US Vice President Kamala Harris needed 1,976 delegates to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination as the US presidential candidate in the November election. She reached that number on Monday evening, just under 32 hours after her boss, President Joe Biden, announced on Sunday that he was leaving the campaign due to doubts about his physical and cognitive abilities that were sown by his disastrous performance in the debate between him and Republican candidate Donald Trump on June 27 in Atlanta.
That support, which Harris began to gather at full speed despite the fact that some voices within the party were advocating the convenience of holding unprecedented “mini-primaries” from which a consensus candidate would emerge, will allow her to go to the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to take place in Chicago between August 19 and 22, with the peace of mind, at least a month in advance, that this conclave will remain a mere formality for her acclamation.
The count was made by the AP agency, which spent the day calling delegate by delegate in search of confirmations and then added those who made their support public. Shortly before 10:00 p.m. (local time on the East Coast of the United States, 4:00 a.m. in the Spanish Peninsula), the agency confirmed that 2,214 had already closed ranks around Harris. Within a few minutes, another 60 had joined in.
The news came at the end of a day in which Harris had broken fundraising records for her campaign with $81 million in donations in just under 24 hours and her cause had attracted a thousand volunteers. In the morning she wrote on X that she was declaring the day her first day of campaigning. In the afternoon she traveled aboard the Air Force Two She headed to Wilmington, Delaware, Biden’s hometown, to reassure those working on the president’s campaign that she is now the boss and that their continued employment is guaranteed.
The identity of the person he will choose as his vice presidential candidate remains to be seen. Names of governors such as Roy Cooper (North Carolina), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania) and Illinois (JB Pritzker) have been floated, as has Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.
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Democrats still remember the tumultuous 1968 convention in Chicago, held a few months after President Lyndon B. Johnson, harassed by the Vietnam War, announced in March that he would not seek re-election. Between that announcement and the party meeting in the summer, two assassinations took place that turned the country upside down: that of Senator Robert Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated five years earlier, and that of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Anti-war protests marked that convention, from which Hubert Humphrey emerged as the candidate in the midst of the chaos. At the polls that November, Republican Richard Nixon easily beat him.
There are 4,696 delegates participating in this summer’s convention, according to Ballotpedia, reference website on electoral matters in the United States: 3,949 of them are committed delegates and 747 are automatic delegates, more commonly known as superdelegates.
Democratic Party chairmen from the various states and associated and overseas territories raced Monday to hold teleconferences and in-person meetings with their delegates to find out how much support Harris had. It soon became clear that more than half a dozen of those states were committed to a unanimous endorsement of the vice president.
The number of those convinced grew throughout the day. By early in the morning, the symbolic figure of one thousand delegates had already been surpassed. One of the last states to support him was his own: California, which is the one that provides the most delegates.
Harris is running for office with the goal of becoming the first female president in US history, after Hillary Clinton came close to breaking the glass ceiling in 2016 in a campaign that pitted her against Donald Trump, the same rival the Democratic candidate will now face.
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