'We Could Make History': Professor Comments On The Historic Nature Of Kamala Harris' Candidacy

  • 2 months ago
On "Forbes Newsroom," Kelly Dittmar, director of research for Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics, sat down with ForbesWomen editor Maggie McGrath to talk about Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Transcript
00:00President Joe Biden announced that he would be stepping out of the presidential race,
00:05and he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, for the candidacy for the Democratic Party.
00:11Here to explain the historic nature of this moment is Kelly Dittmar.
00:15She is the director of research at Rutgers University's Center for American Women in
00:20Politics. Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.
00:27So I want to start just by asking, what is your reaction to the last 24 hours? It's been quite
00:33a news stretch. Yeah, I mean, I think we've been all in the whirlwind of process for a lot of this,
00:40like what's going to happen? What are the moves that people are going to make? Who, how ultimately
00:44is somebody going to become the nominee? And those are all really important things. But I have been
00:48trying to take a step back and say, like, this is really going to be and likely will be historic,
00:55even just the nomination, right? And we know that Kamala Harris doesn't have the nomination yet.
00:59But were she to earn the Democratic nomination, she'll be just the second woman to ever
01:05be a major party nominee for president. She'll be the first black woman, the first South Asian woman,
01:09first multiracial woman to be a major party presidential nominee. So I think we do need
01:15to take a breath and note that as a historical milestone. And then obviously, if she goes on
01:20to be successful, we could be electing the first woman president of the United States. So kind of
01:26the big picture reflection is, wow, we've really shifted in the last 24 hours on the degree to
01:33which we could make history in this election pretty significantly. But at the same point,
01:40obviously, there's a lot of steps to get there. And so then, you know, certainly have been digging
01:44down in the weeds of what would this look like to both get to the nomination and ultimately
01:50to see if she could be successful in November.

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