Kamala Harris has secured enough delegates to win the Democratic presidential nomination, clinching her status as Donald Trump’s opponent in November’s presidential election.
The US vice-president passed the threshold on the first full day since President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed her for the Democratic presidential nomination, shaking up the 2024 race for the White House.
According to a tally by the Associated Press, as of early Tuesday morning, Harris had won the pledged support of 2,668 delegates at next month’s Democratic National Convention, far more than the 1,976 needed.
“Tonight, I am proud to have earned the support needed to become our party’s nominee,” Harris said on X, noting that delegates from her home state of California had “put our campaign over the top”.
She earlier secured the backing of dozens of lawmakers and the most senior Democrats in Washington, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Harris was also buoyed by a surge in fundraising, with her campaign collecting a record $81mn in contributions in the first 24 hours after the president dropped out — more than Biden raised in the first two months of his own bid.
“In the days and weeks ahead I, together with you, will do everything in my power to unite our Democratic party, to unite our nation and to win this election,” Harris said in her first campaign speech, at what had been Biden headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
Trump said in an angry response on his Truth Social network that the shift at the top of the Democrats’ ticket had misled “the Republican Party, causing it to waste a great deal of time and money”.
He added that he hoped there would be many debates in the rest of the campaign, claiming that Harris had “absolutely terrible pole [sic] numbers against a fine and brilliant young man named DONALD J. TRUMP”.
Harris told a crowd in Delaware that as a prosecutor in California before she was elected to high office she had come across “perpetrators of all kinds”, including “predators” who had abused women, as well as “fraudsters” and “cheaters”. “Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.
She accused the Republican nominee of seeking to take the US “back to a time before many of our fellow Americans had full freedoms and rights”.
“What kind of country do we want to live in?” she asked. “A country of freedom, compassion and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?”
Harris’s remarks were preceded by a phone call from Biden, who is isolating with Covid-19 at his holiday home in Delaware. “The name has changed at the top of the ticket. But the mission hasn’t changed,” the president said. To Harris, he said: “I’m watching you, kid. I love ya.”
Many Democratic donors were thrilled by Biden’s decision to step aside, describing his age as a major liability that could have brought down many other Democrats in Congress as well as dooming the White House race.
The Harris campaign said that more than 888,000 people had donated in the day since she was endorsed by Biden, of whom 60 per cent had not given money in this election cycle.
The one-day haul was more than Biden attracted in his first 66 days on the campaign trail last year, more than he pulled in from a Hollywood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and more than three presidents — Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — raised together at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
It also exceeded Harris’s fundraising during the entirety of her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign, and topped the mammoth haul Trump’s campaign reported the day after he became the first former president to become a convicted felon.
During her speech in Wilmington, Harris said she had asked Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, to take charge of her presidential bid. She added that Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, would also stay on.
Harris will be hoping that her entry into the race will give a jolt to the party’s prospects of taking back the White House by energising women, and young, Black and Hispanic voters, as well as drawing support from independent and swing voters turned off by Trump.
The Republican nominee has built a solid lead in polling since Biden’s disastrous performance in their televised debate last month and after surviving an assassination attempt.
Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita on Monday released a memo saying Biden’s decision had changed nothing.
“The liberal elite and deep state — sensing the American public’s disgust with their lawfare, and now in a desperate Hail Mary — have swapped out an incumbent President for the incumbent vice-president in a ploy to try and shake up the race,” they wrote.
They added: “The problem for the left and media elite? Kamala Harris is as bad, if not worse, than Joe Biden.”
US Election Countdown
Sign up to our US Election Countdown newsletter, your essential guide to the twists and turns of the 2024 presidential election