Attending her first fundraiser as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Harris urged support for her new campaign, telling a crowd of more than 800 people in Massachusetts, “We are the underdogs.”
“There’s a fight ahead and we’re the underdogs,” she said, according to National Public Radio. “But this is a people-led campaign and we have momentum.”
According to the Associated Press, Harris is expected to raise more than $1.4 million from the fundraiser, which was originally scheduled to raise closer to $400,000 when Biden was still the Democratic presidential nominee.
According to the Associated Press, musician James Taylor and other heavyweights of the Massachusetts Democratic Party were in attendance, including state Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, former Gov. Deval Patrick and Rep. Richard Neal.
Harris has raised more than $120 million since she was nominated as the presumptive nominee earlier this week. In her first 24 hours as a 2024 presidential candidate, she raised more than $81 million, a record.
Harris attended a fundraiser in Massachusetts, and former President Trump traveled around the country to speak at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville and a rally in Minnesota, calling Harris a “radical leftist lunatic” who would be “worse than Biden.”
Trump specifically singled out Harris as responsible for “destroying San Francisco” when she was district attorney, and said she wanted to “defund the police.”
“You’ve probably noticed that Donald Trump is telling outrageous lies about my record,” Harris said.
During the fundraising, Harris also said the former president wanted to take the country back.
“Make no mistake, this campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump,” Harris said. “As we fight to move our country forward, Donald Trump is trying to take our country back.”
“I’ve dealt with people like that my entire career,” she added. “So in this campaign, and I’m being serious about it, I will proudly stand with his record at any time.”
She also specifically criticized vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who has made negative headlines this week for his views on childlessness and women’s rights.
“Some of the things he and his running mate say are just weird,” she said. “That’s the box you put them in, right?”
Harris was repeating a line of attack first leveled by Harris’s potential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, who called Trump and his running mate “bizarre.”
Her campaign took an attack line, issuing press releases all week opposing the Trump campaign and claiming that Trump felt “buyer’s remorse” over choosing Vance as his running mate.
