‘He is a fighter’: Black North Carolinians rally around Biden at VP Harris event

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to a crowd of primarily Black North Carolinians in Greensboro Thursday amid calls for President Biden to step out of the race.

Harris’ campaign event took place inside a crowded and energetic gymnasium at James B. Dudley High School, the first Black high school in Guilford County, according to the Biden campaign.

The stakes are high this November, Harris said to the crowd as she went on to vaguely reference the turmoil taking place within the Democratic Party.

“He is a fighter,” Harris said about Biden. “He is the first to say, ‘When you get knocked down, you get back up.’”

The vice president touted the Biden administration’s efforts in health care, forgiving student loan debt, working toward gun violence prevention and Biden’s strengthening of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Harris ended with a line-by-line condemnation of Project 2025, a plan for Donald Trump’s presidency from the conservative think tank -- the Heritage Foundation.

In her sixth visit to the state this year, Harris addressed North Carolina’s Black electorate, which accounts for about 20% of registered voters in the Tar Heel State, and that tends to lean Democratic, according to Pew Research data on party affiliation and race.

Gov. Roy Cooper spoke before Harris, energizing the crowd and touching on the chaos within the Democratic Party.

“I know the tensions are high right now, but we must, and we will come together,” Cooper said.

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North Carolina has been no stranger to the spotlight this election season, with a visit from the first lady Jill Biden earlier this week in Wilmington and a rally with President Biden.

Democrats are attempting to sink their teeth into the southern battleground state that has historically tight elections. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state by just about 1.3 percentage points. Although margins are thin, a Democrat hasn’t won the presidential seat in North Carolina since 2008 when Barack Obama captured the state, which was merely a blue spark among a steady pattern of voting red in presidential elections.

Despite disarray from the Democratic Party and Biden dropping in the polls as a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found, several North Carolinians in attendance said they stand by him as their presumptive nominee.

Veronica Thompson, 46, of Greensboro, said she’s in full support of Biden.

“They’ve been a great administration, and so they will have my vote in November,” Thompson said.

Miles Beasley, 22, of Raleigh, said voters need to look past Biden’s age and instead focus on policy issues like job and housing security.

“I think that’s such a distraction,” Beasley said about calls for Biden to step down based on his age and questions over his mental competency.

Nancy Vaughan, Greensboro mayor; North Carolina Sen. Gladys A. Robinson; Shirley Frye, an activist; and Avi Dintenfass, a field organizer, also spoke at the event.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: NC voters at Kamala Harris event remain loyal to Biden despite chaos