With the presidential race deadlocked a week before election day, Kamala Harris will call on voters to “turn the page” on the Trump era, in remarks delivered from a park near the White House where the former president spoke before a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in a last effort to overturn his 2020 loss.
Harris, a former prosecutor, will deliver what her campaign has called her “closing argument” intended to persuade the vanishing slice of undecided voters, in a location she hopes will remind them precisely why Americans denied Trump a second term four years ago. The Democrat is expected to cast her opponent as a divisive figure who will spend his term consumed by vengeance, leveraging the power of the presidency against his political enemies rather than in service of the American people.
“We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign’s chair, told reporters on a call previewing the remarks on Tuesday morning. She said many Americans were “exhausted” by the tribalism and polarization Trump has exacerbated since his political rise in 2016.
Although the vice-president frames the stakes of the 2024 election as nothing less than the preservation of American democracy, her speech is expected to strike an optimistic and hopeful tone, standing in stark contrast to the dark, racist themes that animated Trump’s grievance-fueled rally at Madison Square Garden.
“That’s why people are exhausted with him,” Harris said before boarding Air Force Two, where she worked on the speech with advisers on the plane. “People are literally ready to turn the page.”
In New York on Sunday, Trump repeated that the gravest threat facing the US was the “enemy within”. In recent days, Harris has amplified warnings of her opponent’s lurch toward authoritarianism and open xenophobia. Her campaign is running ads highlighting John Kelly, a marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that the former president met the definition of a fascist. Harris has said she agrees.
“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” Harris said, previewing her message at a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday. “It is either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies’ list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list.”
In her remarks, Harris will attempt to balance the existential and the economic – focusing on the threat Trump poses to American institutions while weaving in the Democrat’s plans to bring down costs and build up the middle class. She is expected to cast Trump as a tool of the billionaire class who would eliminate what is left of abortion access and stand in the way of bipartisan compromise when it does not suit him politically.
Polls consistently show the economy and the cost of living are the issues most important to voters this election. Protecting democracy tends to be a higher priority for Democrats and voters planning to support Harris.
In the final stretch of the campaign, Harris has emphasized the breadth of her coalition, especially her endorsements from a slew of former Trump administration officials and conservative Republicans such as Liz Cheney and her father, the former vice-president, Dick Cheney.
Trump has sought to rewrite the history of 6 January, the culmination of his attempt to cling to power that resulted in the first occupation of the US Capitol since British forces set it on fire during the war of 1812. Trump recently declared the attack a “day of love” and said he would pardon the 6 January rioters – whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages” – if he is elected president.
Hundreds of supporters have been convicted and imprisoned for their conduct at the Capitol, while federal prosecutors have accused Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump maintains that he played no role in stoking the violence that unfolded, and still claims baselessly that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Harris’s campaign has sought to lay out the monumental stakes of the election while also harnessing the joy that powered the vice-president’s unexpected ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.
In an abbreviated 100-day campaign that Harris inherited from Biden after he stepped aside in July, the Democratic nominee has unified her party, raised more than a billion dollars, blanketed the airwaves and blitzed the battleground states. And yet the race remains a dead heat nationally and in the seven swing states that will determine who serves as the 47th president of the United States.
“I will speak to Americans about the choice we face in this election—and all that is at stake for the future of this country that we love,” she wrote on X.
After her speech, Harris will return to the campaign trail, where she will keep a frenetic pace ahead of what her campaign has called a “margin-of-error election”.
“We see very good signs for us across the battleground states, in particular in the blue wall,” O’Malley Dillon said on the Tuesday morning call, referring to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Harris has barnstormed in recent weeks. “And we see that we’re on pace to win a very close election.”
