Vice President Kamala Harris is marching to the Democratic nomination as broad swaths of the party — including potential rivals, lawmakers, governors, influential labor and advocacy groups and more — line up behind her bid to take on Donald Trump.
No credible challenger had emerged by late Monday morning, nearly a full day after President Joe Biden had announced his exit from the race and his endorsement of his vice president.
And the party’s best-known governors, several of whom had been seen as potential challengers, announced their support for Harris — making clear that the biggest remaining question about the 2024 Democratic ticket is who Harris will choose as her running mate.
Four governors of must-win Midwestern states — Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Wisconsin’s Tony Evers and Illinois’ JB Pritzker — endorsed Harris on Monday. They followed Sunday endorsements of Harris from Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, California’s Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. Many of those governors could be considered for the party’s vice presidential nomination.
In her first half-day as a candidate, Harris raised $49.6 million in online donations, campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said — a huge haul that underscored grassroots enthusiasm for a shake-up to the Democratic 2024 ticket. Democratic donation-processing site ActBlue called it “the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle.”
Meanwhile, the cascade of endorsements for Harris’ candidacy that had begun Sunday afternoon was accelerating on Capitol Hill. Harris has the support of more than 30 Democratic senators and more than 80 House members — numbers that had grown rapidly throughout Monday morning.
She also has the support of the political arms of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus, as well as two key labor unions, Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Teachers.
And several state delegations to next month’s Democratic National Convention — Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Maryland — announced that they are backing Harris.
Support for the vice president came across the party’s ideological spectrum — from moderate populists, including Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of the most endangered Democratic incumbents on the ballot this fall, to progressives, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Democratic congressional leaders had remained quiet so far — but there were signs that could soon change. Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark and California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the second- and third-ranking House Democrats, endorsed Harris on Monday morning.
The hour-by-hour endorsements of Harris from Democratic governors, senators, Cabinet officials and state delegations is unfolding by design, with the hope of reaching a majority of delegates by Wednesday, two people familiar with the process tell CNN.
“It’s a coordinated drumbeat,” a senior Democratic aide working on the effort said. “That sound Democrats hear is the party uniting around the vice president.”
How Harris and her allies mobilized
Joe Biden’s 1:46 p.m. ET Sunday announcement that he would not seek a second term ignited a frenetic push by Harris to consolidate the support of a party that had been in crisis in the weeks since the president’s dismal performance during his June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump.
Harris knew what Biden had decided: She’d had multiple phone calls with Biden on Sunday, a person familiar with the matter said. Once the announcement came, Harris — wearing a hoodie from her alma mater, Howard University, workout sweats and sneakers — made more than 100 phone calls over 10 hours.
Alongside her family and staff, the vice president’s calls included lawmakers, governors and leaders of influential labor, advocacy and civil rights groups.
Those calls included former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Clintons, in a statement Sunday, endorsed Harris; Obama did not, deferring to the party’s process.
Harris also called her pastor, Amos Brown III, who, along with his wife, prayed over her, the source said. She ate pizza with anchovies — Harris’ go-to topping — for dinner.
In those phone calls, Harris made clear that while she was grateful for Biden’s endorsement, she planned to earn the Democratic nomination in her own right. That echoes the statement she released following Biden’s announcement to step aside.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she wrote.
Harris’ supporters were also mobilizing.
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The group Win With Black Women periodically holds Zoom calls — but the one that took place Sunday evening had a different tone, with 44,000 people joining, according to its leaders.
Longtime Democratic operative Donna Brazile said that she was in the process of gathering delegates to support Harris. “I need all of you to sign your delegate pledge forms now,” Brazile said on the call. She said voter registration and fundraising will be key in the days ahead.
Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser also spoke on the call.
“I know what it’s like to be in the crosshairs of Donald Trump,” she said. “We have to defend our sister.”
Former Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Joyce Beatty and Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett were also among the speakers.
No serious challenger materializes yet
Though some Democrats have held off on announcing endorsements, no serious challenger has emerged to take on Harris for the nomination ahead of the Democratic National Convention, which starts August 19 in Chicago.
Any challenge might need to materialize even faster: Prior to Biden’s departure from the race, the party had set up a virtual roll call to begin the first week of August. There are no signs at this point it intends to abandon those plans.
Manchin, who had left the party earlier this year and is not seeking reelection, said Monday he will not rejoin the party and seek its nomination.
CNN has previously reported the West Virginia senator was considering re-registering as a Democrat to throw his hat in the ring. But in an interview with CBS News on Monday, Manchin said he will not be a candidate.
“I could not believe that there was not going to be a primary process or a mini process. Other countries do it,” Manchin said, adding that he believes Harris is too liberal but could be forced to the middle if she faces a challenge.
New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams announced his support for Harris in an interview with MSNBC on Monday, reversing course just hours after he told CNN, “there’s a process and we’re going to follow that process,” to determine the party’s nominee.
“We need real, clear, leadership, and she understands it,” Adams told MSNBC. “She was in the position of looking over the border issue, so she understands some of the things that we need to do.”
And he offered a stirring endorsement of Harris’ fitness to lead the ticket, urging advisers to “let her be her.”
Running mate jockeying begins
As of mid-morning Monday, as the swell of support for Harris continued to build, the biggest question might have been who she will choose as a running mate.
Democratic lawyers are beginning their work conducting a deep, yet truncated, vetting process for potential vice presidential hopefuls, two people familiar with the matter told CNN, with siloed teams being established for the leading prospective candidates.
Cooper, Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly are among the Democrats who have been asked to submit information about their finances, family histories and other personal details, two people familiar with the process said. They are part of a group that includes about 10 names, nearly all of whom are elected officials.
A handful of Democratic lawyers, including those who have worked on vice presidential vetting processes in the past, are involved in this effort.
The audition process is also playing out in public, with Cooper and Beshear appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday — with the intent that Harris was watching. An aide said she caught at least part of the conversations.
Beshear, the two-term Kentucky governor, announced his support for Harris — and said he is open to joining Harris as her potential running mate, noting it’s “flattering to be a part” of the conversation about the vice-presidential nomination.
He also offered a window into how he’d play the traditional attack-dog role of a running mate. At multiple points in the interview, Beshear attacked Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who has family ties to Beshear’s home state of Kentucky.
“Let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear said, referring to his home state, taking issue with how Vance described Appalachia in his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Beshear also attacked Vance for past comments expressing support for strict restrictions to abortion access, while touting Harris’ record of supporting protections for reproductive health care.
“JD Vance calls pregnancy arising from rape ‘inconvenient,’” Beshear said. “No, it’s just plain wrong. He suggests that women should stay in abusive relationships. Now listen, a domestic abuser isn’t a man, he’s a monster, and no one should support anyone having to stay in those relationships.”
Cooper, the North Carolina governor who endorsed Harris on Sunday, also appeared on MSNBC on Monday, but deflected questions about whether he would be open to becoming her running mate.
“I think it’s really important that we do keep the focus on her this week. The vice-presidential conversation needs to occur later,” Cooper said. “I want to make sure that Kamala Harris wins. I’m going to work for her all over this country and do what I can to make sure we stop Donald Trump.”
This story and headline have been updated with additional reporting.
Harris will seek Democratic nomination and could be the first Black woman and Asian American to lead a major party ticket
Vice President Kamala Harris said she plans to seek the Democratic nomination after President Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, setting up a push that could make her the first Black woman and first Asian American to lead the ticket of a major political party.
“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said in a statement.
Biden’s historic endorsement — and Harris’s pledge to unite the party behind her —came Sunday after he announced that he is dropping his reelection bid following weeks of disarray within the Democratic Party. The president’s disastrous debate called into question his ability to win a second term and govern for another four years.
“My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. 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,” Biden said.
Still, despite the president’s backing, it remains unclear if Harris will become the nominee, or what process the Democratic Party would take to select an alternative. It will now be up to the delegates to the party’s national convention to choose their candidate. While Harris allies have sought to secure her path to the nomination, some Democrats have stopped short of backing her or explicitly called for an open nomination process.
Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement that in the coming days the party will “undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
Logistically, Harris is the natural heir to the ticket as Biden’s running mate.
The Biden-Harris campaign on Sunday formally amended filings with the Federal Election Commission to rename its principal committee “Harris for President,” saying that the committee name is “different than previously reported.”
The committee also filed a letter with the commission stating that “Vice President Harris is now a candidate for United States President in the 2024 election and will henceforth be conducting campaign activities only in pursuit of that office.”
Control of the campaign war chest, however – totaling $95.9 million at the end of June – depends on whether Harris remains on Democrats’ 2024 ticket.
Recent polling has also shown her performing better against former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, than Biden and other potential Democratic contenders.
Should there be efforts to pass over Harris in favor of Democrats seen as likely to run in 2028, there may be backlash from the vice president’s supporters and prominent Black Democrats. But Harris has also experienced something of a renaissance within her party, as Democrats showered her with praise in the days following the debate.
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Throughout her vice presidency, Harris has struggled to define herself while juggling an issue portfolio that has included difficult topics such as voting rights and stemming the tide of migrants coming from Central America. On the former, an effort to bolster the Voting Rights Act failed in Congress. On migration, Harris was criticized on the right for not spending enough time on the border and on the left for telling migrants in a speech, “Do not come.”
As recently as last year, some Democrats were worried that negative views of Harris could hurt the ticket, prompting prominent Democrats to urge the party to stop undermining her.
But in the weeks since Biden’s June debate performance, Harris has settled into a groove, becoming a key surrogate for Biden’s reelection campaign on reproductive health as the campaign put it, the threat Trump poses to democracy.
Harris allies have argued that much of the criticism is a result of racism and sexism against the country’s first woman of color in such a position. Now, they say, the country is seeing in Harris what her allies have seen for years.
“Oftentimes Black women are not seen until they’re needed,” said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a progressive group that works to boost Black voter turnout. “We’ve seen her constantly berated, marginalized, questioned. I think that the shift is because there’s a need.”
‘Uncharted territory’
A growing number of Democratic officials and donors already have rallied behind Harris, including the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Democratic Senate candidates including Andy Kim of New Jersey, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.
Even as Democrats waited for Biden to make his decision, Harris supporters were working behind the scenes for the last week to secure support from delegates -– not to push Biden out, but to be prepared in case he left the race.
“We have been whipping delegates for the last week,” a senior Democratic strategist who worked on Harris’ 2020 campaign told CNN.
Her network of backers includes a number of key Black female Democratic allies who have been quietly organizing for weeks to ensure that she would be well positioned to lead the ticket if Biden stepped aside. Those women will meet in a Zoom call Sunday evening.
“The bottom line is, we are ready to go,” said Brown of Black Voters Matter. “We are grateful for President Biden’s service and that’s why we fought for him until the end. We are ecstatic that he has put his endorsement behind Vice President Kamala Harris. We expect the full Democratic apparatus to do the same and if they don’t, they will lose this election.”
Harris allies are describing this moment as “uncharted territory” but are confident the party will be able to navigate the days ahead because Biden has endorsed her.
For donors, Biden’s decision to exit the race and endorse Harris represents a seismic change for the Democratic party that many are embracing publicly.
Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic political strategist advising several big-money backers, released a statement Sunday following Biden’s withdrawal supporting Harris.
“Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, daughter of immigrants who met at Cal,” Mehlhorn said. “She is also toughness personified, rising from my home town of Oakland California to become the top prosecutor of the state. With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris.”
Other donors were less enthusiastic about the Harris pick. Top Biden donor John Morgan called the president’s endorsement of Harris a “f— you” to people who “pushed him out.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” he wrote on X.
Harris’s rise
Harris, the daughter of Berkeley political activists and immigrants from India and Jamaica, grew up in Oakland and spent much of her political career in California’s Bay Area. After earning her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law, she became a deputy district attorney for Alameda County. She later served in the San Francisco district attorney and city attorney offices.
In 2003, she was elected district attorney for San Francisco. Seven years later, she was elected California’s attorney general – the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to hold the position.
Harris’s record in law enforcement would later become both a boon and a burden to her political campaigns for Senate and the White House. Among her more controversial policies was a truancy program she advocated, which allowed parents to be charged with misdemeanors if their children missed too many school days. Harris later said she regretted the “unintended consequences” of the program.
In 2016, Harris won her bid to succeed outgoing California Sen. Barbara Boxer, becoming the second Black woman to ever serve in the US Senate.
As a senator, Harris was known for her prosecutorial questioning style during hearings with Trump administration officials and nominees, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Three years later, in January 2019, she entered the Democratic presidential primary. From the start, Harris acknowledged the historic nature of her campaign – she launched her bid on the federal holiday marking Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and held a news conference at Howard University, the historically Black college she graduated from in 1986.
Harris was one of more than a dozen Democrats, including Biden, who sought the 2020 party nomination. One of Biden’s worst debate moments of that cycle came when Harris blasted him over his opposition in the 1970s to court-ordered busing of students to desegregate schools. The dig from Harris, who was close friends with Biden’s son Beau before his death in 2015, came as a surprise to Biden and angered some his allies.
After she dropped out, Harris became a prominent surrogate for Biden before being named his vice presidential pick in August 2020.
“I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021,” Biden told supporters in an email.
This story and headline have been updated with additional reporting.
