Vice President Kamala Harris heads to Pennsylvania, the biggest battleground prize in the 2024 map, on Wednesday to face the latest high-profile moment in her shortened candidacy to field questions from one of the election’s most favored groups — undecided and undecided voters.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump is set to return to Georgia with a pair of events — a faith town hall in Zebulon and a rally in Duluth hosted by Turning Point Action — as he seeks to flip the state and its 16 electoral votes. Back to his article in November.
Town Hall Test: At a CNN town hall in Delaware County outside Philadelphia, with 13 days to go before Election Day, more than 20 million votes have already been cast, putting Harris in a very close race with his Republican rival. The event comes the same night as a proposed CNN debate between the two candidates, which Harris accepted but Trump rejected.
In the final days of the campaign, the vice president sharpened his attack on the GOP nominee, questioning his fitness for office while also warning of serious policy consequences of a second Trump term.
For Harris, Wednesday marks his 95th day as a presidential candidate — a reminder of the reduced timeframe he has to introduce himself to voters. On Wednesday he will aim to continue working to give voters a better understanding of who he is personally and where he stands politically.
The alarm sounds: The vice president is not alone in warning of the danger of a second Trump presidency. Some of the loudest warnings come from those who served in Trump’s administration, including John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff and Homeland Security secretary.
While Kelly has previously expressed concern about the former president, the decision to weigh in so strongly in the final weeks of the election represents a shocking development. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump “definitely falls within the general definition of fascism.”
A retired Marine general recounted to the Atlantic that Trump told him that Trump wanted US military personnel to give him the same respect that Adolf Hitler’s generals showed the Nazi dictator during World War II. A Trump campaign adviser denied Kelly’s claim, calling it “absolutely false.”
The Harris campaign quickly seized on the comments, with vice presidential candidate Tim Walls saying at a rally in Wisconsin that the episode proved Trump was “descending into madness.”
Pay attention to the rhetoric: But it’s not just comments Trump made years ago that are coming under scrutiny in the final days of the election, as the former president increasingly leans toward inflammatory statements at media appearances and campaign events.
During an event aimed at wooing Latino voters in Florida on Tuesday, Trump attacked his Democratic rival with a racist tirade, calling the vice president “lazy as hell.” Harris participated in a pair of television interviews on Tuesday, a day after Blue Wall held separate campaign events in each of the states.
The former president told a crowd at his Doral golf resort that presidents “have a lot of power” to address immigration.
