Arizona Senator Mark Kelly is among three frontrunners to become Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential elections, different outlets reported on Tuesday.
Josh Shapiro and Roy Cooper, governors of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, respectively, complete the list. They are all backed by prominent donors and are being vetted by the firm of former President Barack Obama's former attorney general Eric Holder, the Financial Times said. The process is set to be concluded before the party's national convention, which begins in Chicago on August 19.
Kelly, a former astronaut, mostly has the backing of Hollywood Democratic donors, while Cooper and Shapiro are favored by Wall Street supporters, the outlet said, citing people familiar with the process. His personal back story and his popularity in the battleground state are among his main appeals, they said.
Harris is close to all candidates, including Kelly and his wife, former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. "I couldn't be more confident that Vice President Kamala Harris is the right person to defeat Donald Trump and lead our country into the future. She has my support for the nomination, and Gabby and I will do everything we can to elect her President of the United States," Kelly said on X following President Joe Biden's decision to drop out and endorse Harris.
Mike Noble, CEO of Noble Predictive Insights, told Fox's Phoenix affiliate that the senator would be a perfect running mate. "Mark Kelly has fantastic numbers of all the elected officials in the entire state of Arizona. Mark Kelly has the best image of all the electorate," he said about the senator, who won his seat in 2020 after defeating Republican Martha McSally. He won reelection in November 2022, beating Republican challenger Blake Masters.
Kelly was well-known before taking office due to his job as an astronaut, particularly because of a study in which he and his twin brother Scott's bodies were compared after one spent time in space and the other one stayed on earth.
The experiment took place between 2015 and 2016, with Scott living in space for a year and Mark staying on Earth. Scientists noted some changes after the period was over, including some changes in Scott's chromosomes. His retina and carotid artery were also enlarged, as well as his intestinal microbiome. Over 90% of Scott's genes went back to normal after returning to Earth, but some changes persisted in time.
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