Daily TribuneVP Kamala Harris sails past the number of delegates needed — 1,976 out of nearly 4,000 — to secure the Democratic presidential nomination
UNITED States Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during an NCAA championship teams celebration on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington.
DC. ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
A day after United States Vice President Kamala Harris was anointed by President Joe Biden to replace him as the Democrats’ presidential candidate for the November election, she virtually becomes the party’s nominee by meeting the needed number of delegates to win the nomination on Monday.
More than 1,976 pledged delegates backed Harris, CNN reports, to virtually set the 59-year-old to a faceoff with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Harris also starts her presidential campaign in the battleground state of Wisconsin Tuesday.
With the support of a slew of Democratic heavyweights, including Biden himself, and massive voter donations, Harris quickly closed in as the Democratic party’s heir apparent, and delegates began falling in line to pledge their support.
“Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee,” Harris wrote in a statement, after US media reported she had sailed past the number of delegates needed — 1,976 out of nearly 4,000 — in order to decisively secure the Democratic presidential nomination during voting in the coming weeks.
Harris will be formally named the Democratic Party’s nominee at its convention in mid-August.
The news came after Harris, in her first speech to campaign workers since Biden’s announcement, lashed out at Republican nominee Trump on Monday at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
Telling the crowd of workers she had come to address them personally after the “rollercoaster” of the last few days, she reminded them that in her past role as California’s chief prosecutor, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds.”
“Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to applause.
“We are going to win in November,” a smiling Harris told the workers.
She also pledged to focus on the politically explosive issue of abortion, after Trump praised the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the long-held federal right to the procedure.
Biden, 81, meanwhile, made his first public remarks in nearly a week as he recovered from a bout of Covid.
He called in to the campaign meeting to say that dropping out — after mounting party and voter concerns over his health and mental acuity — had been the “right thing to do” and he praised Harris as “the best.”
