Kerry Washington backs Kamala Harris, says she's proven herself

Kamala Harris is flooding the campaign field with stars to get irregular voters to the polls on November 5.

MILWAUKEE – Wisconsin needed treatment. So the Harris campaign sent Kerry Washington.

Washington, who played fictional uber-fixer Olivia Pope on the hit ABC series “Scandal,” gathered Kamala Harris supporters on Sunday, as an exclusive new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll found a dead heat in Wisconsin between the vice president and former President Donald Trump.

The Harris campaign is leaving nothing to chance in the Midwest final days of the presidential race and has put every celebrity and national politician on the road.

“You guys here in Wisconsin have the ability to save the soul of this county, to actually stand between us and a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on day one, to stand between us and a man.” who said he wants generals. more like Hitler’s generals,” Washington told a room full of black women at a private Harris campaign event at a cafe on Sunday.

The Emmy award winner played Olivia Pope for seven hit seasons until 2018 and helped resolve fictional crises in the White House. Today, she advocates that voters, not TV characters, will decide how the country is governed.

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Americans have forgotten how important they are to democracy, Washington told USA TODAY after a Harris campaign stop.

“We expect other people to solve our problems and solve them for us. But a democracy is really a government of the people, for the people,” she said. “So I’m not here to fix anything. I’m really here to remind people that they have so much more power than Olivia Pope.”

‘No elections we can sit through’

Washington told the women she didn’t expect voters to change their behavior just because she begged them to vote for Harris on Nov. 5. Instead, the actress said she hopes that by being in battleground states like Wisconsin, she can remind community members how important they are to the political process.

“They are the real superheroes of this moment,” she said. “The real fixers.”

Harris’ campaign is concerned that the election will come down to small groups with few voters. The Harris team hopes that in the final week of the campaign, they can be motivated by artists they have followed for years, and whom they have known longer than Harris, to take another look at the Democrat.

Artists including BeyonceUsher, Lizzo, Bruce Springsteenand Eminem have all vouched for Harris in the final days of her race against former President Trump. On Saturday evening, Michelle Obama campaigned with Harris in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

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“These are not elections we can sit out. There is simply too much at stake,” Washington told the gathering on Sunday.

Washington has spoken openly about feeling it could have done more to help the former secretary of state in the 2016 election Hillary Clinton against Trump. Pope’s name was trending the morning after Trump’s shocking victory, Washington said, as social media users called on the fictional fixer for help.

She was active in Harris’ campaign and organized a program evening at the Democratic National Convention in August. Washington spoke at two canvas launches on Sunday, as well as the invitation-only event at the Black-owned small business in Milwaukee. She said she had recently been to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and was going to Georgia and North Carolina.

Washington will also speak Tuesday at a rally in Atlanta organized by When We All Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to registering young people and people of color. She is co-chair of the organization that Michelle Obama founded in 2018.

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‘Women make decisions every day, very important decisions’

Shante Nelson, 42, a public policy strategist who came to the event in Milwaukee, said anyone with any influence should do what Washington is doing.

“Women make decisions every day, very important decisions. And as a result, we should also be able to make decisions when it comes to governing this nation,” she said in an interview afterward.

The private event with Washington took place at the HoneyBee Sage Wellness & Apothecary Cafe.

Owner Angela Mallett said she was discouraged when her choices were made President Joe Biden or Trump and had previously chosen not to participate in the political process. She believes that during election periods, promises are made to the black community that are not kept.

“But now, because of the emergency that I find in this country, and based on the positions and perspectives of one of the candidates – Trump – I don’t feel like I can sit on this,” Mallett said.

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Washington about Harris: she has ‘proven herself time and time again’

The night before the meeting in Washington, Obama had launched a campaign scorching attack about Trump during a meeting with Harris in Michigan. She urged men in particular to consider Harris’ qualifications.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us choose to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to blindside us at every opportunity,” Obama said.

Her comments resonated with the twenty or so women who came to hear Washington the next day. One attendee brought up Obama’s comments and asked Washington how to speak to people who had a double standard toward Harris.

“She has proven herself,” Washington responded, recounting the votes she personally cast for Harris in previous offices. “The way she has proven herself time and time again in these areas of leadership, where she continues to grow in power and authority because she has what it takes, and she is so ready.”

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Washington encouraged the women to pressure people who question Harris’ abilities to explain why they have those concerns so they can become aware of their assumptions.

“Yes, it’s frustrating,” she told them. “These are those moments where you don’t change in one conversation, like deep-seated misogyny, but you call on people to say, you know, do you believe that someone – that a woman you know is just as capable as you are.”