PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris says her mother once told her that she may be the first “to do many things,” but she should make sure she is “not the last.”
After polls close on Tuesday, Harris, 60, could become the country’s first black, South Asian woman president, a prospect that, for many, seemed far-fetched, even impossible, after 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton lost to former President Donald Trump eight years ago.
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In 2024, Harris may have the same Republican opponent, but she and other Democrats are hoping a different political environment will render a different result.
Harris, already the highest-ranked woman in U.S. history as vice president, was also the first black and South Asian woman elected San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before becoming the first South Asian U.S. senator. Her father, Donald, is a Jamaican American economist and retired Stanford University professor. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer researcher and Indian immigrant.
But while Clinton underscored her gender, Harris, like former President Barack Obama, has not made her race or gender a focal point since her similarly historic and dramatic promotion to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket this summer.
That has not prevented Democrats from identifying with her potentially history-making candidacy and campaign.
In a high school gymnasium in Norristown, Pennsylvania last weekend, Democrats gathered to hear former first lady Michelle Obama were optimistic the country was poised to vote for the first woman president. Obama, herself, was the first minority first lady.
For the school’s principal, Detrick McGriff, “as a person, as a girl dad who takes great pride in raising a young, independent woman,” he is encouraged by the country “starting to go ahead and expand its palette of diversity.”
“It’s going to go beyond just a race or religion, but it’s going to go by gender,” McGriff told the Washington Examiner.
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Elsewhere in the crowd, Keith Colquitt, 67, agreed, attributing Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for inspiring him to complete his college degree and arguing Harris’s bid could inspire others.
“[With Obama’s] election, then we hoped that we would see an Asian president, that we would see a Native American president someday, that we would see women, and that you would see just everybody,” the Philadelphia school teacher told the Washington Examiner. On Trump, he said, “There’s a fear with this idiot, if he gets back in, that we’ll go way back.”
But even if Harris is elected this week, McGriff acknowledged the challenges the vice president is likely to encounter after inauguration next year.
“Even though the moment is historic, the work that has to happen … is still the work,” he said. “You have to go ahead and do the things that are necessary, and it’s not easy.”
An hour away in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Republican cousins Wendy Kleintop and Doris Eckhart, both 68 and volunteering for GOP congressional candidate Ryan Mackenzie, dismissed the importance of Harris’s gender or race. Instead, Kleintop and Eckhart contended they placed a premium on merit.
“I don’t want her to be president,” Kleintop, a Walnutport landscaping small business owner, told the Washington Examiner. “[Her presidency] would matter. It would matter very much, but not as a woman to a woman. It would matter because I’m an American citizen and I don’t believe in what she stands for, and I would never vote for her or her party because it is the exact opposite of what I believe.”
As Harris tries to use Republican opposition to abortion against Trump, as Democrats have against the GOP since the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022, Kleintop cited the policy as another reason she could not support the vice president on Tuesday.
Harris, too, has been using a temperament argument against Trump in an appeal to independents, particularly women. But Eckhart downplayed the power of that argument because of, in part, the vice president’s shared record with President Joe Biden. Biden has a net negative 15 percentage point approval rating, according to RealClearPolitics.
“She’s been agreeing with everything that Biden has done so far with open borders, and so on, and so forth,” Eckhart, a Palmerton retiree, told the Washington Examiner.
On the friendlier ground of the Ellipse, the national park south of the White House in Washington, D.C., before Harris’s own closing argument address last week, Democrats vigorously defended the vice president from criticism that they assert verges on sexism. Harris has specifically faced issues concerning her outreach to men.
Carol T., 57, thinks of her friends’ daughters when she considers the possibility of Harris experiencing a Clinton loss this week.
“Are you telling me they don’t exist or they can’t achieve anything?” the Maryland registered nurse told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not a man’s world anymore.”
Beside her on the rope line, Melissa Schutte, 56, expressed confidence the country is “at a turning point” with Harris, repeating the vice president’s stump speech, but conceded it would “completely break [her] heart” if she does not win.
“I would worry also about my daughters and their reproductive rights,” a Washington, D.C., government consultant, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not just abortion; it’s all of our female anatomy that will not be taken care of in the proper way because the misconceptions about what Roe was. I worry about my brother who is gay and married and what that means for him. I worry about my daughter’s friends who are people of color, so I would be devastated and scared.”
Harris’s three-and-a-half month campaign, the shortest in modern presidential history, was almost immediately embraced by Democrats in July, many of whom welcomed the chance at keeping the White House as polls indicated Biden was headed toward a defeat.
The last time an incumbent president decided not to seek reelection in an election year was Lyndon Johnson in 1972, but he announced in March. Biden succumbed to a monthslong Democratic pressure campaign in July after his debate against Trump in June exacerbated concerns about his 81 years of age and mental acuity and endorsed Harris as his replacement.
In days, she cleared the field of Democratic rivals and took over control of their joint infrastructure, including their fundraising, though she did bring in some of her own advisers and aides. There has been little public in-fighting as Harris broke fundraising records, raising $1 billion since January 2023 with Biden.
But as Harris’s “brat” summer, a reference to pop star Charlie XCX’s album of the same name and the momentum the vice president had after she secured the nomination, turned into fall, Harris had to grapple with increased media scrutiny, though not as much as Trump, and a lack of appeal among men as the gender divide is set to define the election.
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Meg Young, 58, who was at a Biden event for labor union members in Philadelphia last week, admitted she is nervous about Harris and the election “all the time,” that she “does not sleep,” and has been “waking up in the middle of the night.”
“I want my life back and a woman president in office next Wednesday elected, a president-elect next Wednesday, that’s what I want to be saying,” Young told the Washington Examiner.