Why Trump should fear the women going all out for Kamala Harris

Hailey Guerra had never bothered to attend a presidential campaign rally before Friday afternoon — but Kamala Harris’s visit to the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale seemed different.

“Everyone’s just like, at least it’s not another old white man,” Hailey Guerra told The Independent, referring to President Joe Biden, who announced last month that he would not seek re-election and instead endorsed Harris.

Guerra’s friend Charlotte Dirige attended with her, clad in a shirt with Harris’s image and the declaration, “Say it to my face,” a nod to the vice president’s challenge to former President Donald Trump after he initially backed out of debating her.

“I was definitely gonna vote for [Biden] still, because it seemed like the lesser of two evils, but I’m actually way more, like, motivated to go out and vote,” Guerra told The Independent. Dirige said Harris’s campaign team had helped her sign up to volunteer.

As Harris hopes to build momentum going into November, these women who are taking an active role in politics for the first time will be crucial to her success.

There’s a palpably different energy at Harris’s rallies than at Biden’s previous campaign stops. Whereas Biden could barely fill a high-school gymnasium in Philadelphia for a Black voter outreach event, Harris’s event in Arizona with her newly announced running mate Tim Walz featured people dancing, doing the wave, and blasting music in English and Spanish.

On Friday afternoon, the Desert Diamond Arena, which is just outside of Phoenix in the must-win state of Arizona, blasted the music of Charli XCX, the singer who declared Harris “brat,” and young women showed up in lime-green shirts, a nod to the color scheme of the artist’s album on Friday. The event was