Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning in Philadelphia on Sunday, described a strong choice voters face in the presidential election, inviting them to visualize her in the Oval Office or her opponent, Donald Trump, “stewing over his enemies list.”
Speaking to reporters after an appearance at a Black church in West Philadelphia, Harris repeated an argument she has been making of late that, in the end, the election comes down to a binary choice between two candidates with vastly different conceptions of presidential power and responsibilities .
“Just imagine the Oval Office on January 20,” she said, invoking the date that the next president will be inaugurated. “It’s going to be one of two people. “It’s going to be Donald Trump or me.”
If voters pick Trump, they’ll be getting a president who is “full of grievance,” she added. “He is full of dark language that is about retribution and revenge. And so, the American people have a choice. It’s either going to be that or it will be me there, focused on my to-do list.”
Harris is spending most of the day campaigning in Philadelphia, the biggest Democratic stronghold in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania — which could end up deciding the presidential election.
She visited a barber shop in West Philadelphia to speak with a group of young Black men, a constituency that her campaign has been working hard to energize. Later in the day, she will stop at a local bookstore, a Puerto Rican restaurant, and then attend a community rally at a youth basketball facility, her campaign said.
At the barber shop, she talked about the importance of Black teachers in classrooms.
“You know that the statistics are, if a Black child has a Black teacher by the end of third grade, they’re like 13% more likely, more likely to go to college,” Harris said. “If they have had two black teachers, by third grade, something like 30% more likely.”
The trip is her 14th visit to Pennsylvania since she entered the race in July and coincides with a massive get-out-the-vote operation that her campaign has launched.
With 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is a must-win proposition for Harris’s campaign. Along with Michigan and Wisconsin, the state is part of the “Blue Wall” that Democrats have traditionally relied on to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes. Trump won the state in 2016 in his race against Hillary Clinton, but lost it to Joe Biden four years later.
“Philadelphia is a very important part of our path to victory and it is the reason I’m spending time here and have been spending time here,” Harris told reporters.
Nnamdi Egwuonwu contributed.