Meghan Markle Said She's "So Excited" About Kamala Harris in a Conversation With Gloria Steinem

• Meghan Markle sat down with Gloria Steinem to talk about the importance of voting.
• After Steinem brought up Kamala Harris's vice presidential campaign, Meghan said she was "so excited to see that kind of representation."
• "For me, being biracial, growing up, whether it was a doll or a person in office, you need to see someone who looks like you in some capacity," she said.

Meghan Markle's full conversation with Gloria Steinem was released Wednesday, during which they discussed voting and voter suppression, feminism, and the importance of representation. The conversation focused on the importance of voting itself, with neither explicitly stating their voting intentions—but when the conversation turned to vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Meghan said she was "so excited" about Harris' candidacy.

While neither Meghan nor Steinem mentioned Harris by name, Steinem commented, "The heart of the Democratic party has been Black women, actually, and now there is a potential Vice President who is Black and that’s exciting." Meghan agreed, saying, "I’m so excited to see that kind of representation. You know, for me, being biracial, growing up, whether it was a doll or a person in office, you need to see someone who looks like you in some capacity."

"As many of us believe, you can only be what you can see," Meghan continued. "And in the absence of that, how can you aspire to something greater than what you see in your own world? I think maybe now we’re starting to break through in a different way."

Meghan also shared her concerns about voter suppression with Steinem. "I had the chance to speak with Stacey Abrams about this to try to get a better understanding of what to do, for example, if you’re a person of color and you’re in line, for potentially hours on end, and during that time someone tries to intimidate you to tell you that you should get out of line because you might be under surveillance or any number of intimidation tactics that are so scary," she said.

"And then you think: ‘You know, it’s not worth it.’ You decide to step out of line and relinquish your right to vote. That’s bad enough, but then there’s a ripple effect because whoever is in the back of the line says, ‘Whatever they did to them…I don’t want that to happen to me,'" the Duchess of Sussex continued. "That, I think, is so frightening. But I wonder how we circumvent that and how we get people to feel empowered."

"Just people hearing you say that will help them be better prepared for it," Steinem responded. "I remember standing in lines in Florida that were eight hours long and that was a form of voter suppression. I was not voting. I was there to encourage. Because if you have young kids, how are you going to do that?"

"But the result of that realization was that in the next voting opportunity people were saying, 'I’ll take your kids. I’ll drive you to the polls. We’ll move the polls closer to your neighborhood,'" Steinem said. "It really is one step at a time."