Vice President Kamala Harris ramped up her call for Black women to mobilize for the 2024 election, telling members of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority on Wednesday that the nation was counting on them to energize, organize and register voters and get them to the polls.
“I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris said as she delivered a keynote speech to a packed room at Zeta Phi Beta Sorority’s Grand Boulé convention in Indianapolis. “With your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”
Harris — a graduate of Howard University, a historically black college, and member of Alpha Kappa Alpha — has repeatedly leaned in to her connections with Black college women on the campaign trail, urging fellow members of sororities to step up in the months ahead of the 2024 election.
Harris called the sorority members “some of the most powerful advocates for justice in America.”
(Darron Cummings / Associated Press)
The leaders of the nation’s “Divine Nine” Black sororities and fraternities have already been quick to pledge support.
Before Harris took to the stage, Stacie N.C. Grant, international president and chief executive of Zeta Phi Beta, said all members of the Divine Nine “stand in unity with an unprecedented outreach for voter registration, education and mobilization to get coordinated efforts to get out the vote.”
“We are stronger together,” Grant said.
Addressing the crowd as “distinguished ladies” and “some of the most powerful advocates for justice in America,” Harris paid tribute to sororities for playing a historic role in fighting for rights.
The women of Zeta Phi Beta, she said, had marched for voting rights and the end of segregation during the civil rights era. They had worked with the March of Dimes to raise the issue of maternal health. They had also, she noted, played a role in shaping recent American politics, helping secure the Biden-Harris campaign’s 2020 victory.
It was a similar message to the one she delivered earlier this month to 20,000 members of her own sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, at its national convention in Dallas.
At points, she repeated lines almost word for word: “When we organize, mountains move,” she said. “When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”
After praising President Biden as a “leader with bold vision,” Harris laid out her own vision for affordable healthcare, touting their administration’s role in capping the cost of insulin, elevating maternal healthcare and extending Medicaid postpartum coverage, as well as in championing the Child Tax Credit and moving to ease student loan debt.
She then warned of “those who want to take the nation backward,” highlighting Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint written by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Former President Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, and adopted a separate party platform last week at the Republican National Convention, where he was officially nominated for president.
“Can you believe they put that in writing?” Harris asked, telling the crowd the authors of Project 2025 planned to cut Medicare, repeal the $35 cap on insulin, eliminate the Department of Education, and end programs like Head Start that provide preschool for hundreds of thousands of children.
“These extremists want to take us back,” she said as the crowd roared. “But we are not going back.”
Harris spoke to the sorority in Indiana hours before Trump was scheduled to appear in North Carolina for his first public campaign rally since Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
The vice president Kamala Harris returns to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., on Tuesday after campaigning in Wisconsin.
(Kevin Mohatt / Associated Press)
Running against Biden, who is 81, Trump had focused his attack on the president’s age and mental acuity. But the Republican, 78, cannot rely on such an argument against Harris, who at 59 is close to 19 years his junior.
In a string of social media posts this week, he has ripped into his new rival — whom he has dubbed “Lyin’ Kamala Harris” — on her border record, referring to her as the “Biden appointed ‘Border Czar’ who never visited the Border, and whose incompetence gave us the WORST and MOST DANGEROUS Border anywhere in the World.”
He has also disparaged Harris as having “terrible” polling performance, even as early surveys released Tuesday indicate she’s seeing an increase in support.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Harris opening a 2-percentage-point lead over Trump: Respondents favored her 44% to 42% over Trump, within the 3-point margin of error, but a notable jump after the two tied at 44% in a hypothethical matchup in mid-July and Trump led by 1 percentage point at the bargaining of July. Asked whether Harris was “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges,” 56% of registered voters polled said yes, compared with 49% for Trump and 22% for Biden.
An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Tuesday indicated that Trump had a 1-point lead over Harris, also within the margin of error.
In a memo to GOP supporters, Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio warned of a “Harris honeymoon” ahead of next month’s Democratic National Convention. New polling that showed Harris ahead, he said, did not change the fundamentals of the race.
“The Democrats deposing one nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars,” Fabrizio wrote. “As importantly, voters will also learn about Harris’s dangerously liberal record before becoming Biden’s partner.”
Over the last 24 hours, a string of GOP figures have taken pains to appear on cable TV painting Harris — whom many Democrats critique as a centrist establishment figure — as a radical member of the liberal left.
“Kamala Harris is from San Francisco,” Montana’s Sen. Steve Daines said on CNN Tuesday. “She’s a San Francisco liberal! A San Francisco radical!”
“Kamala Harris is soft on crime,” said Arkansas’ Sen. Tom Cotton, calling her Senate voting record more liberal than Bernie Sanders’. “She is a failed San Francisco liberal.”
Harris has also drawn some ire from supporters of Israel for declining to preside over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress on Wednesday.
“Kamala Harris is meeting with a sorority in Indianapolis instead of attending Bibi Netanyahu’s address to Congress,” Daines posted on social media.
After Trump’s rally on Wednesday, Biden is scheduled to speak from the Oval Office in the evening about his plans and how he “will finish the job for the American people,” his first address since he announced Sunday that he was dropping out of the 2024 race.