The Sad Rise of Kamala Harris
During the 2024 Democratic National Convention, an important transition took place as 81-year-old President Joe Biden handed over the leadership to Vice President Kamala Harris. This moment was historic, as Harris became the first African American woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major political party.
Since becoming the nominee, Democrat enthusiasm and fundraising for Harris has skyrocketed. This newfound excitement is best exemplified by her VP pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. At a rally in Philadelphia, just hours after Harris called him at home to tell him he would be her running mate, Walz thanked her: “Thank you, Madam Vice President, for the trust you put in me. But maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.” This simple statement epitomized how impactful Kamala Harris has been, and the political height she has risen to.
Beyond the face of joy and change, however, the “Harris show” has become depressing to watch. Back in 2019, she also tried to run for president, but the so-called “bringer of joy” did not bring in even a single delegate.
So how did Harris so swiftly become the nominee after not winning a single delegate five years ago? It started with President Biden picking her from the political wilderness to be his running mate. This was Harris’ first upward failure.
Then, as vice president, she had limited opportunities to demonstrate her readiness for the presidency since the role carries little political power unless assigned tasks by the president. When such duties were given, for example, when Biden tapped Harris in the early months of their term to spearhead efforts to address the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, she not only failed in addressing the crisis but somehow made it worse. According to Pew Research, migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border hit a record high at the end of 2023. How could Vice President Harris be ready for executive duties, if she failed so miserably in this responsibility?
The last obstacle for her in this year’s Democrat presidential nomination was the sitting president himself, her boss. When Biden’s performance was subpar at the June presidential debate, many alarms went off about his mental decline. The once overwhelming support that Biden had and the staunch defense of his mental health from Democrats, including Harris, quickly faded. Most Democrats became silent about Biden’s mental health, and a few, like Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), called for him to drop out of the race. Eventually, Biden did cave to the pressure, or according to sources from the New York Post, was eventually forced out with the threat of the 25th Amendment by Democrat bigwigs. Thus entered Kamala Harris, anointed with not even a single Democrat vote.
When the 2024 Democratic National Convention began, night one was devoted to the so-called “passing of the torch” from Biden to Harris, but it was shown at an unusual time as Biden’s speech was delayed until 11:30 p.m. EST, well out of primetime. This demonstrated the Democrats desire for Biden to just step away from the center of attention due to his current unpopularity, even though he is still the current president of the United States.
Now on top of the Democratic Party, Harris has distinguished herself in every way but policy-making. Rather than articulate her policies through press conferences and interviews, she seems to be allergic to them, as before her Aug. 29 interview with CNN she had not done a single one, nor answered any serious questions since her de facto nomination. It has also almost been two months, and Harris has not even put a policy plan on her campaign website. The policies she did announce are either Trump policies, such as no taxes on tips, or policies that are so vapid, like stopping price gouging through Soviet-style price controls, which created persistent shortages of food and consumer goods in the Soviet Union, a country that now no longer exists.
Even though Vice President Harris markets herself as a change candidate, she still praises Biden’s mental acuity and does not regret her words about Biden before and after his debate with Trump. Biden also touts Harris as the successor of his policies. Make no mistake — Harris is a vote for the status quo despite what she claims, but just with a diverse face.
As YU students coming into this election cycle, we can all agree that we want our political leaders to be smart, disciplined and compassionate, to represent our policies and values in a good light and to portray America in a strong way in international settings. At the very least, we’d like them to have policy platforms and win democratically. We would all like to have America’s first female president enter office, not because of the milestone itself but because she has good policies and a proven record. Kamala Harris makes a mockery of that milestone. When female presidential candidates come to mind, unfortunately, she will be one of the most disappointing in our national memory.
When it comes to elections, before voting we must think with our brains and not with our hearts as we decide if our country will be better with Harris in the White House. As the great communicator Ronald Reagan said, “Ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions ‘yes,’ why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to who you’ll vote for. If you don’t agree, if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.” Fellow YU students, please do your civic duty and use your legal right to vote; don’t sit out elections.
Kamala Harris depicted as chained up during Pennsylvania Halloween parade, officials apologize for “allowing the offensive participants”
MT. PLEASANT, Pa. (KDKA) — Some participants in a Halloween parade outside Pittsburgh are being heavily criticized for their depiction of Vice President Harris in a float.
Photos of the float in Wednesday night’s parade in Mount Pleasant, in Westmoreland County, show a utility vehicle decorated with American flags and campaign signs for former President Donald Trump and people dressed as United States Secret Service agents with what appears to be a rifle mounted on top and with a person dressed as Harris chained up and walking behind the cart. KDKA-TV later learned it was a fake gun.
The photos have gone viral on social media and the response was overwhelmingly negative, with many calling the float racist and offensive.
In a statement on Facebook on Thursday night, the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department apologized “for allowing the offensive participants” to be in the parade.
“We do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community,” the post said.
The department said it has “traditionally only provided safety & traffic control” during the parade, but didn’t elaborate on how the float made it into the parade or who was involved.
“We will be reviewing our planning processes to prevent a situation like this from happening again. Thank you for your understanding and support as we work to make our events more welcoming for everyone,” the post added.
Daylon A. Davis, the president of the NAACP Pittsburgh branch, said in a statement that, “This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.
“We urge the event organizers and local leaders to implement clearer guidelines to prevent this type of hateful and hurtful display from occurring in the future. We also ask that they offer an apology and make a public commitment to anti-racist values that affirm the dignity and equality of all people.”
Mount Pleasant Mayor Diane Bailey condemned the portrayal of Harris. (Be aware: Viewers may find that video offensive)
“I was appalled, angered, upset,” she said on Thursday. “This does not belong in this parade or in this town.”
The mayor said it’s up to the fire department to make changes.
“They’ve never taken applications in the past,” Mayor Bailey said. “They’ve never vetted anyone who wanted to come to the parade.”
Westmoreland County leaders, many of whom are Democrats, met in the courtyard of the Westmoreland County Courthouse to speak out against the float on Friday.
“The disturbing display at the Mount Pleasant Halloween parade on Oct. 30 does not represent who we are in Westmoreland County,” said Ted Kopas, a Westmoreland County Commissioner.
Trump vs. Harris polls show ties in key battleground states as candidates crisscross battleground states
What to know about the 2024 election Friday
- A CBS News poll released earlier this week showed a tied race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.
- Former President Donald Trump in the last 24 hours has attacked Liz Cheney with violent imagery and called Vice President Kamala Harris a “cracker” under pressure.
- Election Day 2024 is four days away, and more than 65 million Americans had voted early as of Thursday evening.
- Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both hit the campaign trail in the Midwest on Friday.
How Trump, Harris stances on marijuana legalization compare
Legalizing marijuana at the national level is generally popular with Americans, and Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have talked about the issue during the 2024 campaign.
Trump hasn’t said he’d support legalizing recreational weed nationally, but said in September that he would vote for a Florida ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana use. He has also said he wants to continue research into medical uses of marijuana.
Harris hasn’t made legalizing marijuana a central theme of her campaign, but she has said the drug should no longer be criminalized. While district attorney of San Francisco in 2002 when the drug was still illegal in California, Harris prosecuted marijuana offenses. As California attorney general, an office she was elected to in 2010, Harris opposed allowing marijuana to be sold for recreational use. As senator in 2019, she introduced legislation to legalize marijuana and expunge nonviolent weed offenses.
Harris says she will eliminate unnecessary degree requirements on Day 1
Vice President Kamala Harris promised to eliminate unnecessary college degree requirements for federal jobs through an executive order on her first day in office if she wins the presidency. While Harris has frequently called for getting rid of such requirements, it’s the first time she has said she would do so through an executive order.
Harris made the pledge while campaigning in Janesville, Wisconsin, on Friday with union workers.
“A college degree is not the only measure of the skills and the experience of the qualified worker,” she said. “One of the things I’m doing on Day 1, because I can do it by executive order, is I will eliminate unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs and I will challenge the private sector to do the same.”
More than 68 million people have voted
More than 68 million people have already voted by mail or in-person, according to the latest data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
Nearly 32 million mail ballots have been returned, while more than 36 million people have voted in-person.
Of the 25 states that report party registration, more than 13 million people who have voted are Democrats, more than 12 million are Republican and nearly 8.6 million associate with a minor political party or no party.
Despite stark differences on worker rights, unions split on Trump, Harris
While Harris’s policies would be better for union workers, Trump has nevertheless garnered support among their members by tapping into issues that are top of mind of the broader electorate like immigration.
Early voting is under way across the United States ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election. Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris have both made last-minute efforts to court union voters – a core voting bloc, especially in swing states like Michigan, where groups like the United Auto Workers (UAW) have significant sway among the electorate.
Vice President Harris has garnered endorsements from important unions across the country, including the UAW, AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union.
Harris also has the support of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the union behind the latest Boeing strike, which is now entering its eighth week. Boeing picketers say that if she hits the picket line with them, it could help her win more votes.
Meanwhile, former President Trump has also solidified union support, limited though it may be. Members of the Teamsters union have shown stronger support for the Republican nominee. Although the International Brotherhood of Teamsters opted not to endorse either candidate, the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, has campaigned with Trump and appeared on conservative-friendly media outlets in support.
Trump also received an endorsement from the International Union of Police Associations. It comes despite Trump’s false claims about the high rate of crime in American cities, his 34 felony convictions and his campaign owing cities across the US hundreds of thousands of dollars, much of it for police overtime pay.
While Harris has wider support among union members – a 7 percent lead on Trump as 50 percent of union members say they believe Harris’s policies would be better for unions than Trump’s – the latter has garnered support among union members by tapping into issues that are top of mind for the broader electorate like immigration.
“Union members who are likely or could support Donald Trump are really not focused on collective bargaining or economic power but issues that have to do with immigration, issues that have to do with a sense of danger because of levels of crime,” Bob Bruno, professor of labour and employment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Al Jazeera.
Despite Trump’s success in stoking fear about “migrant crime”, violent crime in the US has steadily declined during the administration of President Joe Biden. The most recent FBI data shows a 10.3 percent decline in reported violent crime compared with last year.
Al Jazeera analysed where the candidates stand on key issues important to union workers like collective bargaining and wages. Here’s what we found:
On organising
Harris has a pretty consistent record of being pro-union and was an original co-sponsor of a key workers rights bill – Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.
The PRO Act, which originally was proposed in 2019, would prevent employers from interfering with union elections, allow for the National Labor Relations Board to hand out financial penalties to companies that violate labour laws and expedite reinstatement of work if workers lose their jobs as a result of a strike.
The bill was reintroduced in 2023 but has not passed the US Congress. Harris said she would sign it into law if elected.
“The Harris campaign is by far the more supportive of organised labour and collective bargaining, and the Trump campaign is outwardly hostile to the idea,” Bruno said.
JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, voted against the PRO Act and has been a vocal critic of the legislation. Vance also rejected several Biden administration nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. In 2020, then-President Trump threatened to veto the PRO Act if it made it to his desk.
The Trump White House also made it harder for workers to organise, including in 2019 when it got rid of a protection implemented during Barack Obama’s presidency that allowed workers to use company email to organise.
“When it comes to Trump, his presidency was an absolute disaster for working people and for union members. His entire term was doing the bidding of corporate CEOs and big corporations from the massive tax giveaways that he bestowed upon them to making it more difficult for workers to organise as a union,” Steven Smith, deputy director of public affairs for the AFL-CIO, told Al Jazeera.
In her capacity as vice president in the Biden administration, Harris spearheaded the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, which aimed to help better communicate workers rights throughout federal agencies.
On the other hand, Trump has been openly hostile towards workers who are pushing for better working conditions.
In a recent interview with billionaire supporter Elon Musk on X, the social media platform Musk owns, Trump floated the idea of firing workers who are on strike, which would violate federal labour law.
The claim led the UAW to launch a formal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board to investigate Trump and Musk for interfering with workers rights.
On wages
Harris has said that if elected, she would try to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour – an important issue for workers in the service industry and their respective unions because the minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Since then, its purchasing power has declined by almost 30 percent.
When he was asked about whether he would raise the minimum wage at a campaign event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s franchise, Trump dodged the question.
In 2020, he said he would prefer minimum wages to be decided by the states.
“I think it should be a state option. Alabama is different than New York. New York is different from Vermont. Every state is different. It should be a state option,” Trump said at the time.
Thirty-four of the 50 US states have raised their minimum wages above the federal minimum.
That means the remaining 16 still have a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. So for people who work full time at 40 hours per week at those wages, their annual pay would be only $20 higher than the poverty line for a single person household.
When Biden first took office, he pledged to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers. But his efforts to get Congress to pass the legislation were blocked by Republicans and a handful of Democrats. However, Biden did what the administration could do unilaterally and raised the federal minimum wage for federal workers.
Both Trump and Harris have pledged to end income taxes on tips if elected.
Harris has long fought to improve wages across the economy. During her time as attorney general in California, she launched a task force that was intended to crack down on wage theft in the state.
However, it’s not clear how well those efforts performed. By 2022, it was reported that even when workers won wage theft cases against their employers, only one out of seven were paid out those lost wages within five years.
Trump, however, has repeatedly argued against raising wages.
In 2015, he said wages were “too high”. During that time, he also said auto manufacturers should move operations to the southern part of the US to “lower-wage states”.
Despite these policy positions, Trump won the union-heavy state of Michigan in 2016. Biden won the state by 2.8 percentage points over Trump in 2020, and now it’s a dead heat between Harris and Trump in the state. An aggregate of political polls compiled by the poll-tracking website FiveThirtyEight shows Harris has a small lead in Michigan but well within the margin of error.
In 2018 while president, Trump used an executive order to scrap annual pay raises for civilian federal employees.
The Biden administration, however, has fought to improve wages for middle class workers. In several job creation programmes, the administration included a prevailing wage clause that requires companies bidding for contracts to pay a living wage to their employees.
“The middle class is going to earn prevailing wage on all of those construction and factory-related jobs that come with that large federal subsidy,” Bruno said.
On overtime pay
At the end of Obama’s second term, the Department of Labor said any full-time workers making less than $47,476 qualified for automatic overtime pay.
A judge in Texas blocked the rule before it could take effect. When the plan threshold came up for re-evaluation in 2019, the Trump administration slashed it. The cuts meant employers only needed to pay overtime for salaried workers making $35,358 a year or less.
When the rule was up for reconsideration again this year, the Biden-Harris administration raised the threshold to $43,888 on July 1. It will increase again on January 1 to $58,656. The plan will likely continue if Harris is elected next week.
As for Trump, his allies at the Heritage Foundation think tank want him, if he wins, to reverse the rule.
Trump has a long history of failing to pay overtime during his time in the private sector. A 2016 report from USA Today found that his companies violated overtime and minimum wage laws 24 times.
He echoed that sentiment in a campaign speech this month. The Republican nominee told supporters in Michigan he “used to hate to pay overtime”.
“People are shocked and they’re scared because if Trump takes away their overtime, they’re not going to be able to make their rent at the end of the month. That’s the kind of thing that’s at stake here,” Smith said.
Trump, however, has said he wants to end taxes on overtime pay as part of a bigger tax plan if he is re-elected.
“It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break, and that’s what we are doing because this is a good one,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Arizona in September.
Neither campaign replied to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
