Is America ready to elect a black woman as its president? Vice President Kamala Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic US presidential nominee in Chicago next week, believes it’s possible.
The Democrat said in 2019, when she ran against Joe Biden in the primary presidential campaign, “Throughout my career, I’ve heard people say … people aren’t ready, it’s not your time, nobody like you has done this before.”
“I have not heard and I would suggest that no one should hear any such conversations.”
But Harris’s campaign never launched, and she left the primary race before Biden chose her as his vice president.
If Harris, 59, manages to defeat Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and the second Black person after Barack Obama to run the world’s leading power.
Trailblazer
In many ways, Harris is already a pioneer. Born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, she was the first female attorney general elected in California, as well as the first African American and Asian American to hold the position. She then became the first vice president in US history to belong to those categories.
The Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, found in a survey published in September 2023 that for most Americans, gender plays no role in choosing a president.
60 percent of respondents said a female president could handle pressure as well as a man, while 27 percent believed she would do a better job.
“While female leadership — whether as a president, queen, prime minister or head of state — has become the norm in many parts of the world, including Europe, Asia, South America and African countries, the United States has yet to experience this moment,” said Sonia Gipson Rankin, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.
He noted that although Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College, and therefore the presidency, to Trump in 2016, she won the popular vote.
Strategic Differentiation
Regina Bateson, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that voters’ biases themselves may not be the issue.
“The problem often isn’t that voters are actually biased. It’s that party insiders, surrogates and political donors are concerned that voters will be biased,” Bateson said.
This causes them to refuse to support a black woman, a phenomenon Bateson calls “strategic discrimination” that typically occurs during primaries, when a candidate must demonstrate that he or she is able to unite multiple groups of voters.
However, Harris took over after 81-year-old frontrunner Biden withdrew from the race, relieving her of the burden of “trying to convince people that she could be elected” during the primaries.
Along with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a 60-year-old white man, Harris is now hoping to win the trust of all Americans, regardless of their race or gender.
Some are already convinced of this, such as “White Dudes for Harris,” a group that brought together nearly 200,000 people for a Zoom fundraiser for Harris in late July, raising more than $4 million.
Donald Trump wasted no time in attacking his Democratic rival over her background.
The billionaire alleged that Harris had recently adopted a “black” race to gain electoral support.
Harris, who has always spoken proudly about her Black and Asian heritage, slammed Trump for his “divisive and disrespectful” policies.
Fellow former presidential candidate J.D. Vance recently caused an uproar when a 2021 video resurfaced in which he dismissed the Democratic Party, saying it was “run by a bunch of childless women who are miserable with their lives… and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable.”
Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff and has helped raise his two children from a previous marriage. She has no biological children of her own.
Vance’s comments were strongly criticized by Hollywood stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Glenn Close, and were widely considered a political gaffe in a country where fertility rates have been historically low.
Vance sought a retraction of his remarks, saying his remarks were taken out of context.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
