US election 2024: Kamala Harris urges black Americans to vote in bid to repeat 2020 win

WASHINGTON: Vice President Kamala Harris urged Black Americans to vote and cast Republicans as extremists on everything from abortion, voting rights and gun reform.

“Here’s what we need to do. Vote. It gets back to the voting,” Harris said Saturday at a gathering of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organisation, in Boston. Noting that Black voters had record turnout in 2020, Harris said that “it scared some people.”

“It is by no coincidence that immediately thereafter you started seeing extremist so-called leaders passing laws restricting voting days, making it more difficult to vote,” she added.


Since Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020, supporters of the former president have stepped up efforts to reform the US election system, with several states introducing new rules restricting voting and redrawing electoral maps. Still, the Supreme Court this year gave an unexpected boost to the Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 to protect minority rights at the polls by upholding a decision that requires a second majority Black District in Alabama.

Harris, 58, has addressed the NAACP’s national convention for two straight years. With the president ramping up his re-election campaign, Harris the first woman, Black and Asian vice president has become a key envoy in the outreach to Black voters, who Biden credits for his 2020 victory.

Harris also hit out at the new Florida curriculum that contends that enslaved people incurred some “personal benefit” from slavery through “developed skills,” adding to denunciations she made earlier this month during a trip to Jacksonville, Florida.