Snapshot: "Let's Not Feel Powerless"

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to voters' anxieties

Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney in metro Detroit yesterday. (Photo by Sarah Rice via Getty Images)

Yesterday in Royal Oak, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris responded to the growing anxiety and overwhelmed feeling of many voters about this election. Her heartfelt response was a touching and useful moment for many of us during her three-state swing—Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—along with former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican, who has endorsed her.

“We cannot despair,” she began, talking both to moderator Maria Shriver and the crowd that came to hear her and Cheney. Here’s Harris’ whole answer:

We cannot despair. The nature of a democracy is such that I think there's a duality. On the one hand, there's an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people. Oh, there's great strength in that.

And it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that's the moment we're in.

And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it in our democracy, the people, every individual, has the power to make a decision about what this will be. And so let's not feel powerless. Let's not let the—I get it—overwhelming nature of this all make us feel powerless because then we have been defeated. And that's not our character as the American people. We are not one to be defeated.

We rise to a moment and we stand on broad shoulders of people who have fought this fight before for our country. And in many ways, let us look at the challenge then that we are being presented and not be overwhelmed by it. The baton is now in our hands to fight for, not against, but for this country we love.

That's what we have the power to do. So let's own that—dare I say, be joyful in what we will do in the process of owning that—which is knowing that we can and will build community and coalitions and remind people that we're all in this together. Let's not let the overwhelming nature of this strip us of our strength.

These joint appearances with Cheney were largely intended to sway Republican voters, particularly suburban women. But they also provide in the election’s final two weeks an opportunity to humanize the vice president, who said that she makes a point of exercising every day to stay grounded. “Mind and body,” she said. You can watch her comments here.

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