Kamala Harris, Biden’s natural successor?

In the Democratic race to replace the president of the United States, Joe Bidenafter he announced that he will not run for re-election, no one like his vice president, Kamala Harrisemerges with greater force when assuming this task and yet is more questioned.

Harris’s career has been marked by firsts: she was the first black district attorney and the first attorney general in California history; the first Indian-American to serve in the Senate; and, when Biden chose her, the first woman vice president of the United States. Will she now be the first female president?

Born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California, she is the eldest daughter of an immigrant couple – Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica – who divorced when she was seven years old.

Her name means lotus flower and she is a Baptist who grew up attending a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple as a child. But despite her multicultural background, she says she has always felt comfortable with her identity and prefers to describe herself simply as “an American.”

A graduate of Howard University, one of the preeminent black universities, in political science and economics, Harris specialized in the fight against crime.

She was district attorney in San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, and California’s attorney general from 2017 to 2017. Three years earlier, she married attorney Douglas Emhoff, whom she met on a blind date.

In 2016, she became the second black woman and the first of Indian origin to win a seat in the country’s Senate, where she immediately stood out for her incisive questions to officials of the Republican Donald Trump Administration (2017-2021) during the hearings.

Harris’s low popularity

As vice president, Biden initially put her in charge of border immigration policy, which is why Republicans often attack her, and then of defending women’s reproductive rights in the face of the conservative offensive against abortion.

But his management has never been translated into high levels of popularity. According to the average of polls collected by the website FiveThirtyEight dated July 17, 50.4% of citizens disapprove of his management and only 38.6% support it..

“Harris is a successful politician by any measure. She is often criticized for failing to inspire or enthuse Democratic and independent voters, but she has outperformed all other potential Democratic candidates in head-to-head polls against Trump,” William Dunlap, a law professor at Quinnipiac University, told EFE.

In 2019, she had launched her own presidential campaign under the slogan “Kamala Harris for the people,” although her proposal failed to raise enough funds, and after she announced her withdrawal, Biden ended up choosing her as his running mate.

Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Institute of Public Affairs and professor of Political Science at Syracuse University, reminds EFE that when she ran for president she did so by positioning herself to the left of Biden and criticizing him for not being progressive enough.

“That labels her from the start,” the expert notes. “And the more people got to know her through the primary process, the less they liked her. This trait will hurt her in a presidential election. She will be seen as a liberal woman of color from the California coast, and that is not a likely recipe for success.”

Her own personality is polarising. “Many people find her too exalted.” For example, social media has made her loud laughter at public events, regardless of the seriousness of the event, go viral.

Initially, in the letter in which he announced his withdrawal, Biden did not give her explicit support and merely said that she had been an “extraordinary partner” in the electoral process now frustrated by the pressures on Biden for his physical and mental capacity.

But less than half an hour later, she did ask for a vote for the person who has been her “number two” since January 2021: “I want to offer my full support and backing for Kamala to be our party’s candidate this year. Democrats: it’s time to unite and defeat Trump. Let’s do it,” she concluded.