Vice President Kamala Harris will not attend next month’s Al Smith charity dinner in New York City, her campaign has told organizers, opting instead to stump in a battleground state on October 17, less than three weeks before the election.

The historic Catholic fundraiser traditionally features light roasts by the two major-party nominees – aimed at one another and others – in presidential election years. This fall’s gathering is already sold out and poised to welcome an estimated 1,500 guests to a gala ballroom in Midtown Manhattan,

Donald Trump stunned attendees in 2016 when he abandoned the collegial banter and launched a series of personal attacks on Hillary Clinton, who in her own remarks had offered the expected round of self-deprecating humor. The affair – black-tie for attendees, white-tie for the headliners – is named after the first major-party Catholic presidential nominee, four-term New York Gov. Al Smith, the Democratic standard-bearer in 1928.

Smith lost to Republican Herbert Hoover, and it would be more than three decades before another Catholic candidate, Democrat John F. Kennedy, was nominated by a major party – on his way to the White House in 1960.