US vice-president Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will spend the coming week criss-crossing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the trio of battleground states that are key to most of their paths to the White House.
The Democratic ticket is turning its attention to the “Blue Wall” battleground states for a round of campaigning in the relative calm before it ramps up get-out-the-vote activities in the final two weeks before Election Day on November 5th. Polls suggest the race is close in all three states, which Donald Trump won in 2016 and president Joe Biden took in 2020.
“It is a tight race. It is a margin-of-error race,” the vice-president told reporters at the weekend as she prepared to travel to North Carolina. But, she added, “the choice is clear”.
Amid signs that her support among black voters – especially men – is weaker than it’s been for other recent Democratic presidential nominees, Ms Harris is in a four-day wave of outreach to them also.
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She met black elected, faith and community leaders at a barbecue restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina on Saturday night and spent Sunday morning at a church in Greenville, just as her campaign launched its “Souls to the Polls” push to encourage black churchgoers to cast ballots.
Her focus shifts to the Rust Belt at the start of the week with travel to Erie, Pennsylvania, for a stop with black men and a rally. Harris will spend Tuesday in Detroit for a meeting with black entrepreneurs and a town hall-style event led by Charlamagne tha God, the co-host of The Breakfast Club, a syndicated radio show targeting a black audience.
“I want local voices from Detroit and voices from all the battleground states to get the opportunity to ask vice-president Kamala Harris some questions,” he said on Friday. “I know we got some pressing issues to talk about. The future of the nation is decided by who we elect.”
There was better news for her after it was confirmed on Sunday she had erased Republican rival Trump’s advantage in the vast middle of American society: suburban residents and middle-income households, based on an analysis of Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Since Mr Biden ended his flagging reelection bid on July 21st, vice-president Harris has pulled into the lead in both of these large demographic groups, reinvigorating Democrats’ prospects in the election, though the race remains exceptionally close.
Mr Trump has now switched from condemning early voting as a Democrat plot to engineer his defeat to Mr Biden in 2020 to urging people to vote early and by mail.
A recent ABC News-Ipsos poll showed support was split down gender lines, with women voting 60-40 to Harris and men breaking for Trump by a similar margin.
[ US election: The swing state battles that will decide the race to the White HouseOpens in new window ]
Trump needs white women, who supported him in a greater numbers in 2020 than in 2016 – but also black men. On Sunday, he argued that his fellow former president Barack Obama’s call last week for black men to support Harris based “solely on her skin colour, rather than her policies” as “deeply insulting”.
Democratic Georgia senator Raphael Warnock on Sunday told CNN, “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers.” But his fellow black Democrat Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina congressman, told CNN, “Yes, I am concerned,” about black men voting for Trump.
Mr Trump, who is seeking a second term as president, has scheduled a town hall on Monday at Oaks, Pennsylvania and is due in Atlanta on Tuesday for a campaign speech. – Bloomberg