By MILWAUKEE — Kamala Harris heads to Milwaukee on Tuesday afternoon for her first major campaign event as the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, hours after she secured the support of enough delegates to clinch that nomination next month.
Harris is traveling to the critical swing state of Wisconsin two days after President Biden withdrew from the race and backed her — setting off a whirlwind chain of events that quickly transformed the political landscape.
In short order after Biden’s endorsement, the Biden campaign had changed its name to “Harris for President.” By Monday night, she had raised a stunning $100 million from more than 1.1 million unique donors, according to aides, and recruited 58,000 new volunteers. The transition culminated with her Monday night appearance at the campaign’s Wilmington, Del., headquarters, where Biden called in before she spoke. He urged his former staffers to “embrace her” and keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
“The name has changed at the top of the ticket, but the mission hasn’t changed at all,” Biden said. “Trump is still a danger to the community. He’s a danger to the nation.”
Harris had enough pledges from delegates by late Monday to ensure her the nomination, according to a survey of delegates by the Associated Press. In a statement, Harris said she made it clear that she intends to earn the nomination and to “unite our party, unite the nation and defeat Donald Trump in November.”
“I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee, and as a daughter of California, I am proud that my home state’s delegation helped put our campaign over the top,” she said.
In another move that is likely to aid Harris’s quest, Democratic leaders outlined a process for selecting a presidential nominee that would conclude by Aug. 7, if not earlier. Party officials say they will not allow an “in-person contested convention” when delegates start gathering in Chicago on Aug. 19, citing ballot access deadlines, potential legal challenges by the GOP and the time needed to vet a vice-presidential candidate.
Speaking to her campaign aides in Wilmington, Harris previewed her case against Trump. She noted that as a former prosecutor who served as the San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney general, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds,” including “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers” and “cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”
“Hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to cheers, alluding to the former president’s continued efforts to fight several criminal indictments and his conviction on 34 felony counts in a hush money trial in New York. “In this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”
At rallies Monday in Middletown, Ohio, and Radford, Va., Trump’s running mate went after Harris personally and politically.
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance first questioned her patriotism — as Republicans often did with former first lady Michelle Obama — in an attack sure to resonate with the party’s conservative base.
“She talks about the history of this country, not with appreciation but with condemnation,” Vance said. “If you want to lead this country, you should feel a sense of gratitude. And I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Kamala Harris.”
He later derided Biden as a “quitter” and Harris as “a million times worse” for the role she has served in the administration. “She signed up for every single one of Joe Biden’s failures, and she lied about his mental capacity to serve as president,” he said.
In Milwaukee — the same city where Republicans held their national convention this month — Harris plans to highlight the plans outlined in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency that he has tried to disavow. She also will stress Trump’s support for overturning Roe v. Wade and a constitutional right to abortion, his proposals for tax cuts that primarily benefit wealthy Americans and the threat that Democrats believe Trump and Republicans pose to Social Security and Medicare.
Harris’s campaign aides note that she will arrive in Wisconsin with the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers, Sen. Tammy Baldwin and every major elected Democratic leader in the state. The Wisconsin Democratic Party officially endorsed her Monday as the Democratic nominee, saying she had the support of more than 90 percent of state delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
The campaign already counts 48 coordinated offices throughout the state and 160 staffers on the ground.
Baldwin, who is running for reelection in one of the closest races in the country, will travel with Harris from Washington. She has described her candidacy for president as “a new beginning for our party.”
Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, but Biden flipped it back to blue in 2020, and his campaign leadership argued that wins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were the clearest path to victory in the electoral college this fall.
In recent public polling, however, the president trailed Trump here. An AARP poll this month found Biden down six points to Trump in a five-way race that included third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein. A Times/Say24 poll released last week found Biden down five points in the state in a five-way race.
There has been little polling in Wisconsin since Harris became the front-runner for the nomination. A CBS News poll released Monday found that 45 percent of Democratic registered voters believe their chances against Trump are better without Biden and that 83 percent approved of his decision to step aside.
A Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss the mood shift since Biden’s announcement, said “people are super fired up.” What had been a grim atmosphere is now an energized one: “The vibes three days ago were awful, and the vibes yesterday were phenomenal.”
Michael Scherer contributed to this report.