ATLANTA ― Vice president and newly minted Democratic presumptive nominee Kamala Harris offered loud and boisterous evidence Tuesday night that it’s a brand-new race against the GOP nominee, coup-attempter and convicted criminal Donald Trump.
“The path to the White House runs right through this state,” said Harris to a crowd of some 10,000 packed into the Georgia State Convocation Center. “The momentum in this race is shifting, and there are signs that Donald Trump is feeling it.”
Harris repeated lines that have already become a favorite for her audience, contrasting her record of prosecuting sex abusers, suing for-profit college operators, and going after giant banks for fraud against Trump having been found liable for sexual abuse, paying a massive settlement for Trump University, and having been found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to a hide a hush money payment to a porn actor.
“So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris said.
Harris also answered attacks from Trump and his allies accusing her of enabling an immigration policy that allowed millions of migrants to cross the southern border illegally. She pointed out that it was Trump who tanked a bipartisan immigration bill that would have provided new funding for Border Patrol agents and tightened asylum rules because it would hurt Trump’s efforts to regain the White House.
“Donald Trump does not care about border security, he only cares about himself,” she said, adding that as president, she would push that same legislation through Congress and sign it into law, “and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like.”
Harris’s stump speech hit themes familiar to Democrats. Restoring abortion rights, protecting the Affordable Care Act, favoring economic policies that benefit middle-class people over the wealthy, and defending American democracy have been staples of President Joe Biden’s message since the 2020 campaign.
But Harris has ― at least for now ― infused those messages with an energy level not seen in a Democratic national ticket since President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection.
John Bazemore via Associated Press
Karl Bryant, a Black 71-year-old retiree wearing an Obama T-shirt from 2008 who recalled crying with joy at an election watch party that November, said Harris is already matching the enthusiasm that Obama had that year. “Even more so, because she’s got the women on her side,” he said.
Former Georgia state representative Howard Mosby, 63, said that while Biden won Georgia in 2020 with a low-key campaign, he feared that Black voters did not seem as motivated to vote this time. “I think apathy was going to be the killer,” he said, adding that that attitude changed overnight 10 days earlier when Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Harris. “OK, now we’ve got a candidate.”
To defeat Trump in 2020, Biden was able to win five states that Trump had carried in 2016: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. Democrats had typically won the first three ― the so-called “Blue Wall” states ― for a generation in presidential elections, while Arizona and Georgia had traditionally been won by the Republican nominee.
Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin had seen the tightest margins, all under single percentage points with Biden winning Georgia by just 11,779 votes.
Strategists for the Biden campaign, which effectively became the Harris campaign after he dropped out on July 21, had focused on the midwestern states, where he was polling closer to Trump than the Sun Belt states.
Harris’ visit Tuesday suggests that the campaign sees Georgia and its 16 electoral votes as a plausible target for November.
Trump, who handily won the Republican nomination despite four separate criminal indictments against him, announced after Harris’ rally was scheduled that he would stage a rally in Atlanta at the same venue Saturday.