Harris is a Huge Draw at Massive Philadelphia Rally

The Democrats have a chance of a big win in November if this Harris wave turns into a movement. How should leftists and opponents of US imperialism respond?

Video of line of thousands witing to get into Kamala Harris rally Tuesday in Philadelphi (CLICK ON IMage to view NBC video)

A massive rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening at which presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her surprise pick for a vice-presidential running mate had an explosive energy and enthusiasm  that reminded me of a 2020 visit to the same venue by then Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders. 

In both cases, the university had to open a second slightly smaller arena when the Liacouras venue’s 12,000 seats were all filled. An incredibly long winding line of Harris backers hoping to get in were warned by uncharacteristically friendly Philly cops that they still had so far to go they might not make it into even the second arena. That hadn’t happened with the big Sanders rally, where plenty of seats remained empty in the overflow arena. 

Not this time. 

There were several other differences between the two rallies separated by over four years. For one thing, in the Sanders line in 2020 people were mostly young and white. Partly that reflected the fact that Temple’s 30,000 students were enrolled for the fall term and on campus when Sanders, who was riding a wave of support from younger voters, came to speak. This time Temple was on summer session with far fewer students on campus.   But any missing students this time around were  compensated for by throngs of older, gray-haired people, folks who were white, black and skin tones in between. They said they had come from largely black North Philly, from the city’s whiter downtown and South Philly neighborhoods, from the outlying suburbs and even from remoter counties and neighboring New Jersey and Delaware.

These throngs of Harris supporters came despite a heat wave which boosted the temperature on the sidewalks to a muggy 95 degrees. The impact of this heat was all the worse thanks to the slowness of the interminable line and the security checks at the arena entrances. They also ignored warnings of a major thunderstorm which included threatening winds and flooding. 

I conducted several random checks as the line passed by me, counting male and female rally-goers. While my efforts were limited and perhaps not representative of the whole crowd, I  found that on average there were three women for every two men — women of all ages from first-time vote-eligible teenagers to women in their 80s walking with canes. 

Judging from the T-shirts many wore, saying things like “Hands off my body” or Harris’s go-to chant “We’re not (or ain’t) going back!”, it was evident that abortion rights and women’s equality are one of the biggest issues on people’s minds in this election year. As Republican-led states and the rightwing-dominated Supreme Court double down on making termination of a pregnancy virtually illegal and in some cases actually a criminal offense for desperate women attempting to obtain an abortion, that is no small thing. 

It was obvious that most of the people in the line were white, which seemed  surprising to me given Harris’s mixed-race parentage with an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. So I asked a small group of black women who appeared to be in their 30s or 40s why, in a city where blacks are the largest racial group (45% vs. 39% white, with Latino/Latina residents pushing the black percentage into the majority of the city’s population), that the line was largely composed of white people.  One of the younger women in the group noted, “That’s because so many black people work at jobs that they cannot take time off from.”  She added, “I know loads of women and men who wanted to be here but couldn’t get off work. I also know lots of older retired people who wanted to come but have difficulty walking and standing or getting transportation.” 

She makes an excellent point. And there could be other explanations for the  predominance of whites on the line. For example:  standing for hours in a line in dangerous heat is not something one should subject small children to, so younger mothers without the money to pay for child care would be deterred from attending such an event.

I also interviewed white women in the line who said they had driven for one and a half hours and paid tolls and parking garage fees to be at what they considered to be the “historic first rally”  for the first black woman presidential nominee. (Shirley Chisholm, running in the 1972 Democratic primary, was the first black woman to seek the nomination but the nomination went to George McGovern that year.)

A number of women in line—black and white—said “making history” was the reason they decided to brave the heat and the risk of a storm with high winds and heavy rain to be there baking on the sidewalk, even with little hope of getting into either arena.

A lot of excitement on line was about Harris’ vice presidential  pick, which was announced and being reported widely shortly before the rally.  In an interesting opinion published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Aug. 7 a day after the rally, long-time Philadelphia activist  Gwen Snyder, who describes herself as a feminist, a writer and long-time organizer, notes that in selecting 60-year-old white man Walz, a progressive governor, Harris defied predictions that she would pick Pennsylvania’s new and calculatingly centrist Gov. Josh Shapiro. 

An ardent zionist, Shapiro last spring accused the Pro-Palestinian protest tent encampment  at the University of Pennsylvania to be “anti-semitic” and claimed it was “threatening”  to Jewish students on campus (an accusation many Jewish students at the Ivy League school and even participating in the protest, denied). The governor used his authority and influence on state funding to pressure the school’s leadership to call in the cops to bust up the encampment. This was done, with students being arrested and in some cases expelled or suspended for their peaceful protest. 

Shapiro also angered many feminists when he allowed a member of his staff who was being  accused of abusive treatment of a female subordinate  to make a substantial financial settlement offer, including a non-disclosure agreement. 

In rejecting Shapiro, who handily won election as governor with a 14% margin of victory, Harris was going against considerable pressure from big Democratic donors, the wishes of the Democratic Party leadership, and no doubt the powerful America Israel Public Affairs  Committee (AIPAC). 

That’s a good sign. 

As Snyder writes, “As her selection of Walz shows, Harris is a savvy politician. She is not a savior, her first impulse may not always align with progressive values. With enough organized pressure, though, there is a chance that she can be moved. As progressives and organizers we have a vested interest in electing a president we can push to act in the interest of justice.” 

Certainly Snyder is right that Harris is no savior. She has backed President Biden’s fulsome support for Israel in its genocidal war on Hamas, and the concomitant bloody devastation of the captive territory of Gaza (though she has spoken out against the slaughter of civilians including to Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, more forcefully than has Biden). Harris as VP has also uncritically supported Biden’s arms support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. 

In her speech Harris addressed protecting Social Security and Medicare, preserving the Affordable Care Act, protecting the right to vote, the right to a quality education for all, and so on. But where she drew the biggest roar from the assembled crowd was with her call for people to join in shouting “We’re not going back!” The sound probably registered on local seismometers.

I  had decided to go down to observe the rally to see if the sudden wave of support for Harris, who in 2020 had to drop out the primary campaign because of dismally low support and funding, was shifting her campaign from a ordinary series of canned stump speaches to a movement. The astounding explosion of enthusiasm for her in Philadelphia, where things were put together so late in the game that people didn’t learn what time the rally would happen on Tuesday until about three hours before the 5;30 event. No matter though, as, people headed for the venue early to get in line without knowing how long they’d have to wait. 

      After the experience of Biden’s Covid-plagued 2020 campaign which made such events impossible, and the generally low enthusiasm for Democratic presidential candidates in elections going back as far as Michael Dukakis, this was quite extraordinary. In part it could be because after months of a sense of doom among Democrats who were seeing the return of Trump to the White House as almost inevitable, suddenly Harris is offering the hope of a dramatically different outcome. But the phenomenon I was seeing was somehow of another order of magnitude. Could this be a nascent movement in the making? 

It’s still a little soon to be able to say that, but if Harris and Walz elicit similar of responses as they set out to hit all the competitive states in the country (as their first outing in Dearborn, Michigan suggests they are doing), it might start happening. Right now polling still shows considerable residual support for Trump, though Harris keeps flipping his narrow leads in one swing state after another to her advantage, and is now leading narrowly in some national polls. In the 90 days remaining in this election season, if this keeps up and a Harris movement develops, it could end up become a landslide, giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress. 

That would be a far better environment for political activists on the left over the next four years than the one we were looking at under a second Trump administration, during which he is talking about using the military to shut down anti-war or anti-police protests, and deporting millions of immigrants (always a way of silencing that important cohort of the US population, as was done during the 1920s). 

The job for us on the left should be to help this Harris/Walz campaign phenomenon develop while focusing our efforts on making sure as many as possible newly elected members of congress and down-ballot races are left-leaning. Harris and Walz will handle the abortion rights issue and Social Security and Medicare protection but we need to keep the public’s eyes on the War  on Gaza, the incredibly dangerous war in Ukraine, climate change, the obscene wealth gap, and the corrupted reality of our modern government system.

They won’t do that. Their job is to protect the US capitalist system and to support US empire with a massive military.

That’s why we also need to begin now, or at least when the election is over, working to build a mass worker-based socialist third party. We can’t just keep doing what the left always does, voting for lesser evil or for small protest parties or independent candidates that vanish from consciousness after the election season.