WASHINGTON: US Vice-President Kamala Harris has secured the support of the majority of Democratic delegates who will formally elect her as the party's nominee for president at the convention in August as the Trump campaign prepared to hold her responsible for the "border invasion" and J.D. Vance slammed the Democratic party ticket switch as a threat to democracy in his first solo speech as the Republican nominee for Vice-President.
Harris surpassed the mark of 1, 976 delegates needed to win the nomination reflecting the overwhelming support she is getting from the Democratic party, which is rapidly coalescing around her candidacy from the level of leaders down to the rank and file members.
She has no challengers so far.
The party plans to lock up the process through virtual polling before the start of the convention on August 19.
"When I announced my campaign for President, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination, " Harris said in a statement late Monday.
"Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee, and as a daughter of California, I am proud that my home state’s delegation helped put our campaign over the top. I look forward to formally accepting the nomination soon."
She added: "Over the next few months, I will be travelling across the country talking to Americans about everything that is on the line. I fully intend to unite our party, unite our nation, and defeat Donald Trump in November."
Although the presidential election takes place on November 4, early polling is scheduled to start in September, just a few weeks after the four-day Democratic convention closes in Chicago, Illinois on August 22. Democratic voters tend to vote early either through in-person voting at early booths or through mail and drop boxes. Republicans have historically voted on election day, but that is changing.
The Democratic party has been galvanised by Harris' elevation to the top of the ticket and the cloud of doom that hung over the party since Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate against former President Donald Trump had lifted, giving way to new energy. Donations are pouring in with the Harris campaign reporting raising an unprecedented $81 million in the first 24 hours since Harris became the nominee.
Harris’s ascendancy has been watched closely by the Trump campaign, which would have preferred a weakened Biden. In a memo to campaign staff, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are running the Trump campaign, said: "Just as Donald Trump fired Joe Biden, he will demonstrate to the world he can fire Dangerously liberal Kamala as well."
The campaign will tie her to the Biden administration’s failures, chiefly the surge of undocumented migrants coming through the southern border.
"Border Czar Kamala Harris owns the border invasion, which has resulted in nearly 100 terrorists roaming the United States, hundreds of thousands of American dead due to Fentanyl, a child trafficking epidemic resulting in killings and kidnappings, a spread of a new type of crime, a crime directly linked to Harris’ own beliefs, and backed by her actions, released migrants who prey and kill innocent Americans, " LaCivita and Wiles said in the memo.
Vance, the Vice-President candidate, made his solo debut at an election rally in home state Ohio. "Now history will remember Joe Biden as not just a quitter, which he is, but one of the worst Presidents of the United States of America, " he said, adding, "But my friends, Kamala Harris is a million times worse and everybody knows it."
He also accused Harris of hiding from public Biden’s health, a claim first advanced by Trump. Vance also slammed the Democratic party for switching its nominee for president midstream. "That is not how it works. That is a threat to democracy, not the Republican Party, which is fighting for democracy every single day, " Vance said from the auditorium of his high school in his hometown Middletown, Ohio.
"This is not OK."