TEXAS — Kamala Harris took the stage on the final day of early voting to speak to socially distanced crowd at the First Saint John Cathedral in Fort Worth. She later headed to McAllen, and ended the day in Houston.

Democrats in the state see her visit as key to helping boost turnout even more. Tarrant County is a traditionally Republican stronghold until recently, when Beto O’Rourke carried the county by a small margin in 2018. Tarrant County is the state’s most populous county that President Trump won in the 2016 election. 

Spending time in Texas is a strategy that’s not lost on supporters, like Grand Prairie resident Sydney Davis.

"It is great to have someone of her caliber with her expertise, join a ticket to lead us into a better place,” Davis said. "Women can do anything and everything that they want to do. And we've always been leaders since the founding of this country. So for us to have a vice presidential nominee is nothing new, it's just we just needed the right person to step up and do it.”

Davis is a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which is the sorority Harris’ joined as a student at Howard University. Many of the sisters were in attendance at the Biden-Harris voter mobilization event Friday.

Harris took the stage while the Mary J. Blige hit Work That played in the background, and walked out in her infamous Converse sneakers and a navy blazer. Harris shouted “What’s up Fort Worth?” to the crowd of invited guests.

“Now we know this is no time to let up on the pedal though, right?” Harris said, after mentioning how Texans have come out in droves during the early voting period, surpassing the total number of votes cast during the 2016 election as a whole. “We have a choice in this election to elect Joe Biden who says 'We are, as a first order of priority, going to unify our country and bring us back together as a nation who values the importance of giving each other respect and dignity'."

Harris’ late trip to Texas is fairly remarkable for a state that has long been considered noncompetitive, but she made it known the Biden-Harris ticket isn’t ceding Texas to the GOP this year.

"You have power, and at election time that power will be through your vote and you will tell them when they ask that you elected Joe Biden, the President of the United States,” Harris said.

The senator spoke on many of the hot button issues plaguing the nation like COVID-19, healthcare and unemployment.

"We have a president who while we are seeing spikes around our country talking about, 'We've turned the corner,’ continuing to mislead the American people. We need to address it in terms of what we're doing around health care. We need to address it in terms of the racial wealth gap, we need to address it in terms of the gaps in our education system. Joe Biden says let's deal with it by putting $150 billion into low interest loans for minority businesses, black and brown businesses, which tend to be the economic lifeblood of the community,” Harris said. “Even before this pandemic, far too many Americans were working two and three jobs to try and pay the rent and put food on the table. And by the way, in Joe Biden and my America, nobody should work more than one job to have to put food on the table and pay the rent.”

She says Texans know the effects of climate change well, and under a Biden-Harris administration, renewable energy will be embraced.

"We must embrace the science on this, we cannot play politics on this. And we see that in this moment of opportunity to have timelines understanding we must deal with this with a sense of urgency that we also have the opportunity to grow our economy and create jobs,” Harris said.

Currently Biden is underperforming with Latino voters, so Kamala Harris’s tour around Texas is vital. Polls are showing that Biden and Trump are essentially neck and neck, and the Cook Political Report earlier this week categorized Texas as a toss-up state.

A poll released last week by Quinnipiac University indicates Trump and Biden are tied, each with 47% of the voters’ support.

A poll released over the weekend by the Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler shows Biden with a small edge over Trump, 48% to 45%.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Kamala Harries as the Democratic presidential candidate. We apologize for the error and have corrected it on all digital platforms.