Her message has been consistent, but Kamala Harris has in the closing days of the presidential race dropped two notable words from her stump speech: Donald Trump.
The former president’s name was again absent from the vice president’s speeches on Monday night in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where she promised voters a clean break from the discord of the Trump era in American politics.
“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division,” Harris said in her campaign finale. “We are done with that. We’re done. We’re exhausted with it.”
The vice president had herself seemingly tired of discussing Trump – a stark rhetorical pivot for a candidate who in previous versions of her stump speech had said “Donald Trump” so often that his campaign made a compilation video they screened at his own rallies.
In the final speeches of her short but dramatic, 107-day campaign, Harris again offered voters the promise of a kinder, more compassionate country. Trump’s “enemies list,” she insisted, was poised to be supplanted by her “to-do list.” Speaking from the “Rocky” steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she ticked off policy proposals, headlined by an ambitious plan to expand home health care for seniors, and gave a neatly polished review of her biography, but mostly focused on vibes.
Bad ones, in particular, that she promised to excise.
“America is ready for a fresh start,” Harris said. “Ready for a new way forward where we see our fellow American, not as an enemy, but as a neighbor.”
The promise of a “new generation of leadership” has been threaded throughout her campaign, usually implied but, as Election Day neared, delivered in increasingly explicit terms. Supporters gathered earlier in the night at the Carrie Blast Furnaces, a former home to US Steel, sounded ready to take her up on the offer. It was one of the driving forces of her convention speech this summer in Chicago and at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, last week, where she delivered one of about a dozen closing arguments – most of them in battleground states – in the final throes of the campaign.
“It can be easy to forget a simple truth,” Harris said in Washington. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
The way it is, she said in Pittsburgh, is not so good.
“So much about these last several years has been about trying to make people point their fingers at each other,” Harris said in Pittsburgh, “to have Americans point their fingers at each other, to try and make people feel alone or feel small.”
President Joe Biden’s name was, like Trump’s, missing from Harris’ speeches. But her point was clear enough. Even after four years out of the Oval Office, Trump’s capture of the American political narrative – and tone – remains firmly in place.
The alternative, she argued on Monday and throughout the campaign, was within reach. “The promise of America,” Harris said, had brought her to this moment and, addressing women, formed a generation “who refuse to accept a future without reproductive freedom.”
“I see it,” she added, “in Republicans who have never voted for a Democrat before, but who put the Constitution of the United States above party.”
Harris’ speech in Philadelphia, where she was introduced by Oprah Winfrey, concluded a virtual mega-rally with live video from campaign events across seven battleground states airing during breaks in the program. The celebrity support, though, was concentrated in must-win Pennsylvania’s biggest city.
Ricky Martin performed, as did The Roots and Lady Gaga, who sang “God Bless America” to start and ended the rally with her 2011 hit, “The Edge of Glory.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker also addressed a crowd that watched Gov. Tim Walz, the vice presidential nominee, follow Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Detroit, where he delivered a pointed message to male voters.
“I want you to think about the women in your life that you love,” he said. “Their lives are at stake in this election.”
Winfrey, in Philadelphia, described a similarly dire outcome if Trump prevailed on Tuesday.
“If we don’t show up tomorrow,” she said, “it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”
