- Harris is already a pioneer and the first female attorney general of California.
- Citizens believe gender plays no role in electing president, says 2023 poll
- “60% say a female president handles pressure as well as a male.”
WASHINGTON: US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, has said the United States is ready to elect its first black female president.
“My entire career, I've heard people say when I ran… people aren't ready, it's not your time, nobody like you has done that before,” the Democrat, who will be officially confirmed as a presidential candidate in Chicago next week, said in 2019 when she faced Joe Biden in the presidential primary campaign.
“I have not heard and I would suggest that no one listen to that kind of conversation.”
But Harris's campaign never took off and she dropped out of the primary race before Biden chose her as his running mate.
If Harris, 59, beats Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and second black person, after Barack Obama, to lead the world's leading power.
Pioneer
In many ways, Harris is already a trailblazer. Born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, she was the first woman elected attorney general in California, as well as the first African-American and Asian-American to hold that position. She went on to become the first female vice president in U.S. history in those same categories.
In a survey published in September 2023, the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, found that for most Americans, gender does not play a role in choosing a president.
Sixty percent of respondents said a female president would handle pressure as well as a man, while 27 percent believed she would do it better.
“While female leadership — whether as presidents, queens, prime ministers and heads of state — has become the norm in many parts of the world, including Europe, Asia, South America and African nations, the United States has yet to experience this moment,” said Sonia Gipson Rankin, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.
He noted that although Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college and therefore the presidency to Trump in 2016, she won the popular vote.
Strategic discrimination
Regina Bateson, a political science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, believes voter biases per se may not be the problem.
“The problem isn't that voters are biased,” Bateson said. “It's that party members, delegates and political donors fear that voters are biased.”
That leads them to deny support to a woman of color, a phenomenon Bateson calls “strategic discrimination,” which typically plays out during primaries, when a candidate must prove he or she can rally many groups of voters.
However, Harris replaced Biden after the 81-year-old front-runner dropped out of the race, sparing him “this process of trying to convince people that he's electable” during the primaries.
Flanked by her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a 60-year-old white man, Harris now hopes to win the trust of all Americans, regardless of ethnicity or gender.
Some are already convinced, like “White Dudes for Harris,” a group that gathered nearly 200,000 people for a Zoom fundraiser for Harris in late July, raising more than $4 million.
Donald Trump did not wait long to attack his Democratic rival for his record.
The billionaire claimed Harris only recently “went black” to gain electoral support.
Harris, who has always spoken of her black and Asian heritage with pride, criticized Trump for his “divisiveness and disrespect.”
The former president's running mate, JD Vance, sparked outrage recently when a 2021 video resurfaced in which he dismissed the Democratic Party as being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their own lives… and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff and helped raise his two children from a previous marriage. She has no biological children of her own.
Vance's comments sparked a backlash amplified by Hollywood stars including Jennifer Aniston and Glenn Close, and were widely seen as a political misstep in a country where the fertility rate is historically low.
Vance has attempted to retract his comments, saying they were taken out of context.
