Vice President Kamala Harris made a grand entrance Monday during her first official visit to her campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, with Beyoncé’s “Freedom” playing as the soundtrack.
Beyoncé gave the former California senator permission to use her song throughout the presidential campaign, which came after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race on Sunday and endorsed Harris. A spokesperson for Beyoncé told CNN that Harris' team had received “quick approval” just hours before she walked out on stage with the song.
While Beyoncé has not officially endorsed Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 presidential race in 2019, 10 months before Election Day, the fact that the “Texas Hold Em” singer is allowing her song to be used hints at some support for the Democratic nominee.
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! He put aside personal ego, power and fame. 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. Go.”
The singer is definitely leaning Democratic: Just before Election Day in 2020, Beyoncé posted a photo on Instagram of herself wearing a Balmain hat with an “I Voted” sticker and a Biden-Harris face mask. “Come on Texas! #VOTE,” she wrote in the caption.
In 2013, she performed the national anthem at then-President Obama's inauguration, and in 2016, she and husband Jay-Z headlined a pre-election concert for then-candidate Hillary Clinton in Cleveland. Her dancers wore blue pantsuits with T-shirts that read, “I'm with her.”
“There was a time when a woman’s opinion didn’t matter. If you were black, white, Mexican, Asian, Muslim, educated, poor or rich… if you were a woman, it didn’t 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’m with her.”
“Freedom,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, first appeared on Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, “Lemonade,” which was released in April 2016. 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 preparing an explicitly political album.”
The duo performed the song together onstage at the 2016 BET Awards with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous “I Have a Dream” speech playing over the track as the song began.
