U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate on Tuesday (August 6, 2024), according to three people who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

In choosing Mr. Walz, she is turning to a Midwestern Governor, military veteran and union supporter who helped enact an ambitious Democratic agenda for his state, including sweeping protections for abortion rights and generous aid to families.

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Ms. Harris hopes to shore up her campaign’s standing across the upper Midwest, a critical region in presidential politics that often serves as a buffer for Democrats seeking the White House. The party remains haunted by Republican Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016. Trump lost those states in 2020 but has zeroed in on them as he aims to return to the presidency this year and is expanding his focus to Minnesota.

Mr. Walz, 60, is joining Ms. Harris during one of the most turbulent periods in modern American politics, promising an unpredictable campaign ahead. Republicans have rallied around Trump after his attempted assassination in July. Just weeks later, President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign, forcing Ms. Harris to unify Democrats and consider potential running mates during an exceedingly compressed time frame.

The three people spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid preempting the official announcenment later Tuesday.

Ms. Harris, the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to lead a major party ticket, initially considered nearly a dozen candidates before zeroing in on a handful of serious contenders, all of whom were white men. In landing on Mr. Walz, she sided with a low-key partner who has proven himself as a champion for Democratic causes.

Mr. Walz has been a strong public advocate for Ms. Harris in her campaign against Trump and J.D. Vance, labelling the Republicans “just weird” in an interview last month. Democrats have seized on the message and amplified it since then.

During a fundraiser for Ms. Harris on Monday in Minneapolis, Mr. Walz said: “It wasn’t a slur to call these guys weird. It was an observation.” Mr. Walz, who grew up in the small town of West Point, Nebraska, was a social studies teacher, football coach and union member at Mankato West High School in Minnesota before he got into politics.

He won the first of six terms in Congress in 2006 from a mostly rural southern Minnesota district, and used the office to champion veterans issues. Mr. Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard, rising to command sergeant major, one of the highest enlisted ranks in the military.

He ran for Governor in 2018 on the theme of “One Minnesota” and won by more than 11 points.

As Governor, Mr. Walz had to find ways to work in his first term with a legislature that was split between a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-led Senate. Minnesota has a history of divided government, though, and the arrangement was surprisingly productive in his first year. But the COVID-19 pandemic hit Minnesota early in his second year, and bipartisan cooperation soon frayed.

Mr. Walz relied on emergency powers to lead the state’s response. Republicans chafed under restrictions that included lockdowns, closing schools and shuttering businesses. They retaliated by firing or forcing out some of his agency heads. But Minnesotans who were stuck at home also got to know Mr. Walz better through his frequent afternoon briefings in the early days of the crisis, which were broadcast and streamed statewide.

Mr. Walz won reelection in 2022 by nearly 8 points over his GOP challenger, Dr. Scott Jensen, a physician and vaccine sceptic. Not only did Mr. Walz win, Democrats kept control of the House and flipped the Senate to win the “trifecta” of full control of both chambers and the Governor’s office for the first time in eight years. A big reason was the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which held that the Constitution doesn’t include a right to abortion. That hurt Minnesota Republicans, especially among suburban women.

“Tim has been in the news because the country and the world is seeing the guy we love so much,” U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar Klobuchar said on Monday.

Ken Martin, Chairman of the Minnesota-Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party said young people he spoke to on the campaign trail were “Walz pilled”.

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Mr. Walz and other Democrats went into the 2023 legislative session with an ambitious agenda — and a whopping $17.6 billion budget surplus to help fund it. Their proudest accomplishments included sweeping protections for abortion rights that included the elimination of nearly all restrictions Republicans had enacted in prior years, including a 24-hour waiting period and parental consent requirements. They also enacted new protections for trans rights, making the state a refuge for families coming from out of state for treatment for trans children.

Their other major accomplishments included tax credits for families with children that were aimed at slashing childhood poverty, as well as universal free school breakfasts and lunches for all students, regardless of family income. They also enacted a paid family and medical leave program, legalised recreational marijuana for adults and made it easier to vote.

Republicans complained that Mr. Walz and his fellow Democrats squandered a surplus that would have been better spent on permanent tax relief for everyone. And they’ve faulted the Governor and his administration for lax oversight of pandemic programs that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Federal prosecutors charged 70 people with defrauding federal food programmes that funded meals for kids during the pandemic out of $250 million on Mr. Walz’s watch. Known as the Feeding Our Future scandal, it’s one of the country’s largest pandemic aid fraud cases. The Office of the Legislative Auditor, a nonpartisan watchdog, delivered a scathing report in June that said Mr. Walz’s Department of Education “failed to act on warning signs,” did not effectively exercise its authority and was ill-prepared to respond.

Republicans still criticise Mr. Walz for his response to the sometimes violent unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, which included the torching of a police station.

During a May fundraiser in St. Paul, Trump repeated his false claim that he was responsible for deploying the National Guard to quell the violence. “The entire city was burning down. … If you didn’t have me as president, you wouldn’t have Minneapolis today,” Trump said.

It was actually Mr. Walz who gave the order, which he issued in response to requests from the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul. But within Minnesota, GOP legislators said both Mr. Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey were too slow to act. And there was finger-pointing between Mr. Frey and Mr, Walz on who was responsible for not activating the Guard faster.

Mr. Walz has served often as a Biden-Harris surrogate, and has made increasingly frequent appearances on national television. They’ve included an interview on Fox News that irritated Trump so much that he posted on Truth Social, “They make me fight battles I shouldn’t have to fight.” Mr. Walz is also co-chair of the rules committee for the Democratic National Convention. And he led a White House meeting of Democratic Governors with Mr. Biden following the President’s disastrous performance in his debate with Trump.

Putting Mr. Walz on the ticket could help Democrats hold the state’s 10 electoral votes and bolster the party more broadly in the Midwest. No Republican has won a statewide race in Minnesota since Tim Pawlenty was re-elected Governor in 2006, but GOP candidates for attorney general and state auditor came close in 2022.

Trump finished just 1.5 percentage points behind Democrat Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016. While Mr. Biden carried Minnesota by more than 7 points in 2020, Trump has taken to falsely claiming that he won the state last time and can do it again.

Minnesota has produced two vice presidents, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale.

Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority gathering in Houston, July 31, 2024, in Houston.
| Photo Credit: AP

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris effectively secured the Democratic party’s presidential nomination on August 2, confirming her remarkable rise to party standard bearer in November’s showdown against Republican Donald Trump.

Harris was the sole candidate on the ballot for a five-day electronic vote of nearly 4,000 party convention delegates. She will be officially crowned at a Chicago convention later this month.

“I am honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States,” Harris, 59, said on a phone-in to a party celebration after securing enough votes by the second day of the marathon vote.

In the two weeks since President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid, Harris has gained full control of the party.

No other Democrats stepped forward to challenge her elevation to the top of the ticket, making her confirmation as the first Black and South Asian woman ever to secure a major party’s nomination a formality.

The announcement came with Harris preparing to hit the campaign trail next week for a swing across seven crucial battleground states with her newly minted running mate — who is expected to be revealed within days.

The Democratic Party decided on a virtual nomination process — mirroring the pandemic-hit 2020 vote — because of Ohio’s August 7 deadline for major parties to submit the names of their certified candidates for the November election.

The virtual roll call marks the official beginning of the 2024 convention, although in practice the festivities really get going when thousands of party faithful descend on Chicago on August 19.

That will feature ceremonial votes for Harris and her running mate in what is expected to be a raucous celebration of her rise from state politics to the top of the ticket.

Trump’s White House bid was thrown into chaos on July 21 when Biden, 81, withdrew his candidacy, backing Harris as the Democratic nominee.

The vice president has already smashed fundraising records, packed arenas and wiped out Trump’s polling leads over Biden, creating momentum that she hopes she can ride through the convention to the White House.

She is set to make her first public appearance with her running mate Tuesday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — a crucial swing state whose Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, is among a handful candidates being vetted to potentially join the Harris ticket.

The swing will take Harris through all the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where she will seek to rebuild the coalition that carried Biden to victory in 2020.

But she will extend the tour to the much more racially diverse Sun Belt and southern states of Georgia, North Carolina Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada as she seeks to shore up the Black and Hispanic vote that had been peeling away from the Democrats.

On the 8% drop in support for Joe Biden in the 2024 Asian American Survey, a survey run by AAPI Data, APIAVOTE and other organisations

…What we saw was a drop in support for Joe Biden among Asian Americans -that’s the eight percentage point drop. Among Indian Americans, it’s almost a 20% drop. So it’s even more dramatic among Indian Americans. What is important to note, though, is that Donald Trump doesn’t gain much from that decline. How is that possible? Well, you have a big increase in the proportion saying ‘I’m going to vote for some other candidate’ or ‘ I don’t know’, or ‘I won’t answer that question’.

 The the way I interpret it, as a political scientist , is [ these are ] people who are very dissatisfied with their choice between Biden and Trump. So will we expect Harris to perform the same?  I think she’ll perform better. I think a fair number those who are saying I’m going to vote for some of other candidate, she can probably win some of those votes, and the high proportion that say don’t know or refuse to answer, she’ll probably grab most of those votes, as well.

There are examples we can look at from 2019 and 2020 that give us some clues as to how Kamala Harris will perform. She did not perform as well when she was running for president, because she was not well known outside of California. And so even though there was a fair amount of curiosity – and even pride – among Indian Americans, the people who were dominating the news headlines in 2019 were people like Bernie Sanders, people like Elizabeth Warren, and people like Pete Buttigieg and then Joe Biden. So, it was really difficult for Harris to break through. One of the reasons why she dropped out in 2019 was that Bernie Sanders was doing better in California than she was. And she’s a senator from California. So that was a big part of that calculation.

 But once she got chosen for the vice presidential nomination, you saw this big spike in interest among Asian Americans, but particularly Indian Americans. In terms of what you saw on social media, what you saw on commentary, and at least impressionistically  what we gathered from campaign finance data.

The impact of the Kamala Harris candidacy on Indian Americans who have moved towards Trump.

I think it’s important to note that Ms. Harris’s entering into the fray introduces a new dynamic that will create its own set of disruptions in terms of the vote choice and political allegiances of Indian Americans. What we saw in October 2023 (AAPI Data -AP- NORC Survey) was that Harris’s favourability was on par with Biden’s. It makes sense; she is seen as part of the Biden-Harris administration. And so she did not perform that much better among Indian Americans or among Asian Americans more generally than Biden did. That said, she performed a lot better than Donald Trump and a lot better than Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

People were saying how much ethnic pride may influence where Indian Americans go this year. When it comes to people who identify as Democrat or Republican, it’s really hard to vote across party lines, even when it’s your compatriot running on the other side. And so that’s what that evidence shows:  even if there might have been some curiosity, Haley did well among Indian Republicans, she did not do well among Indian Independents, or among Indian Democrats. And the same was true for Ramaswamy. He did even worse among Indian Americans in general, and certainly among Indian American Democrats and Independents. So, without all of that in play, it’ll be interesting to watch how much Harris will try to project a new direction, and how much he will run on the record of the Biden-Harris administration. It’s actually something that vice presidents, if they run for the presidency, have to navigate.

She can pick and choose the progressive side for those audiences that care about that. But she can pick the more centrist sides from her time as Attorney General [ of California] from her time as a district attorney [of San Franciso] .

One issue that will roar to the front now is abortion and reproductive rights. And on that issue, Indian Americans and Asian Americans are among the strongest supporters of abortion rights. She brings credibility to that issue and prominence to that issue in ways that Joe Biden could never have brought to the table.

The economy is the major reason why they [Indian Americans] soured on on Biden, Harris inherits a good amount of that. But I think she has the chance to say I would do things differently. But she also has the ability to raise the visibility of issues like abortion, like climate change, and gun control. These are all issues in which Indian Americans are much closer to her than they are to Trump and [ his running mate J D] Vance.

Immigration is another potential reset opportunity. Everyone is going to try to portray her role in terms of the border issue and, you know, trying to address the root causes of migration from Central America. I think she has the ability to recast the issue as one that also involves family visas, long visa wait times, and the Republican Party’s plans, especially if you look at Project 2025 to dramatically scale back migration. So these are all issues that I think that that she could bring to the table that scrambled the calculations of the Trump campaign and of Indian American voters as well.

How are Republicans going to compete for Indian American and Asian American votes given their hardline positions on immigration?

This is a big challenge of the Republican Party has faced over the last two decades, and it’s gotten worse under Trump. So even if Indian Americans might give the Republican Party credit on issues like the economy and maybe even on some foreign policy issues, [there are] two major issues that prevent them from going over to the Republican side. One is the rise of Christian conservatism and, now,  Christian nationalism. Indian Americans are majority Hindu, and very religiously diverse, even looking beyond Hindus. So that prevents a lot of Indian Americans from feeling welcome, or at home, within the party.

 The other major issue is immigration. Indian Americans are the largest group of Asian undocumented or illegal immigrants in the country. To the extent that the community is more and more aware of the complicated nature of immigration, they might have less hard and fast attitudes…

More and more people might know friends of friends who have overstayed their visas. In some of those [cases]  illegal immigrants might not just be border crossers, they may be visa overseers, including elders who are taking care of their grandchildren, for example.

…[ Donald Trump] has to manage a lot of mixed opinion and a lot of strong anti-immigrant opinion within the party. And it becomes more challenging for him to do something independently that could increase legal immigration. There’s a lot of opposition even to legal immigration, by the likes of [ former White House Senior Advisor] Stephen Miller and [ Breitbart founder and former Chief White House strategist] Steven Bannon, and many other conservatives in the Republican Party.

How loyal are U.S. voters to political parties ?

The important thing to note in the Indian American context is that you have an existing base of voters who have voted for two or three elections or even more. And what political science research says is that if you voted for someone from the same party, for two or three elections, it is very unlikely that you’re going to change your mind. Even if you don’t call yourself a member of that party, you have those habits ingrained in you and your attitudes tend to align with that party.

 Now, there are people who have been independent throughout and those people are more persuadable. But the big missing piece of this is the number of new voters coming in and those who are newly naturalised as well as people who are born in this country who have become voting age since 2020. That’s where you’re going to more likely see persuasion making a difference.

On the impact that Usha Vance, the Indian-origin spouse of Republican Vice Presidential candidate, will have on Indian American votes. 

It’s remarkable that Indian Americans who are among the various large immigrant groups most recently arrived in the United States, are doing as well as they are politically. The Japanese American population, the Chinese American population, and even the Latino population, which has been here for centuries, if not decades, do not have representation on the two major party tickets the way Indian Americans do. And so why is that? 

Immigrants who come from robust democracies are more likely to be engaged in politics than immigrants who come from Communist countries or other repressive regimes. High English proficiency, is a factor too. So, while it might be surprising for a lot of people, it is not unusual to see Indian Americans getting into leadership positions as quickly as they do. Now Usha’s story is a different story. That’s another part of the Indian American story – people doing very well, when it comes to elite education in the United States, and also in terms of elite professionals in the United States. 

Now, she [ Usha Vance] has largely not been political herself. And so that, I think, will be a big question in terms of how much will she actually convert Indian Americans over to the Republican side. She was a registered Democrat until less than a decade ago. 

I think what she did, and will continue to do, is to humanize and soften the image of J.D. Vance and maybe try to soften the policies of the Republican Party when it comes to issues like immigration [and] abortion. But there’s not much that the spouses of vice-presidential candidates do. It’s a big question of how much vice presidential candidates themselves do; usually, the focus is on the top of the ticket. When you get to talking about the spouse of a vice presidential candidate, the effects are marginal at best.

FILE PHOTO: As a VP, Harris has been particularly outspoken on artificial intelligence (AI). 
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is potentially poised to become the Democratic presidential nominee in the November election. As VP, Harris has been particularly outspoken on artificial intelligence (AI). She warned against the “existential” threat of AI and said it could “endanger the very existence of humanity,” in a November 2023 address.

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In a meeting with tech execs like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Harris warned that they have a “moral” obligation to guard against AI’s possible dangers. She backed an AI executive order from President Joe Biden that sought stronger protections for consumers, singling out AI-generated scam calls and the impacts of unlabelled AI-generated content.

Prior to joining the Biden administration, as California attorney general, Harris sued eBay over the ecommerce company’s anticompetitive hiring practices surrounding a no-poaching agreement with Intuit. The lawsuit led to a nearly $4 million settlement in 2014. 

In a different lawsuit against Houzz, she compelled the startup to hire a chief privacy officer after allegations that the home design app had recorded sales calls without proper notification and consent.

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She has also been at the forefront of curtailing distribution of pornography on social media, particularly “revenge porn,” a practice involving the posting of explicit photos without the subject’s consent. She took credit for a pressure campaign that led to Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others taking measures to remove certain explicit images.

(with inputs from Reuters)