US Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to be officially named the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate by the beginning of next week. As the party headquarters announced on Tuesday evening (local time), the electronic vote on Harris will take place from Thursday to Monday. The 59-year-old is the only candidate for the candidacy.
According to the party headquarters known as the Democratic National Committee (DNC), 3,923 party delegates, or 99 percent of participants, have supported Harris’ bid to run in the presidential election on November 5, in which she will face Republican Donald Trump.
The support of at least 300 delegates was necessary to qualify for the final vote on the Democratic presidential candidate. No other candidate exceeded this threshold, the DNC said. The names of these other candidates were not mentioned in the statement.
Harris is also expected to announce her running mate soon. Her team announced that Harris and her running mate would be campaigning in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada next week.
The selection of the vice presidential candidate is considered a strategically important decision. It is about winning potentially decisive votes in the states that are crucial to the outcome of the election – the so-called swing states.
Possible running mates at Harris’ side include the governors of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and North Carolina, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear and Roy Cooper, as well as the Senator of Arizona, Marc Kelly.
DNC chief Jaime Harrison and the chair of the Democratic Party convention scheduled for the second half of August, Minyon Moore, said on Tuesday that the party is moving toward the final phase of the nomination process with “unprecedented momentum and unprecedented unity”: “We stand united in our mission to defeat Donald Trump once again.”
Harris announced on Monday last week that she had secured enough delegate votes for her nomination. That was just one day after 81-year-old President Joe Biden announced that he would not run for re-election after weeks of debate about his mental state and endorsed Harris as a candidate.
The presidential candidates of the two major US parties are usually officially nominated at party conventions. However, the Democratic Party Convention from August 19 to 22 in Chicago is now only there to celebrate Harris’s candidacy, which had already been decided upon beforehand.
The Democrats had already made plans for a virtual vote on the presidential candidate before Biden announced his withdrawal. These plans were based on a law in the state of Ohio that requires presidential candidates to be officially named by August 7.
Ohio then postponed the deadline until after the party convention, but Democratic party representatives were suspicious that the Republicans could use the original deadline.
