- On Tuesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden announced California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. [Vox / Li Zhou]
- It’s a historic pick: Harris becomes the first Black woman and the first Asian American woman ever to run for vice president on a major-party ticket. [NPR / Scott Detrow]
- On Twitter, Biden wrote that Harris, along with his deceased son Beau Biden, “took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I'm proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign.” [Twitter / Joe Biden]
- Harris is no stranger to the campaign trail. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president last year, dropping out in December, and drew headlines for a clash with Biden over his record on desegregating schools in the first Democratic debate. [Washington Post / Amanda Erickson]
- She straddles the divide of the left and moderate wings of the Democratic Party, and has a background in criminal justice: She served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before her Senate bid. [NYT / Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck]
- That background, however, has drawn criticism from some criminal justice reform advocates, who argue she was reluctant to embrace reforms as a prosecutor. [NYT / Danny Hakim, Stephanie Saul, and Richard A. Oppel Jr.]
- As a senator, BuzzFeed notes, Harris's national profile "was elevated by her grilling of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings," including US Attorney General Bill Barr. [BuzzFeed / Henry J. Gomez and Molly Hensley-Clancy]
- And Harris has championed police reform and racial justice issues in the Senate, particularly in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. [Politico / Adam Cancryn and Carla Marinucci]
- Harris’s selection cements the Democratic presidential ticket with less than a week to go until the Democratic National Convention. Though ostensibly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the majority of the event will be digital. [NBC News / Dareh Gregorian]
- Now that the ticket is set, Harris and Biden will make their first public appearance as running mates Wednesday in Wilmington, Delaware. [Reuters / James Oliphant]
- Harris will also face Vice President Mike Pence at the vice-presidential debate in Salt Lake City, Utah, on October 7. [Vox / Catherine Kim, Hannah Brown, and Cameron Peters]
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Harris’s place on the Biden ticket is all about increasing Black voter turnout for Democrats.
In 2016, Black voter turnout fell by 7% after 20 years of steadily increasing turnout. According to the Pew Research Center, “the number of Black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016, representing a sharp reversal from 2012.”
The falloff in Black voters helped doom the Hillary Clinton-Tim Kaine ticket. Dems famously lost Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — three traditionally Democratic states — by a combined total of less than 80,000 votes. This was part of a general phenomenon of Dems staying home: an estimated 4.4 million voters who had supported Obama didn’t come out in 2016, and a third of them were Black.
Democratic strategists are keenly aware that a more robust showing by Black voters in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia might have won those states for the Democrats in 2016, and the White House with it.
She should make an effort to educate younger voters about her record — and make ample use of a line that Biden often quotes: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”
This is a golden opportunity for hard bargaining around federal sentencing guidelines, programs to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, rewriting of the drug laws, prison-reentry programs and other tangible benefits. Harris will be willing to make a deal with activist Democrats. As the vice-presidential candidate, that is her job.