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Harris traveled to Pittsfield on Saturday where she was expected to raise more than $1.4 million, her campaign announced.
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a campaign event in Pittsfield, Mass., Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
By ZEKE MILLER, Associated Press
July 28, 2024 | 9:51 AM
Vice President Kamala Harris used her first fundraiser since becoming the Democrats’ likely White House nominee to excoriate the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as determined to roll back Americans’ freedoms.
Harris traveled to Pittsfield on Saturday where she was expected to raise more than $1.4 million, her campaign announced, from an audience of hundreds at the Colonial Theatre. That would be $1 million-plus more than the original goal set for the event before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a campaign event in Pittsfield, Mass., Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
She told an excited group of supporters that she entered the race as an “underdog,” while expressing confidence that her surging campaign could defeat Trump.
“I will fight to move our nation forward,” Harris said. “Donald Trump intends to take our country backwards.”
Harris also poked at Trump, and his running mate Sen. JD Vance, for lobbing peculiar attacks at her and other Democrats. The vice president appeared to be alluding to a 2021 interview with Vance in which he slammed some prominent Democrats without biological children, including Harris, as “childless cat ladies” with “no direct stake” in America.
“You may have noticed Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record and some of what he and his running mate are saying, it is just plain weird,” Harris said. “I mean that’s the box you put that in, right?”
Harris’ branding the Republican ticket as “weird” appears to be part of a concerted effort by her campaign to spotlight some of Trump and Vance’s rhetoric as questionable. Earlier this week, the Harris campaign on the social media site X called Vance “weird and creepy” for some of his stances on women’s reproductive rights. Trump, meanwhile, has raised the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in stump speeches.
Supports hold signs before Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to deliver remarks at a campaign event in Pittsfield, Mass., Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
“These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who is on Harris’ shortlist for vice president, said in an MSNBC interview earlier this week. “They’re running for He-man women-haters club or something.”
Supporters for the fundraiser included musician James Taylor and many of the state’s Democratic heavyweights, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, former Gov. Deval Patrick and Rep. Richie Neal.
Harris took in more than $100 million in donations in the first 48 hours after Biden quit the race,