Vice President Harris interviewed at least three potential running mates on Sunday as the final hours before her self-imposed deadline to make her choice began ticking away.
Harris will announce her vice-presidential pick by Tuesday night, when she and the candidate will appear in Philadelphia for the first of seven rallies over the course of five days. The two will campaign in each of the seven most competitive states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
Harris, who has maintained an aggressive travel schedule since becoming the likely Democratic nominee two weeks ago, spent the weekend in Washington with lawyers and her closest aides.
At the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, Harris and her aides reviewed the finalists’ backgrounds, experience and potential vulnerabilities. But the in-person interviews, Harris allies said, would be particularly important to the process as the vice president is prioritizing personal chemistry with her running mate, and says she is looking for a governing partner.
The three finalists who met with Harris on Sunday were Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. It remained unclear Sunday whether Harris herself had interviewed three other potential finalists: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Spokespeople for Shapiro, Walz and Kelly declined to comment on the interviews.
On Saturday, Harris holed up at her residence. Former attorney general Eric Holder, who led the vetting process, gave presentations that he and a team of lawyers at Covington & Burlington had created on the finalists.
At the same time, Harris’s team was grappling with the fallout from a British tabloid report that her husband, Doug Emhoff, had an affair during his previous marriage, long before he met Harris. Emhoff acknowledged the affair in a statement on Saturday.
“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff said in a statement released to the news media.
Presidential nominees usually take months to select a running mate, but only two weeks have passed since President Biden withdrew from the race and Harris became the likely nominee. Holder and his team finished the process this week after poring over reams of paperwork on the candidates.
Since Biden dropped out of the race, supporters and opponents of the vice-presidential contenders have tried to sway Harris and her team.
One of the most vocal campaigns has come from some liberals who oppose Shapiro in large part because of comments he made about pro-Palestinian protesters earlier this year. Shapiro, who is Jewish, compared some college protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, and encouraged the University of Pennsylvania to break up encampments of pro-Palestinian protesters.
An article Shapiro penned about 30 years ago in which he argued that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to establish their own state in the Middle East also resurfaced late last week. During a news conference on Friday, Shapiro said he wrote the article when he was a 20-year-old college student and implied that his views had changed in the years since.
Shapiro, a staunch supporter of Israel, said he has been a supporter of a two-state solution, with “Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side by side,” since far before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which prompted Israel to retaliate with its 10-month-long war in Gaza. He also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.”
Separately, some labor groups have raised concerns about Kelly because of his past opposition to legislation that they argue would make it easier for workers to form unions. But after Biden dropped out, Kelly told reporters he would support the legislation, called the PRO Act, if it reached the Senate floor.
The finalists are all White men, reflecting an assumption that voters would prefer a White male running mate for the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent leading a major-party presidential ticket. Four years ago, Biden selected Harris amid a sense by many in the Democratic Party that it was important to have a woman and a person of color on the ticket.
Even before selecting a running mate, Harris has already closed much of the polling lead Trump had opened over Biden before the president dropped out of the race. A CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday showed that Harris has a one-point edge nationally against Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
That makes the race a statistical dead heat, but the same poll showed Biden down five points against Trump just before he exited the race. The same poll showed Harris and Trump tied in key battleground states.
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.
