Kamala Harris charged ahead with her bid for the White House Tuesday with her first campaign rally since entering the presidential race Sunday, addressing supporters in Wisconsin, one of the most critical battleground states in the upcoming election as she continued to lock up key party support.
Harris, 59, kicked off her remarks in West Allis, just outside Milwaukee, by saying she was “so very honoured” to have won enough delegate support in the past two days to become the Democratic nominee.
“Good afternoon Wisconsin. It is good to be back,” she said.
In her first speech from the campaign trail, Harris laid out the battle lines voters are likely to hear over the next 105 days — one of which was comparing her history as a prosecutor with Republican candidate Donald Trump’s trouble with the law. She touched on issues most likely to galvanize the Democratic base, including reproductive rights, gun violence and the middle class.
Harris rode a tsunami of party support into the rally as top congressional leaders on Tuesday joined the chorus of members formally endorsing her presidential bid.
Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both from New York, said they were backing Harris as the candidate best positioned to lead the party ticket.
“We all know that Vice-President Harris has a tremendous record to run on and now begins the next chapter in our quest to make sure Donald Trump does not become president,” Schumer said, addressing reporters in Washington on Tuesday.
High-profile Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have announced their support for Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee, and the party pulled in $81 million in donations after Joe Biden dropped out.
Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Jeffries, minority leader in the House of Representatives, were among the party brass who stopped short of immediately endorsing Harris’s run after dozens of Democratic governors, donors, lawmakers and potential opponents made a mad dash to do so after she launched her campaign with President Joe Biden’s approval on Sunday.
Nancy Pelosi did not endorse Harris until later Monday, while former president Barack Obama has not yet done so.
Political scientists and historians suggested heavy-hitters might have held off on backing Harris to avoid creating the impression that the party was simply appointing Harris as their candidate, instead respecting her wish to “earn and win” her nomination under party rules.
Speaking Tuesday, Schumer confirmed that was the case.
“When I spoke with her Sunday, she said she wanted the opportunity to win the nomination on her own and to do so from the grassroots up, not top down,” Schumer told reporters. “We deeply respected that, Hakeem and I. She said she would work to earn the support of our party and, boy, has she done so in quick order.”
Jeffries added that Harris is “ready, willing and able to lead” the party.
‘Path to the White House goes through Wisconsin’
Harris’s visit to Wisconsin was scheduled before Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, but it takes on new significance after Harris looks to mount a campaign and restore a sense of unity and control to the party after Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 derailed his campaign.
Wisconsin is one of the most crucial battleground states of the election.
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For more than 30 years, the Midwestern state was a brick in the “Blue Wall” — a term for states that reliably went to the Democrats from the ’90s into the early 2010s.
The winning streak came to an end when Donald Trump won the state back in 2016, helping him secure his marginal victory over Hillary Clinton. Biden took back Wisconsin in 2020, but only won by less than one percentage point.
“The path to the White House goes through Wisconsin,” Harris said during her rally Tuesday.
“We have a lot of work to do. We have doors to knock on, we have phone calls to make, we have voters to register and we have an election to win.”
Biden is returning to the White House on Tuesday from his beach house in Delaware after recovering from COVID-19. He will address the nation for the first time since ending his campaign at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday, just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses U.S. Congress.
Schumer and Jeffries praised Biden’s decision to abandon his own bid, with Schumer saying the “selfless decision” gave the party “the opportunity to unite behind a new nominee.”