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Vice President Kamala Harris has revealed new details about the moment when she learned that President Joe Biden was dropping out of the 2024 race.
In an interview with Vogue published on Friday (October 11), Harris opened up about the events surrounding Biden's move to pull out of the presidential race.
Politicians, journalists, and donors called for Biden to step down from race after his debate with former President Donald Trump on June 27. Less than a month later, Harris received a call from the president on July 21. The now-Democratic nominee said she had woken up early that morning with the two young daughters of her niece, who was visiting.
“We were the first ones to wake up in the house,” Harris said. “They were talking with me while I was working out, and I had a cooking show on. That’s my way of getting away from politics—watching the food channel.”
The phone rang after Harris, who was still in workout clothes, had made pancakes and bacon and was sitting on the floor getting ready to do a puzzle with the young girls. During the call, Harris said Biden told her he was leaving the race and hoping to endorse her as his replacement.
“This was a dramatic turn to the day,” Harris recalled.
The vice president immediately called her husband, Doug Emhoff, who was stranded in Los Angeles following the computer glitch that grounded thousands of flights, but he didn't answer.
“I’m like, Where is he? Somebody find him! Why isn’t he answering?” Harris said of the moment. “And I could not reach him for the world”—she tries to contain herself, but cracks up—“because he was in a SoulCycle class.”
Emhoff had left his phone in the car with Secret Service during the SoulCycle class. After the class, the second gentleman grabbed coffee with friends. It wasn't until the big news hit one of his friend's phones that Emhoff ran back to the car to retrieve his.
“There was, like, steam coming out of my phone,” Emhoff said. “There were so many messages, and all the same message, which was: Call Kamala.” So he did. “She literally just said, ‘Where the eff were you?’”
Emhoff talked to his kids, Cole and Ella, “Just let them know what was going on and to strap in” in LA while Harris met with her team in the dining room at One Observatory Circle.
“The big joke around the table was, Who here had actually showered?” Harris recalled.
By the end of the day, Harris said she had made roughly a hundred calls to set her candidacy in motion.
“We brought in pizza,” she said. “Everyone was just around the table doing some aspect of everything that needed to be done. Because, of course, the world was aware of what happened that day.”
That day, Harris was called to something unprecedented, "to mount, and win, a presidential race in three months, as a woman of color, with a felonious former leader as the opposition and the future of democracy said to be at stake," Vogue reports.
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