Former Vice President Kamala Harris urged voters to help Democrats take control of Congress in the midterm elections and warned that voting rights could be imperiled under President Donald Trump at a book tour stop in Oakland on Tuesday.
Harris said she is worried about voters’ rights and access to the ballot. She fears the Supreme Court will soon gut the Voting Rights Act and its protections against racial discrimination, and that a Trump-backed bill in Congress to sharply curtail access to voting will disenfranchise millions.
“These midterms coming up are pretty much the only way we’re going to stop the madness,” Harris said. She said Trump and his administration are acting “without guard rails.”
The Tuesday evening chat, hosted by Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, was Harris’ second stop in the Bay Area since “107 Days” published in September. But the most recent visit inside the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts was anchored in the moment, rather than rehashing Harris’ failed presidential campaign that is chronicled in the memoir.
At times, Harris highlighted how the spirit of Bay Area activism informed her upbringing and how she hoped that spirit would continue among the young leaders in the crowd. She even made a pitch to lower the voting age to 16.
“Because when we ask them to understand and think about what they want for their future, they will know they have some power to decide,” she said.
Harris has called the book tour her “freedom tour” because she said it’s the first time she’s been able to speak openly without being tied to an office or campaign. Harris also described what she called a “shadow tour” she’s taken across the country – without press or cameras – to meet Americans where they are.
“Especially after the election, I felt a deep need to listen,” Harris said.
On Tuesday, that meant a visit to an East Oakland community center where she sat in on a class teaching tweens how to pitch entrepreneurial ideas. During a recent visit to Jackson, Mississippi, she said she followed a single mother as she shopped in a discount grocery store on a budget of $150 for four people. The cart was creaky. The prices had gone up, Harris recalled.
“Tariffs,” she said, a clear jab at Trump.
The mother had to prioritize buying bottled water because Jackson residents can’t rely on the city’s pipes to carry clean water after decades of infrastructural neglect. At times, it’s brown.
“Now, this is America,” she said.
Now, that same mother faces cuts to her food stamps, Harris said.
Simon’s commentary often mirrored Harris’ points. She, too, took shots at the administration.
“I had the impression things would be difficult,” Simon said, “but even with that, I don’t think we understood that we’d have a president who took away a trillion dollars in Medicare and Medicaid.”
Simon described the government being stripped down “to the bones in the last nine months.” She posed to Harris: “What is the call?”
Harris reiterated her call to elect Democrats in the midterm elections, but also warned voters not to get too nostalgic about the past.
“Even before all this, the system wasn’t working for a lot of people,” she said.
This article originally published at Kamala Harris advocates lowering the voting age to 16 at Oakland event.