By Katie Rogers, Michael Gold and Nicholas Nehamas
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump swept through Southern states on Saturday, outlining sharply divergent economic messages for voters in top battlegrounds and, in Trump’s case, solidly blue Virginia.
Trump, after a week in which controversies often overshadowed his closing argument, traveled to North Carolina and Virginia, where he gave rambling speeches in which he tried to turn the race back toward immigration, the economy and transgender issues.
Harris began her day at a rally in Atlanta, where she focused on her plans to bolster the economy, an approach that her advisers say has been intentional in the last days of a coin-flip race.
At an event that featured food trucks and a performance by Georgia-born rapper 2 Chainz, she said her first goal as president would be “to bring down the cost of living for you” through tax cuts and measures like expanding Medicare to help cover home care. She emphasized that message soon after at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, saying that Trump would fight for “billionaires and big corporations.”
Trump, in his speeches at an airport in Gastonia, North Carolina, and arenas in Salem, Virginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, pounced on Friday’s labor report showing that employers added just 12,000 jobs last month.
“These are depression numbers, I hate to tell you,” he said in Gastonia, wildly distorting the picture of what is actually a healthy economy and leaving out that the latest figures were driven down by hurricanes and a labor strike.
In all three speeches, Trump characteristically interrupted that jobs-focused message with winding digressions, personal insults and occasional profanity. At his rally in Greensboro, he chuckled and signaled some approval after a supporter shouted a crude joke insinuating that Harris had once been a prostitute.
Harris’ final push in Georgia came a day after the state’s early-voting period ended. According to election officials, more than 4 million people in the state have already cast their ballots, a breathtaking figure in a place where just under 5 million people voted in 2020 — and where fewer than 12,000 votes decided that year’s outcome.
Onstage in Atlanta, Harris also spoke about reproductive rights, telling the crowd that Georgia, which has the most restrictive abortion law of any battleground state, had “a Trump abortion ban.”
“I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to the challenges you face,” she said. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”
Trump, as he often does, painted a hyperbolic and apocalyptic picture of the stakes.
“If Kamala is reelected, every town in America will be turned into a squalid, dangerous refugee camp,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”
Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in North Carolina every day until Election Day — a potentially defensive move in a state he won in both 2020 and 2016. On Sunday, he will travel to Kinston, a rural town in eastern North Carolina. And he will open Monday with a rally in Raleigh.
In Gastonia, a town of roughly 80,000 people about 20 miles west of Charlotte, Trump directly appealed to suburban women, saying that he believed they in particular needed to be protected “when they’re at home in suburbia” as he made exaggerated, fear-mongering depictions of America as being occupied by immigrants in the country illegally. He again compared migrants crossing the border to Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Although his advisers have urged him to focus on the economy, Trump has seen fear-based appeals about immigration as a way to reach persuadable female voters in swing states. Of the battlegrounds expected to decide the election, North Carolina is the only one that Trump won in both 2016 and 2020, when he defeated Joe Biden there by 1.3 percentage points.
The Trump campaign also sees an advantage in stoking fear about participation in female sports by transgender women and girls, who make up a significantly small fraction of the population, as a way to win over women voters.
In Virginia, Trump brought onstage members of the Roanoke College women’s swim team who had objected to a transgender athlete joining their team. Trump has made attacking transgender athletes a mainstay of his speeches, and the swimmers stood behind him in pink T-shirts that used an image of hot dog as a stand-in for genitalia and read “Keep hot dogs out of women’s sports.”
Later, while praising Elon Musk, Trump described the mechanical arms that caught a SpaceX rocket booster as “like you grab your beautiful baby, your beautiful child, see?” He added: “In the old days, I would have said, ‘like you grab your girlfriend.’ Now I don’t say that anymore. I say, ‘like you grab your child.’”
Trump, who has faced a number of sexual misconduct allegations and was caught on a recording bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, is facing a widening gender gap, with polls showing likely women voters favoring Harris.
Indeed, in the final days of his campaign, Trump has been choosing to defend or participate in the sort of commentary that could alienate undecided voters.
He continues to be dogged by criticism over his violent language about former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.; remarks he made about protecting women “whether they like it or not”; and fallout from racist jokes by a comedian at his rally in New York.
Calling in to Fox News before his rallies, Trump tried to defend himself on all three counts. He downplayed the seriousness of the comic calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” referring to him as “one comedian telling one little joke early in the show when nobody had even started going into the arena, practically.”
“He mentioned Puerto Rico, and they made it like a big deal,” Trump added.
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