Former president Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, took the stage a few hours later in Charlotte for his first rally since President Biden withdrew from the race. He portrayed Harris as a “radical” liberal, lobbing an assortment of attacks against her over immigration and other topics.
“They say something happened to me when I got shot, I became nice,” Trump said, referencing the attempt on his life at a rally less than two weeks ago. He said his opponents were too dangerous. “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice, is that okay?” The crowd roared its approval.
The competing appearances provided a glimpse of what strategists in both parties expect to be a contentious matchup in the coming months. They offered a chance for each candidate to try to frame the stakes of the contest 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’s flaws, while Republicans want to quickly define Harris and saddle her with Biden’s weaknesses.
Biden’s exit — triggered by a dismal June debate performance — has filled Democrats with new hope for November. In a Wednesday morning memo, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said the vice president is less known than Trump and Biden and “opens up additional persuadable voters,” especially in groups that lean Democratic. “This race is more fluid now,” she wrote.
Harris will select her running mate by Aug. 7, according to two officials familiar with her timeline, to ensure the full ticket is in place ahead of the Democratic National Convention virtual roll call. The date, which was approved Wednesday, is ahead of the convention later next month to ensure the ticket meets state ballot deadlines. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.
Trump’s team, meanwhile, is bracing for a “Harris honeymoon” that it says could intrude on Trump’s 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 — but he said it would pass. With voters upset about inflation, the border and other issues, he wrote, the “fundamentals of the race stay the same.”
A CNN poll published Wednesday found that Harris performed better than Biden against Trump, gaining more support from young voters, women, and Black and Hispanic voters. The poll showed Trump still apparently receiving more support, 49 percent to 46 percent for Harris, within the margin of error.
Harris arrived in Indianapolis just before noon on Wednesday and delivered a 15-minute keynote speech at the Grand Boulé, the national convention of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority. Zeta Phi Beta is one of the “Divine Nine,” a group of historically Black sororities and fraternities that includes Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Women across the convention hall stood up to applaud several times throughout the speech. Some live-streamed the remarks on Facebook. They cheered loudest when Harris said, while discussing abortion rights, “When I am president of the United States … ”
Harris praised Biden as “a leader with a bold vision” before moving on to her pitch. She ticked through policies such as a new government rule to remove medical debt from credit reports. She zeroed in on Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that is independent of the Trump campaign but counts many former Trump aides among its creators.
Trump has aggressively tried to distance himself from Project 2025 as Democrats attack it, and over the weekend called it “seriously extreme.” Many of the project’s policy ideas overlap with Trump’s, but it also notably calls for more restrictions on abortion than Trump has advocated on the campaign trail. On Wednesday the former president wrote on social media, “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25.”
Harris called Project 2025 “a plan to return America to a dark past.” The audience booed when she mentioned the initiative and laughed when she said, “Can you believe they put that in writing?”
“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions of our nation,” Harris said. “One focused on the future, the other focused on the past. And with your support I am fighting for our nation’s future.”
Democrats are hopeful that Harris — who is Black and Indian American and would be the first female president — can motivate key left-leaning constituencies in a way that Biden did not. The sorority Harris addressed is nonpartisan, but Black women have long been a key voting bloc for the Democratic Party. While the Divine Nine does not endorse candidates, officials say it will work aggressively to mobilize voters ahead of the election.
In interviews, Black women gathered for the Grand Boulé said they were excited about Harris’s candidacy but also nervous about her chances. They worried that voters would hold her race and gender against her.
“If you had your eyes closed and you just go based on her qualifications versus [Trump’s] qualifications, yes, she’d definitely win,” said Lora Rice, 55, from Georgia. “But they’re not going to do that.” She said Biden, “the White guy,” would have had a better shot.
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), a Zeta who traveled with Harris, drew massive applause when she called for attendees to “reclaim the words that are being used against us, like diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, being the most qualified” — and said, “Let’s let our values lead us into a bold, Black and very female future from Kamala Harris.”
Hillary Clinton, who made history as the country’s first female presidential nominee from a major party and lost to Trump in 2016, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that Harris’s “record and character will be distorted and disparaged” as she runs against Trump, and that “she and the campaign will have to cut through the noise.”
Stacie NC Grant, the president of Zeta Phi Beta, said she was thrilled to have Harris speaking before the convention’s roughly 6,000 attendees. “It is hard to put into words what it feels like to be living history because that is where we are right now,” she said.
“It’s a serendipitous moment,” Grant added.
In Charlotte, Trump focused squarely on Harris, branding her “Lyin’ Kamala Harris” and “Border Czar” and bashing his old opponent, “Crooked Joe Biden,” mostly in passing. He called Harris “ultra liberal” and the “driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe.” He highlighted past comments, including her support for a ban on fracking.
“Kamala, you’re fired!” he thundered at one point, riling up the crowd. Throughout his remarks, he mispronounced Harris’s first name — a pattern among prominent GOP politicians. Critics of the tactic have said they see it as an attempt to “otherize” Harris.
Harris would be worse than Biden, Trump said, “because he’s a fake liberal.”
“He wasn’t that liberal … she’s a real liberal,” Trump said — a remarkable pivot from his previous attacks on Biden.
Trump also mocked Harris’s efforts to frame the race as a battle between a longtime prosecutor and a felon, a reference to Trump’s conviction in New York on charges of falsifying business records.
“I don’t think people are going to buy it,” Trump said.
Trump tends not to talk much about abortion at his rallies. But he defended his position on Wednesday, calling Harris a “radical” on the issue and saying he believes in exceptions to bans for cases of rape, incest and threat to the life of the mother. People close to Trump expect that Harris will be a more effective messenger on abortion than Biden was, The Washington Post previously reported.
In her campaign memo, O’Malley 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’s largest crowd to date. Some $126 million in donations have flooded into the campaign since Sunday, when Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris.
O’Malley Dillon said the campaign would continue its focus on the “blue wall” states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — as well as the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
“We intend to play offense in each of these states, and have the resources and campaign infrastructure to do so,” she wrote.
Trump’s 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 percentage points in 2020.
Even as Trump’s campaign pivots to attacking Harris, the former president has tried to keep attention on Biden.
“Does Lyin’ Kamala Harris think Joe Biden is fit to run the U.S.A. for the next six months? She must answer the question,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, on Tuesday.
MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump, has started airing its first attack ad against Harris, accusing her of misleading voters about Biden’s health and also criticizing the Biden administration’s response to undocumented immigration and inflation.
Biden gave a speech Wednesday night from the White House about his decision to bow out, saying “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy,” including “personal ambition.”
When Trump and Harris might meet for a debate is not yet clear. Trump and Biden had planned to participate in an ABC debate in September, but Trump has backed away from the idea since Biden dropped out, saying he does not want ABC to host and would prefer Fox News. Fox News this week contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns about a possible Sept. 17 debate.
After the sorority event, Harris went to Houston, where on Thursday she plans to speak to a convention of the American Federation of Teachers.
Trump’s team, eager to needle Harris about immigration policy, quickly highlighted her planned proximity to the southern border. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley put out a statement Wednesday criticizing Harris for not traveling to “see firsthand the results of her failed policies.”
In a brief interview with WBT, a radio station in North Carolina, Trump appeared irritated at news reports that Harris had drawn more than 3,000 people to a Tuesday event in Wisconsin. Trump, who takes pride in his massive rallies, insisted without explanation that the number was too high and added, “If I ever had 3,000, they’d give me front-page headlines that nobody showed up.”
Trump returned to the topic later at his rally, still irked. “The fake news said, ‘Ohhh, her crowd was amazing!’” he said, adding later: “They never mention our crowds.”
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.
Knowles reported from Washington. Kornfield reported from Charlotte. Tyler Pager in Washington contributed to this report.
correction
A previous version of this article misstated in one instance the name of the sorority Harris is addressing. It is Zeta Phi Beta. The article has been corrected.
