Fashion
The 8 Top Contenders for Kamala Harris’s Senate Seat
More than a dozen potential candidates are reportedly angling to take over the U.S. Senate soon to be vacated by Kamala Harris, the new vice president-elect….
As one race ends, another begins. In California, roughly a dozen candidates—some publicly, some privately—are reportedly angling to take over the U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kamala Harris, the new vice president-elect.
It will not be an easy decision for California governor Gavin Newsom, in part because of the historical significance of Harris’s seat. Harris, the first Black woman to be elected to national office in the United States, is the only Black woman and one of only three Black senators overall in the current U.S. Senate. (The two others are Cory Booker of New Jersey and Tim Scott of South Carolina.) It’s hard not to imagine that will be one key consideration in Newsom’s decision.
But there is another factor at play. As a state, California is 39% Latino, and there has never been a Latino Senator elected from California. There will undoubtedly be political pressure on Newsom to address that issue, especially as he nears his own reelection campaign in 2022.
Another decision Newsom has to make is whether to appoint a caretaker in the seat or someone who plans to run in 2022 and thus would be able to do so as an incumbent. When President-elect Joe Biden became vice president under Barack Obama in 2009, longtime Biden aide Edward Kaufman was named to fill his Senate seat, and Kaufman announced at the time that he did not intend to run for reelection when the Delaware seat came up in 2010. (A local Delaware official, Chris Coons, entered and won that race.)
“There’s no shortage of ambition here,” the Democratic strategist Brian Goldsmith recently told Politico. “There’s three dozen plausible potential senators—and there’s only one spot. These seats don’t come around often, and once filled, they can be filled for decades. So everybody’s trying to do their own version of smart campaigning.”
Here is a look at the top contenders right now.
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