On Tuesday, August 11, 2020, Democratic presidential candidate for the November 2020 US Presidential elections, Joe Biden, settled on Kamala Harris, a woman of color, as his running mate.
In a tweet, Mr Biden indicated that
“I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate.”
The announcement made Senator Harris to become the first African-American, American South Asian woman to become a running mate for a major political party in the US.
Who Is Senator Harris?
Senator Harris was born to Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan Harris. Her parents are from India and Jamaica.
She was born on October 20, 1964 (age 55 years) in Oakland, California, United States.
She became the first Black Woman in the US Senate from California and has been occupying the role since 2017.
Prior to her nomination, she contested against Joe Biden in 2019 for the Democratic presidential nomination.
She is highly loved in the Democrat for being the face of the party’s future – a young, Black woman.
She fell out of the Presidential candidate race by the end of the year – before even the Iowa caucuses.
Reports at the time indicated that Senator Harris’s struggle to maintain support was driven by an inability to articulate clear policy positions and a backlash from an attempt to attack rival Joe Biden’s record on race during a June 2019 debate.
Senator Harris was a former California state attorney general.
She became popular with liberal activists for her tough questioning of appointees and officials from the administration of President Donald Trump – including Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, during Senate hearings.
She made history in 2016 when she became the first Black woman elected to the US Senate from California, and she has pushed back against critics of “identity politics”, who she says are using the term as a pejorative to marginalise issues of race, gender and sexual orientation.
In the Senate, she introduced a bill to give lower-income families cash payments and tax credits to help battle wage stagnation and rising housing costs, and she has been a strong advocate of criminal justice reforms.
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