US Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday appeared poised to clinch her party’s presidential nomination after receiving support from enough Democratic delegates, as she launched a blistering campaign against the Republican candidate, former US president Donald Trump.
The formal nomination process for a US presidential candidate occurs when delegates from across the US gather to officially anoint a nominee chosen by voters during the primaries.
However, when US President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, the fate of those delegates, who had been slated to vote for him, came into question.
Photo: AP
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.
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 “roller-coaster” 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.
It is a winning issue for Democrats, as Republicans struggle to secure votes among suburban women who have shown waning enthusiasm for another Trump term.
Among battleground state voters, 52 percent judged abortion a “very important” issue for the November ballot, according to the Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll conducted from July 1 to 15.
At the time, 47 percent across the swing states said they trusted Biden more to handle the issue, with 35 percent for Trump.
Biden, 81, meanwhile made his first public remarks in nearly a week as he recovered from a bout of COVID-19.
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.”
Harris was yesterday scheduled to take her fight against Trump to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she was to hold a rally hoping to bolster her following in the critical swing state.
Aiming to become the first female president in US history, the 59-year-old Harris won the backing of a seemingly unassailable number of Democrats.
Notably among them was powerful former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said she endorsed Harris “with immense pride and limitless optimism.”
Donors have also rallied behind Harris, pouring a record US$81 million into her campaign in the 24 hours after Biden stood aside.
The campaign claimed the haul was the largest one-day sum in presidential history — and that, among the 888,000 grassroots donors, about 60 percent were making their first 2024 contribution.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home