When President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was ending his 2024 reelection campaign, the Democrats’ path to the White House in November suddenly seemed a lot less straightforward. Yet a promising successor quickly emerged in Vice President Kamala Harris, who secured the backing of enough delegates to technically win her party’s presidential nomination late on Monday night.
Now, an important question remains: Who might Harris pick as her running mate? The dream of an all-woman ticket ended abruptly on Monday when Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that she will cochair Harris’s campaign and has no intention of leaving her home state. But plenty of other candidates are still in the mix.
Below, find everything you need to know about Arizona senator Mark Kelly, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, all of whom are rumored to be contenders for the VP slot if Harris is, indeed, able to clinch the Democratic nomination.
Mark Kelly
Kelly has served as the junior US senator from Arizona since 2020. Prior to that, his career included several combat missions during the Gulf War, along with space missions as an astronaut with NASA. As a politician, the causes he’s championed include abortion rights, protection of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and gun control, the latter of which took on painful resonance in Kelly’s personal life after his wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in an assassination attempt in Tucson in January 2011. Since the shooting, Kelly and Giffords have devoted much of their time to the fight for increased gun control in the US, cofounding the Giffords advocacy and research group in 2013.
Kelly shares two adult daughters, Claire and Claudia, with his first wife, Amelia.