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Harris Touts Endorsements, Trump Reels 09/13 06:08
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump launched
campaign blitzes Thursday with dramatically different approaches to attracting
swing-state voters who will decide the presidential contest.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Vice President Kamala Harris and former President
Donald Trump launched campaign blitzes Thursday with dramatically different
approaches to attracting swing-state voters who will decide the presidential
contest.
In North Carolina, Democratic nominee Harris used rallies in Charlotte and
Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to
back her. She also promised to protect access to health care and abortion,
while delighting her partisan crowds with celebrations of her debate
performance Tuesday, taking digs at Trump and cheerleading for her campaign and
the country.
"We're having a good time, aren't we?" Harris declared, smiling as her
boisterous crowd chanted: "USA! USA! USA!"
In the border state of Arizona, the Republican Trump pitched a tax exemption
on all overtime wages, adding it to his previous proposals to not tax tips or
Social Security income. But the former president squeezed those proposals,
along with a nonspecific pledge to lower housing costs, into a stemwinding
speech marked by his most incendiary rhetoric on immigration and immigrants
themselves, name-calling of Harris and others, and a dark, exaggerated portrait
of a nation Trump insisted is in a freefall only he can reverse.
"I was angry at the debate," Trump said, mocking commentators' description
of his performance Tuesday. "And, yes, I am angry," he said, because
"everything is terrible" since Harris and President Joe Biden are "destroying
our country." As he repeated the word "angry," Trump's crowd in Tucson answered
with its own "USA! USA! USA!" chants.
The competing visions and narratives underscored the starkly different
choices faced by voters in the battleground states that will decide the
outcome. Harris is casting a wide net, depending on Democrats' diverse
coalition and hoping to add moderate and even conservative Republicans repelled
by the former president. Trump, while seeking a broad working-class coalition
with his tax ideas, is digging in on arguments about the country -- and his
political opponents -- that are aimed most squarely at his most strident
supporters.
That could become a consistent frame for the closing stretch of the campaign
after Trump shut the door on another debate. That potentially could have been
another seminal moment during a year that already has boomeranged around
milestones like Trump's criminal conviction by a New York jury, Trump surviving
an assassination attempt, Biden ending his reelection bid amid questions about
his age, and Harris consolidating Democratic support to become the first woman
of color to lead a major-party ticket.
"There will be no third debate," Trump said Thursday, counting his June
matchup against Biden in the total, and insisting he had won his lone encounter
with Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia.
The post-debate blitz reflected the narrow path to 270 Electoral College
votes for both candidates, with the campaign already having become concentrated
on seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Harris' itinerary Thursday put her in a state Trump won twice, but his
margin of 1.3 percentage points in 2020 was his closest statewide victory.
Arizona, meanwhile, was one of Trump's narrowest losses four years ago. He won
the state in 2016.
In North Carolina, Harris took her own post-debate victory lap, and her
campaign already has cut key moments of the debate into ads. But Harris warned
against overconfidence, calling herself an underdog and making plain the stakes.
"This is not 2016 or 2020," she said in Charlotte. "Just imagine Donald
Trump with no guardrails."
She touted endorsements from Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney
and his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, both of whom have deemed Trump a
fundamental threat to American values and democracy.
"Democrats, Republicans and independents are supporting our campaign,"
Harris said in Charlotte, praising the Cheneys and like-minded Republicans as
citizens who recognize a need to "put country above party and defend our
Constitution."
Yet she also made a full-throated defense of the Affordable Care Act, the
2010 law commonly called "Obamacare" and passed over near-unanimous Republican
opposition. She mocked Trump, who has spent years promising to scrap the ACA
but said at their debate that he still has no specific replacement in mind.
"He said, 'concepts of a plan,'" Harris said. "Concepts. Concepts. No actual
plan. Concepts. ... Forty-five million Americans are insured through the
Affordable Care Act. And he's going to end it based on a concept."
She saddled Trump again with the Supreme Court's decision to end a woman's
federal right to abortion, paving the way for Republican-led states to severely
restrict and in some cases effectively ban the procedure.
"Women are being refused care during miscarriages. Some are only being
treated when they develop sepsis," Harris said of states with the harshest
restrictions.
The vice president added her usual broadsides against Project 2025, a
900-page policy agenda written by conservatives for a second Trump
administration. Trump has distanced himself from the document, though there is
a notable overlap between it and his policies -- and, for that matter, some of
the policy aims of Republicans like the Cheneys.
Harris' approach in Charlotte and Greensboro tracked perhaps her widest path
to victory: exciting and organizing the diverse Democratic base, especially
younger generations, nonwhite voters and women, while convincing moderate
Republicans who dislike Trump that they should be comfortable with her in the
Oval Office, some policy disagreements notwithstanding. That's the same formula
Biden used in defeating Trump four years ago, flipping traditionally
GOP-leaning states like Arizona and Georgia and narrowing the gap in North
Carolina.
Trump, meanwhile, appears to bet that his path back to the White House
depends mostly on his core supporters, plus enough new support from working-
and middle-class voters drawn to his promises of tax breaks.
A raucous crowd cheered his new promise to end taxes on overtime wages. The
Harris campaign quickly labeled the proposal a "snake oil sales pitch," noting
the Trump administration abandoned Obama administration plans to vastly expand
the number of workers eligible for overtime pay in favor of a less generous
expansion. In a state where rising housing prices has been an acute issue since
the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump also pledged to reduce housing construction costs
by "30 to 50 percent" -- a staggering drop that he did not detail beyond
pledging to cut regulations and ban mortgages "for illegal aliens."
"We are going to bring back the American dream bigger, better and stronger
than ever before," Trump said, beaming.
But he reserved most of 75 minutes at the podium for, in his words, anger.
Mostly about an influx of migrants across the U.S. Southern border, but also
about the ABC debate moderators he said were unfair in the debate he insisted
he won. He singled out Linsey Davis, calling her "nasty" -- the same word he
would use to describe his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump ticked through many of his usual immigration bromides, arguing that
migrants in the U.S. illegally have "taken over" cities and suburbs. He again
alluded to the debunked claims -- fueled by right-wing actors on social media
-- that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating domesticated pets
and fowl in public parks. Trump invoked the approval of Hungary's authoritarian
leader, Viktor Orban, and he elicited roars when he promised "largest
deportation operation in the history of our country."
Throughout his remarks, the former president mispronounced Harris' first
name, and he insisted she is both a Marxist and a fascist -- ideologies that
rest on opposite ends of the left-right political spectrum.
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