Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority gathering in Houston, July 31, 2024, in Houston.
| Photo Credit: AP

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris effectively secured the Democratic party’s presidential nomination on August 2, confirming her remarkable rise to party standard bearer in November’s showdown against Republican Donald Trump.

Harris was the sole candidate on the ballot for a five-day electronic vote of nearly 4,000 party convention delegates. She will be officially crowned at a Chicago convention later this month.

“I am honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States,” Harris, 59, said on a phone-in to a party celebration after securing enough votes by the second day of the marathon vote.

In the two weeks since President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid, Harris has gained full control of the party.

No other Democrats stepped forward to challenge her elevation to the top of the ticket, making her confirmation as the first Black and South Asian woman ever to secure a major party’s nomination a formality.

The announcement came with Harris preparing to hit the campaign trail next week for a swing across seven crucial battleground states with her newly minted running mate — who is expected to be revealed within days.

The Democratic Party decided on a virtual nomination process — mirroring the pandemic-hit 2020 vote — because of Ohio’s August 7 deadline for major parties to submit the names of their certified candidates for the November election.

The virtual roll call marks the official beginning of the 2024 convention, although in practice the festivities really get going when thousands of party faithful descend on Chicago on August 19.

That will feature ceremonial votes for Harris and her running mate in what is expected to be a raucous celebration of her rise from state politics to the top of the ticket.

Trump’s White House bid was thrown into chaos on July 21 when Biden, 81, withdrew his candidacy, backing Harris as the Democratic nominee.

The vice president has already smashed fundraising records, packed arenas and wiped out Trump’s polling leads over Biden, creating momentum that she hopes she can ride through the convention to the White House.

She is set to make her first public appearance with her running mate Tuesday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — a crucial swing state whose Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, is among a handful candidates being vetted to potentially join the Harris ticket.

The swing will take Harris through all the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where she will seek to rebuild the coalition that carried Biden to victory in 2020.

But she will extend the tour to the much more racially diverse Sun Belt and southern states of Georgia, North Carolina Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada as she seeks to shore up the Black and Hispanic vote that had been peeling away from the Democrats.

Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to speak during a campaign rally on July 30, 2024, in Atlanta.
| Photo Credit: AP

Vice President Kamala Harris has sealed her Democratic presidential nomination as she emerged as the only candidate to qualify for virtual roll call votes from the party’s delegates from across the country.

As many as 3,923 delegates from across the country petitioned to put Ms. Harris, 59, on the ballot for the Democratic nomination, and she secured the support of 99% of the participating delegates, the Democratic Party announced Tuesday night after the official deadline.

In a joint statement, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Jaime Harrison and the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) Chair Minyon Moore said no other candidate met the threshold of 300 delegate signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The chairs said that voting on the virtual roll call – the process through which Ms. Harris will officially become the Democratic nominee – will begin on August 1 and end on August 5.

“Democratic delegates from across the nation made their voices heard, overwhelmingly backing Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. As we prepare to open the voting on our virtual roll call, we move to this final stage of our nomination process with unprecedented momentum and unity across our party,” the chairs said.

“We stand united in our mission to elect a Democratic nominee who has the experience, the wisdom, and the bold determination to lead our country, and we stand united in our mission to defeat Donald Trump once again,” they said.

The electronic roll call will commence at 9:00 a.m. ET on August 1, marking the official beginning of the 2024 Convention. Delegates will receive a secure ballot and support to cast their vote on a rolling basis starting at 9:00 a.m. The roll call voting period will end at 6:00 p.m. on August 5, the deadline for delegates to return their ballot.

Because Ms. Harris has the verified support of a number of pledged delegates equal to or greater than a majority of all pledged and automatic delegates, the votes of both pledged, and automatic delegates will be counted on the first ballot, it said.

Trailblazer Ms. Harris is the first Indian-American and first African American woman to be ever named on a presidential ticket for any major political party in the U.S.

Former president Barack Obama was the first-ever African American in 2008, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be the presidential candidate of a major political party.

Noticeably, all three — Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton and Ms. Harris — are from the Democratic Party, which has ruled the country for 12 of the last 16 years.

Washington:

Hollywood star George Clooney — one of the first high-profile Democratic activists to urge Joe Biden not to seek reelection — on Tuesday announced his backing for Kamala Harris, while hailing Biden’s exit.

“President Biden has shown what true leadership is. He’s saving democracy once again. We’re all so excited to do whatever we can to support Vice President Harris in her historic quest,” Clooney said in a statement to CNN.

A major fundraiser for Democratic candidates and longtime Biden booster, Clooney broke ranks two weeks ago by openly calling on the 81-year-old president to give way to a younger candidate so that the party would have a better chance of beating Donald Trump in November.

“I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote in The New York Times, shocking many. “I consider him a friend, and I believe in him… But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”

With Biden at the top of the ticket, the Oscar-winner said, Democrats “are not going to win in November,” will lose control of the Senate, and won’t gain a majority in the House of Representatives.

After days of mounting pressure, Biden on Sunday abruptly announced he was leaving the race and endorsed his vice president. Harris has rapidly garnered overwhelming support from party leaders and raked in a huge quantity of donations from voters.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

FILE PHOTO: As a VP, Harris has been particularly outspoken on artificial intelligence (AI). 
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is potentially poised to become the Democratic presidential nominee in the November election. As VP, Harris has been particularly outspoken on artificial intelligence (AI). She warned against the “existential” threat of AI and said it could “endanger the very existence of humanity,” in a November 2023 address.

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In a meeting with tech execs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Harris warned that they have a “moral” obligation to guard against AI’s possible dangers. She backed an AI executive order from President Joe Biden that sought stronger protections for consumers, singling out AI-generated scam calls and the impacts of unlabelled AI-generated content.

Prior to joining the Biden administration, as California attorney general, Harris sued eBay over the ecommerce company’s anticompetitive hiring practices surrounding a no-poaching agreement with Intuit. The lawsuit led to a nearly $4 million settlement in 2014. 

In a different lawsuit against Houzz, she compelled the startup to hire a chief privacy officer after allegations that the home design app had recorded sales calls without proper notification and consent.

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She has also been at the forefront of curtailing distribution of pornography on social media, particularly “revenge porn,” a practice involving the posting of explicit photos without the subject’s consent. She took credit for a pressure campaign that led to Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others taking measures to remove certain explicit images.

(with inputs from Reuters)