Vice President Kamala Harris made a grand entrance Monday during her first official visit to her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., with Freedom” by Beyoncé blasting as her soundtrack.
Beyoncé gave the former senator from California permission to use her song throughout the presidential campaign, which manifested after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 campaign Sunday and endorsed Harris. A spokesperson for Beyoncé told CNN that Harris’ team had received “quick approval” just hours before she walked out to the song.
Although Beyoncé hasn’t officially endorsed Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 presidential race in 2019, 10 months before election day, that the “Texas Hold Em” singer is allowing her song to be used hints at some support for the Democratic hopeful.
On the other hand, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, shared her support for Harris in a Sunday post on Instagram. “New, Youthful, Sharp, energy !!!! You asked for it and our President Biden did what was best for the country ! Putting personal Ego, power and fame aside . That is the definition of a great leader,” Knowles said. “Thank you, President Biden, for your service and your leadership . Go Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Let’s Go.”
The singer definitely leans Democrat: Right before election day in 2020, Beyoncé posted a photo on Instagram showing herself in a Balmain hat with an “I voted” sticker and a Biden-Harris mask. “Come thru, Texas! #VOTE,” she wrote in the caption.
In 2013, she famously sang the national anthem at then-President Obama’s inauguration, and she and husband Jay-Z headlined a pre-election concert in 2016 for then-candidate Hillary Clinton in Cleveland. Her backup dancers wore blue pantsuits with shirts that read, “I’m with her.”
“There was a time when a woman’s opinion did not matter. If you were Black, white, Mexican, Asian, Muslim, educated, poor or rich … if you were a woman, it did not matter,” Beyoncé told the Cleveland crowd. “I want my daughter to grow up seeing a woman lead our country and knowing that her possibilities are limitless … And that’s why I am with her.”
“Freedom,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, first appeared on Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, “Lemonade,” which was released in April 2016. The Times’ music critic Mikael Wood said in his review of the album, “The highly personal ‘Lemonade’ upends expectations in another way, which is the turn it seems to take from [the track] ‘Formation,’ a statement of radical Black positivity that suggested Beyoncé was readying an explicitly political album.”
The duo performed the song together onstage at the 2016 BET Awards with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech playing over the track as the song opened.
