Who is Mark Kelly? Get to know Kamala Harris' potential VP pick

As the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris is in search of a candidate to fill the same role on the ticket she took on four years ago. According to Las Vegas, there’s a big chance Arizona’s own Sen. Mark Kelly could be picked as the vice presidential nominee.

Reportedly, Kelly is being vetted for the number two spot alongside a slate of Democratic governors, including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Minnesota’s Tim Walz and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, as well as U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Whitmer, however, has said she is not interested in joining the ticket and will instead co-chair Harris’ campaign.

Here’s what you need to know about Kelly.

Who is Mark Kelly?

Prior to being elected to the Senate in 2020, Kelly was an astronaut at NASA and traveled to space on four separate missions from 2001 to 2011, spending more than 50 days in space. When he was selected to join NASA in 1996, he was in the same class as his identical twin brother, Scott.

Before his days at NASA, Kelly was a U.S. Navy pilot. He joined the service in 1986, the same year “Top Gun” was released, and later flew 39 missions in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. He has degrees from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, where he studied marine and aeronautical engineering.

He is also the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, whom he married in 2007. Giffords survived a 2011 shooting during a campaign event in Tucson that killed six people. After Kelly commanded his final mission to space months later, he retired from NASA to spend more time helping Giffords rehabilitate. He and Giffords became notable advocates for solutions to prevent gun violence, such as background checks, and Giffords founded an eponymous organization dedicated to those efforts.

Kelly was elected to the Senate in 2020, defeating Martha McSally in a special election after the 2018 death of Sen. John McCain. Kelly won a full term in 2022, handily beating Republican challenger Blake Masters.

What’s Kelly’s record in the Senate?

According to FiveThirtyEight, Kelly voted in line with President Joe Biden 95.5% of the time during the 2021-2022 congressional session. They disagreed on vaccine and mask mandates, which Biden supported and Kelly did not; and imposing more sanctions over a Russian gas pipeline, which Kelly supported and Biden opposed.

Kelly has sponsored a combined 65 bills in four years, according to Congress.gov. Four passed the Senate to later die in the House of Representatives, while two became law. Both of those bills that passed were from the 2021-22 session and dealt with water rights for Indigenous tribes in Arizona and near the Colorado River.

Kelly also has co-sponsored 470 bills in the Senate, 18 of which were signed into law by Biden. The only one of those laws that was passed during the 2023-24 session was the END FENTANYL Act, which requires border patrol to more frequently review and update manuals and policies. It was co-sponsored by Republican Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Braun of Indiana.

In the previous session, Kelly co-sponsored bipartisan bills that required law enforcement agencies to conduct de-escalation training, reformed ocean shipping and promoted U.S. exports, countered human trafficking and extended a program that compensates people who were exposed to radiation from atomic weapons testing.

Kelly and Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, also introduced legislation to require members of Congress to post their public schedules online so constituents can have a more transparent look at what their elected officials are up to and with whom they’re meeting. It has not gained traction.

Kelly’s willingness to work across the aisle with Republican colleagues aligns with his appeal to centrist and center-right voters, who played a crucial role in electing Kelly in 2020 and reelecting him in 2022.

If any concern has surfaced with Kelly, it involved Kelly’s support of unions. ABC’s Max Zahn reported on Wednesday that unions, a major player in the Democratic Party’s coalition, seemed to have an issue with Kelly for not backing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. But Kelly’s team moved quickly to quell the fire – about an hour later, Kelly said he would vote for the bill.

“I would vote for it today,” Kelly told HuffPost. “I am, like a lot of legislation, working to make it better. But if it came to the floor today or any day going back to the day I was sworn in, I would vote for it.”

The AFL-CIO, a federation of some of America’s largest unions, has noted Kelly voted in favor of working people 98% of the time during his two and a half years in the Senate.

If Kelly becomes VP, who replaces him in the Senate?

One of the appeals of picking Kelly is that it won’t sacrifice a Democratic seat in the Senate.

Kelly does not have to resign from the Senate to join the Harris ticket. Only should Kelly become vice president would his seat need to be filled. In that case, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs — also a Democrat — would appoint someone to fill Kelly’s Senate seat until a special election can be held in 2026.

If that happens, though, it would mean that Arizona will have held an election for its U.S. Senate seats every two years from 2016 to 2030.