Former Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday night the Democratic Party must embrace “leaders who have moral conviction and know how to fight” in a speech at the Louisiana Democratic Party’s annual fundraising gala that focused on affordability and the party’s future.
“As I travel the country, people are saying ‘we want our leaders to fight,'” the former 2024 presidential nominee told hundreds of attendees. “And in this fight, I say we start by getting comfortable with some things, including having a certain kind of ruthlessness,” she said.
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Harris said in April she’s thinking about running for president again in 2028 despite having handily lost to President Donald Trump after she replaced former President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election. Recent polling shows Harris as a leading candidate for Democrats in 2028 despite her ties to Biden, who left office with low approval ratings and presided over record-setting inflation.
“Now, I don’t mean ruthlessness like the cruelty [Republicans] show. I mean the kind that is uncompromising in its impatience with injustice, that shows no mercy for corruption, that fights back hard when they threaten the power of the people,” she said. “That is the kind of ruthlessness that must be the attitude of the Democratic Party.”
Harris spent most of her speech chastising Republicans and speaking of a “broken status quo” as she sought to take advantage of rising prices under the Trump administration stemming from the conflict in Iran.
“In today’s America, the cost of living is a crisis,” she said. “But those at the very top don’t seem to get it. I guess they just can’t see it from way up there. And as power has concentrated in the hands of the top of our economy, power has also concentrated in our politics. We have a campaign finance system where dark money drives the political agenda. We have a Supreme Court that with Citizens United allowed anonymous wealthy donors to dominate our elections. And just recently, they resurrected Jim Crow in Louisiana vs. Callais.”
Harris’s visit to Louisiana comes as she’s increasingly spent time in the South following the Louisiana vs. Callais Supreme Court decision that ruled the state’s creation of a second majority-minority district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. She referenced having recently met with middle-class workers from Mississippi, North Carolina, and Georgia in the speech.
KAMALA HARRIS SIGNALS SUPPORT FOR ABOLISHING ELECTORAL COLLEGE AND EXPANDING SUPREME COURT
Harris has made intermittent public remarks since her exit from the White House in January 2025.
She published a book titled 107 Days last September and made headlines earlier in the summer for speaking with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and, by extension, associating herself with the party’s ascendant socialist wing. She called for taking a “hard look at the Electoral College … our corrupted Supreme Court, and statehood for [Washington] D.C. and Puerto Rico,” policy objectives she has referenced often in recent weeks and months.
