US Vice President Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in this year’s presidential election, according to multiple sources.
Harris and Walz will appear together for the first time at a rally this afternoon in Philadelphia, the largest city in the key swing state of Pennsylvania — whose own governor, Josh Shapiro, was also a finalist in Harris’s search for a partner.
Walz, a relatively moderate Democrat popular in his home state, only came to broad national attention over the last two weeks as Harris vetted various candidates, many of whom experienced an uptick in media attention as their names were mentioned.
Harris’s choice comes two weeks ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where she and Walz will formally accept their nominations as the party’s candidates.
Since sitting US President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid on 21 July and immediately endorsed her as his successor, Harris has been met with an unexpectedly euphoric reception from Democratic-leaning voters.
Months of sluggish polling and fundraising under Biden have given way to surges on both fronts. Harris now leads or matches former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump in most national and swing state polls, and her campaign has pulled in record sums of money in its first fortnight.
Of the $310 million (€284 million) raised in July, $200m (€183m) was donated in the week after her candidacy was announced.
Meanwhile, Trump and his Republican colleagues have struggled to formulate a coherent message against Harris.
While many of the former president’s outriders have tried to blame her for the Biden administration’s policy on the US-Mexico border, Trump himself has caused a furore with remarks in which he accused the biracial vice president of “turning black”.
His running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has also attracted outrage and derision for past remarks about women — in particular, a resurfaced interview in which he blamed those who are not raising children for the supposed decline of the US.
“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance told Fox News in 2021, “and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
(Euro News)
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