Vice Presidents and Vice Presidency (US)

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      Peggy Flanagan Would Be MN’s First Female Governor if Harris and Walz Win

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      If Kamala Harris is elected president alongside Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who has been chosen as her running mate, the state’s lieutenant governor would get a history-making promotion. Under the succession plan laid out in Minnesota’s Constitution, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, 44, would become the state’s first female governor, as well as the first Native American person to assume the role. Ms. Flanagan, who was first elected to her current post in 2018, served on the Minneapolis school board from 2005 to 2009 and spent years training liberals who wanted to run for office. Among the rookie politicians she mentored was Mr. Walz, a former social studies teacher from the small city of Mankato, who got his start in politics in 2006 after winning a congressional seat in a largely rural, conservative district. Ms. Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, has championed improving relations between state government and leaders of the 11 tribal nations in the state. A native of St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, Ms. Flanagan was a vocal critic of Minnesota’s old flag, which was retired this year. She argued that the flag’s depiction of a Native American man and a settler was racist. In recent days, as it became apparent that her boss was being vetted as a vice-presidential candidate, Ms. Flanagan made clear she was rooting for him — and happy to serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in 2027. “I think Governor Walz would be honored to be selected to be the vice president, and I have been honored this entire time to serve the people of Minnesota,” she told the local news site Minn Post. “That would not change.” If she becomes governor, Bobby Joe Champion, president of the State Senate, would become lieutenant governor. Mr. Champion would be the first Black person to serve in that role. More

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      Harris Nears Her Big V.P. Reveal After Fierce Lobbying From Democrats

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      The vice president is expected to announce her choice on Tuesday morning. One prominent Democrat recounted being asked by a contender, “Will you please make sure you put in a good word for me?”Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to reveal her running mate on Tuesday morning, a decision that will end a 16-day sprint to vet, interview and choose a person who could potentially become the future leader of the Democratic Party.Ms. Harris’s announcement, coupled with a major rally she plans to hold with her running mate on Tuesday evening in Philadelphia, will also cap a frenzied period that had, in recent days, exposed some of the party’s internal fissures on matters ranging from labor rights to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.With only days to consider a range of contenders, Ms. Harris and her team were inundated with unsolicited advice — much of it public — about whom she should pick. In the final hours, her allies, fellow Democrats, progressive activists and even some of the potential nominees themselves tried to find ways to sway her decision.At the center of the maelstrom is Ms. Harris, who has fielded input from a small group of formal and informal advisers, including former President Barack Obama, whom she has consulted on policy, personnel decisions and her vice-presidential pick during her whirlwind ascent to the Democratic presidential nomination, according to a person familiar with their conversations.Some of the candidates even tried to cozy up to influential friends of Ms. Harris’s, hoping that it might make their way back to the vice president — or at least to one of the people in the tight group of confidants advising her. Two presumed favorites, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, have been checking in with Democratic members of Congress by phone in recent days.Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said she had recently fielded calls from more than one of Ms. Harris’s potential running mates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman

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      In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris Faces Party Divisions as She Chooses a Running Mate

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      The competitive, divisive primary that many Democrats long wanted to avoid has arrived anyway — playing out largely behind closed doors in a fight over the bottom of the ticket.The final stage of the campaign to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate reached something of an ugly phase in recent days as donors, interest groups and political rivals from the party’s moderate and progressive wings lobbied for their preferred candidates and passed around memos debating the contenders’ political weaknesses with key demographics. They turned most sharply on one of the favorites to join the ticket, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who has drawn opposition from progressives and even a senator in his home state. The fissures among Democrats emerged as three leading contenders — Mr. Shapiro, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — met with Ms. Harris at her residence in Washington on Sunday, ahead of a decision her campaign said would be announced by Tuesday.Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, declined to comment on the meetings.Ms. Harris is set to hit the campaign trail with her running mate this week, kicking off a five-day, seven-state tour with a rally on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, where Mr. Shapiro is expected to be in attendance, whether he is her pick or not.Progressive groups have trained their criticisms on Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Kelly, who they accuse of being too conservative on key issues. Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, said during a Sunday interview on CBS that Mr. Kelly had “not really” assuaged the union’s concerns about his commitment to pro-labor legislation and that the organization had “bigger issues” with Mr. Shapiro’s support for school vouchers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Doug Emhoff, Husband of Kamala Harris, Acknowledges Long-Ago Affair

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      Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, said on Saturday that he had an extramarital affair during his first marriage, years before he met Ms. Harris.The acknowledgment, which was released in a statement, came hours after a British tabloid reported that Mr. Emhoff had a previously undisclosed relationship with a teacher who worked at the elementary school his children attended in Culver City, Calif., approximately 15 years ago.At the time, Mr. Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer, was married to Kerstin Emhoff, a film producer, with whom he had two children. The couple filed for divorce in 2009. Mr. Emhoff met Ms. Harris in 2013, and they married the following year.“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions,” Mr. Emhoff said in the statement. “I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.”The Biden campaign was aware of the affair before it decided to tap Ms. Harris as vice president in 2020, according to a person familiar with the vetting process, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In addition, this person said that Ms. Harris knew of the affair before she married Mr. Emhoff in 2014.According to an article published by The Daily Mail on Saturday, Mr. Emhoff had the relationship with a woman who at the time worked as a teacher at The Willows Community School, a private school in west Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shapiro’s College-Era Criticism of Palestinians Draws Fresh Scrutiny

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      Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, wrote in his college newspaper three decades ago that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East, prompting criticism as Vice President Kamala Harris considers him to be her running mate.Mr. Shapiro, 51, has embraced his Jewish identity and been one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel at a moment when the party is splintered over the war in Gaza.But he says his views have evolved since publishing an opinion essay as a college student at the University of Rochester in New York, when he wrote that Palestinians were incapable of establishing their own homeland and making it successful, even with help from Israel and the United States.“They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own,” he wrote in the essay, published in the Sept. 23, 1993, edition of The Campus Times, the student newspaper. “They will grow tired of fighting amongst themselves and will turn outside against Israel.”Mr. Shapiro, who was 20 at the time, noted in his essay that he had spent five months studying in Israel and had volunteered in the Israeli Army.“The only way the ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it,” Mr. Shapiro wrote, adding, “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance queda bajo el foco por críticas a los ‘momentos más débiles’ de Simone Biles

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      Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, dijo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beshear, a Potential Harris V.P. Pick, Rallies Democrats in Deep-Red Iowa

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      Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, in contention to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, tried out for the post in Iowa on Saturday by going after the man he would face on the Republican ticket, telling Iowa Democrats that Senator JD Vance of Ohio has “contrived” his claims to be from Appalachia.“He ain’t gonna be your vice president,” Mr. Beshear told a standing cheering crowd of around 450 of Iowa’s top Democratic Party supporters. Mr. Beshear headlined the state party’s Liberty & Justice fund-raiser in Des Moines, which sought to energize voters in the run-up to the November general election.After a bruising 2024 legislative session overseen by the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and a majority Republican Legislature, Democratic lawmakers have been desperate for the voter energy they said they had seen since the Harris announcement.“There’s just a sense of, OK, the election is starting now,” State Senator Nate Boulton of Des Moines, the Democratic whip, said just before the event.Mr. Boulton, who is up for re-election in November, said that while Ms. Harris had a large pool of promising candidates for her vice-presidential pick, he was excited about Mr. Beshear’s ability to win twice in a deep-red state like Kentucky.“I think that’s a story we’re looking for here in Iowa,” he said.Though Mr. Beshear has shown off his chops as an attack dog in recent days, his message to Iowa Democrats also invoked calls for unity and kindness.“We are called to love and get along with every other human being in this country and across our globe,” he said.But his biggest applause lines came when he described Ms. Harris as both tough and caring.“In November, we are going to win and get back to being each other’s neighbors, to being American before we’re Democrats or Republicans,” Mr. Beshear said. “We’re going to get back to working together to get things done. And I believe that while they will falsely say, ‘Oh, she’s too far to the left,’ what she will do as president is not move a country to the right or the left. She will move it forward for every single American citizen.” More