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2024 Hawaii & National Election Coverage

Vice President Kamala Harris made an appeal today to the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, Black women, telling an audience of several thousand in Indianapolis that Donald Trump’s agenda represented “an outright attack on our children, our families and our future.”

Harris’ pointed speech, delivered at a convention of Zeta Phi Beta, one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, laid out a “choice between two different visions for our nation.”

One vision — hers — would build on a series of what she described as the Biden administration’s biggest accomplishments: expanding access to health care, lowering the cost of prescription drugs such as insulin, reducing child poverty and creating an economy that “works for working people.”

The other, she warned, would return the United States to a “dark past,” with cuts to Medicare and the elimination of the Department of Education and popular programs such as Head Start.

“These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back. We are not going back,” Harris, a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, said again with emphasis, in a banquet hall filled almost exclusively by Black women. “Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom.”

Although the vice president barely mentioned Trump by name, her speech was a clear effort to do what Democrats had hoped for months President Joe Biden would be able to: make the election a referendum on the former president.

Repeatedly, Harris, 59, articulated the idea that the choice between herself and Trump, 78, amounted to one between the “future” and the “past” — an argument that the 81-year-old incumbent president could not make.

If she is to rejuvenate the Democratic coalition that powered her and Biden to the White House in 2020, Harris must inspire audiences like the one she faced today. Black voters are a key Democratic constituency, but their enthusiasm for Biden had fallen drastically during his term in office. Many Black voters, especially younger ones, have expressed dissatisfaction with such challenges as rising prices, and Trump has tried to take advantage.

Now, Black sororities and fraternities, with more than 2 million members nationwide, can offer Harris a ready-made coalition to fight back. Even before Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her, the heads of the “Divine Nine,” the country’s nine most notable Black Greek-letter organizations, were planning a giant voter organization effort.

Harris’ almost-certain ascent to the top of the ticket has fueled their excitement. On the evening of her decision to seek the Democratic nomination, advocacy group Win with Black Women held a call that drew tens of thousands of attendees and raised more than $1.5 million for her campaign, organizers said.

“There’s so much at stake,” Harris told her audience of sorority sisters today. “In this moment, our nation, as it always has, is counting on you to energize, to organize and to mobilize.”

LaBeatrix Wright, an attendee from Hueytown, Alabama, said she was moved to tears, adding that she was inspired by the historic nature of Harris’ candidacy. When Harris took to the stage, the crowd gave her a standing ovation. Some attendees raised their hands in the air in celebration.

“She really moved the needle for the women in the room,” said Wright, 61. “If you weren’t supporting her before, you are now.”

In demonstrating the election’s significance to women, Harris also highlighted the value of providing Americans with paid family leave and affordable child and elder care, as well as combating the relatively high rate of maternal mortality in the United States.

And she promised to restore nationwide abortion rights, one of the Democrats’ most popular policy positions with women. She ended her speech with what felt like a warning to Republicans.

“We are not playing around,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company