Harris to address the venue where Trump questioned her Black identity
Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to sit for a rare interview with reporters from the National Association of Black Journalists on Tuesday, part of an effort to court Black voters and present a contrast with former president Donald Trump after his contentious sit-down with the group in July.
The conversation will be Harris’s first extended engagement with a panel of journalists since launching her campaign nearly two months ago, raising the stakes for the vice president’s campaign as early voting begins in several key states.
Harris will visit Philadelphia for the interview, returning to the critical city one week after her debate against Trump. Boosting Black turnout in swing-state cities such as Philadelphia is a key part of Harris’s strategy, and her campaign announced a mobilization effort Tuesday aimed at engaging young people and voters of color.
The combined efforts highlight how Harris is turning to Democrats’ most loyal constituency even as she downplays issues of race in her own rhetoric, said Ashley Etienne, a former communications director for Harris who also worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
“Her turnout among Black voters has to match, if not exceed, Obama,” Etienne said. “So she has got to supercharge Black engagement and turnout for sure.”
Harris has largely eschewed interviews with journalists since launching her presidential campaign July 21, instead preferring campaign rallies and other settings where she has stuck to scripted remarks. The approach had led Trump’s campaign to suggest that she was not capable of answering questions or speaking extemporaneously. Harris silenced some of those critiques with a solid performance at last week’s debate, though Trump’s allies still argue that unscripted events tend to expose her limitations.
During his own appearance at NABJ’s conference in Chicago two months ago, Trump caused an uproar by falsely claiming that Harris — the child of an Indian mother and Jamaican father — had exclusively embraced her Indian heritage.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris, who attended a historically Black university, has long embraced her Black identity. Still, she has opted against making her race a central part of her presidential campaign, dismissing Trump’s comments as the “same old show” but otherwise largely ignoring them.
“Next question,” she said when asked about Trump’s remarks in a CNN interview last month.
Tuesday’s conversation could push Harris to speak more clearly about race, including any plans she has to address the racial wealth gap, address bias in the criminal justice system and bring down the cost of living for struggling families.
It could also surface some of the many issues on which Harris has shifted her position over the past five years. Harris previously entertained the idea of reparations for descendants of the enslaved, backed legalizing marijuana at the federal level and expressed an openness for reallocating some resources away from policing toward other services in certain situations. Her campaign has disavowed some of her past positions, but her current stance on several issues remains unclear.
The conversation with NABJ journalists will also be the first time Harris is speaking at length in public since a potential assassination attempt against Trump at his Florida golf club Sunday.
Trump has continued to assert, without evidence, that the “rhetoric” of Harris and other Democrats has put his life in danger. The White House and Harris’s campaign have condemned political violence and issued statements saying they are glad Trump was not harmed.
“Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” Trump wrote Monday in a lengthy social media post.
Harris may also have an opportunity to speak about Trump’s attacks on immigrant communities, particularly Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have spent recent weeks repeating baseless claims that Haitians in Springfield are stealing and eating pets in the town.
Officials in the town have said there is no basis for those claims. In recent days, schools and government buildings in Springfield have been targeted by threats of violence, in some cases requiring them to be temporarily closed.
Harris will be interviewed by Eugene Daniels of Politico, Tonya Mosley of NPR and Gerren Gaynor of TheGrio.
The event is being co-hosted by WHYY in Philadelphia, and the audience will include working journalists as well as students from local historically Black colleges and universities.