Harris bets America is ready for first Black woman president

WASHINGTON, United States — Is America ready to elect a Black woman as its president? Vice President Kamala Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic US presidential nominee in Chicago next week, is betting that it is.

"In my entire career, I've heard people say when I ran... people aren't ready, it's not your time, nobody like you has done that before," the Democrat said in 2019 when she ran against Joe Biden in the primary presidential campaign.

"I haven't listened and I would suggest that nobody should listen to that kind of conversation."

But Harris's campaign never took off and she left the primaries race before Biden picked her as his running mate.

If Harris, 59, manages to beat Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and the second Black person, after Barack Obama, to run the world's leading power.

In so many ways, Harris already is a trailblazer. Born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she was the first woman attorney general ever elected in California, on top of being the first African American and Asian American to hold that post. She then became the first vice president in US history in those same categories.

In a survey published in September 2023, the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, found that for a majority of Americans, gender does not play a role in choosing a president.

Sixty percent of respondents said that a female president would handle pressure as well as a man, while 27 percent believed that she would do better.

"While female leadership -- whether as presidents, queens, prime ministers, and heads of state -- has become the norm in many parts of the world, including Europe, Asia, South America, and African nations, the United States has yet to experience this moment," said Sonia Gipson Rankin, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.

She noted that even though Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college and therefore the presidency to Trump in 2016, she won the popular vote.

Regina Bateson, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that voters' biases may not themselves be the issue.

"The problem is often not that voters are