Kamala Harris is warning that racism is taking a new form in American politics, with voting laws threatening Black political representation across the South.
Asked on the Baby It’s Keke Palmer podcast whether she is running for president in 2028, the former vice president said the question is smaller than the one already in front of voters. “I haven’t decided yet. I will. I promise you, but ’28 won’t matter if we don’t do ’26 right.”
She said the Supreme Court’s Callais decision effectively weakened the Voting Rights Act, and that states in the South are using the opening to cut Black representation. The Congressional Black Caucus could lose as many as one third of its members. As many as 200 Black state legislators across the South could be lost.
“They have backdoored racism through the door of politics, and we have to call it what it is,” she said. “They’re going back to a Jim Crow South on the issue of voting.” Saying it that plainly carries a cost for her, and she addressed that too. “I don’t care because I’m calling it what it is.”
She told voters to be transactional, to treat a ballot as a purchase and to expect health care, child care and housing in return for it. She criticized a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid.
Then she answered the people who want her to be grim about all of it. “You’re not going to take my joy. You cannot. You are not that powerful.”
