On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Kamala Harris implored African American voters to support Democrats to win the 2024 election and stave off Republican challenges to US democracy, as she believed they would strongly support Donald Trump in Iowa in their first state nomination race.
The US vice president, who was the featured speaker at the NAACP’s annual King Day at the Dome event in Columbia, South Carolina, claimed that the country’s freedoms were under “profound threat.” He gave several examples, including the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, lengthy voting lines, book bans supported by Republicans, and the high rate of gun violence.
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Citing Coretta Scott King, the late wife of Martin Luther King, she remarked “Freedom is never truly won. You earn it and win it in every generation.” Harris added, “We were born for a time such as this.”
Demonstrators were waiting for Harris at the location, some of them carrying Palestinian flags. This is the most recent indication from voters who lean Democratic that the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel in its onslaught on Gaza is upsetting some of its most ardent supporters.
The Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina, which is home to a significant Black voting bloc, will take place on February 3. However, there are indications that policy setbacks and economic unease are also undermining Black support: a recent Economist/YouGov study revealed that just 67% of Black US adults thought favorably of Biden.
VP Harris stated in her speech, “Today we are witnessing a full-on attack on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms.” Speaking in the state that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley formerly commanded, she offered commentary on Haley’s recent faux pas of failing to mention slavery as a reason for the American Civil War.
“They even tried to erase, overlook, and rewrite the ugly parts of our past,” Harris made this statement only hours after the Biden-Harris reelection campaign announced that it had raised almost $100 million for election expenses in the last quarter of 2023.
An elite advisor to Harris in her 2020 presidential campaign who will soon be released in The Truce, a book critical of her political acumen.
“A lot of us, at least folks that I was friends with on the campaign, all realized that: ‘Yeah, this person should not be president of the United States” ” the assistant said to writers Hunter Walker and Luppe B. Luppen that her nomination effort was “rotten from the start”.
The issues Harris faced with employee morale in 2020 persisted throughout her tenure as vice president, according to the authors.
The writers went ahead and wrote, “Harris saw heavy staff turnover, with aides describing a toxic climate riven with factionalism and mismanagement. One source who worked for the vice president declined to go on record or even discuss matters anonymously, due to the heated atmosphere around the office,” the authors wrote. “It was, they said: ‘Game of Thrones’.”
Meanwhile, Biden observed the day by volunteering for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Philabundance, a food relief organization. The president of the United States placed parcels containing milk and fresh fruit onto a conveyor belt in a warehouse.
In an audio conversation on SiriusXM with Black civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, Biden stated that his decision to run for reelection was inspired by Trump, saying: “Trump is just saying things that are off the wall.”
