Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in Indianapolis: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris hit the campaign trail in her first week with a series of appearances in strategic places, appealing to key constituency groups to fire them up to get onboard and help power her campaign.

In Indianapolis on Wednesday, she spoke at a rally of more than 6,000 Black women hosted by the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, founded at Howard University, the historically Black college she attended. The multi-generational network of women played an outsized role in delivering strong voter turnout for Democrats in President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign victory.

“I thank you,” Harris said of their participating in the winning 2020 campaign. “And now, in this moment, our nation needs your leadership once again.”

Vice President Harris has emerged as the Democratic presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election after President Joe Biden, 81, ended his re-election bid on Sunday in the face of opposition from fellow Democrats, who questioned his ability to beat Donald Trump again considering that driven by his age, his physical and mental acuity seemed to be slipping in recent months, most prominently in his halting debate performance on CNN in Atlanta June 27. Many party insiders and administration officials had worried that he had showed signs frailty, and was growing perhaps too feeble to continue and serve another term.

He fought back for weeks, then came down with Covid and had to isolate in his home in Delaware, where family and friends finally must have convinced him it was best to pass the torch to Harris.

The 59-year-old vice president, the first Black woman and Asian American to serve in that position, appeared to have a well developed plan in place as she locked up most of the delegates she needed for the nomination and most of the endorsements she sought from potential opponents at an open convention beginning Aug. 19 in Chicago.

Trump is in Trouble: Kamala Harris Just May Be the Game Changer We Need

Of course her election would be a historic first as she would become the first president of African American and Asian ancestry.

President Biden, who came back to Washington after isolating at his home in Delaware with Covid, will address the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday night to explain his decision to drop out.

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As for Donald Trump, he was to hold his first rally since Biden ended his campaign on Wednesday in the battleground state of North Carolina.

On Tuesday, Trump took the unusual step of speaking to reporters on a conference call to underscore his campaign’s line of attack against Harris, focusing on the U.S.-Mexico border, a problem he turned into a political issue in 2016 by calling for a wall to be built along the border.

Of course it was never completed, and one of his key advisers, Steve Bannon, was convicted for his role in bilking donors in a fake “Build the Wall” crowdfunding campaign. He and his partners pocketed over $1 million. Yet Trump pardoned Bannon for that before leaving office. He still faces state charges in New York while he serves four months in federal prison for contempt of Congress.

Biden had placed a special responsibility on Harris in charge of working with countries in Central America to help stem the tide of immigrants, but she was not made responsible for border security, a point Trump will certainly fail to mention in his criticism.

“She wants open borders,” Trump said, which of course is a wild exxageration and totally untrue.

While Trump’s party unified around his presidential bid after a failed assassination attempt two weekends ago, he’s watched from the sidelines as Biden’s sudden departure from the race dramatically shifted the narrative and sparked a surge of attention toward Harris, taking over the front pages of newspapers and the top 10 minutes of television news broadcasts, as well as much of the talk on cable news and social media..

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who Harris has so far retained from the Biden campaign, said in a memo made public on Wednesday that Democrats would aim to compete in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, opening up a map that in the final weeks of Biden’s campaign had appeared to be more focused on the Midwest.

“This race is more fluid now – the vice president is well-known but less well-known than both Trump and President Biden, particularly among Dem-leaning constituencies,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.

Democrats will formally nominate their new ticket at next month’s convention in Chicago after an Aug. 7 virtual vote.

Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, is considered to be on the short list to serve as Harris’ running mate, as well as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and others.

The Harris campaign on Wednesday said it has raised $126 million since Sunday, with 64 percent of donors making their first contribution of the 2024 campaign.

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