WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta on Wednesday that “we are not playing around” and asked for their help in electing her president in November.
“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future, the other focused on the past," she said in a speech three days after launching her bid for the White House. "And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”
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Voters in Indiana haven’t backed a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly 16 years. But Harris, a woman of Black and South Asian descent, was speaking to a group already excited by her historic status as the likely Democratic nominee and one that her campaign hopes can expand its coalition.
On Wednesday, she thanked the room full of women for their work electing her vice president, and Joe Biden president. “And now, in this moment, our nation needs your leadership once again,” she said.
In a memo released Wednesday, campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon pointed to support among female, nonwhite and younger voters as critical to success.
“Where Vice President Harris goes, grassroots enthusiasm follows,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “This campaign will be close, it will be hard fought, but Vice President Harris is in a position of strength — and she’s going to win.”
Still, Democrats face challenges as the country is nursing frustrations over higher prices following a spike in inflation, while Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, survived a recent assassination attempt that further energized his already loyal base. But the memo was more optimistic than the narrow path the campaign saw after the 81-year-old Biden delivered a disastrous debate performance in June. He quit the race on Sunday.
Harris mentioned he’d be addressing the nation later Wednesday on why he decided to step aside, and called him a “leader with a bold vision.”
“We are all deeply, deeply grateful for his service to our nation,” she said before turning to contrast the administration's agenda with that of Trump’s.
“These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back," she said. "All across our nation we are witnessing a full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights.”
She cited the freedom to vote, to be safe from gun violence, to love whom you want to love openly, to “learn and acknowledge our true and full history," and the freedom “of a woman to make decisions about her body and not have her government telling her what to do.”
Trump unleashed a barrage of attack lines on Harris during a rally in Charlotte, calling her his “new victim to defeat” and accusing her of deceiving the public about Biden’s health and ability to run for a second term. Trump referred to Harris as “Lyin' Kamala” — repeatedly mispronouncing her first name — and said she is “the most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history.”
Harris landed in Houston later Wednesday, visiting the city's emergency operations center to discuss the ongoing recovery efforts following Hurricane Beryl and to thank emergency management and first responders. She watched Biden's Oval Office speech from Houston.
On Thursday, she's speaking at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers, which has endorsed her candidacy.
While the campaign will keep emphasizing what it calls its Blue Wall of states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — to get the needed 270 electoral votes, Harris hopes to be competitive in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada as well.
Trump has generally run stronger with white voters who do not hold a college degree. AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of voters and nonvoters that aims to tell the story behind election results, found that group made up 43% of all voters in 2020 and Trump won them by a margin of 62% to 37%, even though overall he lost the election.
For Democrats, Black women would probably make a fundamental difference in November, and Harris has already shown signs of galvanizing their support.
In the 2020 election, AP VoteCast found that Black women were just 7% of the electorate. But 93% of them voted for Biden, helping to give him narrow victories in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
After Harris announced her candidacy, roughly 90,000 Black women logged onto a video call Sunday night for her campaign. It was a sudden show of support for an alumnus of Howard University and sister of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority who has made Beyoncé's song “Freedom” her walk-on music at events.
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This story has been corrected to show the sorority meets biennially, not annually.
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Follow the AP's coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.