Kamala Harris rallies new campaign to fight against Trump after Biden’s endorsement
(WILMINGTON, Del.) — Vice President Kamala Harris officially accepted President Joe Biden’s endorsement and held an event at her campaign office headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware on Monday.
“It is my intention to go out and earn this nomination and to win,” Harris said after taking a moment to thank her predecessor for his “bold and visionary leadership.”
Biden, who had just finished giving remarks of his own to campaign staffers after stepping down from the race Sunday afternoon, told the team that although he is no longer on the ticket, he’s not going anywhere.
“I want you to know, I won’t be on a ticket, but I’m still going to be fully, fully engaged. I’ve got six months left of my presidency. I’m determined to get as much done as I possibly can both foreign policy and domestic policy,” Biden said.
The president continued, promising to “always have their back.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I want you to know you’ve always had my back. I promise you. I will always have your back,” he said.
Harris picked up the baton where Biden dropped it off, heavily going after former President Donald Trump. Her new campaign has begun framing the race as a fight between a prosecutor — Harris served as California Attorney General — and a criminal.
“As many of you know, before I was elected as Vice President, before I was elected as a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, to California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters, who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”
“And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his,” she said.
Voters have told ABC News that this election feels like it’s more of a vote against Trump than for Biden. Harris told staffers it’s more than “us versus Trump.”
“This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump,” she said. “Our campaign has always been about two different versions of what we see as the future of the country… one focused on the future, the other focused on the past. Donald Trump wants to take our country backward to a time before many of our fellow Americans had full freedoms and rights.”
Staffers were told Sunday night that they would keep their jobs, and on Monday, it was announced that former campaign co-chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon would stay on to run the campaign.
Harris ended her remarks by fervently telling staffers that this team was perfectly poised to win in November: “When we fight, we win!”
(WASHINGTON) — After more than three years supporting President Joe Biden’s policy agenda as his deputy, Vice President Kamala Harris must articulate her own agenda for her presidential campaign — and the first term that could follow.
Since Biden announced on Sunday that he was leaving the 2024 race, Harris has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.
Now Harris — who ran well to the left of Biden during her unsuccessful presidential primary campaign in 2020, but has since become a loyal advocate of the administration’s policies — is taking on the challenge of establishing her own path forward and stance on key issues that matter most to voters as the November election approaches.
Her 2020 platform and some remarks from during her vice presidency offer a glimpse of a Harris presidency that could prove more progressive than Biden’s in several key areas.
Israel-Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, with Harris — who, as vice president, customarily presides over such proceedings — noticeably absent.
While Harris’ team has said her absence is merely the result of a scheduling conflict and the vice president will meet one-on-one with Netanyahu later this week, she has in recent months signaled that she may take a more stern approach to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Harris was initially a strong supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas — knocking down a suggestion that the Biden administration might condition aid to the country in November, saying “we are not going to create any conditions on the support that we are giving Israel to defend itself.”
But by December, Harris began wading deeper into Middle Eastern diplomacy during a trip to Dubai for a United Nations climate conference where she also met with leaders from the region. During the trip, she took a more forceful tone with Israel than many other senior administration officials had done at the time, declaring “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and saying the administration believes “Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.”
In a March address in Selma, Alabama, marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Harris called out Israel again — saying its government “must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid — no excuses” and calling on Israel to open border crossings and ensure humanitarian workers were not targeted.
In an interview published earlier this month in The Nation, Harris said young Americans protesting the war in Gaza are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” and that while she “absolutely rejects” some of their statements, she understands “the emotion behind it.”
And she’s been vocal in her support of an at least temporary cease-fire, saying during her March speech in Selma that “given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate cease-fire” for at least six weeks.
Harris doesn’t have a long-standing relationship with Netanyahu in the same way Biden does, but she met with Israel’s Benny Gantz at the White House while he was serving on the country’s war cabinet in March. She also met with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog earlier this year on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Abortion
Already the administration’s lead messenger on the central campaign issue of abortion rights, Harris has been consistently more boldly outspoken on the issue than Biden.
Before running for president in 2020, she went after crisis pregnancy centers as California attorney general and went viral for a line of questioning with then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, where she pressed him to name a single law that polices what men can do with their bodies.
Her 2020 platform included a proposal to pass a Reproductive Rights Act that would have taken affirmative steps to enforce Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court later overruled in 2022.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision affecting Roe, Harris has toured the country as bans went into place. She made history by being the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic in March — a move that demonstrated how loudly supportive of abortion rights she is — and delivered a fiery speech on then-GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis’ home turf in Florida this spring when a six-week ban went into effect there.
She made it clear in her first rally on Tuesday that abortion rights would continue to be a central issue for her as a presidential candidate.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will fight for a woman’s right to choose because one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do,” Harris said in a rally in Indiana on Wednesday, addressing the Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
That’s not to say Biden didn’t also make abortion rights a central tenet of his administration and campaign, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at University of California, Davis and abortion historian. However, she said, he was constrained by generational and religious differences that made Harris “the much more effective, passionate messenger on reproductive issues.”
Should Harris win in November, “I think there would be some differences in substance, really significant differences in tone, and then, maybe or maybe not, differences in outcome,” Ziegler said.
Outcomes — such as codifying Roe vs. Wade into law, going even further to also protect birth control or in-vitro fertilization, or pursuing further legal challenges to protect abortion rights — would depend primarily on how Democrats perform down the ballot in November and whether Harris has the opportunity to confirm any more justices to the Supreme Court.
Health care
In her remarks to campaign staff Monday, Harris said that her campaign will “fight to build a nation where every person has affordable health care.”
The Medicare for All plan that Harris proposed in 2020 would have covered all medically necessary services, including emergency room visits, doctor visits, vision, dental, hearing aids, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, and comprehensive reproductive health care services. The plan had a 10-year transition period.
Under Harris’ plan, Americans would have had a choice between the public Medicare for All plan and plans from private insurers that would have had to adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits.
To pay for the program, she proposed charging an additional premium to households making above $100,000 per year, with a higher income threshold for those in higher-cost-of-living areas.
In 2020, Biden called for a less ambitious “Medicare for all who want it” public option plan. However, according to Roll Call, he hasn’t mentioned that public option since December of 2020 — before he took office.
Biden also previously suggested he would veto a Medicare for All bill, arguing that it would raise taxes for the middle class.
But the vice president’s past policy differences with Biden may not mean all that much for a Harris presidency.
“I wouldn’t expect it to change at all [from Biden’s agenda],” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, said. “Until there’s some indication that that’s politically realistic, I don’t think anybody’s going to even try.”
Barker added that smaller changes, similar to the $35 price cap on insulin for seniors on Medicare in the Inflation Reduction Act, is “the way they’ll continue” in a Harris administration.
Criminal justice
While Harris faced sharp criticism from the left during the 2020 primary for her background as a prosecutor, her platform that year contained a slate of ambitious reforms to the criminal justice system aimed at ending mass incarceration and fighting racial inequities.
Harris’ platform advocated to legalize marijuana and expunge some marijiuana-related convictions; end cash bail and mandatory minimums; eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine; and stop the use of private prisons and the death penalty.
Her criminal justice plan also sought to increase the Department of Justice’s oversight of police departments and limit them from acquiring certain kinds of military equipment. In a clip that has been circulated by Republicans, she also advocated for restoring the right of formerly-incarcerated people to vote and automatically expunging non-serious, non-violent offenses after five years.
The Biden administration’s most significant action on criminal justice came when it took action on marijuana, reducing federal criminal penalties for offenses relating to the drug and pardoning those with criminal charges for simple possession of marijuana.
While Harris’ 2020 platform went well beyond Biden’s on criminal justice, her recent remarks make no indication that it will be a major theme of her campaign. The issue went unmentioned in her speech at the campaign’s Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters on Monday.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview — something she told reporters this month she planned to do by the end of August, but has yet to announce.
With an absence of plans for any such sit-down, Republican critics have accused her of dodging the press.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”
His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media.
The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll number are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.
Harris has also stirred an enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.
All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.
Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.
One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.
On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.
The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”
An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”
Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.
(CHICAGO) — Perhaps no demographic group has had more ink spilled about it this election year than young voters. Traditionally a Democratic group, 18- to 29-year-olds soured on Joe Biden’s presidency faster than many other groups — and that was before the war between Israel and Hamas touched off protests on college campuses and alienated young voters from Biden even further.
However, with Vice President Kamala Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee, young voters seem to have returned to the Democratic fold. According to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll from Aug. 9-13, registered voters under age 40 supported Harris over former President Donald Trump 57% to 37%. By contrast, in the previous ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, they supported Biden over Trump just 46% to 44%.
Of course, polls can tell us who voters support, but not necessarily why. So while in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, we convened a panel of three young voters — one liberal, one moderate and one conservative — to see how they were thinking about the 2024 election.
Two of them said they were likely to vote for Harris, while one was likely to vote for Trump, mirroring young voters overall. Among the reasons they gave included the candidates’ economic plans, high prices, health care, crime and the war in Gaza. Interestingly, all three panelists cited the economy as one of the most important factors to their vote — just as polls show that the economy is the top issue for young voters nationwide — but that didn’t always lead them to the same conclusions.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, both panelists we interviewed said they were likely to support him, but they were feeling much better about supporting the Democratic ticket now that Harris is headlining it. This mirrors a spike in enthusiasm among Democratic voters that has shown up in poll after poll since Biden’s withdrawal.
All three panelists also hailed from Chicago, and they weighed in on what it meant to them that the Windy City was once again hosting a DNC and whether anything they heard at the convention could change their votes.
Although young voters are usually only a small slice of the electorate, they are an important part of the Democratic coalition, so any drop in support among them could be a problem for Democrats. Our discussion shed some light on how these voters are approaching the 2024 election.