Second gentleman Doug Emhoff made two stops in Charlottesville on Wednesday, spending his afternoon reviewing election integrity with University of Virginia law students and his evening fundraising for his wife’s presidential campaign with high-profile Democrats at a local winery.
It was his most recent stop in a national tour he has embarked upon as part of an effort to vault Vice President Kamala Harris to the presidency.
Emhoff spent the early days of the week in Texas, visiting San Antonio on Monday and Austin and Houston on Tuesday. He then headed to Wilmington, North Carolina, Wednesday morning before traveling up to Charlottesville Wednesday afternoon. Enthusiasm for Harris, he said, is everywhere.
Part of that, he said, is because of her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
“Everyone is sick and tired of Donald Trump. They were sick tired of him when he was president,” Emhoff told the crowd at a fundraiser at Oakencroft Farm & Winery just northwest of Charlottesville. “Everyone in here is nodding. They’re all holding their stomachs, because they all realize what that was like, and now he’s even worse. This is a degraded version of an already horrible person.”
It was one of many lines from Emhoff that elicited nods and applause from the crowd of 100 during his 30-minute remarks at the winery owned by Dorothy Batten, the daughter of the late Virginia media mogul Frank Batten Sr., best known for co-founding the Weather Channel.
Emhoff was introduced at the winery by best-selling author John Grisham and his wife Renee, who live in the area.
The author began his own remarks with a confession.
“I had never heard the term second gentleman until about last week,” he said to laughter. “I never met the first one.”
Welcoming Emhoff, John Grisham noted that Charlottesville and surrounding Albemarle County are "a blue dot in a state that appears to be red.”
“But every four years, we deliver,” he said to cheers.
Virginia voters delivered for Joe Biden in 2020, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama twice before that in 2012 and 2008. And they will do it again for Harris this November, John Grisham said.
“You may have a future career in, I don’t know, storytelling,” Emhoff told the author as he stepped up to the microphone.
Emhoff did not spend his entire trip to Virginia Wednesday joking with celebrated authors at a winery. Just an hour before, the second gentleman had been at the Forum Hotel on UVa Grounds, where he met with 80 members of the UVa Law Democrats student group to talk about free and fair elections — and the role those students are playing in safeguarding them.
Before he entered the room, the students had undergone training on Virginia voting laws and the work they can do as poll observers. The Law Democrats frequently send observers to parts of Virginia that lack local volunteers, and Emhoff told them that their work will be of vital importance this November. Harris’ campaign, he said, has assembled an army of lawyers to brace for Trump’s team raising legal challenges to election results, just as it did in 2020.
“We’re going to need this army of lawyers to come into action, because we already know what they’re going to do. They’ve literally said what they’re going to do,” Emhoff told the students.
He argued that Republicans’ interest in election integrity is a direct result of Trump’s conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged against him. It’s a claim Trump continues to make.
On Sunday, the former president called into a tele-rally in Virginia, where early voting is already underway, and encouraged his supporters to hit the polls. The very next day, however, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that early voting is "stupid" and suggested it was not secure.
“Now we have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early. I wonder what the hell happens during that 45,” he said Monday at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania.
On Monday, Trump posted on social media that Democrats are “getting ready to CHEAT!”
It’s a theory Trump has maintained since at least 2020. Despite all evidence indicating election fraud is extremely rare, many of his allies have explicitly or tacitly supported the claim.
While Democrats rallied for Harris at one of the area’s oldest wineries on Wednesday, days before, Republicans rallied mere miles away at Virginia’s largest winery: Trump’s.
U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York visited Trump Winery in Albemarle County just south of Charlottesville on Saturday, where she told a crowd of hundreds that Democrats “will do anything to try to take away the will of the American people.”
Emhoff, himself a lawyer, told the students at UVa that election integrity efforts Republicans have embraced since 2020 are being used to suppress voter turnout among legal voters.
“They cannot win on the issues, so they have to try to make it more difficult to vote,” he told the students. “You’re giving up your time for the cause of democracy, for the rule of law, for our Constitution and the sacred right to vote. I cannot thank you enough.”
He encouraged them to help Virginians get registered and prepared to vote.
“Make no mistake, we are going to win this election,” he said to applause.
After finishing his remarks, Emhoff was walked out of the hotel toward a waiting motorcade. Secret Service agents and Albemarle County police officers stood outside of the hotel, steps from the university’s School of Law and Darden School of Business, heavily armed and scouting for potential security threats.
Within minutes of departing, Emhoff was whisked away in that motorcade. Sirens flashed as the long line of black SUVs and police cruisers drove down Barracks Road, motorists moving to the side to let the second gentleman pass.
Donors were already waiting at Oakencroft to hear Emhoff speak. Even before he arrived, a sniper team was perched on a ridge on the property, a herd of Scotch mule sheep below them.
Grisham told the crowd that the turnout was double what had originally been expected. And twice the donors meant organizers easily beat their fundraising goal of $250,000. Before Emhoff took the stage, they had already raised nearly $600,000 for the Harris campaign.
Among those who helped facilitate donations was local Democratic fundraiser Sonia Smith who, along with her husband Michael Bills, has become among the most prolific donors in the commonwealth.
With glasses of wine in hand, guests listened intently to Emhoff’s remarks, laughing at his jokes and nodding as he called the election “the most important of our nation’s lifetime.”
A Trump victory, he said, will mean the appointment of young and extreme Supreme Court justices, a national abortion ban and tariffs that will lead to recession. Harris, he argued, would be both pro-business and pro-worker, fighting to lower costs for everyday Americans.
“He was a reality TV star. It’s not real. He’s a fake businessman. He’s a fake tough guy. It’s all an illusion,” Emhoff said of Trump. “She’s the real deal. He’s not.”
He concluded his speech saying Democrats need to avoid distractions, focusing instead on door-knocking, organizing and doing the groundwork required to win.
He joked that "there is not a lot of happy couple talk these days" shared between him and his wife, with both of them on the campaign trail.
During those rare moments of free time together, Emhoff said he will show the vice president a new poll or headline and he has to be reminded himself to avoid the distractions and focus on the groundwork.
“She literally takes my head, ‘Stay focused, stay disciplined, and get back out on the road,’” he said.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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