Kamala Harris says Republicans are ‘cheating,’ and she has a ‘controversial’ plan to level the playing field: ‘We need to be ruthless too’

Former Vice President Kamala Harris has laid out a plan for Democrats to counter what she calls “cheating” by Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. She shared her ideas while speaking at the National Urban League Conference on July 31 in Nashville.

Harris said Democrats need to consider major changes to how elections and the courts work in order to compete with the GOP. She described the Republican approach as “ruthless” and said Democrats must respond in kind.

“In light of and in this environment where they are cheating, we will be too big to rig. Too big to rig,” Harris said. “It means being ruthless, they are ruthless! We need to be ruthless too.”

Harris calls for changes to the Electoral College and the Supreme Court

Harris outlined three main ideas during her speech. The first was revisiting the Electoral College, the system used to decide presidential elections. “I know this is going to be controversial coming from me in particular, we need to revisit the Electoral College,” Harris said. The crowd responded with some applause.

Her second idea was expanding the U.S. Supreme Court. “We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 district courts,” she said. This would mean adding four new justices to the court, since it currently has nine. The court has also been at the center of other recent disputes with the president, including a ruling against Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

The last president to appoint a Supreme Court justice was Joe Biden, who picked Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022. Harris also called for revisiting statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., saying Democrats should support it “if they so want.”

Harris made these comments about two years after she lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump. Trump won the Electoral College by a margin of 312 to 226. He received about 77.3 million votes, just under 50% of the total, and won 31 states. Harris received about 75 million votes, according to LiveNOW from FOX.

“And by that, I do not mean cruel. That is not our nature. By that I do not mean breaking the law. That is not what we do. But I do mean we must be uncompromising, and we must allow for a real conversation about revisiting certain things,” she said.

Her remarks were made during a discussion about how Democrats can respond to Republican strategies heading into the upcoming elections. Accusations of cheating have gone in both directions recently, as Trump has also accused Democrats of trying to steal primary races. Harris made clear that being “ruthless” did not mean acting outside the law or being unkind.