Kamala Harris issued a plea to Black voters on Martin Luther King Jr Day to join with Democrats to win the 2024 election and to stave off what she said were threats to US democracy posed by Republicans who look set to overwhelmingly back Donald Trump at their first state nomination contest in Iowa.
The US vice-president, the headliner at the NAACP’s annual King Day at the Dome event in Columbia, South Carolina, said that freedom in the country was under “profound threat”, and cited the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, long lines for voting, Republican-backed book bans and the prevalence of gun violence.
“Freedom is never truly won. You earn it and win it in every generation,” she said, quoting King’s late widow, Coretta Scott King, and urging voters to “roll up our sleeves”. “We were born for a time such as this,” she said.
Protesters were awaiting Harris at the venue, some waving Palestinian flags – the latest sign of dissent from typically Democratic-leaning voters that the Biden administration’s staunch backing of Israel in its attack on Gaza is angering some core supporters.
South Carolina, home to a hugely influential Black voting bloc in the Democratic presidential primary, will hold its contest on 3 February. But there are signs that economic anxiety and policy disappointments are also stressing Black support: an Economist/YouGov survey recently found that only 67% of Black US adults had a favorable view of Biden.
In her address, Harris said: “Today we are witnessing a full on attack on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms.” Speaking in the state once governed by Nikki Haley, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, she passed comment on Haley’s recent gaffe when she failed to cite slavery as a cause of the civil war.
“They even tried to erase, overlook and rewrite the ugly parts of our past,” Harris said, hours after the Biden-Harris re-election campaign said it had raised almost $100m in the last quarter of 2023 for election spending.
Earlier Monday, the Guardian quoted a former top aide to Harris during her 2020 nomination campaign, from The Truce, a soon-to-be published critique of her political skills.
“A lot of us, at least folks that I was friends with on the campaign, all realised that: ‘Yeah, this person should not be president of the United States”, the aide remarked to authors Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen, adding that her nomination campaign was “rotten from the start”.
The authors wrote that the problems Harris experienced with staff morale in 2020 had continued throughout her time as vice-president.
“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’.”
Biden meanwhile marked the holiday by volunteering for Philabundance, a hunger relief group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The US president loaded packages with fresh fruit and milk on to a conveyer belt in a warehouse.
In a radio interview with the Black civil rights advocate the Rev Al Sharpton on SiriusXM, Biden said Trump was a motivating factor in his decision to seek re-election, saying: “Trump is just saying things that are off the wall.”
Reuters contributed reporting
