Vice President Harris plans to speak Wednesday afternoon at the Indianapolis convention of a historically Black sorority, delivering one of her first speeches as the likely Democratic nominee for president to women who represent the base voters she needs to energize.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, is set to take the stage a few hours later in Charlotte for his first rally since President Biden withdrew from the 2024 race \u2014 an event that will set the stage for Trump\u2019s new campaign against Harris.<\/p>\n
The dueling appearances are a chance for each candidate to frame the stakes of the race as it plunges into uncharted territory, with Trump no longer running against his ideal opponent and Harris seeking to take charge of the Democratic ticket a little more than 100 days before the election. Democrats are hoping that Harris can refocus the contest on Trump\u2019s flaws, while Republicans want to quickly define Harris and saddle her with Biden\u2019s weaknesses.<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s exit \u2014 triggered by a dismal June debate performance \u2014 has filled Democrats with new hope for November. In a Wednesday morning memo, Harris campaign chair Jen O\u2019Malley Dillon said the vice president is less known than Trump and Biden and \u201copens up additional persuadable voters,\u201d especially in groups that lean Democratic. \u201cThis race is more fluid now,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s team, meanwhile, is bracing for a \u201cHarris honeymoon\u201d that it says could intrude on Trump\u2019s summer of momentum and polling gains. In a Tuesday memo, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio predicted that Harris would see a polling bump starting in the next few days \u2014 but he said it would pass. With voters upset about inflation, the border and other issues, he wrote, the \u201cfundamentals of the race stay the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harris plans to arrive in Indianapolis just after noon on Wednesday and deliver a keynote speech there at the Grand Boul\u00e9, the national convention of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority. Zeta Beta Phi is one of the \u201cDivine Nine,\u201d a group of historically Black sororities and fraternities that includes Harris\u2019s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.<\/p>\n
Democrats are hopeful that Harris \u2014 who is Black and Indian American and would be the first female president \u2014 can motivate key left-leaning constituencies in a way that Biden did not. In interviews, Black women gathered for the Grand Boul\u00e9 said they were excited about Harris\u2019s candidacy but also nervous about her chances. They worried that voters would hold her race and gender against her.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you had your eyes closed and you just go based on her qualifications versus [Trump\u2019s] qualifications, yes, she\u2019d definitely win,\u201d said Lora Rice, 55, from Georgia. \u201cBut they\u2019re not going to do that.\u201d She said Biden, \u201cthe White guy,\u201d would have had a better shot.<\/p>\n
Democratic leaders and delegates to next month\u2019s nominating convention have quickly rallied behind Harris. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who made history as the country\u2019s only female presidential nominee from a major party, voiced support for Harris in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know a thing or two about how hard it can be for strong women candidates to fight through the sexism and double standards of American politics,\u201d wrote Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. She warned that Harris\u2019s \u201crecord and character will be distorted and disparaged\u201d as she runs against Trump, and that \u201cshe and the campaign will have to cut through the noise.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her memo, O\u2019Malley Dillon laid out her case for confidence in Harris. She led the charge on abortion rights, an issue on which Democrats have demonstrated a clear political advantage. In Milwaukee on Tuesday, she drew the campaign\u2019s largest crowd to date. Some $126 million in donations have flooded into the campaign since Sunday, when Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Malley Dillon said the campaign would continue its focus on the so-called \u201cBlue Wall\u201d states \u2014 Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania \u2014 as well as the \u201cSun Belt\u201d battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. \u201cWe intend to play offense in each of these states, and have the resources and campaign infrastructure to do so,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
Biden, before he dropped out, had increasingly looked to the Blue Wall as his path to victory \u2014 as other states slipped further from his grasp and as Trump threatened to put Democrats on defense in traditionally blue states. And Trump\u2019s campaign is still trying to expand the map: The former president has another rally planned for Saturday evening in Minnesota, a state that Biden won by seven points in 2020.<\/p>\n
Even as Trump\u2019s campaign pivots to attacking Harris, the former president has tried keep attention on Biden.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoes Lyin\u2019 Kamala Harris think Joe Biden is fit to run the U.S.A. for the next six months? She must answer the question,\u201d Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Biden is scheduled to give a speech Wednesday night from the White House about his decision to bow out, which came after weeks of pressure from other Democratic leaders and a debate in which Biden repeatedly appeared to lose his train of thought.<\/p>\n
Harris heads to Houston on Wednesday after the sorority event. Trump\u2019s team, eager to needle Harris about immigration policy, quickly highlighted her planned proximity to the southern border.<\/p>\n
Trump has several events lined up later this week. He plans to speak Friday evening in West Palm Beach, Fla., at an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action. On Saturday, he will deliver a keynote speech at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, underscoring his newfound interest in cryptocurrency. Trump was once skeptical of cryptocurrency but has embraced it after aggressive lobbying by executives in the industry.<\/p>\n
Sabrina Rodriguez in Indianapolis contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Vice President Harris plans to speak Wednesday afternoon at the Indianapolis convention of a historically Black sorority, delivering one of her first speeches as the likely Democratic nominee for president to women who represent the base voters she needs to energize. Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, is set to take the stage a few hours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6620,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}