Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, less than two weeks removed from her last campaign rally visit to Wisconsin with running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, visited the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on Tuesday — just under a month after her Republican rival former President Donald Trump accepted the GOP’s presidential nomination in the same building.
"Now look, they left here riding high," Walz said of the Republicans who attended last month's convention. "They were feeling good, this thing was over. Well trust me Milwaukee: A hell of a lot can change in four weeks."
"Not only do we have massive energy at our convention, we got a hell of a lot more energy at where they had their convention, right here — oh yeah, that one guy’s gonna be so sad tonight. So sad, so sad, so sad," Walz added, laughing.
The campaign, Walz argued, is riding a surge of momentum, ("Can you feel it? Hell yes we can feel it. It’s what we do," he said) and the source of that momentum is Harris.
In her turn on the stage, Harris borrowed on the themes of the Democratic National Convention, taking place 90 miles down Interstate 94 in Chicago, a promise for progress, keyed in by a tagline chanted by her supporters: "We are not going back."
“This is about two very different visions for our nation. One, ours, focused on the future. The other, focused on the past. And Wisconsin, we fight for the future,” Harris said. “We believe in the future: a future with affordable heath care, a future with affordable child care, a future with affordable housing and paid leave. That’s the future we believe in,” she said, to raucous applause.
She leaned into her economic plan, including her pitch to ban price gouging on food and groceries, and a promise to cap prescription prices for all Americans, an expansion of the existing caps on certain prescriptions for Medicare recipients. She also pledged to expand the child tax credit, with a tax plan that would give a $6,000 break to families during the first year of a child’s life.
By comparison, she said, Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on foreign goods would amount to between a $2,500 and $3,900. That’s according to an estimate from the Center for American Progress, a liberal-aligned public policy think tank.
Trump, she argued as she has so often on the campaign trail, is a risk to American norms, citing his comments on pledging to be a "dictator on day one," to use the Justice Department against enemies and — in a social media rant attacking the results of the 2020 election — calling for the "termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution."
"Somebody who intends to terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again have the opportunity to stand behind the seal of the President of the United States,“ Harris said.
Notably, Harris’ speech deviated from a common line in her stump speech. She’s often set herself as the prosecutor facing off against the felon, leading to crowds to chant “Lock Him Up,” drawing harsh comparisons to the 2016 chants weaponized against Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, she didn’t offer that opportunity.
She did, however, deviate from her speech, calling attention to a medical emergency on the floor and directing the crowd to clear a path. When she got the all-clear, the tension left her face.
"This is who we are, right? This is what we’re about: Looking out for each other," Harris said.