ATLANTA — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump swept through Southern battleground states Saturday, outlining sharply divergent economic messages for voters in areas where the presidential race remains in a dead heat.
At a rally in Atlanta that featured food trucks and a performance by Georgia-born rapper 2 Chainz, Harris focused on her plans to bolster the economy. She told the crowd that her first goal as president would be “to bring down the cost of living for you” through tax cuts and measures such as expanding Medicare to help cover home care.
Trump, who tacked a trip to solidly blue Virginia onto his Saturday rally schedule in Southern states, first appeared at an airport in Gastonia, North Carolina, where he gave a rambling speech and pounced on Friday’s labor report showing that employers added just 12,000 jobs last month.
“These are depression numbers, I hate to tell you,” he said, wildly distorting the picture of what is actually a healthy economy and leaving out that the latest figures were driven down by hurricanes and a labor strike.
Their dueling messages about the economy addressed voters’ top issue since the beginning of the race. Harris began the day speaking to reporters in Milwaukee and outlining her economic policies, a focus that her advisers say has been intentional in the last days of a coin-flip race. Trump opened his rally with remarks on the economy, although he characteristically interrupted his message with winding digressions, personal insults and occasional profanity.
The two candidates are fighting over such a small number of undecided voters in battleground states that on Saturday their planes seemed to be chasing each other. In the morning, Air Force Two and what the former president’s team calls Trump Force One started virtually next to each other in Milwaukee. Later in the day, Harris’ plane landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, just a few hundred yards from where Trump’s plane was parked.
Harris’ final push in Georgia came a day after the state’s early-voting period ended. According to election officials, more than 4 million people in the state have already cast their ballots, a breathtaking figure in a place where just under 5 million people voted in 2020 — and where fewer than 12,000 votes decided that year’s outcome.
Onstage in Atlanta, Harris also spoke about reproductive rights, telling the crowd that Georgia was among the states with “a Trump abortion ban.” In her third stop in the state in the past two weeks, she again made abortion a top focus, hoping that the issue would resonate in a place with the most restrictive abortion law of any battleground state.
“I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to the challenges you face,” she said. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”
Trump, as he often does, painted a hyperbolic and apocalyptic picture of the stakes.
“If Kamala is reelected, every town in America will be turned into a squalid, dangerous refugee camp,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”
Throughout Harris’ speech, she urged supporters in the crowd to make sure they voted and to encourage people they knew to do so as well. Trump instructed members of his audience to drag people to the polls if they had to: “They’re couch potatoes? Get them off the couch.”
Even as both candidates push supporters to the polls, Democratic and Republican strategists alike have warned against overinterpreting early-voting data, especially in a state like Georgia, where there is no party registration. Women have made up roughly 56% of the early electorate in the state; Black voters have accounted for more than 26%.
Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in North Carolina every day until Election Day. After his rally in Gastonia, he will stop in western Virginia before returning to North Carolina for a rally in Greensboro. On Sunday, he will travel to Kinston, a rural town in eastern North Carolina. And he will open Monday with a rally in Raleigh.
In Gastonia, a town of roughly 80,000 people about 20 miles west of Charlotte, Trump directly appealed to suburban women, saying that he believed they in particular needed to be protected “when they’re at home in suburbia” as he made exaggerated, fearmongering depictions of America as being occupied by immigrants living in the country illegally. He again compared migrants crossing the border to Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Although his advisers have urged him to focus on the economy, Trump has seen fear-based appeals about immigration as a way to reach persuadable female voters in swing states. Of the battlegrounds expected to decide the election, North Carolina is the only one that Trump won in 2016 and 2020, when he defeated Joe Biden there by 1.3 percentage points.
In the final hours of his campaign, Trump is choosing to defend or participate in the sort of commentary that could alienate undecided voters.
He continues to be dogged by criticism over his violent language about former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.; remarks he made about protecting women “whether they like it or not”; and fallout from racist jokes by a comedian at his rally in New York.
Calling in to Fox News on Saturday, Trump tried to defend himself on all three counts. He downplayed the seriousness of the comic calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” referring to him as “one comedian telling one little joke early in the show when nobody had even started going into the arena, practically.”
“He mentioned Puerto Rico, and they made it like a big deal,” Trump added.
On Saturday, the Harris campaign released what it called Harris’ “closing ad,” a two-minute spot that will air during NFL games Sunday, including a rivalry matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions, two battleground-state teams.
The ad features Harris speaking directly to the camera and emphasizing the arguments she has made in her campaign’s final stretch, including her pledges to lower costs, protect health care and serve as “a president for all Americans.” It does not directly mention Trump. In Atlanta, Harris stood in front of a banner that read, “A president for all.”
Harris is scheduled to hold a rally in Charlotte on Saturday evening before a day of events in Michigan on Sunday. A senior adviser to Harris, who insisted on anonymity to describe internal strategy, said the vice president would attend a mix of local events in addition to holding a traditional campaign rally, in part so that staff members in Michigan would have the opportunity to participate in get-out-the-vote activities, rather than setting up and breaking down a large event.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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