Donald Trump and Kamala Harris launched a frantic tour of swing states on Wednesday in the final week of the campaign for the US presidency, a day after the vice-president told a crowd outside the White House that her rival was unstable and itching for power.
Harris was to travel to North Carolina and then to Pennsylvania, focusing again on two of seven battleground states that could determine who wins the closest, oddest and most consequential election in modern US history. For weeks the race has been locked in a statistical dead heat.
North Carolina has not voted for a Democratic president since it went with Barack Obama in 2008, and in a sign of how hotly contested it is, Trump was expected there – in the town of Rocky Mount, about an hour’s drive from Harris’s Raleigh rally.
Trump has a second rally planned in yet another swing state, Wisconsin in the Midwest, where he will appear with US football legend Brett Favre.
As Trump struggled to deal with the fallout from a self-inflicted wound over the weekend that infuriated Latino voters, a key demographic, Harris gave a powerful closing argument speech in a symbolic setting. She spoke at the spot in Washington where Trump stirred up a mob that went on to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power,” Harris said.
She used the setting of the White House lit up against the black sky behind her as a symbolic pitch to show that she was ready for the presidency.
“America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are,” Harris told the huge crowd of flag-waving supporters. “Each of you has the power to turn the page, and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”
Harris’s campaign said 75 000 people attended the rally. The number could not be immediately verified.
Trump held a rally on Tuesday evening in Allentown, Pennsylvania and remained on the defensive after a comedian who spoke at his weekend event in Madison Square Garden in New York described Puerto Rico, a US territory in the Caribbean, as “a floating island of garbage”.
It was a dud of a joke at a rally that featured racist and misogynistic comments from the podium. Trump said the comedian “probably shouldn’t …have been there.”
The comment infuriated American Latinos, in particular Puerto Ricans, who number some 400 000 in Pennsylvania, the battleground state seen as the most important of all.
In his rally on Tuesday night, Trump engaged in damage control, saying “nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rico community more than I do”.
Biden made a gaffe of his own on Tuesday night ,about comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s derogatory comment on Puerto Rico, appearing to refer to Trump’s supporters as “garbage” during an election campaign call. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” said Biden. “His, his, his demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American.”
In a statement, the White House said Biden was referring to Trump’s rhetoric, not to his supporters.
On Tuesday, crowds stretched from the Ellipse, a park bordering the White House grounds where Harris spoke, all the way back to the Washington Monument, the obelisk towering over the National Mall.
Speaking from behind bulletproof screens next to blue signs saying “Freedom”, Harris warned that the election was a choice between a “country rooted in freedom for every American, or ruled by chaos and division”.
Harris soon switched to a recap of her detailed plans to help financially struggling middle-class Americans.
She got one of the biggest cheers when she referred to Republicans seeking to curtail abortion, saying the government should not be “telling women what to do with their bodies”.
Harris also addressed one of her main weaknesses – the fact that some voters still see her as a continuation of Biden, who dropped out of the White House race in July. “My presidency will be different, because the challenges we face are different,” she vowed.
Earlier, addressing supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, however, Trump called the New York event a “love fest”, the same phrase he has used to describe the Capitol riot.
The Republican later rallied in blue-collar Allentown, in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial of the seven battleground states that are expected to decide the election – and a city that is home to a large Puerto Rican community.
Fears of a repeat of the chaos from four years ago hang heavy over this year’s election, with Trump repeatedly indicating that he might again refuse to accept the result if he loses.
Cape Times