Harris in Phoenix, Tucson: ‘Trump failed. He failed us’
Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Wednesday made a final appeal to Arizona voters who have yet to cast their ballots, emphasizing the “clear contrast” between this year’s Republican and Democratic tickets during back-to-back events in Phoenix and Tucson.
The trip marked Harris’ second visit to the crucial battleground state this month and overlapped with the seventh visit of Republican President Donald Trump, who is seeking reelection. Unlike the Trump campaign, Harris and Demo
cratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have shied away from large rallies, instead hosting more intimate events with community leaders, union members and business owners.
That pattern held Wednesday: Harris began her Tucson visit by meeting with five Latina businesswomen at La Chaiteria, a Mexican restaurant that recently opened in one of Tucson’s historically Latino neighborhoods.
Though Pima County has long been reliable for Democrats, the Biden campaign believes an Arizona win will require boosted participation among Tucson-area voters. Harris’ visit was meant to more broadly energize Tucson’s Latino population, campaign officials said.
As Harris arrived at La Chaiteria, owner Wendy Garcia greeted her alongside local artist Alejandra Trujillo, who’d painted a mural at the site depicting civil rights icon Martin Luther King and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo joined in hands and raising them in the air.
“This was an idea we had to promote the union and support of Latinos and Afro-Americans to just be together and support the community,” Trujillo told Harris after the senator asked about her inspiration behind the mural.
After meeting with Garcia and four other business leaders, Harris stepped out of the restaurant and addressed reporters and a crowd of supporters that had gathered outside. She praised the women for forging ahead with their businesses despite the many obstacles they’d faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and talked up the $150 billion plan she and Biden drafted to invest in small and minority-owned businesses such as La Chaiteria.
“There’s so much innovation. There’s so much excitement about the work that they are doing. But they need access to capital,” Harris said.
The senator’s remarks were at times drowned out by honking from a caravan of Trump supporters who drove by the restaurant flying “Trump 2020” campaign flags. Harris was undeterred.
After concluding her remarks, she waved to supporters and used her fingers to make the number six — the number of days until the election — as they cheered. Harris remained well over 6 feet away from the small crowd, a nod to the care the Biden campaign has taken to emphasize that they are following social distancing guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Precautions also were in place at Harris’ next scheduled event, a drive-in rally held at Pima Community College’s West campus. By the time Harris took the outdoor stage there, at about 12:30 p.m., about100 cars had gathered for the pandemic-friendly drive-in rally.
Other prominent Democrats from the Tucson area, such as Reps. Raul Grijalva and Ann Kirkpatrick, warmed up the crowd. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords introduced her husband, Mark Kelly, who is challenging U.S. Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz.
Mayor Regina Romero, the first Latina to lead Tucson, introduced Harris, but not before taking her own jabs at Trump over what she called his “wall of hate” being constructed south of Tucson along the Arizona-Mexico border in protected desert wilderness and ancestral tribal lands.
Harris didn’t pull any punches, either, beginning her speech with a takedown of President Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19.
“Donald Trump failed. He failed us,” she said, criticizing Trump’s decision to downplay the seriousness of the virus earlier this year and railing against his administration’s attempts to get the Affordable Care Act repealed. “He failed
the American people.”
Harris contrasted Trump’s health care philosophy with Biden’s, working to paint the Democratic Party as a guardian of health care access for Americans with low earnings and pre-existing conditions.
At one point, she asked attendees to honk if they knew anyone with such a condition, rattling off a few examples such as diabetes and breast cancer. The honking was deafening.
Harris contrasted Trump and Biden’s economic strategies: While Biden evaluates the economy by looking at how the average American is doing, she said, Trump looks to the stock market.
She repeated Biden’s vows to repeal a Trump-sanctioned tax cut for the wealthy and invest the funds in infrastructure.
Harris devoted the final portion of her remarks to the importance of voting, highlighting America’s “long history of powerful folks trying to make it difficult for other folks to vote.”
“They know that when we vote, things change,” she said of historically marginalized groups. “Our democracy is always going to be as strong as our willingness to fight for it … and that means everyone of us voting.”
Harris took a quick flight to Phoenix, where she met with Black community leaders ahead of another drive-in rally.
As she soon as she stepped off the plane, she was asked about protests against police brutality and particularly the killing of Walter Wallace in Philadelphia.
“Part of the reason that people are marching in the streets is that there has not been the level of attention, especially recently over the last few years, that is necessary from the president of the United States. And Joe’s committed to that,” she told reporters.
Harris went on to call for creating a national registry of police officers who break the law so they don’t get fired in one community and move on to another. She also called for national standards on use of force, decriminalizing marijuana and expunging the records of people of convicted of marijuana offenses.
The senator from California made the same argument to a socially distanced gathering of a few dozen supporters inside the Van Buren in downtown Phoenix. But she also threw open the floor to a range of issues, from access to capital in communities of color to COVID-19.
Harris noted that people of color have been more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and to die from it and businesses owned by people of color affected by the economic recession the pandemic has wrought are more likely to face barriers accessing capital.
The country’s recovery won’t be “like flipping a light switch,” she warned.
Harris said that it must be “taking, again, into account racial disparities, understanding we have to do this in a way that’s equitable.”
Later, at a drive-in rally across from Papago Park, Harris took the stage at dusk with singer Alicia Keys, her song “Girl on Fire” blaring as the crowd honked its horns.
In a race when so many voters are simply fatigued by politics and just about everything else, the two hit tried to hit an energizing tone in the election’s last days.
“Get all up in your feelings of civic pride,” Keys told the crowd as she urged them to vote.
When Harris spoke afterward, her remarks largely mirrored those she’d delivered in Tucson earlier in the day.
Highlighting the impact of the dual public health and economic crises affecting Arizona, she again described the election as a “clear choice … about where we go from here.”
“Arizona has a longstanding reputation for no BS,” she said. “Just get the job done.”