Black women quickly mobilize to boost Kamala Harris presidential bid

WASHINGTON — As Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention Thursday, making her the first Black and South Asian woman to lead a major party ticket, her nomination has energized a strong and loyal voting bloc in the Democratic Party — Black women.

Since President Joe Biden last month bowed out of his reelection race and named Harris as his choice for the nomination, her campaign has quickly scooped up the necessary delegate votes, raked in more than $300 million and galvanized the Democratic base. Black women are playing a major role in this rapid mobilization.

Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie said in an interview with States Newsroom that Harris is benefiting from not only an influx of cash, but also an army of volunteers.

The campaign’s battleground states director, Dan Kanninen, told reporters in late July more than 360,000 volunteers have signed up to knock on doors, canvass and make phone calls.

“What we’ve seen happen in the last couple of weeks is an influx of resources that will allow Harris to mount as effective a mobilization campaign as she can,” Gillespie said.

All of this is key to mounting a competitive race, Gillespie said, especially in all-important Georgia.

Black women’s work to encourage turnout and register voters was credited with turning the state blue for Biden in 2020. The victory sent two Democratic U.S. senators to Congress, solidifying a split Senate in which Harris was the tiebreaker and in which a Democratic majority confirmed numerous federal judges to lifetime appointments — as well as the first Black woman named to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter moved Georgia from a “lean Republican” ranking to “toss-up” after Harris entered the presidential race, noting a 1 percentage point lead over her GOP opponent, former President Donald Trump. For comparison, Biden was trailing 2.5 percentage points behind Trump in the Peach State.

Keneshia Grant, an associate professor of political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C., said that when Biden first announced he was stepping down July 21 under pressure from party leaders following his disastrous debate performance, it was not immediately clear that Harris would be next in line. It took Biden a little over 30 minutes to endorse her as his chosen successor.

In the days before Biden’s announcement, South Carolina’s U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn urged the party to coalesce around Harris, should Biden no longer be on the ticket. Clyburn was pivotal in delivering Black support for Biden in 2020 and remains a close Biden ally.

“We should do everything we can to bolster her, whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket,” he said of Harris.

Grant said that Black women — often referred to as the backbone of the Democratic party — had signaled to top party members that “passing over this Black woman in this moment would not be tolerated.”

Within hours of Biden quitting the race, a Zoom call with organizers of #WinWithBlackWomen drew in more than 90,000 participants and raised more than $1.3 million to support Harris’ bid.

“The (Democratic) Party might not have had a notion of a Black woman as president, right now, but clearly the people feel differently and felt differently,” Grant said.

Influence of ‘Divine Nine’

As a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., the first Black sorority, established in 1908 at Howard University, Harris has an untapped resource in the “Divine Nine” – Black Greek-letter organizations, made up of four sororities and five fraternities.

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, a professor of African American studies at the University of Iowa, said that Black sororities and fraternities are more than a social group. She added that they’ve been at the forefront of civil rights issues such as the women’s suffrage movement and anti-lynching legislation.

“The whole idea is that you’re coming together in the name of service to help Black communities as well as holding up academic excellence,” Whaley said.

As soon as Harris entered the race at the top of the ticket, the Divine Nine, which boasts more than 2 million members, swung into action.

“One of the things that the Black sororities and (fraternities) are known for is voter registration,” Whaley said.

The National Pan-Hellenic Council, Inc. — the governing body of the Divine Nine — announced it would undertake a major voter turnout mobilization campaign. Because the groups are nonprofits, they can’t endorse a candidate and must remain nonpartisan.

“This campaign will activate the thousands of chapters and members in our respective organizations to ensure strong voter turnout in the communities we serve,” the National Pan-Hellenic Council, Inc. said in a statement.

Harris’s sorority, AKA, formed its own political action committee on Aug. 9, according to ProPublica’s Federal Election Commission tracker.

Whaley said she’s not surprised Harris has prioritized inclusion of Black sororities, such as her visit to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority conference in Indianapolis, Indiana when she was the likely Democratic presidential nominee, in late July.

“We know when we organize, mountains move,” Harris said to more than 6,000 sorority sisters. “When we mobilize, nations change. And when we vote, we make history.”

Whaley said that Black sororities are a “training ground to be of service to community, to be a leader, and to function effectively in a world where you are a member of a starkly marginalized group and you are a minority in terms of your gender.”

A different tune

On Harris’ first visit to the campaign headquarters in Delaware, before she addressed the staff, the song she walked out to was Beyoncé’s “Freedom.”

It’s a song that is played during all her campaign stops and, according to CNN, Beyoncé has given the campaign permission to use the 2016 song from her Grammy-nominated album, “Lemonade.”

Grant noted that in choosing that particular Beyoncé song, it not only signals to voters that Harris at 59 is a younger candidate — compared to Trump, who is 78 — but it’s a departure from the catchphrase coined by former first lady Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “When they go low, we go high.”

“From the things I’m seeing in the campaign and from her posture, she’s not saying ‘When you go low, I go low,’ but she is saying … ‘When you go low, we at least call you out on it,’” Grant said.

The song choice is also not lost on Kinitra Brooks, an associate professor and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Brooks, who co-edited a collection of essays on Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” said that the song is about more than breaking chains, but “the cost of freedom.”

“It takes hard work to achieve freedom, but also to maintain it,” she said. “I think that leads to the conversations that we’re having about the rollback of rights.”

As Harris has set out on a rapid-fire campaign tour in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, she has positioned her campaign as a “fight for the future,” and has accused the Trump campaign of focusing on the past.
“Across our nation, we have been witnessing a full-on assault on hard-won, hard-fought freedoms and fundamental rights,” Harris said at an Aug. 10 campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada. “We are not going back.”