CNN
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Vice President Kamala Harris will give her final address Wednesday night at CNN Town Hall in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, to voters whose early voting has already begun, with less than two weeks until the election.
The event, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. ET, comes on the day CNN proposed a second debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump, which Harris accepted but Trump rejected. .
Harris has stepped up her attacks on Trump’s basic mental abilities in the final stages of the campaign, calling him incoherent and “unfit to be president of the United States.” She also focused more sharply on his role in stripping the federal government of abortion rights, calling his often callous discussion of the issue a symbol of “atrocity.”
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to take a fierce stance against Ms. Harris, and in recent weeks has seen fit to question and sometimes attack Jewish, black and Latino voters who support the Democratic Party. .
But for all the rhetoric, organizing, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaign advertising, the race has become more of a coin flip. Both sides have shown signs of dissatisfaction with the relative stability of national and swing state polls.
Here are five things to keep in mind during Harris’ town hall, moderated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
In recent weeks, Harris’ campaign has increasingly questioned whether Trump is mentally and physically fit to remain in the White House for another four years.
“He’s becoming increasingly unstable and insecure, and we need to address that,” Harris told reporters in Detroit over the weekend. “I think the American people are better than people who actually look unstable.”
It’s a reversal of the strategy Trump and his Republican allies used to insult President Joe Biden for years until the 81-year-old incumbent dropped out of the 2024 race in July. . Harris, who just turned 60, has maintained a frenetic campaign schedule and has mocked Trump for skipping scheduled news conferences, with some reports citing “fatigue” as the reason. She’s also seen the 78-year-old Republican recently shut down a town hall and swayed and danced for 39 minutes in front of a confused-looking South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, who was scheduled to host the event. , and seems to actively mention strange behavior. event.
At the same time, surveys of undecided voters continue to show they want to learn more about Harris and her policy plans. She has already proposed one of the most ambitious elder care expansions in modern U.S. history, but it rarely receives a thorough hearing.
Harris doesn’t necessarily have to choose between promoting herself and mocking Trump, but questions at town halls often give candidates more room to steer the conversation. Where she ends up will provide new insight into how she and her camp view the race.
Ms. Harris has handled the topic of Mr. Biden with care, delicately balancing her loyalty to her own president with the political reality that Democrats have forced her out of the race.
Earlier this month, the Trump campaign took issue with Harris’ response to a question on ABC’s “The View” about her actions being different from Biden’s, saying, “I can’t think of anything.”
A week ago, in an interview with Fox News in which she was asked a similar question, Harris used the do-over to highlight the age difference between Biden and Biden (she is 60, he is 81). He tried to show his distance from Mr. Biden. Political background (her resume was built in California, where he spent 36 years in the Senate). She also said she would include Republicans in her cabinet.
“My presidency is not a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris told Fox News.
The economy is perhaps Harris’ biggest challenge. Mr Biden has been keen to tout his economic record, touting the US recovery from the coronavirus pandemic as a success story. But Harris must face the reality that many Americans continue to feel inflationary pressures. She sought to respond to this pressure with policy proposals aimed at combating price gouging and supporting first-time home buyers.
While polls show Americans have deep concerns about Biden’s age, he has one unique point to make. That makes him the only person to ever defeat Trump. Harris is seeking to reassemble Biden’s 2020 coalition, which included strong support from black voters and support from suburban moderates. The need for support from those voters may be the answer to why she doesn’t want to see more light between herself and Biden.
Trump unleashed a barrage of sometimes profane attacks on his Democratic rivals and their allies in the final stages of the campaign.
He said Harris is a “shit” vice president. He called former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who campaigned with Harris, “stupid as a rock.”
Will Harris respond directly to those attacks or brush them off?
The vice president has increasingly quoted Trump himself on the campaign trail, sometimes even playing clips of Trump’s inflammatory remarks, stumbles and bizarre moments at his own rallies. . She has used such moments to criticize President Trump as unstable.
Abortion rights have become perhaps the biggest issue for Democrats since the Supreme Court (majority comprised of three conservatives nominated by President Trump) struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.
This is something Harris is emphasizing in the final stages of the campaign, especially as polls show a historic gender disparity with clear majorities of women supporting Democratic candidates and men supporting Trump. .
Harris is likely to look for ways to emphasize her support for abortion rights while pointing to the real problems posed by President Trump’s request for states to decide their own policies. In recent days, she has focused her campaign efforts on individual cases of women affected by each state’s restrictive abortion laws.
In Georgia on Saturday, she cited the case of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died after her treatment was delayed because of the state’s abortion laws.
A report last month in the nonprofit news organization ProPublica revealed that Thurman died in 2022 from a treatable infection due to medical delays caused by the state’s restrictive abortion laws. Thurman tried to schedule an abortion in North Carolina, four hours away, but was late due to traffic. Instead, she underwent a medical abortion (a two-pill drug approved for terminating pregnancies up to 10 weeks), but developed rare and ultimately fatal complications.
“Donald Trump continues to refuse to take responsibility, refuse to take any responsibility for the pain and suffering he has caused, or even just acknowledge the pain and suffering that has occurred.” said Harris.
On Monday alone, Harris joined former Congresswoman Liz Cheney in three events in three different states, crossing the “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. As she has said many times, she is a hard-line conservative and has never voted on policy. Although she is the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, she supports the vice president because her survival in the next election is at stake.
Harris hasn’t backed away from her liberal tendencies, but she has consistently said she wants to be a “president for all Americans” to Republican voters frustrated by Trump but unsure of breaking away from their tribe. I sent you a message. Harris is not the first candidate to use this line, or a version of it. But the vice president, who sits next to Cheney, the daughter of Iraq War architect and former Vice President Dick Cheney, who also voted for Harris, said there is a disconnect between meaningful groups of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. He is betting that he can persuade the party. Mr. Trump.
This is large-scale coalition politics at its purest, the type common in European parliamentary elections but rarely seen in US presidential elections. If Harris fails, her campaign will be accused of wasting precious time and resources. If she wins, it could signal a potential historic realignment of American politics.
But before that, she has to make her closing argument in time for the moment.
