Trump, Harris in frantic campaign push as US election nears

Harris will travel to North Carolina and then to Pennsylvania, two major battleground states – Copyright AFP SAUL LOEB

Danny KEMP

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris launch a frantic tour of swing states Wednesday in the final week of the campaign for the US presidency, a day after the vice president told a huge crowd outside the White House that her rival was unstable and itching for unbridled power.

Harris will 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 will be in that same state on Wednesday — 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 Brett Favre, an American football legend.

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 highly symbolic setting.

She spoke at the very spot in Washington where Trump stirred up a mob that went on to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to keep him in power even though he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

“This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power,” Harris said. 

But the vice president also gave an optimistic vision of the United States’ future, using the setting of the White House lit up against the black sky behind her as a symbolic pitch to show that she is 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, who cheered often.

– ‘Turn the page’ –

“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 claimed 75,000 people attended the rally. The number could not be immediately verified, but the crowd was unusually big in an election that has already seen heavy enthusiasm on both sides.

Trump held a rally 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 potentially catastrophic dud of a joke at a rally that featured a spate of racist and misogynistic comments from the podium.

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 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 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 demonization 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.

The Trump campaign seized on the comments, with the candidate himself calling them “terrible.”