Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday helped pack diapers into bins of private care merchandise destined for North Carolina hurricane victims, agreeing with one helper who mentioned “it takes a village.”
“You’re precisely proper,” Harris replied to Greg Hatem, proprietor of The Pit Authentic Barbecue restaurant as she put two packages of diapers inside every cardboard field that was positioned in entrance of her assembly-line model.
Harris met with Black leaders on the barbecue restaurant in Raleigh earlier than she joined volunteers who had been there to pack bandages, child method, child wipes, ache reduction drugs and different objects for victims of Hurricane Helene, which tore via western North Carolina final month.
The vice chairman was overnighting within the state, which narrowly backed her rival, Republican Donald Trump, in 2020. Democrats are campaigning exhausting to flip North Carolina into their column within the presidential election subsequent month. On Sunday, Harris was attending church in Greenville as a part of her marketing campaign’s “Souls to the Polls” effort to get out the vote and holding a rally.
The weekend journey was her second to the battleground state after it was struck by Hurricane Helene. The Democratic presidential nominee went to North Carolina final Saturday to survey the aftermath of Helene and pledged federal help for its victims.
Before her aircraft left Washington, Harris instructed reporters accompanying her that she regarded ahead to speaking with residents “initially to see how they’re doing within the wake of the hurricane.”
Democrats view North Carolina as swinging their means this 12 months with its base of Black and college-educated voters, in addition to ladies involved concerning the lack of abortion protections. But the aftermath of Hurricane Helene has turn into a political flashpoint with former President Trump and his allies attacking the Biden administration’s response to the pure catastrophe.
At The Pit, Harris met with Black elected, religion and neighborhood leaders. Her marketing campaign didn’t launch a listing of the folks she met with.
After church on Sunday, Harris, a Baptist, was set to talk about her financial plans at a rally to generate assist for early voting, which begins Thursday in North Carolina.
Making landfall on Sept. 26, Hurricane Helene resulted within the deaths of roughly 230 folks and worn out roads, electrical energy and cellphone service. Just two weeks later, Hurricane Milton hit Florida this week and generated an estimated $50 billion value of injury and left a number of folks lifeless.
Harris additionally visited Georgia after Helene struck there, too, along with nearly attending briefings on the federal authorities’s response and rejiggering her marketing campaign schedule. She continued to journey for the presidential race with time spent this week in Nevada and Arizona.
One of her prime messages has been that there must be no worth gouging by corporations in search of to benefit from shortages brought on by the hurricanes, a difficulty she has made central to her marketing campaign as a technique to deal with inflation.
“To any firm or particular person that’s utilizing this disaster to jack up costs via unlawful fraud or worth gouging, whether or not or not it’s on the gasoline pump, the airport or the lodge counter, we will probably be monitoring and there will probably be a consequence,” Harris mentioned at Friday’s briefing.
But Trump and his allies have falsely urged that catastrophe reduction from the Federal Emergency Management Agency went to immigrants as an alternative of hurricane victims, whereas additionally suggesting that persons are not getting the complete monetary assist to which they’re legally entitled.
At a latest rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump mentioned the response has been worse than throughout 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which left almost 1,400 folks lifeless and brought on $200 billion in damages.
“North Carolina’s been hit very exhausting and this administration has not executed a correct job in any respect. Terrible, horrible,” Trump mentioned on the rally, including that Harris was “on a fundraising comedy tour whereas persons are stranded and drowning throughout a few of our biggest states.”
President Joe Biden has referred to as Trump’s falsehoods concerning the authorities’s response “un-American” and instructed his predecessor to “get a life, man.”