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

5 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.

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

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