Harris Portrays 2024 Race as Choice Between 'Freedom' and 'Chaos' in First Campaign Rally

US Vice President Kamala Harris frames race with Trump in her first rally as 2024 presidential candidate as choice between 'freedom' and 'chaos.'

Harris is beginning her campaign for president with a rally in West Allis outside of Milwaukee.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone. Good afternoon Wisconsin. It is good to be back,” Harris said on Tuesday — her first words from the campaign trail, in a state decided by only about 10,000 votes in 2020.

To chants of “Kamala, Kamala, Kamala!” Harris thanked statewide elected Democrats, Gov. Tony Evers and Tammy Baldwin.

“I had the privilege of serving with Tammy when I was in the United States Senate. And I know that the folks that are here are going to make sure you return her to Washington, D.C., in November,” she said.

“The path to the White House goes through Wisconsin,” she said.

Harris is not just beginning her campaign. She is beginning to form a campaign message, one with a middle-class theme not unlike the Biden administration’s.

“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead, a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, where every worker has the freedom to join a union,” she said Tuesday.

“So, all of this is to say building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. “Because here’s one thing. We all here, Wisconsin, know when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

“We have to remember that the shoulders on which we stand, generations of Americans before us, led the fight for freedom,” she said. “And now, Wisconsin, the baton is in our hands.”

“We believe in the sacred freedom to vote,” she said.

“We believe that every person in our nation should have the freedom to live safe from the terror of gun violence,” she added, “and in reproductive freedom.”

The latter is an especially sharp point for Harris, who had been traveling speaking on behalf of reproductive freedom before Biden announced he would not seek reelection.

She pledged to “stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion position because we trust women to make decisions about their own bodies.”