The Making of the President 2024: The Final Push
Yesterday (October 28, 2024), Vice-President Kamala Harris spoke in very friendly territory for a Democrat: Washington, DC. It's not a swing state, and doesn't have many electoral votes (3 in total). For Harris however, it provided a symbolic reminder for her audience, both in attendance, and seeing news reports of the event.
With the White House brightly lit as her backdrop, Harris delivered her closing argument for an election just one week away. She called on her nation to move past violent division like the kind that incited an attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. She asked for her listeners “to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms” as she pled for a future of shared responsibility. She said that it was time for Americans to reject “the schemes of wannabe dictators” and to “start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”
Harris chose speak in the very same park where on Jan. 6, 2021, former President Donald J. Trump exhorted his followers to “fight like hell.” She compared her calls for unity with the hateful rhetoric spouted at the event held at Madison Square Gardens on Sunday (October 27th) that Donald Trump billed as his closing statement. Harris told her audience, “America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust, and it can be easy then to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way.”
The audience Harris spoke to was estimated to number in the tens of thousands. Harris framed the election as an important choice of “whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American” or one “ruled by chaos and division.”
In the final days of the campaign in which the economy is considered to be the most important issue according to polls, Harris's campaign is focusing its message on her opponent's lack of fitness for office and stressing the dangers he presents to American democracy. Voters, she said Tuesday night, would not “submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”
After holding his event in Madison Square Gardens on Sunday, Trump continues to campaign in battle ground states. He has attempted to redirect attention from the negativity that came out of his rally on Sunday. Yesterday (Tuesday October 29) he was campaigning in Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state. At a round-table discussion he recognized a retired health care worker, Maribel Valdez, who identified herself as Puerto Rican and said the island stood with him. The event in Drexel Hill, Pa., outside Philadelphia, came two days after a conservative comedian at Mr. Trump’s Manhattan rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” This provoked outrage from Puerto Rican politicians, celebrities and Hispanic voters. Later, at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, he denounced criticisms of his rally, calling it “an absolute love fest.” He was critical of Democrats who have pointed out that a pro-Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden in 1939.
Trump also held a rally at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He told the crowd, "We love Georgia." His speech included attacks on transgender people, tax cut proposals, and lots of talk of immigration. He called transgender issues a "big thing" and told supports: "We don't want transgender operations all over the place ... We don't want men playing in women's sports."
He also was critical of those, including some members of his former administration, who have described him as being a threat to democracy. He said, "The way they talk is so disgusting, just horrible. This is the kind of outrageous rhetoric that has resulted in two assassination attempts in the last three months." Trump called former first lady Michelle Obama "nasty" for comments she made about him at an event for Harris over the weekend. In a speech in Michigan on Saturday October 26, the former First Lady described Trump as "erratic" and said that he is a convicted felon and in "obvious mental decline," among other criticisms. Trump responded by saying it “was a big mistake she made." He did not elaborate.