Hours after Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential election, the writer Rohita Kadambi tweeted a photo of Michael Scott, a fictional character from NBC sitcom The Office, holding a glass of white wine.

The writer Zack Bornstein tweeted a photo of a menu that featured seven white wines.

Both joked that their memes reflected Kamala Harris’s running mate prospects.

Though the vice-president has not yet been formally selected as her party’s nominee, support for her is rapidly coalescing. Harris has already earned more than enough unofficial support from delegates to win the nomination, all but ensuring she will face Donald Trump in November. The likely scenario has led to a debate on cable news and social media about who Harris should tap to run against the former president’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance.

Among the names on the shortlist frequently floated are Mark Kelly, an Arizona senator; Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor; Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor; and Roy Cooper, the North Carolina governor.

Just like the wine in the Twitter memes, the list of candidates is mostly white. The candidates are also mostly male.

The makeup of the shortlist reflects the barriers many marginalized politicians face in winning statewide elections, which would have bolstered their chances of being on the shortlist. The circular debate also indicates that many insiders are very eager for a “traditional candidate” to run alongside Harris, showing an inability to imagine a presidential ticket without a white man.

In 2008, the then Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama tapped Biden to be his vice-president; sixteen years later, politicians of color are still expected to find a white, male running mate to act as a type of security blanket to calm racist and sexist anxieties.

“White men make white people feel comfortable,” said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian at the Ohio State University. “That’s why 45 of the 46 presidents have been white men.”

A spokesperson for Harris’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The process of selecting a running mate largely hinges on a desire to balance the ticket and connect with a wide swath of voters. Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, will lead Harris’s vice-presidential candidate-vetting process (Shapiro, Cooper and Kelly have reportedly emerged as early favorites). It is very likely that Harris will pick a running mate with cache in a critical battleground state like Pennsylvania, said Sharon D Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida.

The makeup of the assumed shortlist not only reflects the white, male dominance in American politics, but is also based in a reality bias – both implicit and explicit – that plagues the nation.

Harris is “being realistic about racism and sexism in this country”, Austin said. “It is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. When people see Kamala Harris, they see a Black woman, even though she is a multicultural woman who is of Jamaican and Indian descent.”

Democratic leaders on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign took a more traditional approach when they tapped Tim Kaine, a senator from Virginia, to be her running mate, said Nadia E Brown, a gender studies professor at Georgetown University. Kaine, a white Spanish-speaker, was believed to be the best bet at connecting with the Democratic base. So they bypassed Julián Castro, the then secretary of housing and urban development and a former San Antonio mayor. Castro was a rising star within the party but he was not selected to run with Clinton for fear a woman and a Chicano man was too much diversity for voters to digest, Brown said.

“That was a disaster strategy. Tim Kaine didn’t bring anything to the table to bolster the Clinton campaign,” Brown said. “My hope is that the Harris campaign will pick someone who will aid and not necessarily just assuage the fears or trepidation of white America.”

The full list is not completely homogeneous. Wes Moore, Maryland’s first Black governor, has been frequently floated to run with Harris. So has Gretchen Whitmer, though the Michigan governor has said she would refuse an offer to run with Harris and instead would serve as the campaign co-chair.

“I am not leaving Michigan,” Whitmer told reporters on Monday.

Still, it is largely white men who are rising to the top. With the election day still weeks away, Democrats are hoping to seize the momentum of Sunday’s announcement and galvanize support from their base. Polling indicates they have made progress.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted days after Biden dropped out found Harris two percentage points above Trump.

Jeffries, the historian, said that, like in the 2020 race, this cycle will be determined by who goes to the polls.

“This is not a ‘convert your opponents to supporters’ election. This is a turnout election,” Jeffries said. “Whoever is able to rally their base to turn out will win. And we know that in the Democratic party, Black women, in particular, are the base. If you want to win, that’s who’s got to show up.”

Hours after announcing her intention to seek the nomination, more than 40,000 people attended a Zoom call, according to organizers from Win With Black Women, a collective of Black women leaders around the country. At the end of the call, Johnnetta B Cole, the famed educator and former president of Spelman and Bennett Colleges, sought to rally participants with an Ethiopian proverb: where a woman rules, streams run uphill.

“Things are gonna be different,” said Cole. “Things are gonna be better. Things are gonna be righteous when we have a sister president of the United States of America.”