Kamala Harris has secured the majority of delegates needed for her designation as candidate | USA Elections

US Vice President Kamala Harris needed 1,976 delegates to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination as candidate for President of the United States in the November elections. She reached that number this Monday night, less than 32 hours after her boss, President Joe Biden, announced on Sunday that he was leaving the campaign due to doubts about his physical and cognitive abilities due to his disastrous performance in the debate he faced Republican candidate Donald Trump in Atlanta on June 27.

This support, which Harris began to gather at full speed, despite the fact that some voices within the party advocated the convenience of holding an unprecedented “mini-primary” from which a consensus candidate would emerge, allowing her to participate in the Democratic National Convention, scheduled between August 19 and 22 in Chicago, with the peace of mind, at least a month away, that this convention would remain a mere procedure for her own accolades.

This account was created by the AP agency, which called delegate by delegate throughout the day looking for confirmation and then added those who had made their support public. Shortly before 10:00 pm (local time on the east coast of the United States, 4:00 am on the Spanish peninsula), the agency confirmed that 2,214 had already closed ranks around Harris. Within minutes, another 60 people had joined.

The news came at the end of a day when Harris had broken fundraising records with $81 million in donations to her campaign in just less than 24 hours and a thousand volunteers had joined her campaign. In the morning she wrote in X that she declared that day the first day of her campaign. In the afternoon she boarded a Air Force Two He is heading to Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, to reassure those working on the president’s re-election that he is now the boss and that their jobs are guaranteed.

It remains to be seen the identity of the person who will be chosen as the vice presidential candidate. The names of governors such as Roy Cooper (North Carolina), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania) or Illinois (JB Pritzker) as well as Arizona Senator Mark Kelly are being heard.

Fresh in the memory of Democrats is the 1968 impassioned convention in Chicago, held just months after President Lyndon B. Johnson, troubled by the unpopularity caused by the Vietnam War, had announced in March of that year that he would not stand for re-election. Between that announcement and the party meeting that summer, two assassinations occurred that turned the country upside down: the killing of Senator Robert Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, the victim of an assassination five years earlier, and that of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Anti-war protests marked the convention, from which Hubert Humphrey emerged as a candidate amid the chaos. He was easily defeated by Republican Richard Nixon in the November election.

There are 4,696 delegates attending this summer’s conference, according to Ballotpedia, Reference website on electoral matters in the United States: 3,949 of them are pledged delegates and 747 are automatic delegates, commonly known as superdelegates, who have their place guaranteed regardless of the results of the primaries.

Democratic Party chairmen from various states and allied and overseas territories rushed to hold telematic conferences and in-person meetings with members of their delegations on Monday to gauge how much support Harris had. It soon became clear that more than a half-dozen of those states were committed to unanimous support for the vice president.

The number of those convinced continued to grow rapidly throughout the day. By early morning the symbolic mark of one thousand votes had already been crossed. One of the last states to support it was Harris’s native California, which contributes the most delegates because it is the most populous state in the Union.

The candidates are running with the goal of becoming the first female president in the history of the United States. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was on the verge of breaking that glass ceiling in a campaign that pitted her against Donald Trump, the same opponent the new Democratic nominee will now face.

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