As Megan Thee Stallion ended her set at a campaign rally for Kamala Harris in Atlanta last week, the 29-year-old rapper called out to the packed arena: “We about to make history with the first female president! The first black female president!”
The mostly female crowd of more than 10,000 roared as it shared the rapper’s excitement at the possibility of electing a woman to the White House.
“Hillary Clinton kind of cracked the glass ceiling,” said Yvonne Marcus (68), who signed up to volunteer for the Harris campaign last month, shortly after US president Joe Biden said he was ending his re-election bid and endorsing Harris. “But the time is right, now, for Kamala to win this election.”
With fewer than 100 days to go until November’s presidential election, Harris’s candidacy has injected a heady new energy into a Democratic Party that had for weeks been tearing itself apart amid fears Biden would lose to Donald Trump.
Polling shows that in a little over a week, Harris eliminated Trump’s lead in nationwide polls as well as in the battleground states that are likely to determine the election outcome.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll published on Tuesday, the same day as the Atlanta rally, showed Harris was backed by 48 per cent of voters across the seven crucial swing states, compared with 47 per cent for Trump – a virtual tie.
Harris’s polling strength has been underpinned by a surge in support among younger voters, voters of colour and female voters in particular.
Democrats hope the vice-president can sustain that momentum until polling day on November 5th – and that female voters in particular can help drive a record turnout for their party.
“Her candidacy is energising. It has taken from what felt like a dread election to a really hopeful, forward looking, exciting moment, not just to stop Trump, but to show what a better future could look like,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, a group that recruits young Democratic candidates for office, and a veteran of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“Candidates matter ... their story matters. Who they are matters,” she added.
Harris has made reproductive rights and expanding abortion access central to her campaign message. In her nearly 20-minute stump speech in Atlanta, she vowed to “stop ... extreme abortion bans” and push for a federal law that would codify the rights enshrined under Roe vs Wade.
But unlike Megan Thee Stallion – or a local DJ who encouraged the crowd to sing along to Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman as they awaited the vice-president – Harris made no explicit mention of her gender, or the possibility that her election could make history for black women in particular.
She did, however, call out Trump and his running mate JD Vance for their increasingly personal and sexist attacks. In the past week alone, the former president has called Harris a “low-IQ individual”, said she would be “like a play toy” for foreign adversaries and questioned her racial identity.
“I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black,” Trump said at a National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday. The vice-president’s late mother was Indian-American, and her black father was born in Jamaica.
Vance, meanwhile, has been haunted by a video that resurfaced of a 2021 interview where he called Harris and other childless Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”. Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, Douglas Emhoff.
“The way that they talk about women, it is just off-putting ... it’s creepy. It is like they have never met a woman before,” said Litman.
Harris addressed the comments lightheartedly in Atlanta. “He and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” she said, prompting laughter from the crowd. “And, by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to just be plain weird?”
Addressing the former president, she added: “Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage. Because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”
Several members of the crowd in Atlanta referred to the campaign eight years ago of Clinton, the first female candidate to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, who ultimately lost to Trump after a bitter campaign in which he labelled the former secretary of state a “nasty woman”.
However, most rally attendees insisted that the US had made significant progress since 2016, and that Harris would be able to shatter what Clinton herself has called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling”.
“I thought that Hillary was going to get in there, but they fooled us,” said Joycelen King (61), another volunteer for the Harris campaign. “But to have [Harris] be a diverse woman, it just shows how much the United States has changed.”
Since 2016, the US has witnessed the Women’s March, the Me Too movement and the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, which had enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion.
In the wake of that decision, Republican legislatures in many states have pushed increasingly hardline and unpopular abortion restrictions – and in some cases raised questions about the legality of fertility treatments and birth control.
Political scientist Lara Brown said pent-up frustration meant many women voters were rushing to support Harris.
“Women have been waiting for eight years for a messenger,” Brown added. “Harris has stepped into a place where Democrats and those who are aligned with the Democratic Party ... have been hungry for a voice, and she has given them a voice.”
Not all rallygoers in Atlanta supported Harris because of her gender or race. Jennifer Coggin (64), who signed up to volunteer for the Harris campaign after Biden stepped aside, said gender made little difference to her.
“As a woman, I would be so proud to have a woman as president. But that is not the main thing I am looking for in a candidate,” she said. “I mean, she can be a man, she can be trans, I don’t care. If she has got the qualifications I am looking for in my leader, that is who I am going to vote for.”
But many were enthused by what Harris’s candidacy represents – and the possibility that she could defeat Trump.
Lori Evans (66), said that as a secondary school student, she had led a feminist group aligned with what was then called the women’s liberation movement.
“I have been waiting for this my whole life,” Evans said. “I never thought I would be alive to see this happen.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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