Thank you, President Joe Biden – and welcome to the race, Vice President Kamala Harris

So, how are you feeling? Energized? Shocked? Ready to win? Even though our presidential electoral process seems to last about three years, the whole narrative can change in one afternoon – and things sure changed quickly at 1:46 p.m. last Sunday.

That’s when President Joe Biden publicly announced he would be dropping his reelection bid and that he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination.

President Joe Biden deserves credit for reading the situation properly and understanding that America’s best chance to avoid another four years of misery under a Trump presidency was for him to bow out and endorse a younger (but still experienced) candidate like his vice president. While it’s important to recognize that Biden put aside his personal ambitions for the good of the country, we must make sure to credit him for the job that he has done in his three and a half years as president so far.

The president inherited a mess when he took over for Trump in January 2021. Only a few weeks before his inauguration, the U.S. Capitol had been overrun by domestic terrorists intent on preventing Biden from taking office because their leader had spent months lying to them about the 2020 election being stolen. The COVID-19 pandemic was also still ravaging the country in January 2021 with more than 95,000 deaths reported in the U.S., the highest total deaths of any month up to that point.

The president navigated the country out of the pandemic and steadied a rocky economy. Other successes of the Biden-Harris administration include:

• Providing billions of dollars in funding to rebuild our nation’s crumbling roads and aging bridges through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
• Taking on gun violence and passing the first major federal gun safety bill in almost 30 years – the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act
• Fighting to protect abortion, birth control, and fertility treatments like IVF
• Stopping cuts to Social Security and Medicare
• Lowering prescription drug costs and capping insulin at $35 a month for seniors
• Creating manufacturing and clean energy jobs that provide good pay and benefits
• Taking on the climate crisis head-on and more effectively than any other president in history

Now it’s time for Harris to take the reins and continue these successes and, hopefully, add more to the list.

Democrats really couldn’t have imagined a better start to Harris’s campaign. Clearly, there is excitement among voters and donors because Harris smashed fundraising records, raising $81 million in the first 24 hours after Biden’s announcement on July 21 and topping $100 million within 36 hours. 

The Biden-Harris campaign had $96 million cash on hand at the end of June, meaning that Harris more than doubled that total in less than two days this week. The $81 million 24-hour total is the most raised in one day in U.S. history. Obviously, raising $100 million in donations every week is not sustainable, but the boost provided by that money and the excitement surrounding the campaign can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.

Despite Harris’s years as a prosecutor, district attorney, and then attorney general in California, her time as a U.S. senator, and her three-plus years as vice president, many Americans are still not terribly familiar with her. Voters need to be aware of her credentials as a woman who prosecuted child sex assault cases, expanded resources for domestic violence survivors, and created the Bureau of Children’s Justice in California. They should know that as vice president, she has addressed the Black maternal health care crisis and worked to improve elder care and lower the cost of child care.

Harris is the only presidential candidate in the two major parties who has a track record of defending reproductive rights and she has been leading the charge to restore abortion rights since Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. Harris has organized executive actions to protect access to abortion care in our country.

The vice president is also a decades-long supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, and she supports tougher gun safety legislation that would create red flag laws, restrictions on assault weapons, and stronger background checks.

There are only three months and a few days until Election Day but it’s a whole new ballgame now. Voters are now presented with two starkly different choices. In one, they have Harris, a 59-year-old Black woman of South Asian descent who will protect abortion rights, support LGBTQ+ rights, prevent cuts to Social Security and Medicare, work to lower costs and raise wages for American workers, and lower prescription drug costs. The other choice is Trump, a 78-year-old 34-time convicted felon who is also a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, right-wing extremist wannabe dictator who will lie and deceive to get what he wants – absolute power.