(Bloomberg) –The campaign for the US presidency enters its final week with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump locked in a stubbornly close race, making starkly different pitches to motivate supporters and win over the few remaining persuadable voters.
Harris casts herself as standing in between Trump and a key trifecta that includes economic opportunity, reproductive rights and Democracy itself. She pledges to lead the country with more vitality than either of the last two presidents, who were both born in the 1940s.
On Tuesday, Harris, 60, will lay out her closing argument at a major rally from the same site on the National Mall in Washington where Trump addressed supporters ahead of the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump, 78, gave his own summation during a massive rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York. His long-standing argument: Democrats have broken the country — especially the economy and immigration system — and he alone will fix it.
The event included a warm-up comedian calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump has promised a role in his administration, claiming he could slash nearly a third of the annual federal budget.
Despite both candidates’ efforts and billions of dollars spent, they’ve been deadlocked for weeks in nearly all public polls conducted across the seven battleground states and as millions of early votes have already been cast.
Data about party affiliation and demographics from early voting hasn’t shown a distinctive edge for either candidate. And top advisers to both say they are confident about their ability to turn out the less reliable members of their base groups and nudge undecideds in their favor in the last few days before Nov. 5.
Ultimately, the outcome may depend on whether voters see the race as a referendum on President Joe Biden’s — and by extension Harris’ — struggle to harness post-pandemic inflation or Trump, who has stoked increasingly fractious American politics for a decade.
For the party in the White House, “if an election is about a choice, you win, and if it’s a referendum on the incumbent, you tend to lose,” said Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Trump sometimes muses on the stump that he wishes Biden hadn’t dropped out of the race, aware that it’s easier to tie an administration’s failures to a president than to his No. 2. That hasn’t stopped his team from making the referendum question central to its closing argument.
Biden’s Role
Biden is expected to cast his ballot Monday in his hometown in Wilmington, Delaware, but otherwise largely recede from the campaign trail. He’s set to visit a pair of Democratic strongholds — Baltimore on Tuesday and Philadelphia on Friday — but does not have a customary blitz of political events as Election Day nears.
Republicans believe Trump is reaching men, particularly those who are young, Black or Latino, more effectively than he has in his previous two campaigns. Those voters are among the people most likely to experience the pinch of inflation and feel alienated by Harris’ history of progressive California politics.
Even though Harris has resisted creating too much distance from Biden, her allies are hopeful she’s done enough by explaining her personal story and offering economic proposals for voters to understand she aims to improve upon the current administration’s work.
“While she was in the room where it happened, she wasn’t the decider of the policy,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “She’s communicated she’ll continue some good things and take a different direction on some others.”
A voter casts their ballot at a polling location inside Metropolitan Branch Library during early voting in Atlanta.
On Monday, Harris will visit a semiconductor assembly line in Michigan to highlight Biden’s signature bill subsidizing domestic chips manufacturing — and Trump’s threats to end the multibillion-dollar effort. The campaign has also invested in ads touting Harris’ economic proposals as polls have shown her narrowing Trump’s advantage on the issue.
That hasn’t stopped hand-wringing from some progressive leaders, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who say they’re worried Harris won’t do enough to make sure last-minute deciders have a clear understanding of her promises to cut middle-class taxes and take on corporate greed, including price gouging.
But Harris aides have also signaled the campaign intends to balance its economic message with warnings about democracy and reproductive rights in the final days. That’s an acknowledgment her path relies on a strong showing from women who are fed up with Trump’s personality and are angry after the Supreme Court, led by justices Trump appointed, overturned federal abortion protections.
Harris has looked to motivate women — and stem Trump’s advances with young men — by relying on celebrities in recent days, including a rally focused on reproductive rights Friday in Texas headlined by superstar recording artist Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
Artists including Maggie Rogers, Gracie Abrams, Mumford & Sons, Remi Wolf and members of The National will appear at Harris events this week in a bid to mobilize votes.
Trump’s final push across swing states including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Virginia is headlined by an event Wednesday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, featuring legendary Packers quarterback Brett Favre.
“We’re going to close out with a very, very aggressive schedule,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told reporters on Sunday. “We’re going to make sure that everyone who is in any of these states that we’re going to, that they know President Trump is going to fix it.”
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