Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday vowed to help Black voters in a key swing state, but the Democratic presidential nominee did not propose any policy changes for the war in Gaza as she tries to repair a frayed relationship with Arab Americans.
“I’m working to earn the vote, not assuming I’m going to have it because I’m Black,” Harris said in Philadelphia, calling “our young Black men … the backbone of our economy — and when they do better, we all do better.”
She again pushed her proposals to help that group, including a proposal to greatly increase a federal benefit to help Black Americans — and others — start their own businesses.
“Nobody can start a small business for $5,000, so I’m expanding that to $50,000,” she said during an interview arranged by the National Association of Black Journalists, whose conference GOP nominee Donald Trump addressed in July.
As she did during last week’s debate with Trump, Harris criticized his record for attacking the “Central Park Five,” allegedly refusing to rent apartments to Black people in buildings he owned in New York and spearheading the “birther” movement about whether then-President Barack Obama was born in the U.S.
In a portion of the interview, Harris was asked about Trump’s false allegation that Haitian migrants, most of whom are Black, were eating American citizens’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. Citing subsequent threats on schools and other government buildings there, Harris was at her most intense.
“It’s a crying shame. Literally. What’s happening to those families, those children in that community,” she said, accusing the Republican nominee, without naming him, with “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.”
Black voters are among several blocs Harris has tried reaching out to since ascending to the top of her party’s ticket. Also on that list: Arab Americans, toward whom she again on Tuesday appeared to sound more sympathetic than, at times, Biden has been.
After the end of the Israel-Hamas war, she said, there should be “no reoccupation of Gaza … no changing of the territorial lines in Gaza. She also said there should be “security in the region for all concerned.”
“We need to get this deal done and we need to get it done immediately — and that is my position and that is my policy,” said Harris. But she did not directly answer when asked if the United States, as Israel’s top ally, could also support a Palestinian state. She said Palestinians deserve to live “with dignity” but also again defended Israel’s right to defend itself — while reiterating her support for a Biden administration pause on 2,000-pound bombs for the Jewish state.
But Harris also, as she had in a previous interview, used a flawed statistic when discussing the state of the U.S. economy when she and President Joe Biden took office, saying, “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”
PolitiFact, part of the Poynter Institute, critiqued the remark in an X post: “This is exaggerated.”
“The unemployment rate spiked to a post-Great Depression record of 14.8 percent in April 2020, as the pandemic began to rage. Trump was in office then. But he didn’t ‘leave’ Biden or Harris with a post-Depression record unemployment rate,” PolitiFact added. “By December 2020, the unemployment rate had fallen back to 6.4 percent, which was high for recent history but well below numerous spikes during recessions.”
Harris also drew contrasts, in statements Politifact deemed more accurate, between the Biden administration’s record and Trump’s on Black child poverty and Black unemployment.
The former president at that July 31 event called a woman Black interviewer rude and contended Harris, of Jamaican and Indian parentage, “happened to turn Black” recently for political advancement, claiming that “all of a sudden, she made a turn.”
Yet, as always, Trump’s poll numbers did not crater. In fact, according to a FiveThirtyEight’s calculation of polling data, Trump has gone up 2.1 percentage points since he sat at 43.3 percent on Aug. 12.
Still, as Harris appeared at the event in Philadelphia, FiveThirtyEight’s latest tabulation put her up nationally 48.3 percent to 45.4 percent. And a RealClearPolitics average of recent polls in Pennsylvania had the duo essentially tied, but a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Monday showed Harris ahead 49 percent to 46 percent among likely voters there, within the survey’s margin of error.
The NABJ interview was the start of a busy campaign week for the vice president.
She is slated to delivered remarks at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute conference in Washington on Wednesday. It’s back to swing states on Thursday and Friday, with campaign stops in Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Harris campaign started Tuesday with a statement announcing an “all-hands-on-deck mobilization” effort “to encourage young voters across the battlegrounds to register to vote.” That initiative will include activity on college campuses and what the campaign called “an aggressive campaign blitz across battleground states.”
The Trump campaign, ahead of what it has billed as a “town hall” with the GOP nominee Tuesday evening in Michigan, sought to reach voters in Philadelphia before Harris appeared. It contended, if elected, Harris’ proposals would deliver an average tax hike of $2,394 a year for voters in Pennsylvania, citing the Tax Foundation.
“When Kamala is in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin this week — will she tell voters that on average they will pay more than $2,000 in extra taxes each year if she is elected and lets the Trump Tax Cuts expire?” Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said in a statement. “The choice is simple — more money in your pockets with President Trump or higher taxes with Kamala Harris.”
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