PHILADELPHIA – Vice President Kamala Harris this afternoon rallied her supporters in the City of Brotherly Love, exhorting them to find in the face of a stranger the face of a neighbor.

“We are optimistic and excited about what our nation can do together,” said Harris. “Let’s win this election and let us be intentional about building community coalitions. We all have so much more in common than what separates us. We will be the better for it. We are going to fight for the country we love. It is one of the highest forms of patriotism to fight for our ideals with our vote. From now until Election Day we are going to get the vote out in Pennsylvania.”

The Democratic nominee for President directly addressed Generation Z and those first-time voters in the crowd.

“You young leaders are rightly impatient for change,” said Harris. “You are leaders in what we need to do to protect our planet. You who grew up with active shooter drills know what we have to do to protect safety in our schools. And you know not to have her government tell a young woman how to make decisions about her body. This is about your lived experience. You are here because you know your power. The path to victory runs through all the leaders who are right here.”

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker addressed the crowd prior to Harris and added some detail to the vice president’s point in this critical battleground state.

“There’s one thing that any expert will tell you, and that is that the road to the White House runs through the Keystone State of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and that means our City of Philadelphia, the birthplace of democracy, the sixth largest city in this nation,” said Parker. “You all are ambassadors. We’re all the soldiers who have to go out and make victory a reality. If you don’t understand the math of how to win this election you can’t understand the goal.

“That guy [Donald Trump] won Pennsylvania by 44k votes in 2016,” the mayor added. “But guess what? We remembered what happened. Then we remembered the assignment, and in 2020, the Biden-Harris team won Pennsylvania by 80k. They did. Guess what the difference was? More people came out to vote in the City of Philadelphia and our neighboring counties – our brother-sister counties: Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montour. More southeastern Pennsylvanians came out to vote. Southeastern Pennsylvania is stronger together. When you go out and you think about the why, I want you to remember the math. Our Vice President Harris is communicating to the American people that we can have a new path forward. There is room for you in our America, for everybody. We can make it happen.”