Harris plans 'Freedom Rally', Trump puts men on trial in final push

(Bloomberg) — The campaign for the U.S. presidency is entering its final week, with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump locked in a stubbornly close race, taking starkly different positions to motivate supporters and leave the few remaining convincing voters.

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Harris casts herself as standing between Trump and an important trifecta, including economic opportunity, reproductive rights and democracy itself. She promises to lead the country more vitally than the last two presidents, both of whom were born in the 1940s.

On Tuesday, Harris, 60, will deliver her closing arguments at a large rally from the same location on Washington’s National Mall where Trump addressed supporters ahead of the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The 78-year-old Trump gave his own summary during a massive rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York. His long-standing argument: Democrats broke the country — especially its economy and immigration system — and only he will fix it.

The event included a warm-up that called Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash” and billionaire Elon Musk, who has promised Trump a role in his administration and claimed he could cut nearly a third of the annual federal budget.

Despite the efforts of both candidates and the billions of dollars they have spent, they have been deadlocked for weeks in almost all public polls in the seven battleground states, even as millions of early votes have already been cast.

Party membership and demographic data from early voting have not shown a distinctive advantage for either candidate. And top advisers from both say they are confident in their ability to bring out the less reliable members of their base groups and push the undecided to their advantage in the final few days before November 5.

Ultimately, the outcome may depend on whether voters see the race as a referendum on President Joe Biden’s — and by extension Harris’s — struggle to rein in post-pandemic inflation, or Trump, who has been increasingly divisive for a decade fuels American politics.

For the party in the White House: “When an election is about a choice, you win, and when it’s a referendum on the incumbent party, you tend to lose,” said Jim Messina, who led the Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Trump sometimes muses on the tree stump that he wishes Biden hadn’t dropped out of the race, aware that it’s easier to pin an administration’s failures on a president than on his No. 2. That hasn’t deterred his team to put the referendum question at the center of his closing argument.

Biden’s role

Biden is expected to vote Monday in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, but will otherwise largely withdraw from the campaign trail. He is scheduled to visit a pair of Democratic strongholds — Baltimore on Tuesday and Philadelphia on Friday — but will not have his usual blitz of political events as Election Day approaches.

Republicans believe Trump is reaching men, especially young people, black or Latino, more effectively than he did in his previous two campaigns. These voters are among the people most likely to experience inflation and feel alienated by Harris’ history of progressive politics in California.

Even though Harris has resisted creating too much distance from Biden, her allies hope she has done enough by explaining her personal story and making economic proposals so that voters can understand that they need the work of the current administration wants to improve.

“While she was in the room where it happened, she was not the decision maker on policy,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “She has communicated that she will continue some good things and take a different direction on some others.”

On Monday, Harris will visit a semiconductor assembly line in Michigan to draw attention to Biden’s signature bill subsidizing domestic chip production — and Trump’s threats to end the multibillion-dollar effort. The campaign has also invested in ads touting Harris’ economic proposals as polls have shown her lead over Trump’s issue on this issue has narrowed.

That hasn’t stopped hand-wringing from some progressive leaders, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who say they worry Harris won’t do enough to ensure that last-minute decision makers have a clear understanding of her promises to cutbacks for the middle class. taxes and tackle corporate greed, including price gouging.

But Harris aides have also indicated that the campaign plans to balance its economic message with warnings about democracy and reproductive rights in the final days. That’s an acknowledgment that her path depends on strong action from women fed up with Trump’s personality and angry after the Supreme Court, led by justices appointed by Trump, struck down federal abortion protections.

Harris has tried to motivate women — and counter Trump’s advances with young men — by relying on celebrities in recent days, including a rally focused on reproductive rights Friday in Texas headlined by superstar artist Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.

Artists including Maggie Rogers, Gracie Abrams, Mumford & Sons, Remi Wolf and members of The National will appear at Harris events this week in an effort to mobilize votes.

Trump’s latest push through swing states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Virginia, will culminate Wednesday with an event in Green Bay, Wisconsin, featuring legendary Packers quarterback Brett Favre.

“We’re going to close out on a very, very aggressive schedule,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told reporters on Sunday. “We’re going to make sure that everyone in any of these states that we go to knows that President Trump is going to fix it.”