Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend

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This combination of pictures created on November 01, 2024 shows former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) speaks at a campaign rally at Lee's Family Forum in Henderson, Nevada, October 31, 2024, and US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (R) speaks during a campaign rally at Reno Expo Center in Reno, Nevada, on October 31, 2024. (Photo: AFP)

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter the final weekend of the most tense United States (US) presidential campaign of modern times with a flurry of swing-state rallies that will test their stamina — and ability to persuade the country’s last undecided voters.

Harris, bidding to become the country’s first woman president, will use rallies in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan to drive home her message that Trump is a threat to US democracy.

Trump — seeking a sensational return to the White House after losing in 2020 and then becoming the first presidential nominee to have been convicted of crimes — promises a radical right-wing makeover of the government and aggressive trade wars to promote his policy of “America first”.

In an interview with Fox News Saturday morning, Trump took a swipe at the state of the economy under the Biden-Harris administration, calling the disappointing job numbers released Friday “a gift to me”.

The candidates’ frantic schedules will run right into Monday, culminating with late-night rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris.

Election Day is Tuesday, but Americans have been voting early for weeks, with more than 72 million ballots already cast — including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats seek to pull out all the stops to keep the state in their column.

Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states likely to determine the result in the US Electoral College system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival fighting hard to peel off even slivers of support from each other’s camps.

Harris, currently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing that by appealing to centrist voters and propelling her base to the polls with a robust ground game and get-out-the-vote effort.

Thousands of women were expected to demonstrate Saturday, under the theme “We Won’t Go Back,” in cities across the country in support of Harris and abortion rights.

But as she has worked to appeal to women voters across party lines, using issues like abortion and health care, Trump lashed out at a Democratic TV ad depicting wives of his supporters secretly voting for Harris.

“Can you imagine a wife not telling her husband who she’s voting for?” he asked on Fox News Saturday morning.

Harris, who earlier rebuked Trump for saying he would protect women whether they “like it or not,” has encouraged voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president.

“He is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance — and the man is out for unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin on Friday.

Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric in hopes of firing up his loyal base to turn out in massive numbers.

“Kamala’s closing message to America is that she hates you,” Trump fumed on Friday night in Warren, Michigan, where he trashed the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — despite experts saying the overall economy is strong.

He also warned that “a 1929-style economic depression” would ensue if Harris were elected. Speaking on Fox Saturday, Trump described the weak employment data released Friday as “the worst job numbers,” though analysts said the figures were a temporary blip.

Citing her hawkish foreign policy views, Trump earlier had conjured the image of Liz Cheney, a former Republican representative turned Harris supporter, being shot.

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.

Harris, the nation’s first Black and first Asian-American vice president, meanwhile has sought to harness celebrity star power like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the campaign’s waning days.

Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican heritage, joined Harris onstage Thursday, amid a firestorm triggered by a Trump rally warm-up speaker branding the US territory a “floating island of garbage”.

With the election just days away — and Trump refusing to say whether he would accept its results if he loses — businesses in the capital Washington have begun boarding up storefronts as city authorities warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” in the days after the polls close.

Trump is already alleging fraud and cheating in swing states such as Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what could be more unrest, following the violence that erupted at the US Capitol in the wake of the 2020 vote.

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