Harris’s vice presidential candidates have built careers fighting Trump. Now they could face him.

The leading candidates for Kamala Harris’ running mate have gotten to this point, in part, by fighting Donald Trump.

Five of the six vice presidential candidates who met with Harris’ team in recent days have cultivated their state and national profiles by being prominent figures in the MAGA “resistance” — whether clashing with Trump as governor or state prosecutor, defeating his protégés in important races or launching a new type of politics in response to their rise.

Presidents generally do not end up in direct confrontation with the politicians who emerge as their counterweights during their first term. But Trump has been on the scene long enough that those who rose up in the backlash against his first term are rising even higher in national politics.

Now, one of them is likely to become the vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket, aiming to thwart his comeback bid.

Some Democrats say her familiarity with Trump will be an advantage for Harris.

“Trumpism has lost every election for almost a decade. Having to run against the same people who defeated your team over and over again must be making you melt down even more,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which narrowly lost to Trump. “These people know how to contrast their common sense with the extreme weirdness of MAGA and Trump. They proved it.”

The Trump campaign said it is not concerned.

“Our hearts go out to whoever Kamala Harris chooses as her running mate, as they will be asked every day for the next 95 days how they could support the weakest, most failed, and most dangerously liberal candidate in history,” the spokeswoman said. Trump campaign. Karoline Leavitt said in an email. “And we will be more than prepared to hold them accountable for their own record as well.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro began building his national profile as the state’s attorney general when he filed lawsuits against the Trump administration over issues including its attempt to roll back the contraceptive coverage requirement for health insurance and the travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. He also fought Trump’s bid to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

In 2022, Shapiro ran for governor against a Trump-endorsed MAGA diehard, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, and defeated him by nearly 15 points, an attractive margin in a closely divided state that boosted his standing in the political arena. Mastriano, who was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee and organized buses to Washington on January 6, 2021, was present in the restricted areas of the US Capitol that day, entering an area on the east side of the Capitol after other Trump supporters broke through barricades, although Mastriano said he followed police lines “as they existed” and left when it became clear it was not peaceful.

Meanwhile, Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, a former astronaut and Navy pilot, was first elected in a 2020 special election that was largely a referendum on Trump. Kelly and President Joe Biden painted Arizona blue in a presidential election for the first time since 1996.

Two years later, Kelly ran again for a full six-year term and defeated Trump-backed Republican Blake Masters, belittling Masters as a “dangerous” election denier and highlighting other unpopular positions aligned with Trump.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz got his start in elected office running alongside backlash against a different Republican president, winning a seat in Congress in 2006. He held on to his red-leaning House seat by less than 1 point in 2016, when Trump dominated the district by double figures. Two years later, he rode a blue wave of anti-Trump sentiment to become the state’s governor.

More recently, he went viral for belittling Trump and his MAGA movement as “weird.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had in some ways the sharpest rise of the Trump era in 2019, when he sought to make the unlikely leap from mayor of a small town in South Bend, Indiana, to the White House. He ran for president advocating generational change and a new kind of politics at a time when Democrats’ angst over Trump was at its height.

To some extent, it stuck: Buttigieg rose from obscurity to narrowly win the 2020 Iowa caucuses and place second in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. He fell short in the last primaries, dropped out and supported Biden – before becoming his transportation secretary.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker may be Trump’s most outspoken critic, often insulting the former president as a “racist,” a “homophobe,” a “misogynist” and a criminal. He also has belittled Trump as “just a flatulent old man with an orange tan who fell asleep in his own judgment.” He also won his job in 2018, when the combination of a midterm backlash against Trump and Illinois’ blue hue proved too much for the then-governor. Bruce Rauner, the Republican incumbent.

Then there’s Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who is also in the running to be Harris’ running mate. His rise in deep-red Kentucky is less tied to Trump, and a big part of his appeal as a potential vice president is his ability to win over voters for Trump.

But Beshear defeated a Trump-like Republican opponent in 2019 and rode the backlash to the end of Roe v. Wade. Wade to comfortably win a second term as governor in 2023.

One way or another, Trump played a big role in creating the cast of characters that could round out the Democratic ticket he faces this year.