() – Donald Trump is trying to return to power, while Kamala Harris finally dares to go off script while Democrats worry about her campaign.
On Tuesday, the Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate offered voters an unusually self-reflective view of their characters as they chased the dwindling number of undecided voters in a race with not much margin left.
Trump, fresh off a bizarre half-hour at an event on Monday in which he danced on stage to his campaign soundtrack, made a clumsy attempt to repair his damaged image among female voters. “I am the father of IVF (in vitro fertilization),” said the former president, whose conservative majority on the Supreme Court unleashed chaos on reproductive health care.
And in a testy appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, he made a virtue of his frequent incoherence, presenting it as a sophisticated “weave” of multiple ideas that only a political genius could outline. And he tried a new version of the story about his attempt to steal the 2020 election, declaring that his crowd in Washington on January 6, 2021 was filled with “love and peace.”
Harris also sought a second chance among a key voting bloc that is cold to her campaign. In her bid to become the first black president, she courted black male voters who last week were berated by former President Barack Obama for flirting with Trump. In an interview with radio host Charlamagne Tha God, the vice president further sharpened her attacks against her rival, calling him “weak” because he aligns himself with dictators and agreeing with the host that his political creed was equivalent to “fascism.”
While Trump flaunted his rambling rhetorical style, Harris rejected suggestions that she is too scripted. “That would be called discipline,” Harris said in the radio interview.
But as Democrats panic over Trump’s possible return to the White House, Harris is beginning to embrace more spontaneous actions.
Harris took the rare step of answering questions on the “town hall”-style radio show, and got some tough ones about her commitment to the black church and the economic woes of black voters. This Wednesday, Harris will venture into the lion’s den at Fox News, hoping to reach another important group of voters. His appearance on the pro-Trump network is part of his attempt to give Republicans unhappy with the former president a reason to vote Democratic.
With Trump trying to repair his deficit among women and Harris belatedly trying to shore up support among black men, the battle for the world’s most powerful political office looks less like a test of strength than a fight between two candidates who know that mitigating your weaknesses can be the key to victory.
With polls in swing states deadlocked, the election could come down to a few thousand votes in a handful of battlegrounds, leaving both Harris and Trump searching for people who agree with them but who They often don’t vote.
These elections were a succession of unexpected events, with a convicted felon who survived two assassination attempts, an elderly president who resigned from his second term a few months before the elections were due, and a vice president who was entrusted with a mission of last minute to save the White House from a rival that Democrats consider a would-be tyrant.
But the extraordinary stakes of what is to come—and the power of democracy—were on full display Tuesday, as more than 300,000 voters in the key state of Georgia showed up on the first day of early voting and They broke a record.
In the recent elections in the so-called “Peach State,” a high turnout would be a good sign for Democrats. But despite Trump’s insistence that all voting should take place on Election Day, the Republican Party has been pleading with its voters to show up early, so it’s still early to draw conclusions about who is turning out.
Gabriel Sterling – the Georgia secretary of state’s chief of operations, who played a key role in debunking Trump’s election falsehoods four years ago – argued that democracy was alive and well in his state. “To those who claimed Georgia’s election laws were Jim Crow 2.0 and those who say democracy is dying… Georgia voters would like to say a few words,” he said.
In Chicago, Trump demonstrated exactly what he would take to the Oval Office in a second term, promising an aggressive program to punish countries and companies with a draconian tariff regime.
It also offered a reminder of his wild years as president. He was impervious to facts, systematically ignored economic logic, and was steeped in personal grievances and conspiracy theories.
But Trump also showed why he is so attractive to so many voters who believe they have been left behind by an economy run by corporate elites for their own benefit. He posed as a proud populist and turned his interviewer, John Micklethwait, Bloomberg News’ top editor, into an avatar of the established economic elite. When the British-born journalist said it was “simple math” that tariffs would increase costs for businesses and consumers, Trump went on the attack, saying: “You’ve been wrong about these things your whole life.”
Trump also again refused to disassociate himself from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he often deferred to during his term. Asked about Bob Woodward’s report that he had spoken to the autocrat several times since leaving the White House, Trump said: “I don’t comment on that. But I will tell you that if I did, it would be a smart thing to do.”
The interview was a classic example of how Trump flouts the truth and has shattered traditional electoral conventions. He accumulated a torrent of falsehoods and digressions that made him impossible to immobilize, effectively escaping any type of accountability.
Trump later recorded an interview on Fox News with women voters that will air in full this Wednesday. “I’m the father of in vitro fertilization, so I want to hear this question,” Trump said during the event recorded in Georgia. And he added: “We really are the party of in vitro fertilization (IVF). We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than they are. So we are totally in favor.”
trump has previously proposed have the government or insurance companies pay for IVF treatments, without specifying how. But Harris and Democrats have been warning that a GOP victory next month would threaten IVF treatments and other reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion.
Trump trails Harris among female voters in most polls and urgently needs to close that gender gap with 20 days left.
The vice president faces similar challenges among black men. Although this is a cohort that has generally voted Democratic, there have been signs of erosion in recent cycles; a trend that Trump has been working to advance.
But Harris fired back on Charlamagne Tha God’s “The Breakfast Club,” saying black voters need to think carefully about the future.
“When you vote in this election, you have two options, or you don’t vote, but you have two options if you do and they are two very different visions for our nation,” Harris said, warning as she often does that another Trump presidency “would take us backward.”
And he went further than he has done before in categorizing the threat he sees personified in the former president, who over the weekend suggested turning the military against “the enemy within.” The show’s host said one option represented by Trump is “fascism,” adding, “Why can’t we say it?”
Harris responded: “Yes, we can say that.”
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