Beyonce to appear at Houston rally for Kamala Harris

Beyonce is expected to appear at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Houston on Friday.

Ms Harris’s presidential campaign has taken on Beyonce’s 2016 track Freedom as its anthem, and the singer’s planned appearance brings some star power to what has become a key theme of the Democratic nominee’s bid.

She is heading to the reliably Republican state just 10 days before Election Day in an effort to refocus her campaign against former president Donald Trump on reproductive care, which Democrats see as a make-or-break issue this year.

Houston-born Beyonce’s appearance is expected to draw even more attention to the event.

The trip is set to feature women who have been affected by Texas’s restrictive abortion laws, which took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.

She has campaigned in other states with restrictive abortion laws, including Georgia which is among the seven most closely contested states.

The Democrat has centred her campaign around the idea that Mr Trump is a threat to American freedoms, from reproductive and LGBT+ rights to the freedom to be safe from gun violence.

Beyonce gave Ms Harris permission early in her campaign to use Freedom, a soulful track from her 2016 landmark album Lemonade, in her debut ad. Ms Harris has used its thumping chorus as a walk-out song at rallies ever since.

Beyonce’s alignment with Ms Harris is not the first time that the Grammy winner has aligned with a Democratic politician. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, danced as Beyonce performed at a presidential inaugural ball in 2009.

In 2013, she sang the national anthem at Mr Obama’s second inauguration. Three years later, she and her husband Jay-Z performed at a pre-election concert for Democrat Hillary Clinton in Cleveland.

“Look how far we’ve come from having no voice to being on the brink of history — again,” Beyonce said at the time. “But we have to vote.”

Speculation over whether the superstar would appear at this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago reached a fever pitch on the gathering’s final night, with online rumours swirling after celebrity news site TMZ posted a story that said: “Beyonce is in Chicago, and getting ready to pop out for Kamala Harris on the final night of the Democratic convention.”

The site attributed it to “multiple sources in the know”, none of them named.

About an hour after Ms Harris ended her speech, TMZ updated its story to say, “To quote the great Beyonce: We gotta lay our cards down, down, down… we got this one wrong.”

In the end, Ms Harris took the stage to star’s song but that was its only appearance.

Last year, Ms Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, attended Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour in Maryland after getting tickets from the star.

“Thanks for a fun date night, @Beyonce,” Ms Harris wrote on Instagram.