for the 2020 presidential election, his campaign revealed last Tuesday, elevating California’s junior senator as the first woman of color to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket.
This decision has been long-awaited throughout this country and did not come easy. It comes more than a year after Harris, who was also a 2020 Democratic candidate, clashed with Biden over racial issues during the first primary debate. If elected, she would be the nation’s first female, first Black, and first Asian-American vice president.
The age difference between Harris, who is 55, and Biden, provides the ticket with some generational diversity. Biden, who is 77, would be the oldest president-elect in U.S. history.
“You make a lot of important decisions as president. But, the first one is who you select to be your Vice President. I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021,” Biden wrote in an email from his campaign to supporters.
“I need someone working alongside me who is smart, tough, and ready to lead. Kamala is that person,” he wrote. “I need someone who understands the pain that so many people in our nation are suffering, whether they’ve lost their job, their business, a loved one to this virus.”
Despite her strengths, Harris’ selection is not without risk. In her own presidential run, she was an inconsistent candidate, and her record as a prosecutor has, at times, been a political millstone, notably as attitudes on law enforcement and mass incarceration has dramatically shifted to the left.
While Harris has more forcefully embraced criminal justice reform recently, she faces lingering distrust from some in the party’s progressive faction, including younger voters of color who did not broadly embrace her candidacy.
The Trump campaign was quick to jump on this announcement, painting Harris as an out-of-touch liberal. Trump mentioned in a news conference on Tuesday that he was surprised by the selection, stating that “she did very, very poorly” in her presidential run and clashed directly with Biden in the primary.
One of his fiercest criticisms centered on Harris’ grilling of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearing in 2018, one of several breakout moments she had as a new senator.
“She was the meanest, the most horrible, the most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate” during the hearings, Trump said.
Despite the weeks of blustery speculation about Biden’s pick, the final decision was announced not by news leaks, but a text message to supporters. The campaign later tweeted a picture of Biden informing Harris via video chat on a laptop—an aptly socially distanced job offer in the era of coronavirus.
Once the pick was made official, Harris was celebrated by other women in contention for the job. National security advisor Susan Rice praised her as a “tenacious and trailblazing leader,” while Los Angeles Rep. Karen Bass commended her “relentless advocacy for the people.”
They were echoed by a chorus of Democratic officials and interest groups signaling their approval, including former President Obama, who described the choice of a vice president as “the first important decision” a president makes.
“Joe Biden nailed this decision,” Obama said in a statement.
