As the Democratic vice-presidential nominee hits the campaign trail, a race to replace her kicks off.
Within nanoseconds of the ascension this week of Senator Kamala Harris to the Democratic presidential ticket, her home state of California was already looking to the next question: Who will replace her if she becomes vice president? If Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected president, Ms. Harris’s rise will leave an opening in January for her seat in the U. S. Senate. That pick will be made by Gov. Gavin Newsom, and it stands to be consequential, not only for him but also for his sprawling state and a nation that has long viewed it as a political and cultural bellwether. [Sign up to get the California Today newsletter.] “This is a proud moment — historic,” Mr. Newsom said Wednesday, speaking of Ms. Harris’s nomination and noting their rise together through the crucible of Bay Area politics, “which is not for the timid.” He said the choice of her successor “is not what I’m focused on right now,” given his state’s dismal pandemic situation. But when asked by a reporter whether would-be candidates had been pitching themselves for the job, Mr. Newsom paused for a rueful chuckle. “You may be the only one who hasn’t, unless you just did — and that is only a slight exaggeration,” he said. In fact, political strategists say, the choice will be tricky for Mr. Newsom, a white man who would be replacing a female senator who is Black and of Indian and Jamaican descent in a heavily Democratic state with no ethnic majority and innumerable factions. Ms. Harris is only the second Black woman to serve in the U. S. Senate, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has forced a reckoning on racism. But Latinos make up nearly 40 percent of the California’s population of 40 million, and the state’s first Latino senator also would be history-making. “And women are not going to want to lose one of the few women in the Senate,” added Rose Kapolczynski, a Democratic strategist who for 20 years advised the former occupant of Ms. Harris’s Senate seat, Barbara Boxer. Mr. Newsom also has deep ties to the state’s L. G. B. T. community since his time as mayor of San Francisco, and a responsibility to balance power between the state’s north, south, inland and coastal regions. A generational changing of California’s political guard has produced a deep bench of Democratic leaders with high profiles, robust egos and powerful statewide interests behind them, from big business to public employee unions. Mr. Newsom would have no shortage of names to choose from. Almost two dozen were being floated around the state capital even before the announcement that Mr. Biden’s running mate would be Ms. Harris. Among them: Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Alex Padilla, popular Latinos and Newsom allies who have both won statewide office; U. S. Representatives Karen Bass of Los Angeles and Barbara Lee of Oakland, who are Black and who were both considered as potential running mates for Mr. Biden. Also vying for a spot on the list: popular female officeholders such as U. S. Representative Katie Porter of Irvine and State Senate President Toni Atkins; grass-roots progressives such as U.
