CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The night after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Janice Robinson made her first appearance at a Democratic Party meeting in her affluent neighborhood of Ballantyne. She had two questions: What are you going to do? And how can I help?
It wasn’t long before Robinson, 60, an occupational therapist, became a precinct chairwoman, organizing Democrats through “A Dem Good Time” happy hours, phone banking, and canvassing in what was once a Republican stronghold.
Nearly four years later, on a warm autumn afternoon at a baseball stadium in Uptown Charlotte, she counted her post-2016 experience as one of the reasons she now feels a kinship with the person she was there to see: Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
“I’m a big believer in that you get out there and you do something,” Robinson said, as she waited for Harris to take the stage in a socially distanced audience of 150 people — most of them women. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, taught her daughters that when something is not right, “you should do something,” Robinson added.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Harris has become a frequent target of Trump and his surrogates, who arguably attack her even more than Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, mispronouncing her name or using language to paint her as the "other.” But Harris is motivating the voters who could provide the fatal blow to Trump’s reelection — a diverse coalition of suburban women like Robinson who see themselves in her story and have been powering Democratic victories up and down the ballot since 2016.
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