With Biden out, Kamala Harris becomes the new Democratic Party choice for President

By Natalia Marques

The Democratic Party seeks to distance itself from the unpopular presidency of Joe Biden with his withdrawal from the upcoming elections, but does Harris really represent a significant change?

On Sunday, following nationwide pressure and pressure from within top leaders of his own party, Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. 

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden said in a statement. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

Later on in the day, Biden endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the nominee from the Democratic Party. “My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President,” Biden said in a post on X. “And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats—it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”

The beginning of the end for Biden was marked by a humiliating debate performance against the Republican Party choice for president, former President Donald Trump, on June 27. President Biden’s slurred words and nonsensical responses called his fitness for office into question. Biden continued to produce embarrassing political gaffes at the NATO Summit earlier in July, when he called Ukrainian President Zelenksy “President Putin” and called Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump” at a press conference. 

Biden’s fate was further cemented after the attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally. Trump’s reaction to the attempted assassination, in which he pumped his fist and shouted “Fight, fight, fight!” was a sharp contrast to Biden’s frailty. 

Polls showed that the vast majority of Democratic voters wanted Biden to drop out. For the Democratic Party establishment, Kamala Harris is shaping up to be the most logical second choice—a younger, more diverse option who in many ways, is just as conservative as the candidate she is replacing. 

Who is Kamala Harris?

Harris’ career in the upper echelons of the California criminal justice system is one of further entrenching the state’s reputation as one of the worst in terms of mass incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, California’s incarceration rate of 494 per 100,000 people means that the state “locks up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democratic country on earth.”

As California’s Attorney General, Harris personally championed a harsh statewide truancy law that enabled highly punitive measures against parents whose children were not attending school. This law sought to make an example out of parents, who were often working people whose children could not attend school due to a variety of circumstances. These included a mother, Cheree Peoples, of Orange County, arrested and walked out of her home in her pajamas in front of cameras, whose daughter could not attend school regularly due to sickle cell anemia.

Also in her time as California’s Attorney General, Harris spent years defying a Supreme Court ruling to decarcerate the state, a defiance she undertook for one of the most nefarious reasons possible—to maintain the adequate levels of cheap and forced prison labor. California as a state is plagued by wildfires, and forces its massive population of prisoners to take on dangerous jobs on the frontlines of fighting these fires. When Harris was running for President, a memo emerged from 2014 in which lawyers from her office argued that nonviolent prisoners needed to stay in prison because their freedom would “would severely impact fire camp participation.” This would be “a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” Harris’ lawyers argued. 

Her record as Vice President proved to be a continuation of her deep conservatism. Not only has she been a fierce supporter of Israel for her entire political career, but she has been just as complicit as “Genocide Joe” Biden in continuing the US’ policy of unconditional arming and funding of Israel as it carries out genocide in Gaza. She has also been a hardliner on immigration, famously telling Guatemalan asylum seekers “do not come,” warning migrants that they would be turned away at the border.

A headline from the Wall Street Journal from 2020, when Kamala joined Biden’s presidential campaign reads “As Harris Joins Biden Ticket, Wall Street Exhales in Relief.” Her key supporters throughout her political career have indeed been the rich and powerful, with the “social and legal elites” of San Francisco funding her first campaign to become the city’s District Attorney. Her popularity with the upper classes continued, with billionaires bankrolling her bid for president in 2020.

In response to Biden’s endorsement of Harris, Claudia De la Cruz, a socialist running for president against both Biden and Trump on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, wrote, “Let’s remember Kamala may be a Black woman, but class interests matter! She has contributed to the mass incarceration of our Black and brown people and has been complicit of genocide. She isn’t kin nor is she a sister of working women!”

This article originally appeared in People's Dispatch on July 22th, 2024

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