Harris, Trump hold dueling events as a new presidential race takes shape

1 month ago 19

INDIANAPOLIS — Vice President Harris, in a Wednesday afternoon address here, cast the 2024 election as a fight against “extremists” who want to take the country backward, delivering one of her first speeches as the likely Democratic nominee for president to women who represent the base voters she needs to energize.

“We are not going back,” she told the crowd of thousands, to big cheers.

Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, is set to take the stage a few hours later in Charlotte for his first rally since President Biden withdrew from the 2024 race — an event that will set the stage for Trump’s new campaign against Harris.

The dueling appearances are a chance for each candidate to frame the stakes of the race as it plunges into uncharted territory, with Trump no longer running against his ideal opponent and Harris seeking to take charge of the Democratic ticket a little more than 100 days before the election. Democrats are hoping that Harris can refocus the contest on Trump’s flaws, while Republicans want to quickly define Harris and saddle her with Biden’s weaknesses.

Biden’s exit — triggered by a dismal June debate performance — has filled Democrats with new hope for November. In a Wednesday morning memo, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said the vice president is less known than Trump and Biden and “opens up additional persuadable voters,” especially in groups that lean Democratic. “This race is more fluid now,” she wrote.

Trump’s team, meanwhile, is bracing for a “Harris honeymoon” that it says could intrude on Trump’s summer of momentum and polling gains. In a Tuesday memo, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio predicted that Harris would see a polling bump starting in the next few days — but he said it would pass. With voters upset about inflation, the border and other issues, he wrote, the “fundamentals of the race stay the same.”

A CNN poll published Wednesday found that Harris performed better than Biden against Trump, gaining more support from young voters, women and Black and Hispanic voters. Trump still led their poll of registered voters nationwide 49 percent to 46 percent, within the margin of error.

Harris arrived in Indianapolis just before noon on Wednesday and delivered a 15-minute keynote speech there at the Grand Boulé, the national convention of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority. Zeta Phi Beta is one of the “Divine Nine,” a group of historically Black sororities and fraternities that includes Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

Harris praised Biden as “a leader with a bold vision” before moving on to her pitch. She zeroed in on Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that is independent of the Trump campaign but counts many former Trump aides among its creators. Trump has aggressively tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as Democrats attack it and over the weekend called it “seriously extreme.”

Harris called Project 2025 “a plan to return America to a dark past.”

“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions of our nation,” she said. “One focused on the future, the other focused on the past. And with your support I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

Democrats are hopeful that Harris — who is Black and Indian American and would be the first female president — can motivate key left-leaning constituencies in a way that Biden did not. The sorority Harris addressed is nonpartisan, but Black women have long been a key voting bloc for the Democratic Party. While the Divine Nine does not endorse candidates, officials say it will work aggressively to mobilize voters ahead of the election.

In interviews, Black women gathered for the Grand Boulé said they were excited about Harris’s candidacy but also nervous about her chances. They worried that voters would hold her race and gender against her.

“If you had your eyes closed and you just go based on her qualifications versus [Trump’s] qualifications, yes, she’d definitely win,” said Lora Rice, 55, from Georgia. “But they’re not going to do that.” She said Biden, “the White guy,” would have had a better shot.

Hillary Clinton, who made history as the country’s only female presidential nominee from a major party and lost to Trump in 2016, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that Harris’s “record and character will be distorted and disparaged” as she runs against Trump, and that “she and the campaign will have to cut through the noise.”

Stacie NC Grant, the president and CEO of Zeta Phi Beta, said she was thrilled to have Harris speaking before the convention’s roughly 6,000 attendees. “It is hard to put into words what it feels like to be living history because that is where we are right now,” she said.

“It’s a serendipitous moment,” Grant added.

In her campaign memo, O’Malley Dillon laid out her case for confidence in Harris. She led the charge on abortion rights, an issue on which Democrats have demonstrated a clear political advantage. In Milwaukee on Tuesday, she drew the campaign’s largest crowd to date. Some $126 million in donations have flooded into the campaign since Sunday, when Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris.

O’Malley Dillon said the campaign would continue its focus on the so-called “Blue Wall” states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — as well as the “Sun Belt” battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. “We intend to play offense in each of these states, and have the resources and campaign infrastructure to do so,” she wrote.

Trump’s campaign is still trying to expand the map: The former president has another rally planned for Saturday evening in Minnesota, a state that Biden won by seven points in 2020.

Even as Trump’s campaign pivots to attacking Harris, the former president has tried keep attention on Biden.

“Does Lyin’ Kamala Harris think Joe Biden is fit to run the U.S.A. for the next six months? She must answer the question,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, on Tuesday.

Biden is scheduled to give a speech Wednesday night from the White House about his decision to bow out.

Harris heads to Houston on Wednesday after the sorority event. Trump’s team, eager to needle Harris about immigration policy, quickly highlighted her planned proximity to the southern border.

Trump has several events lined up later this week. He plans to speak Friday evening in West Palm Beach, Fla., at an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action. On Saturday, he will deliver a keynote speech at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, underscoring his newfound interest in cryptocurrency. Trump was once skeptical of cryptocurrency but has embraced it after aggressive lobbying by executives in the industry.

correction

A previous version of this article misstated in one instance the name of the sorority Harris is addressing. It is Zeta Phi Beta. The article has been corrected.

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