Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, tailored his remarks to his audience at a fundraiser at the Chicago Cultural Center on Friday, approaching a crowd made up mostly of attorneys as peers as he urged them to contribute to his wife’s presidential campaign.
“It’s go time,” Emhoff said to about 200 attendees at the fundraiser, held under the center’s Tiffany glass dome. “Treat this as the trial of your life. Treat this as the biggest deal you’ve ever worked on.”
Emhoff, a former media lawyer, gave up his partnership with the DLA Piper law firm after Harris was elected vice president in 2020, and is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s law school.
The Chicago visit came just a couple of weeks after Emhoff joined Harris, a former California prosecutor, onstage at the United Center on the Near West Side to celebrate her nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Harris has been campaigning across the country since then ahead of her first debate next week with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
“We need great lawyers to protect our democracy, plain and simple. And democracy literally is the client here — our way of life, our existence. That’s what is at stake, and that’s why us lawyers are going to be right there every step of the way,” Emhoff said.
Harris raised $360 million in August, nearly three times the $130 million that Trump brought in, according to The Associated Press. Those numbers build on Democratic fundraising momentum that went into overdrive after President Joe Biden exited the race.
Friday’s fundraiser was expected to raise an estimated $1.4 million to $1.5 million, attorney Jon Bunge said before introducing Emhoff. Some of the money raised will be spent on field offices for the Harris campaign in swing states, Bunge said.
Bunge is a former federal prosecutor and partner at the Chicago office of law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Among the event’s co-hosts were former Ald. William Singer, who unsuccessfully challenged Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1970s, and former U.S. Attorney in Chicago Zach Fardon, Bunge said.
“The more that we can raise, the more that we can compete all across the country. The map is wide open,” Emhoff said in remarks that lasted about a half-hour.
Emhoff was also in Chicago in August before the convention for a trio of local fundraising events, including one at the home of former American Israel Public Affairs Committee President Lee Rosenberg, an adviser to Gov. JB Pritzker.
The second gentleman was preceded onstage Friday by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, former acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
Emhoff said the presidential campaign brought out “the most badass version of Kamala Harris.”
“This is real. This is not some honeymoon. This is exactly who she is, meeting this moment,” Emhoff said.
