If Harris manages to beat Trump, she will become first woman and the second Black person to run America
\n WASHINGTON
\nUS Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has claimed that America is ready to elect its first Black woman president.
\n\u201cIn my entire career, I\u2019ve heard people say when I ran… people aren\u2019t ready, it\u2019s not your time, nobody like you has done that before,\u201d the Democrat, who will be officially confirmed as presidential nominee in Chicago next week, said in 2019 when she ran against Joe Biden in the primary presidential campaign.
\n\u201cI haven\u2019t listened and I would suggest that nobody should listen to that kind of conversation.\u201d
\nBut Harris\u2019s campaign never took off and she left the primaries race before Biden picked her as his running mate.
\nIf Harris, 59, manages to beat Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and the second Black person, after Barack Obama, to run the world\u2019s leading power.
\nTrailblazer
\nIn so many ways, Harris already is a trailblazer. Born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she was the first woman attorney general ever elected in California, on top of being the first African American and Asian American to hold that post. She then became the first vice president in US history in those same categories.
\nIn a survey published in September 2023, the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, found that for a majority of Americans, gender does not play a role in choosing a president.
\nSixty per cent of respondents said that a female president would handle pressure as well as a man, while 27 per cent believed that she would do better.
\n\u201cWhile female leadership \u2014 whether as presidents, queens, prime ministers, and heads of state \u2014 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,\u201d said Sonia Gipson Rankin, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.
\nShe noted that even though Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college and therefore the presidency to Trump in 2016, she won the popular vote.
\nStrategic discrimination
\nRegina Bateson, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that voters\u2019 biases may not themselves be the issue.
\n\u201cThe problem is often not that voters are actually biased,\u201d Bateson said. \u201cIt\u2019s that party insiders and delegates and political donors worry that the voters will be biased.\u201d
\nThat leads them to withhold support from a woman of colour, a phenomenon that Bateson calls \u201cstrategic discrimination,\u201d which usually manifests itself during the primaries when a candidate must demonstrate that he or she is able to rally many groups of voters.
\nHarris, however, took over from Biden after the 81-year-old leader withdrew from the race, thus sparing her \u201cthis process of trying to convince people that she\u2019s electable\u201d during the primaries.
\nFlanked by her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a 60-year-old white man, Harris now hopes to win the trust of all Americans, regardless of ethnicity or gender.
\nSome are already convinced such as \u201cWhite dudes for Harris,\u201d a group that brought nearly 200,000 people together for a Zoom fundraiser for Harris in late July, raising more than $4 million.
\nDonald Trump didn\u2019t wait long to attack his Democratic rival on her background.
\nThe billionaire charged that Harris \u201cturned Black\u201d only recently in order to win electoral support.
\nHarris, who had always spoken of her Black and Asian heritage with pride, called out Trump for his \u201cdivisiveness and disrespect.\u201d
\nThe former president\u2019s running mate, J.D. Vance, caused an outcry recently when a 2021 video resurfaced in which he dismissed the Democratic Party as being run by \u201ca bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives… and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.\u201d
\nHarris is married to Douglas Emhoff and helped in raising his two children from a previous marriage. She does not have any biological children of her own. Vance\u2019s comments caused a backlash amplified by Hollywood stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Glenn Close, and were widely considered a political misstep in a country where the fertility rate is historically low. Vance has sought to walk back his remarks saying they were taken out of context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If Harris manages to beat Trump, she will become first woman and the second Black person to run America WASHINGTON US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has claimed that America is ready to elect its first Black woman president. \u201cIn my entire career, I\u2019ve heard people say when I ran… people aren\u2019t ready, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":425714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-425692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n