Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Milwaukee on Tuesday, 48 hours after Joe Biden announced he was abandoning his bid for re-election to the White House, to hold the first formal rally of her presidential campaign. She has not yet secured the Democratic Party nomination, but she already has enough delegates to do so.
Before a packed audience of some 3,000 people, Harris repeated the messages she delivered on Monday during a rally at her campaign headquarters, which until then was Biden’s, in Wilmington, Delaware: she attacked her opponent, Donald Trump, and presented the fight between the two as that of a prosecutor against a convicted criminal and promised that if she wins in November she will be a president who looks to the future, rather than obsessing over the past. “When we fight, we win,” she exclaimed to an enthusiastic crowd.
The vice president recalled her record as a prosecutor, and insisted on a message that is becoming a hallmark of her presidential career: “In those jobs, I faced criminals of all kinds: predators who abused women, scammers who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own benefit,” she said. “So trust me: I know guys like Donald Trump.”
On a call with reporters around the same time as the rally, Trump said he was willing to debate Harris (both are scheduled, if all else fails, on Sept. 10 on an ABC News set), and fired back. “She’s just like Biden, but much more radical. She’s a radical leftist person, and this country doesn’t want a radical leftist person today.”
Harris’ speech lasted 17 minutes, during which she asked the audience: “Ultimately, in this election, each of us has to answer this question: What kind of country do we want to live in?” she said. “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and the rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?”
She presented herself as a president “for the middle class,” promised to push through a law that would increase gun control, and focused on one of her favorite topics, the right to abortion: “Those of us who believe in reproductive freedom will stop Trump’s extreme prohibitions. We trust that women are capable of making decisions about their own bodies and not having their government tell them what to do.”
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In such a short space of time, while her campaign was breaking records for small donations (more than 100 million dollars in two days), her supporters had already produced the first slogans related to Harris’s main ideas. “Lock him up, lock him up,” they shouted about Trump, turning on its head the Trumpist calls in 2016 for the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton. They also exclaimed: “We will not go back!”
Harris spoke at a high school about eight miles southwest of downtown Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention was held last week, crowning Trump as the party’s absolute leader in a conclave where dissidents of his MAGA ideology were banned. Wisconsin is one of the decisive states in the November elections, and the candidates will go out of their way to visit it frequently in the campaign to court its voters.
A pop phenomenon
The vice president’s rally also served to confirm that her figure is experiencing a boom these days in the voracious and capricious world of pop culture. On the one hand, there is the cascade of memes celebrating her eccentricities and contagious laughter. On the other, the support of pop stars such as the British Charlie XCX or Beyoncé, who gave permission to Harris’ campaign to use her song Freedom campaign (it was played to welcome and dismiss the election event in Milwaukee). There were also shouts of “Kamalanomenon,” another familiar reference for members of Generation Z that requires an instruction manual for the rest: it is related to the Chappell Roan song Femininomenonwhich young social media users have used in their short videos about Harris.
The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, clarified a little more about how Harris’s acclamation process will work. Any candidate for the nomination will have to be presented before July 30, provided that they have the support of 300 delegates. If Harris is the only one who presents herself (and everything indicates that she will be), virtual voting will begin the following day. This Wednesday, the committee will vote to approve those rules. Then it will be up to Harris to choose her second in command. The betting pools for that position are open, and include some governors such as Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), Roy Cooper (North Carolina), JB Pritzker (Illinois) and Andy Beshear (Kentucky), as well as one senator: Mark Kelly, from Arizona.
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