The importance of Kamala Harris in 2024 election

US Vice President Kamala Harris could become an important figure in the 2024 elections because Joe Biden is expected to get re-nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate. The argument goes that Harris who will remain the vice-presidential choice will play a key role in Biden’s second term in the White House. Biden, who will be 81 by January 2025, it is anticipated he will not be a fully functional president, and it will be Vice President Harris who will be involved in the administration.

So a Republican presidential aspirant, Nikki Haley, framed the Harris issue quite clearly. She said, “We are running against Kamala Harris. Make no bones about it…(it’s) Kamala Harris that’s going to end up being President of the United States if Joe Biden wins this election.” And this awareness is not coming from the Republican corner alone.

The feeling is shared in the Democratic circles, but for slightly different reasons. The Democrats view that it was Harris who had garnered the crucial black votes in the last election for Biden. Biden had got 87 per cent of the Black vote in 2020. The black support had waned for Biden’s presidency as became evident in the November 2022 mid-term Congressional election. Harris is seen as a vital link to reconnect with the black voters. So, when she spoke at the annual conference of the NAACP at Boston on Saturday, the leading black organisation which had fought for black rights for a century, Harris has become the buzz in Democratic and black political circles.

Her role as Vice-President so far has not been impressive enough because it is felt that Biden has not given her the important assignments that would have shown her mettle. And her popularity ratings have been the worst for a Vice-President in a long time. But her stepping out to take on the Republicans’ ultra-conservative political agenda, attacking Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s revisionist history on slavery portraying the disreputable system as something which had some good in it, and her advice to Illinois health workers to defy the state’s restrictive abortion laws has given a new profile to her politics.

Reverend Al Sharpton, civil rights activist and head of National Action Network, supported Harris’ new role as an aggressive campaigner. He said, “We have constantly said to the White House that they need to send her out more because we need the base – that is Black voters and others – to understand what you are doing.” The complaint is that Biden and his White House have not been communicative enough with their voters’ base.

Harris seems to have hit the right political buttons when she addresses the annual conference of NAACP, an organisation that had been in the forefront of black civil rights, in Boston on Saturday. She said, “We are in a moment where there is a full-on attempt to attack hard-fought and hard-won rights and freedoms and liberty. And what I know about the leaders here is that the members of NAACP are up to the challenge to fight.”

This is the kind of clear message that has to go out from Harris and the Democrats if they mean to fight the extreme rightist political agenda of the Republicans across the board.  There is of course the fact that Biden and other centrists in the Democratic party would not want to be identified with the radical political progressives in the party because it would alienate the majority of voters who are not Republican sympathisers. Harris has then to tread the fine line between the standard liberalism of America, which leans towards conservatism rather than towards progressivism, to win the election. Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are doing enough to scare ordinary Americans with their move away from the middle path.