It’s been less than a week since President Joe Biden announced he’s out of the 2024 presidential race and backed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him.
Since then, the vice president appears to have taken a divided Democratic Party by storm, attracting national and New York support.
What You Need To Know
- State Attorney General Letitia James organized Black attorneys general to back the vice president last Sunday and jumped on pro-Harris fundraising calls all week
- Vice President Kamala Harris is closing the gap with former President Donald Trump, according to a new Siena College/New York Times poll
- National party leaders criticized Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to protect Democratic congressional seats during the 2022 midterms, prompting U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to order a revamp of New York’s campaigns
“She’s in the best position to step into the White House as president of these United States,” New York’s Democratic Attorney General Letitia James told Spectrum News in an interview on July 23.
“[Her] mother is Indian, father’s Jamaican — a true immigrant story — and she also happens to be a woman. She and I both graduated from Howard University. I know her well,” she said.
James organized Black attorneys general to back the vice president and jumped on pro-Harris fundraising calls all week.
“People rally around someone who they feel is like them and who really gets it, and her coming out to the song by Beyonce about freedom — that just really changed the game,” said Yvette Buckner, president of the Buckner Group, a government relations group, referring to the Beyonce song that accompanied Harris’ entry to her campaign headquarters July 24.
“It connected a way old women, young women - people who are having their freedoms really challenged right now by the Republican Party,” Buckner continued.
Harris is closing the gap with former President Donald Trump, according to a new Siena College/New York Times poll.
But despite the newfound enthusiasm, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, a Democrat, argues the party “can’t take New York state for granted.”
National party leaders criticized Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to protect Democratic congressional seats during the 2022 midterms. Prompting U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to order a revamp of New York’s campaigns.
“New York has always taken the fact that we’ve been blue for granted,” said Buckner, who has worked on multiple campaigns over the years, including for City Council and statewide offices.
“We were not paying as much attention to those new groups and those new trends as we should have — to see Asian Americans for the first time really being one of our core constituencies that we have not invested in, in a very strong way. That is something that is now changing,” she added.
Richards admits this cycle already feels different.
“We are focusing in on upstate, we are focusing in on Long Island and that we’re not even taking parts of New York City for granted, right?” he said. “This is going to be an all hands on deck effort. Of course, we have swing states we need to win, but just as some people have said, New York state certainly has moved more red currently and we need to make sure that we’re doing everything to pull out every vote we can.”
Meanwhile, Harlem women are also set to rally for Harris this weekend.
State Sen. Cordell Cleare, a Manhattan Democrat, told NY1 that women in the community “felt the need to immediately jump out and let everyone know that we support our vice president.”
“We don’t want people in the midst of all this going on to become discouraged with the process,” she added.
The political shift comes as Democrats prepare for their national convention that is less than a month away.