MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — Kamala Harris — the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — is all over the news. But long before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Duchess Harris was paying close attention to the vice president.
Duchess Harris, a professor of American Studies at Macalester College, serves on the project advisory board for The Kamala Harris Project.
Professor Harris and 15 other nonpartisan academics have been tracking Harris' tenure as vice president as the nation's first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American in the position.
"A lot of people were not focusing on her because people did not think this moment was going to happen," said Professor Harris. "So what I think is going to be really interesting is how she will now be vetted in a way that she was not vetted four years ago."
After President Biden's announcement on Sunday morning that he would be dropping out of the race, VP Harris' supporters quickly mobilized.
Sunday night, an estimated 90,000 Black women and allies took part in a Win with Black Women Zoom call. 40,000 logged onto the Zoom call which hit capacity and another 50,000 people streamed on other platforms. In three hours, the event raised $1.5 million for Harris' campaign.
"What it does is help Americans that might have been surprised by that understand what Black women have been doing for the last 50 years, actually maybe 60 years. So this has just been a buildup of what has been many peoples' lives work," Professor Harris said.
Professor Harris' academic work includes the book "Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump."
"My scholarship really explains to people that Black women are the most loyal voting bloc within the Democratic Party. For instance, 94% of Black women voted for Hillary Clinton, and white women were divided and divided so much that more white women voted for Donald Trump than they voted for Hillary Clinton," Professor Harris explained.
She also explained how the concept "linked fate" can help people better understand voting behavior patterns.
"What it does is show that women of different races vote in a way that supports their entire family... so who your fate is linked to. So Black women will ask, 'How does this impact my father? My husband? My son?' What we have found is that Black men will not say, 'How will this impact my wife?' But we think now with Vice President Harris, that will be changing," Professor Harris said.
Monday night, in response to Sunday night's fundraising, more than 53,000 attendees logged on to a "Win with Black Men" event. More than $1.3 million was raised over four hours for the Kamala Harris campaign.
"That also is really unprecedented. When Shirley Chisholm said that she was going to run for president in 1972, only two Black men in Congress said that they would support her," Professor Harris said.
It's been eight years since Hillary Clinton made history — the first time a major party had nominated a woman for president.
"We're in a different moment than when Hillary was running because we are post-Dobbs. So people are going to be thinking about a woman presidency differently," Professor Harris said.
And for those who think VP Harris' identity should be left out of the conversation, Professor Harris said, "Colorblind does not work when you go to cast your vote. It just does not. So it works in both directions. There were African Americans who had never voted, who came out to vote because Barack Obama was running for presidency. So in that way, it mattered. But the way that it also can matter is that there were women, including as I said white women, who would not vote for Hillary because they didn't want a woman president," Professor Harris said. "So race does matter. Gender does matter. I understand that people want us to get past it, but we have not gotten past it."