Black women for Harris. White women for Harris. White men for Harris. Disabled voters for Harris. Cat ladies for Harris.
Kamala Harris has launched her presidential campaign with a bang and has received support from various identity groups. They are gathering support, raising funds, gathering volunteers. Many people are reminded of Obama’s campaign in 2008.
But this time is different. Republicans, led by Donald Trump, have attacked the intent of identity politics. This time, the presidential campaign of the first Asian-American to be nominated for president by a majority party in the US has brought identity politics to the fore.
It started the night President Joe Biden ended his bid for re-election. He endorsed his running mate, Kamala Harris. That night, Black women gathered on a Zoom call raised $1 million for the Harris campaign.
Within hours, Black men rallied in support of Harris and raised similar amounts of money.
Then white women came in. This mobilization led to the largest Zoom call in history, raising over $8.5 million in less than a day.
‘White Dudes for Harris’ is the latest in a series of Zoom gatherings To support the Vice President.
Voters are thrilled to see Harris unite behind them in the final months before the election.
This identity-based consolidation makes one thing clear: People across America see a reflection of their own identity in Kamala Harris.
The Zoom calls raised more than $10 million for Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Black women came in support of Harris
A Zoom meeting in support of Kamala Harris in 2020 drew just 90 people. On July 21, 90,000 Black women and their allies came online to support Harris’ presidential campaign.
Zoom allows 1,000 participants at a time, but an executive had to step in to increase the capacity to 40,000, said Amy Allison, an active member of #WinWithBlackWomen.
“It was thrilling,” he said.
“It wasn’t chaos. There was an infrastructure in place among Black women to be able to step up and meet that moment. And I think that’s the difference that Kamala Harris is bringing to the race.”
This was the resurgence of the campaign. The women discussed the next course of action, AP reported.
“We are together. We are beautiful, we are strong, we are capable. We are ready. We have incredible power in this group,” said Ellison, who founded She the People to support women of color in politics.
These women are now more hopeful.
“People were so hungry for that sense of community and hope,” he said.
Black Men for Harris
On July 22, Black men showed their support for Harris in an online streaming event co-hosted by #WinWithBlackMen, a network of Black men’s groups. The AP reported that thousands of Black men showed their support for Harris here.
The event also featured speeches from black leaders in elected positions in the business and civil rights communities.
More than 53,000 people registered for the online Zoom call, according to Roland Martin, a Black media worker who moderated the Zoom call event.
It raised a total of $4 million.
Black voters were also crucial to Biden’s victory in the 2020 U.S. election.
“It wasn’t just policy folks or legislative folks or elected officials. It was everywhere. Everybody came in with their toolbox and asked, OK, so how can we contribute?” Angelique Roche, a writer and consultant, told the AP, who said the Zoom call was powerful.
“These were different generations, different levels of education, different jobs, different backgrounds, different industries, all coming together and saying we’re ready, we’re in this,” he said.
‘White women: answer the call’
‘White Women: Answer the Call’ was a Zoom call inspired by Black women. ‘White Women for Harris’ involved 164,000 white women. Recorded the largest zoom meeting in history In less than two hours, $2 million was raised, The Guardian reports.
The event was organized by gun control activist Shannon Watts. Actor Connie Britton, former American football star Megan Rapinoe, US House of Representatives Lizzie Fletcher and singer Pink attended the event.
In total, Watts tweeted, $8 million was raised in less than a day.
This is surprising because in 2016 exit polls found that 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump. He was running against a woman, Hillary Clinton. Again in 2020, more women voted for Donald Trump.
According to the Center for American Women & Politics at Rutgers University, “a majority of white women have voted for the Republican candidate since the 2000 presidential election, when the white women’s vote was roughly evenly split between Democrat Al Gore and Republican winner George W. Bush.”
Watts hopes history doesn’t repeat itself.
“Fellow white women: we can fix this and we must fix this, and it starts with mobilizing as Black women,” Watts wrote on Instagram ahead of the call.
“White women voting for Republicans, even when it appears to be against their best interests, is a complex phenomenon influenced by privilege, systemic racism and sexism, religious affiliation, and, of course, patriarchy,” she wrote in a Substack post.
‘White People for Harris’
‘White People for Harris’ Over 180,000 participants attended Apart from the participants, it also included Hollywood superstars like Mark Ruffalo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sean Astin, Mark Hamill and Josh Gad.
Actor Jeff Bridges, who played ‘The Dude’ in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, also made an unexpected appearance on the call.
He was heard saying, “I’m white, I’m a man, and I’m here for Harris.”
Also in attendance were top Democratic officials, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.
Important issues were discussed in this call and light-hearted satire was also made on Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Governor Walz, Harris’s potential running mate, said this is the perfect opportunity for white men to show that Trump does not represent all white men.
Actor Josh Gad said the call for ‘White Dudes for Harris’ was a contrast to the testosterone-heavy Republican National Convention. “They have Kid Rock, Kevin Sorbo and a dolphin fan, and we have the Hulk, Samwise Gamzee, Luke Skywalker and Mayor Pete on Zoom,” he said.
Governor Pritzker joked about joining a call called “Couches Against Trump, known as CATS,” a reference to Vance’s attack on Harris about “childless cat ladies.”
There are many identity groups being formed in America in support of Harris. But there is no one like the Cat Ladies for Harris.
‘Cat Ladies for Harris’
Many pet lovers and self-described ‘cat ladies’ also showed support for Harris in the Zoom call. The call was a response to Trump’s vice president JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment about Harris, The Guardian reported.
The meeting began with the presentation of pictures of pets. Nancy Pelosi was a surprise guest on this call. She told the audience that the purpose of the call was to show support for women’s freedom so that they can “love as they want and live as they want”.
“When J.D. Vance expressed his opinion on our freedoms, we decided the cat ladies were going to strike back,” Pelosi said. “They didn’t realize what an opportunity they were giving us and what they would do.”
The call was organised by a group called Pet Lovers for Kamla.
Initially this group was created only for cat lovers, but dog lovers also showed solidarity in it.
On the call, the women discussed social media posts, texts and volunteering for Harris. They also raised money for Harris’ political campaign.
Now that Harris has so many identity groups, she is set to give a tough fight to Donald Trump in the US elections. It seems that Americans have started paying attention to Kamala Harris.
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