WASHINGTON - Kamala Harris has made history night as the first Black woman to accept a spot on a major party’s presidential ticket.

In her highly anticipated address capping the third night of the virtual Democratic National Convention, Harris mixed her polish as a former prosecutor with deeply personal tales of her upbringing to argue that she and Joe Biden can rejuvenate a country ravaged by a pandemic and deeply divided by partisan bitterness.

Harris evoked the lessons of her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biologist and Indian immigrant, saying Wednesday that she instilled in her a vision of “our nation as a beloved community -- where all are welcome, no matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we love.”

“There is no vaccine for racism,” Harris said. “We have got to do the work.”

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HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WEDNESDAY'S DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION:

- Democratic convention takeaways: Make history, pound Trump

- Harris makes history with vice presidential acceptance speech

- Obama speaks at DNC from Museum of the American Revolution

- Hillary Clinton returns to DNC championing women in politics

- Democrats use Trump’s ‘It is what it is’ to make their case

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Follow AP’s election coverage at https://apnews.com/Election2020

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HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

President Donald Trump offered a running angry commentary of the Democratic convention as top party officials laced into his leadership.

In all-caps missives, Trump took to Twitter to push back as former President Barack Obama accused him of “treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”

“HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GOT CAUGHT,” Trump tweeted falsely. Federal officials surveilled associates of Trump’s 2016 campaign through legally obtained court warrants as part of a counterintelligence investigation into Russian election interference.

“WHY DID HE REFUSE TO ENDORSE SLOW JOE UNTIL IT WAS ALL OVER, AND EVEN THEN WAS VERY LATE? WHY DID HE TRY TO GET HIM NOT TO RUN?” Trump added, referencing his predecessor’s decision to wait until the Democratic primary was largely wrapped up before throwing his weight behind Joe Biden.

Trump also untruthfully characterized Kamala Harris' criticism of Biden, saying, “BUT DIDN’T SHE CALL HIM A RACIST-? DIDN’T SHE SAY HE WAS INCOMPETENT-” Harris specifically said Biden wasn't racist, and she didn't call him incompetent.

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Some of the most influential women in Kamala Harris’ life are introducing her as the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

They are Harris’ younger sister, Maya Harris; her niece, Meena Harris; and her step-daughter, Ella Emhoff. Maya Harris has long been one of Harris’ closest political advisers.

Emhoff is the daughter of Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, and affectionately calls Harris “Momala.”

At Wednesday’s Democratic National Convention, Meena Harris called her aunt a role model who taught her she could do anything she wanted, and a role model to so many women and girls of color around the world. Maya Harris says she’ll have Harris’ back the way Harris had hers as children growing up.

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Kamala Harris has been formally nominated as Democrats’ pick for vice president, becoming the first Black woman to do so for a major political party.

The 55-year-old California senator ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic presidential primary, dropping out months before the first votes were cast.

Joe Biden emerged on top of the once-crowded primary field, clinching the nomination and tapping Harris as his running mate last week.

By joining the party’s ticket, Harris also becomes just the third woman and first Asian-American to seek the vice presidency. She is a daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.

A former state attorney general, Harris became close to Biden’s son Beau while he was attorney general of Delaware. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, and Harris was elected to the Senate the following year.

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Former President Barack Obama has delivered a searing take down of Donald Trump while presenting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the ones who will “lead this country out of these dark times.”

Obama made the case for electing his former vice president and Harris, a California senator, during a live address to the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. He implored people to vote, arguing American democracy is at stake.

“This administration has shown that it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” Obama said, urging voters to “leave no doubt about what this country that we love stands for.”

Obama is among the headliners on the convention’s third night and is speaking before Harris. They are both barrier-breaking figures, he as the nation’s first Black president and Harris as the first Black woman on a major party ticket.

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Former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says Joe Biden can hold his own on having a plan for nearly every policy challenge, large and small.

The Massachusetts senator said Wednesday night in her Democratic National Convention speech: “I love a good plan, and Joe Biden has some really good plans - plans to bring back union jobs in manufacturing and create new union jobs in clean energy.”

Warren spoke from an early education center in Springfield, Massachusetts, and said Biden will guarantee affordable, quality child care for all families.

She says the pandemic has laid bare another central theme of her presidential campaign, that the nation’s economic system “has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and kick dirt in the face of everyone else.”

She says, “Joe’s plan to ‘build back better’ includes making the wealthy pay their fair share, holding corporations accountable, repairing racial inequities and fighting corruption in Washington.”

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is accusing President Donald Trump of “disrespect for facts, for working families and for women in particular,” disrespect she says she’s “seen firsthand.”

Pelosi spoke Wednesday night during the Democratic National Convention with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop. She said Trump’s disrespect is “written into his policies toward our health and our rights, not just his conduct.”

She contrasted Joe Biden as having a “heart full of love for America” against Trump’s “heartless disregard for America’s goodness.”

Pelosi also listed a litany of bills House Democrats have passed, including LGBTQ protections, gun violence measures and a coronavirus relief bill and charged that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump are “standing in the way” of those reforms.

She closed by predicting this fall that Democrats will increase their majority in the House and win back control of the Senate.

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Hillary Clinton is reminding people of her 2016 loss despite winning 3 million more votes than Donald Trump as she urges Democrats not to sit the election out so he can’t “sneak or steal his way to victory.”

Addressing the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday from her home in Chappaqua, New York, Clinton says she hoped Trump would put his ego aside and be the president America needs, but that hasn’t happened.

Recalling a moment when Trump asked Black voters in 2016 what they had to lose by supporting him, Clinton said: “Now we know.”

Clinton says she knows about “the slings and arrows” that vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris will face as a Black woman on the ticket.

“Believe me: This former district attorney and attorney general can handle them all,” she added.

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Former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords is calling on Americans to speak out to combat gun violence, “even when you have to fight to find the words.”

Struggling to speak herself, Giffords recounted her difficulty recovering from the 2011 shooting that nearly took her life.

Giffords said during brief remarks at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night: “Confronted by paralysis and aphasia, I responded with grit and determination.”

The former congresswoman added: “Today I struggle to speak. But I have not lost my voice.”

Since the shooting, Giffords has become a leading gun control advocate and frequently speaks out on the issue. She told viewers that Joe Biden was there for her after the shooting and that they must participate in the November election to be “on the right side of history.”

“We can let the shooting continue, or we can act,” she said, adding: “We can vote.”

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Kamala Harris kicked off the third night of the virtual Democratic National Convention by saying viewers may have heard “about obstacles and misinformation, and folks making it harder for you to cast your ballot.”

“I think we need to ask ourselves why don’t they want us to vote,” Harris said Wednesday. “When we vote, things get better. When we vote, we address the need for all people to be treated with dignity and respect in our country.”

She did not say what those possible obstacles were, but Democrats have accused President Donald Trump of deliberately trying to disrupt operations at the Postal Service in a year when more people are expected to vote by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Harris urged viewers to send a text message to the Biden campaign to receive information on how to vote and deadlines for obtaining mail-in ballots, which vary by state.

Later Wednesday, she is expected to accept the Democratic vice presidential nomination.

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President Donald Trump is pushing back against a reproach from former President Barack Obama, who is set to speak at the Democratic National Convention.

Trump said in a Wednesday evening news conference that the reason he is now in the White House is because Obama and Joe Biden, his opponent this November, did not do a good job.

Trump said, “They did such a bad job that I stand before you as president.”

He said if they had done a good job, he wouldn’t have even run for president in 2016. He says, “I would have been very happy. I enjoyed my previous life very much.”

Excerpts of Obama’s remarks released ahead of Wednesday’s convention show he will portray his successor as having unleashed America’s “worst impulses” and treated the presidency as a reality show “to get the attention he craves.”

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Kamala Harris plans to use her history-making speech at the virtual Democratic National Convention to say she will help Joe Biden promote “a vision of our nation as a beloved community – where all are welcome, no matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we love.”

The California senator will become the first Black woman to accept a spot on a major party’s presidential ticket when she formally becomes Biden’s running mate with her address later Wednesday. Her party hopes the moment can galvanize Democratic voters heading into the fall campaign against President Donald Trump.

She will call on the country to elect a “president who will bring all of us together - Black, white, Latino, Asian, Indigenous - to achieve the future we collectively want,” according to excerpts released beforehand. “We must elect Joe Biden.”

Harris also plans to criticize Trump, saying, “Right now, we have a president who turns our tragedies into political weapons.”

”Joe will be a president who turns our challenges into purpose,” Harris will say.

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Former President Barack Obama is set to implore voters to back his former vice president for the nation’s top job, arguing that “our democracy” is on the line.

Obama will address the virtual Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Excerpts of his speech were released in advance.

Obama says President Donald Trump has “shown no interest in putting in the work” or “treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”

Convention organizers have titled the third night of their event “United America,” saying speakers will reflect Democrats’ argument that Joe Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, can unify the country after a divisive four years under Trump.

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Hillary Clinton is using her return to the Democratic National Convention to issue a stark warning about the 2020 election.

According to excerpts released Wednesday, Clinton plans to reflect in her speech on her 2016 election loss to President Donald Trump and urge Americans not to take the election’s outcome for granted.

She will say, “For four years, people have said to me, ‘I didn’t realize how dangerous he was.’ ‘I wish I could go back and do it over.’ Or worst, ‘I should have voted.’ Well, this can’t be another woulda coulda shoulda election.”

Four years after she made history as the first woman nominated for president by a major party, Clinton will nod to another enduring legacy: the millions of women inspired by her 2016 bid who marched, ran for office and have become a powerful force in taking on Trump.

Her presence Wednesday night comes as California Sen. Kamala Harris becomes the first Black woman to accept a spot on a major presidential ticket and one day after the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

(Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

8/20/2020 2:28:32 AM (GMT -4:00)