Will US Democrats support a WOC as their candidate or will they by pass Kamala Harris?

[IwantToRetire]

Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race and Endorses Harris: Live Updates

After intense pressure from within his own party, President Biden said he was ending his campaign and backing Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his place. Ms. Harris said she would seek the nomination, adding: “Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/21/us/biden-drops-out-election

It would be impossible to have anyone else at this point. A lot of groups would be angry at her being passed over for a start, and there's no process to pick anyone new. Hillary Clinton had a specific disadvantage above and beyond being a woman: she'd been trashed by the news media for 25 years. It effectively came down to 75,000 votes in 3 states. It is far, far from a done deal for Trump.

The party is pretty much falling in line. Obama and Pelosi have yet to endorse, but some big figures have. They'll be searching hard for the VP slot.

I know every electoral system has its strengths and weaknesses, but what astounds me about the American system is that it is still set up for a country where travel was by horse drawn carriage and communication by letters travelling the same way. It’s why there is an electoral college and over two months between the election and the President taking office, to allow the state representatives to the electoral college to come together and elect the president, and for him to go to DC.

My American friend marvels that European countries call elections within weeks and the new government starts work the day after the results are known. I presume it’s a Constitutional thing again where it would be too hard to change, and everyone is too used to being on permanent election footing with a new president starting his campaign for reelection the day after his inauguration.

I know FPP leads to unrepresentative number of seats, but never having heard of the Electoral College until Trump Clinton, it just seemed anti democrat when each individual was for an individual that they wouldn't get to be President.

I was told it was created because those who designed actual felt ordinary voters weren't really competent to take such a decision.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/electoral-college-trump-biden-2024-b2475958.html

and https://archive.ph/2Z8Ed

Given Biden has endorsed Harris, I think you need to check where you read.

Do we really need to reduce Harris to her sex and race? It might be nice to talk about her as if she were a real person who has all kinds of qualities.

From that perspective, I suspect they will pass. She's not especially well thought of as a political figure, even before she was given the rather fraught immigration brief. She's not all that popular even among moderate Democrats, and she has a reputation as a bully. Biden did her no favours by making it clear she was an affirmative action appointment either.

There has been a significant swing among black men under 30 towards the Republicans.

I suspect that there will be movement among black women voters as well - I think there has been some already - but not as many, just like women of other races are more likely to support progressive political parties, gender ideology, and identity politics generally.

For some time some people I know said what it was that the Democrats never thought KH would win by votes.

So Biden got his long term wish to be President (he had tried in the past I think) and would go on to stand for a second term, but then relatively soon he would stand down for health or some other reason.

Then KH would automatically become President as his Vice President, and that in the remaining years of the term of what would have been Biden's second term, the US public would sort of have to accept not just a women but a Black American Woman. And might find it was okay.

But actual ill health has decided to scupper that devious plan!

It is and isn't significant. The baseline was so low for Black Republican votes that even a relatively small change is statistically significant, if that makes sense.

The constitution was designed to be extraordinarily difficult to amend. It needs supermajorities in both houses of Congress AND ratification by 3/4 of the states.

I don't think she'll be voted in. They might pick Shapiro

No that isn't why it was created.

The US is a union of states that have a lot of independence. The president needs to be the president of all of them.

If it were by population, a few very populated states - urban coastal states like California, mainly could elect the president. Small rural states would effectively have no effect on the outcome. The best interests of these states are often quite different than those of California or New York. And the president is not like the PM, the executive branch is one leg of the tripod that makes up the American government and in some ways have a lot more power.

Why would any state enter a union where they would be completely powerless to affect democratic elections? If would be as if the EU operated on popular votes across Europe, so a tiny country like Malta would simply have no say in anything. They'd be in dereliction of their duty to their citizens.

I seem to remember there was an occasion where the bland Vice President was the presumptive Democrat candidate but wasn’t particularly inspiring, then a younger, dynamic handsome Latino man took the Democrat Convention by storm with a powerful speech that rallied supporters and won the nomination. He then went on to beat the favourite Republican candidate in the presidential election.

So it is possible. Although that may or may not be the plot of the final season of The West Wing🤔.

Do we really need to reduce Harris to her sex and race? It might be nice to talk about her as if she were a real person who has all kinds of qualities.

I only started the thread on that basis as so many people say that the US thinks that way. That it wouldn't matter if she was totally brilliant, but because both sexism and racism are so deeply ingrained in US culture and media that she just wouldn't get the majority vote.

So the thread really isn't about her (though there could be one spelling out her political stance etc..) this is more about the US.

Admittedly based on probably rather crude new media reporting.

Goodness knows how the UK is characterised in the US.

Probably not very flattering!

The current system disadvantages people in other ways, though. If you're a Democrat in Alabama or a Republican in Massachusetts, your vote is meaningless. I don't think that argument holds up. What the EC does is give small states disproportionate power because your votes equal your number of representatives (roughly proportional to population plus your 2 senators.

And candidates are still chasing states with higher numbers of votes, anyway.

FWIW< I think a black woman could be president, but not Harris.

For the Democrats, Michelle Obama would get it, if she wanted to, which she doesn't. On the Republican side, I could see Condoleeza Rice.

If I were placing odds I'd say the first woman or black woman would be more likely to be a Republican.

Not always, some states will split their electoral college votes. But it's essentially a kind of FPTP system. Personally, I think that's important, because it toes candidates to a specific set of people and a specific place, rather than an abstract set of voters. Whether a president, or congressman, or senator is a Democrat or Republican, they are meant to represent the best interests of all of their constituents in the place they live. Not just those who voted for them.

Yes, it doesn't totally negate population, nor should it, it is meant to be a balance.

I wouldn't underestimate it though. Hilary Clinton lost because she was an idiot in her campaign and neglected the industrial heartland states, thinking they weren't important. Frankly, she deserved to lose for that. She made it clear she didn't give a shit about those people in everything she did and said, and lost what were traditionally Democratic votes.

In any case, you can't just change it, any more than the EU can decide to change things so the individual member nations have less say. That would be a huge overstep.

Many ppl in the US want to eliminate the Electoral College. It is set up to advantage small, rural states (like Wyoming) over large, populous states (like California). The problem is that it would take a Constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College and the amendment process also gives an advantage to small, less populous states by counting each state equally in terms of ratifying the proposed amendment.

A Constitutional amendment has to be passed by 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate then ratified by 3/4 of the states.(Wyoming, with a population of 584,057, counts for as much as California, with a population of 38,965,193 when it comes to ratifying a Constitutional amendment.) Why would the smaller states, who benefit from the EC, vote to get rid of it (or why would their representatives vote for that Constitutional amendment in Congress)?

Half the US population lives in 11 states. They're the main ppl who would benefit from a change but they aren't close to being able to push it through either both houses of Congress or 3/4 of the states. I can't forsee that changing.

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/three-branches/amendment-process

If they tried the small states would have a good excuse to leave the union.

Wasn't the Electoral College created to give more power to the slave-holding states, which generally had lower populations (especially of men allowed to vote)?

Telling republican-voting people and states that their voice isn’t as important as liberal voices in New York or LA is a sure fire way to destroy the country.

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer answer: With the exception of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, all American states were slave states at the point of American independence. New York, for instance, only abolished slavery in 1827. So the question of a division between slave and non-slave states only came about many decades after the establishment of the electoral college.

Thanks, @Lunatone ! I had mistakenly thought the College was considerably newer than it is.

There have been, it should be said, a lot of arguments made since 2016 that the electoral college system was racist, but this is largely to try to frame Trump's first victory as illegitimate. But it feeds very much into the modern "progressive" American line of argument which is basically "Everything I dislike is racist", and doesn't really deal with the complexities of the real world.

Um, slavery absolutely was an issue with the Constitution. It just wasn't why this particular change was made. While slavery was legal in almost all the states, the number was far greater in some. This is why the Three-Fifths Compromise was negotiated, to give the slave states greater representation and votes.

But in the case of the Electoral College, it was small versus large, and slave numbers don't line up by overall size.

No-one said that slavery wasn't an issue in the constitution (and it hardly couldn't be with the fact that most of the influential American politicians in the era of the War of Independence being from Virginia), just that it wasn't a significant driver behind the electoral college system. It's worth noting that the three-fifths compromise was brought in because basing a notion of the wealth of American states (for taxation and other purposes) on either property wealth or head of population would disadvantage states with significant slave populations, due to the nature of slavery.

Though this is a massive subject which gets off topic about how many American institutions were set up to consolidate the country as an oligarchy, and even in the eighteenth century there were both people who wanted to exercise this power oppressively (for instance to protect the institution of slavery) and those who had more idealistic ambitions. And I suppose this more or less sums up American history ever since...