Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off her campaign on Tuesday with a high-energy rally in Wisconsin reflecting the swarm of enthusiasm around her ascendent race for the White House.
An estimated 3,000-plus supporters filled a gymnasium in the Milwaukee area and cheered for the entire first minute Harris took the stage at her first official campaign rally. Throughout her remarks, she played up what’s shaping up to be a central part of her campaign: She’s a former prosecutor and attorney general competing against a convicted felon.
“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said, echoing remarks she made to staff Monday about the Republican nominee’s criminal history.
A record-breaking first 24 hours of fundraising, largely from small donations, gave Harris another thing to hit Trump on.
“Just look at how we are running our campaigns. Donald Trump is relying on support from billionaires and big corporations, and he is trading access in exchange for campaign contributions,” she said.
“We are running a people-powered campaign, and we just had some breaking news,” she continued. “We just had the best 24 hours of grassroots fundraising in presidential campaign history. And because we are a people-powered campaign, that is how you know we will be a people-first presidency.”
She pointed to a dinner Trump hosted at his Mar-a-Lago resort in May, where he reportedly promised oil executives and lobbyists he’d roll back environmental regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations.
The crowd lit up when Harris began digging into Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency put together by a conservative think tank and backed by some of his allies ― though Trump has tried to distance himself from it.
“Can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris asked, emphasising the agenda’s plans to gut several government assistance programs.
“They intend to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with pre-existing conditions,” she said. “Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back.”
The Republican Party, meanwhile, appears to be reeling over this shift in the 2024 election landscape. Trump has started insulting her as “dumb as a rock” and began laying the groundwork to get out of a debate against her in September. Though he said on Tuesday he “absolutely” wants to face off with her, he’s now raising complaints about ABC News hosting it and calling the network “fake news.”