Vice President Kamala Harris ramped up her call Wednesday for Black women to mobilize for the 2024 election, telling members of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority that the nation was counting on them to energize, organize, 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 into her connections with Black college women on the campaign trail, urging her sorority sisters to step up in the months ahead of the 2024 election.
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, Stacy N.C. Grant, the international president and chief executive of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, 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 the nation’s fight for justice.
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 their 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 vision of affordable healthcare, touting the Biden-Harris administration’s role in capping the cost of insulin, championing the Child Tax Credit, forgiving student loan debt, elevating maternal health care and extending Medicaid postpartum coverage
She then warned of “those who want to take the nation backward,” highlighting Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The former president has tried to distance himself from the project and adopted a separate party platform last week at the Republican National Convention.
“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 would take away 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 Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indiana hours before former President Trump planned to hold his first public campaign rally since Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
Running against Biden, who is 81, Trump focused his attack on the President’s age and mental acuity. But the former president cannot rely on such an argument against Harris, who is 59 and 19 years his junior.
In a string of social media posts this week, he has ripped into Harris — who 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 “terrible” polling performance, even as early polls released Tuesday indicate Harris is seeing a spike in support.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Harris opening a 2-percentage-point lead over Trump. The poll showed Harris led Trump 44% to 42%, within the 3-point margin of error, but a notable jump after Harris and Trump tied at 44% in mid-July and Trump led by one percentage point at the bargaining of July. Asked if Harris was “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges,” 56% of registered voters agreed, compared with 49% for Trump and 22% for Biden.
An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Tuesday indicated that Trump holds 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 the DNC 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 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, claiming that when she was in the Senate she had a more liberal voting record than Bernie Sanders. “She is a failed San Francisco liberal.”
Harris has also drawn some ire from supporters of Israel for declining to preside Wednesday over a joint address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“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 appears in North Carolina, President Biden is scheduled to speak from the Oval Office Wednesday evening about his plans and “how I will finish the job for the American people” for the first time since he announced Sunday he was dropping out of the 2024 race.