Kamala Harris will skip Al Smith dinner in New York
NEW YORK — Vice President Kamala Harris will skip the Al Smith dinner next month in New York, her campaign announced.
The charity roast, scheduled for Oct. 17, traditionally serves as a highlight of the final stretch of the presidential campaign and is usually a forum for jokes about rival candidates and even self-deprecating laugh lines.
But the Harris campaign says the Democratic nominee will be too busy barnstorming the battleground states.
“[Harris] is going to be campaigning in a battleground state that day, and the campaign wants to maximize her time in the battlegrounds this close to the election,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said.
Aside from scheduling concerns, Harris has mostly sought to avoid unscripted moments and events that she does not have control over since taking the Democratic baton from President Biden.
Her campaign may also want to avoid the dinner because it is hosted by the Catholic church and Cardinal Dolan has harshly criticized Democrats over their stance on abortion rights and some other hot-button cultural issues.
The Trump campaign has not said whether he will attend this year’s dinner. He got booed in 2016 at the dinner when many believed he acted improperly by accusing Democrat Hillary Clinton of being corrupt and hating Catholics.
It was not clear whether this year’s dinner would have featured traditional jokes poking fun at rivals. Trump and President Biden, who is the second Catholic president, did not make any jokes at their appearances at the 2020 edition, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic and instead used their speeches to appeal for the support of Catholic voters.
The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner is named for the former New York governor, a Democrat and the first Roman Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party in 1928. He lost the race to Republican Herbert Hoover.
The white-tie event raises millions of dollars for Catholic charities and has traditionally shown that those vying to lead the nation can get along, or pretend to, for one night.
The event has become a tradition for presidential candidates since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960. In 1996, the Archdiocese of New York decided not to invite then-President Bill Clinton and his Republican challenger, Bob Dole, reportedly because Clinton vetoed a late-term abortion ban.
