U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters on Thursday that she is "ready" to debate her rival for the White House, Donald Trump, after launching a blistering attack on the former president and his "extremist" Republicans.
"I'm ready, let's go," Harris told reporters. She accused Trump of "backpedaling” away from a previous agreement for a debate hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.
"I think the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on the debate stage," she said after landing at Joint Base Andrews following a trip to Indiana and Texas.
The Sept. 10 debate was one of two debates that President Joe Biden and Trump had agreed on. The first one was hosted by CNN on June 27, but Biden has since dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris as his successor.
Trump has said he would prefer to shift the debate to Fox News, but he would be willing to face off with Harris more than once.
Harris did not respond to a question about having Fox News host a debate.
Alex Conant, a Republican consultant, said the debate could be "decisive."
"It's the only time voters really tune in," he said.
This year's campaign has already shown the potential power of a debate. Biden's disastrous performance on June 27 revived concerns over the 81-year-old's mental capacity and persistently low polling numbers.
His support within the Democratic Party crumbled, and he ended his reelection bid on Sunday.
Addressing teachers earlier on Thursday, Harris, 59, attacked Trump and Republicans, seeking to rally a key part of the Democratic coalition behind her bid to take on the billionaire for the presidency.
The country's first female vice president – who is seeking to make history again in November – has enjoyed a groundswell of support from labor groups, ethnic minorities and her own party.
The first union to endorse her – the American Federation of Teachers – applauded at their convention in Houston as Harris warned that America was witnessing a "full-on attack" by Trump's Republicans on "hard-won, hard-fought freedoms."
"While you teach students about democracy and representative government, extremists attack the sacred freedom to vote. While you try to create safe and welcoming places where our children can learn, extremists attack our freedom to live safe from gun violence" she said.
"They have the nerve to tell teachers to strap on a gun in the classroom while they refuse to pass common sense gun safety laws."
Calling herself "a proud product of public education," she connected her personal story to her political outlook, telling her audience that the work of teaching was "personal and it is professional, and... so critically important."
The former top prosecutor for California tied the event to a key campaign message about refusing to go back to Trump's America, praising her audience as "visionaries" who look to the future.
And she contrasted Democratic efforts to cancel student debt and her vision of investment in public schools and universities with Trump's vow to dismantle the Education Department and cut spending in half.
Trump, who at 78 is the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history, has promised he will "not give one penny" of federal funds to schools with vaccine mandates. Every public school in America has vaccine mandates.
Harris has faced increasingly extreme rhetoric from Trump, who on Wednesday called her a "radical left lunatic" and claimed – entirely falsely – that she was in favor of the "execution" of newborn babies.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a resolution on Thursday criticizing Harris's record on immigration.
In a promising sign for Democrats, however, Trump and Harris were statistically tied in a new New York Times/Siena College poll that showed her narrowing the gap after the survey found Biden behind by six points in early July.
One of the most urgent tasks facing her in the much shorter term, however, is to forge her own political identity before she can be defined by Trump as inseparable from the unpopular Biden.
And she has begun quickly spending some of the $100 million-plus that she has raised in the opening days to tell her personal story and counter Republican characterizations of her as an out-of-touch liberal.
The Harris campaign sought to plant an early flag with its first TV spot Thursday – an ad featuring the Beyonce hit "Freedom," warning that Americans' rights are under threat from the Trump agenda.
The speech came amid a mushrooming controversy over resurfaced remarks by Trump's vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who singled out Harris as he called Democrats a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives."
Harris has two stepchildren and the comments have sparked accusations that father-of-three Vance represents an out-of-touch Republican mindset.
Hollywood star Jennifer Aniston pointed to her own infertility while comedian and talk show host Whoopi Goldberg asked: "Now, what the hell?"
