Washington: With various polls showing that the US presidential race is heading for a dead heat two weeks before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is moving aggressively to make sure voters in the battleground states remember precisely why they rejected her opponent Donald Trump four years ago.
Gone is the euphoria of her joyful first weeks as the Democratic presidential nominee. In a change of strategy, Harris, who turned 60 on Sunday, October 20, 2024, is no longer trying simply to diminish the former president. Now, he looms large. Literally.
The strategy represents a return to President Biden’s original tack of amplifying Trump in order to force the contest into a referendum not on his administration, but on the former president’s words and deeds. It’s a blueprint that helped drive big Democratic victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022. And his recent run of undisciplined behaviour has given Harris ample material to highlight.
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“See for yourself,” she told a crowd in Wisconsin gesturing to two large television screens installed at the rally. “Let’s roll a clip.”
The video screens lit up with a 40-second montage of Trump bragging about overturning the abortion laws.
As Harris stood watching like a late-night host observing the audience’s reaction, the crowd booed and then began a chant of “Lock him up.” She gently stopped them before returning to her promises to restore and protect abortion rights.
Deploying his words as her sharpest weapons, Harris is not shying away from pointing to Trump’s erratic behaviour and increasingly outlandish and antidemocratic statements to paint him as unfit, unstable and, above all, too dangerous for another term. It is a closing argument she is hoping will persuade the dwindling number of undecided voters to help her defeat him.
“I do believe that Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said at a rally. “And the consequences of him ever getting back into the White House are brutally serious.”
Harris’s increasingly pointed attacks on the former president are landing as she struggles to overtake his advantage on the economy, the issue that voters are mostly likely to prioritize. They have been paired with her campaign’s methodical outreach to key constituencies that Democrats believe are repelled by Trump’s polarizing style and divisive rhetoric.
The latest poll by The New York Times said the race seemed to be heading for a tie as Trump and Harris are running neck and neck.
The two candidates are tied in The Times’s polling average of five critical battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Neither candidate is ahead by a single point, and in several of these states, neither candidate is ahead by more than two-tenths of a percentage point.
But as the battle for these states gained further momentum, Trump toured North Carolina Monday and continued to spew venom on the four ‘depressing years’ under Joe Biden and Harris while promising the US a golden era ahead. But he did not spell out his plans and, instead, went personal, attacking his opponent.
Harris made an aggressive bid to win over independents and moderate Republicans in the suburbs, visiting vote-rich counties in three Great Lakes swing states Monday with former Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney.
In the presidential race’s closing days, Harris’ campaign is courting a small but potentially decisive group across what it sees as similar terrain in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — a trio of battleground states that tipped the 2016 race for Donald Trump but swung back in Democrats’ favour in 2020.
– global bihari bureau
