Harris will address a historically black student body as she hopes to win over women of color with her campaign

Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she boards Air Force Two Tuesday after a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
AP

WASHINGTON — Indiana voters haven’t backed a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly 16 years. But when Vice President Kamala Harris travels to the solidly Republican state on Wednesday, she’ll be speaking to a constituency she hopes will turn out in droves in November: women of color.

Just three days after launching her bid for the White House after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, Harris will deliver a speech at the biennial convention of the historically black sorority Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis.

It’s a moment for Harris, a woman of Black and South Asian descent, to speak to a group already excited about her historic status as the presumptive Democratic nominee and one her campaign hopes can expand her coalition. In a memo released Wednesday, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon pointed to support among female, nonwhite and younger voters as critical to success.

“Where Vice President Harris goes, grassroots enthusiasm follows,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “This campaign will be close, it will be hard-fought, but Vice President Harris is in a position of strength — and she will win.”

Still, Democrats face challenges as the country simmers with frustration over higher prices after a spike in inflation, while former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, survived a recent assassination attempt that further energized his already loyal base. But the memo was more optimistic than the narrow path the campaign saw after the 81-year-old Biden delivered a disastrous debate performance in June.

While the campaign will continue to focus on the so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to secure the necessary 270 electoral votes, Harris hopes to be competitive in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Trump has generally done better among white voters who don’t have college degrees. AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of voters and nonvoters that aims to tell the story behind election results, found that group made up 43% of all voters in 2020, and Trump won them by a margin of 62% to 37%, even as he lost the election overall.

For Democrats, black women would likely make a fundamental difference in November, and Harris has already shown she can mobilize their support.

In the 2020 election, AP VoteCast found that Black women made up just 7% of the electorate. But 93% of them voted for Biden, helping him win narrow victories in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

After Harris announced her candidacy, some 90,000 black women joined a video call for her campaign Sunday night, an overnight show of support for the Howard University alumnus and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sister who has used Beyoncé’s “Freedom” as her song at events.

After her trip to Indiana, Harris will travel to Houston to speak at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers, which endorsed her candidacy on Monday.

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This story has been corrected to show that the student association meets biennially, not annually.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.