Kamala Harris vowed to do everything in her power to defeat Donald Trump in a stirring speech to campaign staffers in which she pledged to offer Americans a “brighter future” compared with the “chaos, fear and hate” proposed by her Republican rival.
The US vice-president was speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday, the first full day since President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed her for the Democratic presidential nomination, shaking up the 2024 race for the White House.
Harris’s comments came after she secured the backing of dozens of lawmakers and the most senior Democrats in Washington, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, making her the overwhelming frontrunner to win the party’s presidential nomination.
The vice-president’s momentum was buoyed by a surge in fundraising: during the first 24 hours of her campaign, she collected a record $81mn in contributions — more than Biden raised in the first two months of his own bid.
“In the days and weeks ahead I, together with you, will do everything in my power to unite our Democratic party, to unite our nation, and to win this election,” Harris said.
Harris quickly took the fight to Trump, saying that as a prosecutor in California before she was elected to the Senate and then the vice-presidency, she had come across “perpetrators of all kinds”, including “predators” who had abused women, as well as “fraudsters” and “cheaters”. “Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.
But Harris added that the focus of her campaign for the Oval Office would be broader. “Donald Trump wants to take our country back to a time before many of our fellow Americans had full freedoms and rights. But we believe in a brighter future that makes room for all Americans,” she said, asking: “What kind of country do we want to live in? A country of freedom, compassion and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?”
Harris’s remarks were preceded by a live phone intervention by Biden, who is ill with Covid-19 at his holiday home on the Delaware coast. “The name has changed at the top of the ticket. But the mission hasn’t changed,” the president told the campaign staff. To Harris, he said: “I’m watching you, kid. I love ya.”
Many Democratic donors were thrilled by Biden’s decision to step aside, describing his age as a major liability that could have brought down many other Democrats in Congress as well as dooming the White House race. Most were encouraged by the prospect of Harris taking the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month.
The Harris campaign said that more than 888,000 people had donated in the day since she was endorsed by Biden, of whom 60 per cent had not given money in this election cycle.
The astonishing one-day haul was more than Biden attracted in his first 66 days on the campaign trail last year, more than he pulled in from a Hollywood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and more than three presidents — Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — raised together at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
It also exceeded Harris’s fundraising during the entirety of her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign, and topped the mammoth haul Trump’s campaign reported the day after he became the first ex-president to become a convicted felon.
During her speech in Wilmington, Harris said she had asked Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, to take charge of her presidential bid. She added that Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, would also stay on.
Harris will be hoping that her entry into the race will give a jolt to the party’s prospects of taking back the White House by energising women, and young, Black and Hispanic voters, as well as drawing support from independent and swing voters turned off by Trump.
But it could still be difficult for Harris to make gains against the Republican nominee, who has built a solid edge in polling since Biden’s disastrous performance in their televised debate last month and after surviving an assassination attempt.
Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita on Monday released a memo saying Biden’s decision had changed nothing.
“The liberal elite and deep state — sensing the American public’s disgust with their lawfare, and now in a desperate Hail Mary — have swapped out an incumbent President for the incumbent vice-president in a ploy to try and shake up the race,” they wrote.
The added: “The problem for the left and media elite? Kamala Harris is as bad, if not worse, than Joe Biden.”
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