The Democratic presidential nominee in waiting, Kamala Harris, has assured major donors that her team is urgently vetting potential running mates, a key campaign surrogate tells the Daily Beast.
Harris told roughly 400 members of her campaign’s finance team in a video call Friday that she felt “very honored” to have former attorney general Eric Holder and his law firm handling the high-stakes vetting process, which will determine who is best suited—and least compromised—to join her on the ticket.
“This will be vetting on steroids,” Chip Forrester, co-chair of the Southern Finance Committee of the Harris presidential campaign, who participated in Friday’s call, told the Daily Beast.
Holder also vetted candidates for the Dem ticket’s No. 2 slot in 2020, when Joe Biden chose Harris, then a senator from California, propelling her to the vice presidency and situating her as his heir apparent. The gravity of Biden’s unprecedented, 11th-hour withdrawal from the race and his endorsement of Harris just weeks ahead of the party’s convention has added an aura of surrealism.
“We are in absolutely uncharted territory,” Forrester, a Nashville native, said in a telephone interview. “This is atomic bomb level political stuff.”
He predicted Harris will whittle down her field of roughly a dozen potential candidates to perhaps three by next week. She’ll need to choose her running mate by Aug. 7, which is the deadline for the DNC to conclude a virtual roll call vote to make Harris’s nomination official. In addition to heading up fundraising for Harris in Southern states, Forrester will serve as an at-large Tennessee delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, scheduled to begin on Aug. 19.
While she vowed to move swiftly, Harris gave no hints on the private call Friday about her top preferences for the many names of running mates who have been floated. They include Governors Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona is also on the shortlist.
But Forrester, who rallied every Tennessee delegate to pledge unanimous support for Harris last Sunday just hours after she was endorsed by Biden, made no bones about who he wants Harris to choose for her veep pick: “Full disclosure, I’m all for Mark Kelly.”
The Democratic financier said Kelly brings a lot to the table: red-state Arizona, which he won twice; machismo as a Navy fighter pilot and astronaut who commanded the Endeavor space shuttle mission; a spotlight on gun violence—his wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and nearly killed; and a personal reproductive rights story—the couple tried to conceive a baby through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a hot-button, abortion-related election issue for Democrats.
But Kelly, along with other short listers, could face one of his biggest career challenges yet if former AG Holder and his team start digging deeply into his public and private life. “To be vetted for vice president is one of the most intense scrutinizations of your life,” Forrester said.
If not Kelly, then Whitmer, Forrester said. But he noted bluntly that a double female ticket could be a femme fatale at a time when voters may already feel extended beyond their comfort zone and anxious to defeat Donald Trump.
“We’re already asking the American people to stretch to elect a woman, a Black woman and one of Asian descent,” he said.
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