[K]EENE, N.H. — At first glance, the younger black woman from the West and the older white man from the East couldn’t appear more different. Yet when California U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris brought her 2020 presidential campaign to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire this week, she sounded a lot like her Vermont colleague Bernie Sanders.
“The economy of America is not working for working people,” she told a capacity crowd Tuesday at Keene State College. “We need a new commander in chief.”
Harris made national news during her first-ever Granite State visit in February by noting, unlike Sanders, “I am not a democratic socialist.” But listen to her Monday CNN appearance in Manchester and Tuesday speeches in Keene and Hanover and you heard many similarities between the two candidates.
Harris is a co-sponsor — along with fellow senators and presidential aspirants Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — of Sanders’ new “Medicare for All” bill to create a government-run health insurance system for every American.
“Health care should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris said in Keene.
Speaking immediately after Sanders’ own CNN appearance, Harris agreed to consider his headline-grabbing call for voting rights for prisoners, saying “I think we should have that conversation.”
The two have raised the most money of all 19 so-far-declared Democratic candidates, with Sanders pulling in $18.2 million and Harris following with $12 million this past quarter.
But Sanders is polling better than Harris. The Vermonter is second to former Vice President Joe Biden nationally, while Harris is fourth after South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Sanders is scoring even better in the Granite State, where he tops the latest University of New Hampshire survey, while Harris ranks fifth after him, Biden, Buttigieg and Warren.
Harris, who only visited the region for two days in February before this week’s trip, is hoping that more exposure to voters will raise her standing.
“I fully intend to win this election,” she told a standing-room-only crowd at Dartmouth College, where she appeared Tuesday afternoon.
Harris has sparked headlines this week when she joined Warren in calling for Congress to explore impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump — a move Sanders fears will distract from Democratic policy initiatives and undercut the party’s coming electoral chances.
Harris also made news Tuesday by voicing support for placing a third gender option on federal identification forms.
“Racism, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia are real in this country,” she said in Hanover. “We must agree that whenever and wherever that hate presents itself, we must all speak out.”
Although Harris hasn’t spent as much time in the Granite State as her New England colleagues Sanders and Warren, the Californian said she wouldn’t campaign any differently here.
“When they say you need to have one conversation in the Midwest and another conversation in the South and another conversation when you go to the coast, I’m not buying it,” she said. “The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”