Getty Senator Kamala D. Harris speaks on stage at The United State of Women Summit 2018 - Day 1 on May 5, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.
California senator and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris is appearing at a town hall in Charleston, South Carolina today, one of several campaign stops as Harris visits the state. You can watch a live stream of the event here.
An alternate live stream of the event is available here.
Brady Quirk-Garvan, chairman of the Charleston County Democratic Party, is moderating the town hall, which takes place at the Royal Family Life Center in North Charleston.
Harris will hold a second town hall in the state on Saturday, February 16, appearing at Brookland Health & Wellness Center in Columbia. That event will kick off at 1:30.
The Friday event was expected to kick off at 4PM, Eastern Time, but started late. Some attendees were posting photos and videos of the sizable waiting crowd; you can see some of those shots below. Local media was reporting that around 1000 people had gathered for the event.
A little over a year out from the South Carolina primary, and here’s the crowd for @KamalaHarris’s first town hall here in Charleston
Harris is a California Democrat with a natural following in her home state; her campaign is confident about her chances of winning the state in the Democratic primary. “We think it’s really, really hard to compete with her in California,” one adviser told Politico. The campaign is also cautiously optimistic about Harris’s chances in the key primary states of North and South Carolina. South Carolina will be the first southern state to hold a Democratic primary in the 2020 race — that primary takes place in February of 2020. Harris has already shown signs that she plans to campaign hard in the state. She was in Columbia three weeks ago on January 25, for a sorority event known as the Pink Ice gala. She has also hired Jalisa washington-Price, who directed Hillary Clinton’s South Carolina operations, to join her own South Carolina staff.
Earlier on Friday, Harris told reporters, “I believe that the people of South Carolina are ultimately going to elect the next President of the United States based on issues, and certainly the way that I am approaching this state is that I believe that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.” She added, “Voters, families, people want to know that the people who are running for office and the folks that they will elect are focused on their kitchen table issues, focused on issues they care about each day—that is my intention to do that and to spend a lot of time here.”