SOMERSWORTH, N.H. — California Senator Kamala Harris made her first visit to New Hampshire since May on Sunday, when she hosted a town hall with an overflow crowd of more than 900 people at the public high school in Somersworth, New Hampshire.
At the rally, her second event of the day after a large house party in the Lakes Region, Harris vowed to "prosecute the case against four more years of Donald Trump," a challenge that she said would take a prosecutor like herself. She claimed that "he has betrayed the people he promised to help" and sharply criticized his signature tax bill and his child detention policy at the border. "There's quite a rap sheet," she said. "Let's look at the evidence."
She opened her remarks by telling the audience "I fully intend to win this election" to a loud round of applause and later explained how she would reach out to Trump's base in response to the first question of the afternoon. She said talking about "the things that wake us up in the middle of the night, the 3 a.m. thought" would help her campaign bridge partisan divides. "The vast majority of us, when we wake up thinking that thought, it is never through the lens of the party we voted for in the last election," she said.
The evidence-based, non-partisan rhetoric from Harris helped the former California Attorney General and San Francisco District Attorney position herself as a unifying candidate for several voters in attendance.
Charles Knox of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an undecided voter who has seen eight or nine of the 2020 candidates, ranked Harris in his top three. He said that he was concerned about electability and liked that Harris was "not on the hard left." He explained that he always likes to observe the body language of the candidates and came away from the town hall impressed with Harris.
"She's a person with compassion, empathy for others," Knox said. "She's bright, of course. She has a sense of humor. She's not super serious. She seems to have fun."
Kate Brogan of Portland, Maine, who attended because her son Jack is "a big Kamala Harris fan," saw the California Senator's fun-loving personality up close when Harris and her son shared a moment after the speech over his blue-and-yellow Golden State Warriors jersey. Brogan said she wanted a change from "the politics of division these days" and appreciated the Harris campaign's unifying message. "It was just nice to hear her talking about U.S. values," she said.
The nearly half-an-hour question-and-answer session, one of the longest for any top-tier candidate, allowed Harris to expound upon her values in the context of sometimes unconventional policy questions.
One questioner, an atheist, asked Harris what she would do to make the Pledge of Allegiance, which includes a reference to God, "more accepting." While she acknowledged the person's right not to pledge allegiance to the flag, Harris said that she felt differently. "I love pledging allegiance to the flag," she said.
Other questions sought to clarify her position on specific issues. She appeared to commit to gender parity in her cabinet after a questioner directly asked if she would follow the example of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "Yes, and I will also tell you — yes," she said to a round of applause.
She declined however to comment on Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's no-first-use of nuclear weapons policy, a significant departure from decades of American foreign policy. "I've not reviewed her bill so I will not speak to that," Harris said.
The balancing act from Harris reflected the deliberate approach of her campaign. While she described her signature policy proposal, a $6,000 tax credit for families making less than $100,000 a year, as "the most significant middle-class tax cut we have had in generations," she made sure to explain how she was going to pay for it. "On day one, we're going to repeal that tax bill," she said.
The promise to replace President Donald Trump's corporate tax cut with a middle-class tax cut was the beginning of a minutes-long riff for Harris. She repeated the line "in the America we believe in" several times, as she drove towards the end of her speech by touching on issues of teacher pay, climate change denial and school shooting drills.
Yet perhaps the best example of the America that Harris believes in was the city her campaign chose for the town hall on Sunday, her first appearance in New Hampshire since she reemerged as a top-tier candidate after her breakout debate performance.
Harris was introduced by Emmett Soldati, the owner of a local LGBTQ-friendly cafe and the son of a former mayor, county-level prosecutor and congressional candidate. Soldati welcomed the crowd to Somersworth, which he called "the Rainbow City" for its well-established LGBTQ community. The city has an openly gay mayor and a transgender state representative.
Soldati also noted that Somersworth has the largest Indonesian immigrant population in New England and told the audience that "community fought back" against recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. "Somersworth became a model for the political soul of our country," Soldati said.
When she took the stage, Harris thanked Soldati for the introduction and promised to "listen as much if not more than I talk." She told the audience that "it's not new for us to fight for love of country and the soul of our country" and laughed that she was born in Berkley, California in the 1960s. "My sister Maya and I, we joke we were surrounded by a bunch of adults who spent their free time marching and shouting about this thing called justice," she said.
For all her praise of grassroots activism, Harris returned to her own profession, the law, as a key to lasting change.
"Among the heroes of that great civil rights movement were the lawyers," she said. "Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley and these individuals who understood the skill of the profession of the law to translate the passion from the streets to the courtrooms of our country."
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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