In Her Words: Harris Makes History

America elects its first female vice president

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story November 7, 2020 Senator Kamala Harris accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president in August.Erin Schaff/The New York Times By Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember “The thing we all know is we never walk in those rooms alone — we are all in that room together.” — Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT After several tense days of vote-counting in a handful of battlegrounds, Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday. The result provided a history-making moment for Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president. Our colleagues Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember unpack the significance of this moment. (Full story here: Kamala Harris Makes History as First Woman and Woman of Color as Vice President) From the earliest days of her childhood, Kamala Harris was taught that the road to racial justice was long. She spoke often on the campaign trail of those who had come before her, of her parents, immigrants drawn to the civil rights struggle in the United States — and of the ancestors who had paved the way. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT As she took the stage in Texas shortly before the election, Ms. Harris spoke of being singular in her role but not solitary. “Yes, sister, sometimes we may be the only one that looks like us walking in that room,” she told a largely Black audience in Fort Worth. “But the thing we all know is we never walk in those rooms alone — we are all in that room together.” With her ascension to the vice presidency, Ms. Harris will become the first woman and first woman of color to hold that office, a milestone for a nation in upheaval, grappling with a damaging history of racial injustice exposed, yet again, in a divisive election. Ms. Harris, 56, embodies the future of a country that is growing more racially diverse, even if the person voters picked for the top of the ticket is a 77-year-old white man. That she has risen higher in the country’s leadership than any woman ever has underscores the extraordinary arc of her political career. A former San Francisco district attorney, she was elected as the first Black woman to serve as California’s attorney general. When she was elected a United States senator in 2016, she became only the second Black woman in the chamber’s history. Almost immediately, she made a name for herself in Washington with her withering prosecutorial style in Senate hearings, grilling her adversaries in high-stakes moments that at times went viral. Yet what also distinguished her was her personal biography: The daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, she was steeped in racial justice issues from her early years in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., and wrote in her memoir of memories of the chants, shouts and “sea of legs moving about” at protests. She recalled hearing Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to mount a national campaign for president, speak in 1971 at a Black cultural center in Berkeley that she frequented as a young girl. “Talk about strength!” she wrote. It was a story she tried to tell on the campaign trail during the Democratic primary with mixed success. Kicking off her candidacy with homages to Ms. Chisholm, Ms. Harris attracted a crowd in Oakland that her advisers estimated at more than 20,000, a tremendous show of strength that immediately established her as a front-runner in the race. But vying for the nomination against the most diverse field of candidates in history, she failed to capture a surge of support and dropped out weeks before any votes were cast. While she struggled to attract the very women and Black voters she had hoped would connect with her personal story during her primary bid, she continued to make a concerted effort as Mr. Biden’s running mate to reach out to people of color, some of whom have said they feel represented in national politics for the first time. After waiting days for results, Democrats rejoiced in a victory that offered a bright spot in an election that delivered losses to many of their candidates, including several high-profile women. Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who got involved in politics through Ms. Chisholm’s presidential campaign, said she always believed she would see the first Black woman at the steps of the White House. “Here you have now this remarkable, brilliant, prepared African-American woman, South Asian woman, ready to fulfill the dreams and aspirations of Shirley Chisholm and myself and so many women of color,” she said. “This is exciting and is finally a breakthrough that so many of us have been waiting for. And it didn’t come easy.” Read the full story here. Thoughts on the election? Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com. What else is happening Here are four articles from The Times you may have missed. A Biden-Harris campaign event in Florida last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times “It’s time for America to unite. And to heal. We are the United States of America.” Joe R. Biden was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, becoming the first candidate to beat an incumbent in more than a quarter-century. [Read the story] “We can use that as a vehicle to really talk about what I see as the most important work in my life, which is all the stuff we’re doing off the field.” Megan Rapinoe, the decorated American soccer player, has a book coming out on Tuesday. It’s only kind of about sports. [Read the story] “I really enjoy watching women in action.” Manohla Dargis, a Times film critic, writes that watching actresses become action stars made her think differently about bodies and the meaning of representation. [Read the story] “Early females in the Americas were big game hunters.” The discovery of a 9,000-year-old female skeleton buried with what archaeologists call a “big-game hunting kit” in the Andes highlands of Peru has challenged ancient gender roles. [Read the story] In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here to get future installments. Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com. Follow us on Instagram at @nytgender. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for In Her Words from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. 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On Politics: Biden’s Big Challenge

The unity message won. Now it will face a test.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story November 7, 2020 Erin Schaff/The New York Times By Giovanni Russonello The New York Times has called the race in Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, and with it, the presidency of the United States. He has defeated Donald Trump, who becomes the country’s first one-term commander in chief in nearly three decades. It was the culmination of a race that Mr. Biden entered, he often said, only after being outraged by the sight of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The episode appeared to harden his resolution to mount a centrist campaign that would reject extremism and pull the country together. CNN was the first network to call the race this morning, with The Associated Press and others soon following. “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” the Biden campaign said in a statement heralding the triumph. But it’s not exactly the victory that polls had predicted, or that Democrats had envisioned. Mr. Trump may have lost, but Trumpism is far from dead. And, not surprisingly, he is so far continuing to dispute Mr. Biden’s win; there’s little guarantee of a smooth transition. So as the nation confronts a pandemic and an economic crisis, it’s also facing down a crisis of consensus. Rather than expanding on their sweeping victories in the 2018 midterms, Democrats are on pace to lose seats in the House, and face an uphill battle to gaining control of the Senate. While Mr. Biden won more popular votes than any presidential candidate in history, Mr. Trump earned the second-most. Mr. Biden had centered his entire campaign on a promise to unite the country. Accepting the Democratic nomination in August, he pledged to “restore the soul of America.” But after this week’s election, Americans are just as split as ever on what that soul contains. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT “I don’t think there is any question that the results reveal the continuation of some of the stratification of the country,” said Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, a Democratic political action committee. Only a small fraction of voters — 5 percent, according to early exit poll results — decided whom they would support in the immediate run-up to the election. Partisan allegiances were even stronger than four years ago: Well over 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans voted for their party’s nominee. In Philadelphia on Friday night, as elections officials counted votes at the city’s convention center, a symbolic scene unfolded outside, with Trump supporters gathered on one side of a police barricade, demanding an end to the count, and Mr. Biden’s backers gathered just steps away. Some on the Biden side were playing music out of amplifiers; soon, a rig of amps had materialized on the Trump side, and a different soundtrack began to blare there. In nearby Scranton, Pa., our correspondent Sabrina Tavernise spoke to voters and got a front-row view of the political polarization. Sammy Diana, a 55-year-old Trump supporter, described himself as “sick to my stomach” as the results rolled in yesterday, and refused to accept their legitimacy. “I definitely, definitely, definitely believe it was fixed. Dead people voted,” he said, echoing some of the unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud made by Mr. Trump and his allies. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Still, almost all voters in Tuesday’s election — 96 percent, according to the preliminary results of The Associated Press’s VoteCast survey — said that bridging the country’s divides should be at least a somewhat important priority for the next president. Among the roughly four in five voters who said this was very important, most cast ballots for Mr. Biden. His focus on unity was evidently not misplaced. The surest way a leader can pull a divided country together, especially if he or she isn’t a dynamic speaker or a movement figure, is by winning resoundingly, then sweeping into power amid an inevitable air of consensus. Instead, Biden and his Democratic allies in Congress will face a Republican Party feeling emboldened, with a base of support that has only grown in the past four years. After presiding over a chaotic four years as president, Mr. Trump may go down in history as more successful at building a reliable base of Republican supporters than at governing. The range of Republican victories in the House on Tuesday speaks to that. The class of freshman Republicans in Congress will range from Marjorie Taylor Greene, an avowed supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, representing a rural and suburban Georgia district, to Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban-American former TV journalist, who unseated a Democratic incumbent in the heart of Miami. Should Mr. Biden face a divided Congress when he steps into the Oval Office, taking big legislative steps forward will be difficult. If campaigns are waged in poetry and governing is done in prose, Mr. Biden is swiftly moving into the prosaic stage. Discourses on national healing may soon dissolve in favor of a hard-nosed focus on partisan politics. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT While Mr. Biden was famous during his years in the Senate for establishing mutual respect across the aisle and forging alliances with Republicans, those days may be gone. And so now the spotlight falls on Georgia, where two Senate seats are heading to January runoff elections. They appear likely to determine which party controls the Senate next year. “Yes, we can put political pressure on Republican senators; yes, we can launch national campaigns to pass legislation,” Mr. Cecil said. “But ultimately, if we’re just judging Mitch McConnell by history, he has shown very little interest in working together.” He added, “We should put all that we can into the two Georgia Senate races and see if we can pull them off.” RECOMMENDED READING Ruth Fremson/The New York Times   Biden Wins Presidency, Ending Four Tumultuous Years Under Trump Joseph R. Biden Jr. achieved victory offering a message of healing and unity. He will return to Washington facing a daunting set of crises. By Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns Erin Schaff/The New York Times   Kamala Harris Makes History as First Woman and Woman of Color as Vice President Ms. Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, has risen higher in the country’s leadership than any woman ever before her. By Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember Erin Schaff/The New York Times   A Traditionalist Who Ran as Himself Joseph R. Biden Jr. has spent his career devoted to institutions and relationships. And those are the tools he will rely on to govern a fractured nation. By Katie Glueck and Thomas Kaplan Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. Subscribe to The TimesGet The New York Times app Connect with us on: Change Your EmailPrivacy PolicyContact UsCalifornia Notices The New York Times Company. 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018