US Democrats’ vote on Harris as presidential candidate has begun
Harris at a campaign event in Atlanta
© AFP
The US Democrats began voting on Thursday to officially nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate. The electronic voting is scheduled to last five days until Monday at 6 p.m. US Eastern Time (midnight CEST). Harris is assured of the nomination; she has no competition in the vote.
Harris is expected to name her candidate for vice president by Monday. She has announced that she wants to appear with the vice presidential candidate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. The selection of the vice presidential candidate is considered a strategically important decision. It is about winning potentially decisive votes in the states that will determine the outcome of the election – the so-called swing states.
The governors of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Minnesota, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear and Tim Walz, the representative of Arizona in the US Senate, Marc Kelly, and US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have recently been mentioned as possible running mates at Harris’ side.
Harris had already 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 fitness and advocated for 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 the party convention, 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 expressed concern that the Republicans might still apply the original deadline.
AFP
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