Kamala Harris heads to must win Pennsylvania Wednesday to take voters questions live while Donald Trump campaigns in Georgia another of the seven toss-up states expected to decide the result of an extremely close White House race.
With just 13 days to go before the election, Vice President Harris and former president Trump are each on a mission to persuade the sliver of American voters who remain undecided in the home stretch.
The pace of campaigning has intensified in the electoral fight that is nearing its November 5 apogee after twists, turns and a fair bit of drama including recent claims by a former Trump aide that the ex-president sometimes spoke in positive terms about Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Harris, who turned 60 over the weekend, will be near Philadelphia for a CNN town hall-type meeting with voters, but there is not one planned for Trump despite the network’s offer to hold a separate one for him.
Pennsylvania is a coveted prize for the candidates, and Harris and Trump have made repeated appearances there and across other swing states.
The Harris camp has also confirmed that Michelle Obama will join her at an event Saturday in battleground Michigan, the former US first lady’s first campaign stop with Harris.
Trump will hold his own town hall event Wednesday as well as a rally in the southern battleground state of Georgia, which the 78-year-old Republican won in 2016 and then narrowly lost to Joe Biden four years later.
About 23.5 million Americans have already voted by mail or in person, reportedly a far higher number than the same period four years ago.
In Georgia, a staggering 1.9 million early votes have already been cast, shattering the previous record.
Nevertheless, Trump told Fox News on Wednesday that he still felt “very mixed” about early voting, even though he confirmed he himself would be voting early in Florida.
“People have different feelings about it,” he said. “But the main thing is you’ve got to get out, you’ve got to vote.”
Can polls be trusted?
Harris’s arrival in the campaign shook up the country, which was expecting a rematch between Biden and Trump, now a felon convicted on 34 charges of falsifying business records to hide hush-money payments to a porn star.
Since Biden’s shock withdrawal after a disastrous debate performance, the Trump-Harris race has been one of the tightest in American history.
It’s hard to know the degree to which opinion polls are accurate, as they have in the past underestimated support for Trump but also failed to predict the level of support for Democrats.
While the ex-president hammers on his promises of a migrant crackdown and economic good times after a period of high inflation, rivals raise concerns about his willingness to honour American democracy.
The Harris campaign has also begun to hit at his mental and physical fitness for the Oval Office while trying to woo moderate Republican voters.
One of Trump’s top aides as president, former US Marine general John Kelly, confirmed Tuesday to The New York Times previous reports that he considered the Republican to be a fascist.
“Certainly the former president is in the far right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly also claimed that Trump “commented more than once that, You know, Hitler did some good things too.”
A day after the explosive remarks were published, Harris’s campaign arranged a press call with retired military figures who backed up Kelly’s assessment and warned that a second Trump presidency would have far fewer democratic guardrails than his first term.
“General Kelly is warning us that Trump is seeking the power to do anything he wants, anytime he wants,” retired US Army colonel Kevin Carroll said on the call.
“Trump is now running to give himself unprecedented, unchecked, and in the phrase he used last night on television, ‘extreme’ powers.”
