WASHINGTON - Vice-President Kamala Harris made an appeal on July 24 to the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting bloc, Black women, telling an audience of several thousand in Indianapolis that Donald Trump’s agenda represented “an outright attack on our children, our families and our future”.

Harris’ pointed speech, delivered at a convention of Zeta Phi Beta, one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, laid out a “choice between two different visions for our nation”.

One vision – hers – would build on what she described as the Biden administration’s biggest accomplishments: expanding access to health care, lowering the cost of prescription drugs such as insulin, reducing child poverty and creating an economy that “works for working people”.

The other, she warned, would return the United States to a “dark past”, with cuts to Medicare and the elimination of the Department of Education and popular programs such as Head Start.

“These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back. We are not going back,” Harris, a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, said again with emphasis, in a banquet hall filled almost exclusively by Black women. “Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom.”

Although the Vice-President barely mentioned Trump by name, her speech was a clear effort to do what Democrats had hoped for months President Joe Biden would be able to: make the election a referendum on the former president.

Repeatedly, Harris, 59, articulated the idea that the choice between herself and Trump, 78, amounted to one b...