Over 160,000 people joined a Zoom call to garner support among white women for Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential bid.
On Thursday (July 25), thousands of people including activists, podcasters, the singer Pink, and regular voters gathered for a White Women for Kamala Harris Zoom call, per Reuters.
Several attendees on the call said they regretted not doing enough before the 2016 election that put Trump in the White House.
The call was organized by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun safety group with roughly 10 million members.
The point “is to make sure we are using our economic and political power to help elect Kamala Harris,” Watts said.
“White women have fallen down too many times when it comes to voting for a presidential candidate.”
White women supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, 47% to 45%, Pew Research shows. In the 2020 election, an even higher number of white women, 53%, supported Trump.
Watts said that she wanted White women to follow the lead of the Black women who quickly organized behind Kamala Harris’s candidacy; on July 21, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, 44,000 of them gathered for the Win With Black Women Zoom call and raised $1.8 million.
“When I started Moms Demand Action as a White woman in the suburbs of Indiana, even though I was a progressive woman, I was surrounded by the women who were the people they call ‘the 53 percent’ — the White women who have voted Republican in every single presidential election since the 1950s except for two,” Watts said. “I know these women and I learned how to organize them through Moms Demand Action, because so many of these women would come into the organization after there had been a school shooting, some national tragedy or because they sent their own kid to school to do a lockdown drill.”
On Thursday’s call for white women, participants discussed strategies, including reaching out to friend groups, fundraising and countering misinformation.
Roughly 50,000 people joined a Zoom call for Black men supporters on Monday (July 22). According to reports, there have also been calls for South Asian women, LGBTQ allies, and white men.