Vice President Kamala Harris declared herself and her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “joyful warriors” against convicted felon Donald Trump on August 7 as they spent their first full day campaigning together across the Midwest.
They got an unusual glimpse of how hotly contested the region will be when they overlapped on a Wisconsin tarmac with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
The Democrats visited Wisconsin and Michigan, hoping to shore up support among the younger, diverse, labor-friendly voters who were instrumental in helping President Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
Harris told the day’s first rally in Eau Claire, “As Tim Walz likes to point out, we are joyful warriors.” Contributing to that feeling, the Harris campaign said it had raised $36 million in the first 24 hours after she announced Walz as her running mate.
The vice president said the pair look on the future with optimism, unlike former President Donald Trump whom she accused of being stuck in the past and preferring a confrontational style of politics — even as she criticized her opponent herself.
“Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again have the chance to sit behind the seal of the United States,” Harris said, her voice rising amid applause from a crowd her campaign said numbered more than 12,000.
Harris also leaned into the theme of her campaign, “freedom,” elevating her voice in a new way as she becomes more comfortable delivering it.
Especially emphatic in the outdoor event in Eau Claire, Harris called for “Freedom of who you love openly with pride. Freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body!”
“Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in America?” Harris shouted in closing. “And are we ready to fight for it?”
Harris left the stage to the sounds of her new campaign anthem, “Freedom,” by Beyoncé.
The dueling schedules overlapped enough that while Harris was still greeting a group of Girl Scouts who came to see her arrive at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Wisconsin, Vance’s campaign plane landed nearby and was taxiing in the distance.
Harris posed for a group picture with the girls around the same time Vance was deplaning, and he began walking over to Air Force Two, trailed by his security detail.
The vice president eventually climbed into her motorcade, and it pulled away before they could interact. Still, that the pair came so close to doing so on a tarmac was unusual given the carefully scripted nature of campaign schedules.
“I just wanted to check out my future plane,” Vance later told reporters, meaning that he would travel on Air Force Two should he and Trump be elected in November. He also criticized Harris for not taking questions from reporters, though she sometimes answers shouted questions while boarding or leaving her plane for campaign stops.
Vance later told the crowd at his Eau Claire event, “We actually just saw the vice president’s plane. If those people want to call me weird I call it a badge of honor,” Vance said, responding to a moniker Walz used to describe him that made the Minnesota governor notable online in the days before Harris tapped him as her running mate.
Addressing the Democrats’ Wisconsin rally ahead of Harris, Walz had some critical words for Vance but trained most of his sharpest words on Trump, saying the former president “mocks our laws, he sows chaos and division amongst the people and that’s to say nothing of the job he did as president.”
Democratic enthusiasm has surged since Harris announced her candidacy and picked Walz as her running mate.
“We love Joe. Joe has been an incredible president, but he just isn’t the same messenger. And sometimes you need a better messenger,” said Dan Miller, from Pelican Lake, Wisconsin, who attended the Walz-Harris rally. “And that’s Kamala.”
