Kamala Harris has launched her campaign for the White House, after President Joe Biden stepped aside Sunday under pressure from party leaders.

The vice president has Biden’s endorsement, and is unchallenged as yet for the Democratic nomination, which will be formally decided at the Aug. 19 convention in Chicago.

“I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” Harris said in a statement. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda. We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”

In her statement, the vice president paid tribute to Biden’s “extraordinary leadership,” saying he had achieved more in one term than many presidents do in two.

  • xapr@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    From my understanding, the reason for this is to give candidates with less funds and less name recognition an opportunity to bubble up. Imagine that if the primary consisted of all states at the same time, candidates would need to campaign nationally, or only in the most populous states, either of which would cost tons of money. This would make it so that only candidates already starting off with massive campaign funds would have any chance.

    One possible alternative approach would be to start with the smallest states (either by population or by area), one at a time, and ramp up to multiple largest states at the end of the primary cycle. This would give candidates a viable way to ramp up their campaign funds and name recognition. The only problem with this approach would be that the smallest states tend to be very white, so perhaps some adjustments would need to be made to make it more representative of the demographics of the country as a whole from the beginning.