Harris thanks Black women after Trump defeat: ‘We could not have done this without you’

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris thanked Black women this week for their strong support after she and President-elect Joe Biden were projected to win the 2020 election. 

In a tweet directly addressing Black women on Monday, Harris wrote: “Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy.” 

“We could not have done this without you,” Harris added in the tweet, which has since racked up over 521,000 likes in one day.

I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 9, 2020

Harris, who will be the first Black American, first Asian American, and first woman to serve the country as vice president next year, also made similar comments thanking the key voting bloc for their turnout during her victory speech in Delaware on Saturday.

Data from exit polls carried out by CNN shows that women of color largely supported the Biden-Harris ticket.

About 90 percent of Black female voters said they voted for Biden in last Tuesday’s election, compared to about 9 percent of Black female voters who said they backed Trump.

By comparison, exit poll data from the news network showed roughly 44 percent of white female voters said they backed Biden and 55 percent said they supported Trump. In addition, data also showed about 69 percent of Latina voters said they voted for Biden, while 30 percent said they voted for Trump.

Harris’s special “thank you” to Black women also comes as prominent Black female political figures such as former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) garnered widespread praise from Democrats after the Nov. 3 election for their political organizing.

After losing a tight race against then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp in 2018, Abrams expressed concerns about voter suppression and set her sights last year on tackling the issue by creating a multi-state voting rights initiative called Fair Fight 2020. 

She has also raised money through her Fair Fight Action group to support Democrats in Georgia. Abrams reported this week that the group have raised $6 million to help the party in Georgia ahead of the state’s pivotal Senate runoff elections in January.

The winners of these races will decide which party gets control of the upper chamber in Congress. 

Georgia took the national spotlight last week when Biden edged a slim lead in the state over Trump. The former vice president leads in the Peach State by more than 12,000 votes, but the race has not been called. The reliably red state has not broken for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1992. 

Abrams said Tuesday that she thinks fighting voter suppression nationwide had an influence on this year’s elections.

“Voter suppression happens anywhere,” she said. “We changed not only the trajectory of Georgia, we changed the trajectory of the nation. Because our combined power show that progress is not only possible, it is inevitable.”