U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris interviewed three more possible Democratic vice presidential running mates on Sunday and could soon make a choice on who will be her running mate against Republican former President Donald Trump and his No. 2, Ohio Senator JD Vance, in the November election.
Harris is meeting with Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly at the Naval Observatory in Washington, her vice presidential mansion. She met with another possible running mate Friday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and is also considering two other governors, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
Aides have described the in-person meetings as a “chemistry test,” a chance for Harris to gauge her personal rapport with possible running mates she already knows to one degree or another.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told ABC’s “This Week” show Sunday morning that Harris would choose her running mate “later today.” Brazile said Harris will be choosing from a group of “talented people, some probably better than others. I know she will make a really good, historic choice.”
The Harris campaign has said she then plans to embark on a seven-state tour of political battleground states with her running mate, starting Tuesday in Philadelphia.
It is the country’s sixth-biggest city and a key Democratic stronghold in Pennsylvania, a state both she and Trump are eyeing as crucial to their chances of winning a four-year term in the White House starting in January.
Harris’ selection of a running mate has been unusually truncated because, until two weeks ago, she was running for reelection as vice president herself as second in command to President Joe Biden. But Biden, after a stumbling debate performance against Trump in late June and falling poll numbers, ended his campaign and quickly endorsed Harris.
Democrats have quickly embraced Harris’ campaign and she will be the first Black woman and first of Indian descent to head a major U.S. political party’s presidential ticket.
Biden had been trailing Trump in national polls by about six percentage points before ending his campaign, but Harris has quickly pulled even or slightly ahead of Trump, depending on an array of polling.
The election is on November 5, three months from Monday, and much remains unsettled, including whether Harris and Trump will debate.
Trump and Biden had been set to face off a second time on September 10 on ABC News, again without a live audience, as was the case when Biden and Trump met on June 27.
Now, Trump has backed out of that encounter, although Harris says she will show up at the network for the debate. Trump says he’s instead agreed to debate September 4 in front of a live audience on Fox News, long a conservative platform that has given him wide and fawning coverage more to his liking. Harris has balked at changing the original debate plan Trump had agreed to with Biden.
Trump is also facing legal challenges as the 2024 campaign nears the start next month of early voting in some of the country’s 50 states.
The former president was convicted of 34 felony counts in late May of falsifying business records in 2016 to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star to silence her claim of a one-night tryst with Trump a decade earlier, an encounter he has denied.
Trump has sought to upend the verdict, but if New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan rejects that quest, Trump is set to be sentenced on September 18. He could be placed on probation or sentenced to up to four years in prison.
Meantime, the two candidates have engaged in vitriolic early sparring.
“I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said as she opened her campaign. “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.”
Trump has routinely intentionally mispronounced her first name – it’s correctly pronounced “comma-la” — and called her a “radical left freak,” “low IQ” and “dumb.”
