TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are battling for holdout votes on a penultimate weekend of campaigning across US swing states, with Michelle Obama joining the Democrat onstage before the Republican nominee hosts an eyebrow-raising rally in New York City.
With just 10 days left in a bitterly contested presidential race, the rivals converge on Saturday (Oct 26) on Michigan, one of the three fiercely-contested “Blue Wall” states – along with Wisconsin and top battleground prize Pennsylvania – that Democrats see as critical to any path to Election Day victory on Nov 5.
Polls show a dead heat in the race’s final days, and with more than 35 million people nationwide already casting early ballots, Americans are deciding whether to elect the country’s first-ever woman president, or its oldest commander-in-chief.
Part of Harris’ strategy is to peel moderate Republicans away from an increasingly vituperative Trump, who continues to demean certain Americans as the “enemy”.
On Friday, he warned that if he wins the White House, people who committed election fraud “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences”.
For Republican A.D. Jefferson, a 62-year-old labourer attending Harris’ rally in Houston, the Trump turmoil is too much.
“I just think she’s less controversial,” he told AFP. “I’m a Republican, but I feel like Trump is just too chaotic for me.”
Fresh off a high-energy rally in Texas with pop icon Beyonce to highlight Republican restrictions on abortion, Harris heads to Kalamazoo, Michigan where she will court voters by drawing on yet more starpower, this time deploying one of the Democratic Party’s most popular emissaries: former first lady Michelle Obama.
Her husband Barack Obama joined Harris on Thursday for a rally in Georgia.
Harris, 60, rallies on Sunday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the largest city in the largest of the swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election under the US electoral system.
Trump, who swept the three Blue Wall states in his shock victory in 2016 only to see Joe Biden reclaim them for Democrats four years later, is strategising that clawing back one or more of the trio and winning the other so-called Sun Belt swing states would propel him back into the White House.
With just a few thousand votes possibly the difference between victory and defeat in the tightest of swing states, Trump holds rallies on Saturday in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where a robust ground game and relentless barnstorming of the battlegrounds could prove decisive.
They follow the release late on Friday of the extended, three-hour interview that Trump taped for the Joe Rogan Experience, America’s most popular podcast.
He is seeking to woo Rogan’s massive, largely male audience, as the Republican candidate hunts for viral moments that tap into his everyman appeal.
