Dolores Huerta boosts Kamala Harris at Arizona rally as campaign focuses on labor

Dolores Huerta, labor leader and civil rights activist, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president during a trip to Arizona, telling supporters that they need to recruit their friends, neighbors and even their “exes” to get out the vote and help Harris win on Nov. 5.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Huerta said, noting that the election is less than four months away. “This is about all of us. We’ve got to stand together, we’ve got to work together.”

The Thursday visit marked the Harris campaign’s first major Phoenix event since the vice president became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee. The race for the White House entered a new phase this month after President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign.

Biden endorsed Harris to take on former President Donald Trump, and many Democrats quickly followed.

Huerta joined Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of Cesar Chavez, for a rally at the Southwest Carpenters Training Center. The pair made a stop at a Harris campaign office in Maryvale earlier in the day to meet with staff and volunteers as the new campaign takes shape.

Harris “stands with our friends in labor” and is “Trump’s worst nightmare,” Chavez Rodriguez told the crowd.

Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers Association with Chavez, is a longtime Harris ally. She endorsed Harris for president in 2019 and served as a California co-chair on the Harris presidential primary campaign that year. Huerta made the case against Trump during her speech at the rally, warning against Trump’s promise for sweeping deportations of illegal immigrants.

“We want a democracy. We do not want a dictatorship,” Huerta said.

During her visit to the Maryvale office, Huerta said that campaign staff and volunteers are working to save the United States from the “fascism that is creeping in.” She likened the high stakes of the political moment to Nazi Germany.

“Every single person would have stood up to say we’re going stop Hitler, right?” Huerta said. “Every one of us is going to recruit as many people as we can to join to stop this fascism in the United States of America.”

Huerta and Chavez both made a point to note the labor movement’s ties to Arizona. Huerta reminded campaign staff and volunteers that Chavez, her partner in founding the United Farm Workers Association, was born in Yuma.

“You might say that the movement started here, right?” Huerta said.

The campaign’s decision to focus on labor for its first Arizona events comes as Democrats say they need to do more to appeal to working people in Arizona. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien raised eyebrows when became the first president of his organization to ever speak at the Republican National Convention last week. His appearance is a sign that the Trump campaign is courting union members.

“President Trump is making lasting inroads with union leaders and broadening the Republican tent in a historic way,” Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a written statement after O’Brien’s speech.

Unions were a key focus at the Harris rally, where attendees listened to music from local Cumbia band Powerdrive and ate tacos and paletas. Democrats warned that Project 2025, a wide-ranging policy plan from a conservative think-tank with ties to Trump, raised questions about the validity of public sector unions.

Earlier Thursday, Arizona Democratic Party chair Yolanda Bejarano spoke at a Democratic National Committee news conference with union leaders and slammed Trump and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance as “working hand-in-hand with their billionaire friends to rip away workers' rights.”

The move toward unions is happening in Washington, D.C., too. Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly believed to be under consideration to serve as Harris’s running mate, voiced support for the PRO Act this week, a pro-union bill that he declined to sign on to when it was filed. Labor leaders said that Kelly’s reluctance to support the bill could hurt Democrats in union-heavy states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin if he were selected to be the vice-presidential candidate.

Rank-and-file union members who don’t support pro-labor candidates are “shooting themselves in the foot to vote for anyone other than Harris at this point,” said Ken Hamilton, a trainee organizer with the United Auto Workers who lives in Phoenix. He came to see Huerta speak, calling her the “GOAT” or the “greatest of all time.”

“She’s the GOAT of organizing. She inspires us,” Hamilton said.

The campaign, which Harris took over from Biden, has made some changes to its event style to match its new leader. Staff played music by Charli xcx, a pop musician who voiced support for Harris online, and swapped out Biden signs for blue and white signs that say "KAMALA" Some rally attendees even peeled the "KAMALA" signs off the walls as a campaign keepsake.

Meredith Loucio, who lives in New York but traveled to Phoenix because of the recent death of her father, said the rally helped her “take off the mantle of mourning for a little bit and get energized.” Loucio would have voted for Democrats no matter what but said that Harris has brought new enthusiasm to the race.

“All of a sudden, it’s not your grandfather’s election anymore. It’s your daughter’s. And that is very exciting,” Loucio said.

Carmen Walker, an independent broker with Medicare who lives in Laveen, said she has been so excited about Harris’s rise that she has been getting less sleep.

“I was really kind of dismal about how things were going,” Walker said. “The state of democracy, I was really, really fearful that we were putting ourselves in a position that was going to cost us the election.”

“But since Sunday,” Walker said. “I’m so excited about the future.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Dolores Huerta boosts Kamala Harris in AZ as campaign focuses on labor