Kamala Harris warned on Sunday that the midterm elections in November would determine whether the “age-old sanctity” of the right to vote would be protected in the US or whether “so-called extremist leaders around the country” would continue to restrict access to the ballot box.
With just 56 days to go until the elections, and with the paper-thin Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress, the vice-president said that “everything is on the line in these elections”.
In an interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press, she said that the country was facing a rising domestic extremism threat.
“I think it is very dangerous and I think it is very harmful, and it makes us weaker,” she said.
Harris pointed to the plethora of extreme election deniers, many endorsed by Donald Trump, who have embraced Trump’s lie that the 2020 election, won by Joe Biden, was “stolen” from him.
Many of them, whom Biden has lately slammed as “Maga Republicans”, after the Trump campaign slogan Make America great again, have won Republican nomination for statewide positions that control election administration.
Were they to win in November, they could command considerable power over both state elections and the 2024 presidential contest.
“There are 11 people right now running for secretary of state, the keepers of the integrity of the voting system of their state, who are election deniers,” Harris said. “Couple that with people who hold some of the highest elected office in our country who refuse to condemn an insurrection on January 6.”
She said that an “age-old sanctity” – the right to vote – had been violated as a response to Biden’s victory which saw Americans turn out to vote in unprecedented numbers, often via mail or drop-boxes, which helped increase access. “I think that scared some people, that the American people were voting in such large numbers,” she said.
Congressional attempts to shore up voting rights have so far been stymied by the Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.
Harris said that should Democrats increase their Senate majority in the midterms, Biden would abolish the filibuster specifically for voting rights legislation. He could then pass stalled voting rights legislation that increases democratic safeguards.
“We need to have protections to make sure that every American, whoever they vote for, has the unobstructed ability to do that when it is otherwise their right,” she said.
On Sunday morning, Harris and the second gentleman, her husband, Doug Emhoff, joined the remembrance event at the National September 11 Memorial in New York to mark the anniversary of the al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the US, which killed 2,977 people.
The vice-president did not speak, as per tradition, but in the NBC interview that aired she also spoke of America’s reputation as a world role model for democracy being under threat.
She cited the right-wing challenges to election integrity, including the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a bid to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat, and extremist Republicans’ unwillingness to condemn it, while also fielding many candidates in current elections who still refuse to accept the true result.
And she added that when meeting foreign leaders, the US “had the honor and privilege historically of holding our head up as a defender and an example of a great democracy. And that then gives us the legitimacy and the standing to talk about the importance of democratic principles, rule of law, human rights … through the process of what we’ve been through, we’re starting to allow people to call into question our commitment to those principles. And that’s a shame.”