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Ahead of a planned college campus tour in battleground states, Vice President Kamala Harris penned a letter to students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on Wednesday, encouraging them to vote and laying out the stakes of this year’s elections.
The Democratic presidential nominee released her letter as an ad through Watch The Yard, which publishes content related to Black colleges and universities, Black Greek organizations and the Black collegiate experience.
An HBCU graduate in her own right, the vice president has spent a lot of time on college campuses mobilizing voters over the last few years. In September 2023, she went on a “Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour” to promote reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ equality and freedom from book bans. She also appeared on ESPN during a bowl game for her alma mater, Howard University, last winter to tout the value of HBCUs. And she was back at Howard earlier this month hyping up students.
The bonds she built with college voters then seem to have sowed the seeds for the surge in young voter support she’s seen as Democrats’ presidential nominee. So it follows that Harris and her team are making even more concerted efforts to get college students to the polls. They recently announced a “back to school" campaign to engage young voters across 150 campuses in battleground states. Her letter to HBCU students this week is more proof of how crucial the Harris-Walz campaign thinks young, college-going voters will be to their election bid this fall.
In the letter, Harris said her time at Howard had a “profound impact” on her and said HBCUs are where Black youths are “constantly reminded you are young, gifted, and Black.” She said college is “when I started to become politically engaged” and where she “learned that progress in our country happens when young people fight for it.”
Harris said college students’ record turnout in 2020 is the reason she’s vice president today, and she declared “fundamental freedoms” are at stake this election, citing voting rights, marriage equality and bodily autonomy under threat from anti-abortion lawmakers.
“Your vote has never mattered more,” she wrote. “I know that when young people fight for progress, it changes the course of our nation. I believe in you. I am inspired by you. And I am rooting for you.”
Both the Harris campaign and its allies, and the Trump campaign and its allies, are taking diverging approaches to college voters this year. While Harris and Trump both speak about the need for young voters to turn out, Trump, tellingly, is the only candidate in the race whose allies have openly promoted efforts to make it harder for college students to vote.