BLADE EXCLUSIVE: Vice President Kamala Harris details what’s at stake in November
Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with the Washington Blade by phone on Monday for an exclusive interview in which she outlined the stakes of November’s election for LGBTQ communities and all Americans who are now facing “a profound, unapologetic, and intentional movement to restrict rights.” The conversation comes at the outset of the Biden-Harris campaign’s roll-out of an aggressive organizing and paid media push for Pride month, which will feature appearances at more than 200 events in June as part of an effort to mobilize LGBTQ and “equality voters” in key battleground states.
Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents in a 2022 poll by the Human Rights Campaign said they consider LGBTQ equality a “make or break” issue, and queer Americans, who comprise a larger share of the electorate than ever before, are considered critical for the president and vice president’s reelection effort.
Harris stressed that these constituents are not monolithic. “What is important to me,” she said, “is that I am in the community where those voters may be, in addition to every other community where I’m listening to their priorities and needs and then being responsive to that.” America’s first woman, first Black, and first South Asian vice president, Harris, 59, has broken barriers throughout her career in public service, beginning with her election as San Francisco district attorney in 2003, and then as California attorney general in 2010 and U.S.
senator for California in 2016. Harris has also been credited with playing a major role in the establishment and expansion of rights and protections for LGBTQ communities at the local, state, and federal levels over the past two decades.
