Harris Warns Black Women That Trump Poses a Threat to Children and Families

Her speech was a clear effort to make the election a referendum on the former president.

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Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted the Biden administration’s accomplishments, while arguing that a Trump presidency would return the United States to a “dark past,”

Vice President Kamala Harris made an appeal on Wednesday to the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, Black women, telling an audience of several thousand in Indianapolis that Donald J. Trump’s agenda represented “an outright attack on our children, our families and our future.”

Ms. Harris’s pointed speech, delivered at a convention of Zeta Phi Beta, one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, laid out a “choice between two different visions for our nation.”

One vision — hers — would build on a series of what she described as the Biden administration’s biggest accomplishments: expanding access to health care, lowering the cost of prescription drugs like insulin, reducing child poverty and creating an economy that “works for working people.”

The other, she warned, would return the United States to a “dark past,” with cuts to Medicare and the elimination of the Department of Education and popular programs like Head Start.

“These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back. We are not going back,” Ms. Harris, a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, said again with emphasis, in a banquet hall filled almost exclusively by Black women. “Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom.”

ImageIf she is to rejuvenate the Democratic coalition that powered her and Mr. Biden to the White House in 2020, Ms. Harris must inspire audiences like the one she faced on Wednesday. Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

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