By Tyler Pager, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post (c) 2024 , The Washington Post · Tyler Pager, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey · NATIONAL, ELECTIONS, POLITICS, MEDIA · Oct 29, 2024 – 9:29 AM
Inside a third-floor conference room of the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris was grappling with how to hone her closing argument to voters. How could she warn of the dangers she believes Donald Trump poses, while connecting it to people’s everyday lives?
Drinking an iced tea as she prepared for a live town hall on CNN, Harris settled on a pithy line that has now become the summary of her closing argument at rallies, interviews and other events. As president, she has taken to saying, Trump would sit in the Oval Office stewing over his “enemies list” – while if she prevails, she will focus on a “to-do list” to fix Americans’ problems.
The point Harris is seeking to make – and one she will reiterate on Tuesday, when she addresses a large rally a week before Election Day on the Ellipse in Washington – is that Trump’s vows to eviscerate democratic norms are not just theoretical but would affect people’s day-to-day lives. If Trump is consumed with boosting himself and using his power for revenge, her argument goes, he will not have time to help ordinary Americans.
In the campaign’s final days, the question of whether a vote for Trump would risk letting the country slide into autocracy has been thrust into the center of a bitterly fought race that polls show will come down to razor-thin margins in seven battleground states. Not only has the subject become Harris’s closing argument as she seeks to sway a tiny sliver of undecided voters, but Trump has made incendiary comments about how he would govern that have prompted a string of former staffers and fellow Republicans to speak out against him.
Harris’s campaign is betting that some of the voting blocs where she is strongest – including college-educated voters, who tend to vote in higher numbers – are moved by arguments about how dangerous a second Trump term would be. But the campaign also recognizes that to appeal to a wider swath of voters, Harris and her surrogates must explain why Trump’s threats to democracy matter when it comes to the issues that affect people’s day-to-day lives, from the economy to health care.
It is not clear whether the strategy will work. In the past, character attacks against Trump have not moved independent voters as much as Democrats hoped, two prominent strategists involved in the 2018 and 2020 elections said. Some advisers to the Harris campaign – and Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Harris – have raised concerns about the argument and whether focusing more heavily on a different issue, like abortion rights, might be more effective.
Trump’s supporters agree.
“‘Trump is bad’ is not a winner. You know who tried that? Everybody. I think it zero matters,” said David Urban, a Trump ally.
Polls show Harris and Trump in a deadlocked race that has not moved for weeks, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona. Polls suggest that Harris will perform particularly well with college-educated voters and young women – both of whom tend to be reliable voters – while Trump has gained support among young White men and has cut into support among traditionally Democratic groups like Latinos and Black men.
Harris’s Tuesday speech on the Ellipse – the site where Trump spoke just before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, urging supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol, “fight” for him and to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” as Congress was finalizing the presidential election results – is meant to provide a stark visual reminder of a day when American democracy faced its biggest threat in modern history.
Democrats have often been frustrated that many voters seem willing to look past Trump’s behavior and actions on Jan. 6, appearing to focus more on issues like the economy and immigration.
In an effort to strike a balance between reminding voters of Trump’s behavior and addressing their immediate concerns, Harris is expected to address the former president’s actions before and during the Capitol assault, but to spend most of the speech providing a contrast between what Trump and Harris presidencies would look like.
As part of that argument, she will spend much of her speech discussing reproductive rights and what she has dubbed “Trump abortion bans” across the country. Harris also plans to devote time to the economy and keeping prices down, as well as to how she would uphold national security, while arguing that Trump would destroy it.
“All of these issues are issues that affect and concern the American people, and I will continue to speak on all of them,” Harris told reporters Friday in Houston.
A senior Harris adviser emphasized that the backdrop of the vice president’s speech will be the White House, because they want voters to visualize the choice they have in determining who will occupy that building in January.
“A closing argument should reach all the voters that you think you either need to persuade or motivate, and that’s what we’re going to do,” the adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the speech. “So this is not going to be a narrow message. Because what we’ve seen in research is when voters really focus on, ‘Okay, it’s not theoretical, Donald Trump could really be back in the White House,’ [they ask,] ‘What does that mean for me?’”
For that reason, Harris will address not only issues around the rule of law and democracy, but also the economy, tax cuts, health care and abortion, the adviser said. “This is going to touch all the key issues that all the voters out there who have yet to make a decision are most concerned about,” the adviser said.
Even as she focuses more on Trump, Harris and Democrats up and down the ballot still believe abortion is one of their strongest issues and among Trump’s biggest weaknesses. They cite anger among suburban women over sweeping abortion restrictions that have taken effect in many states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, with justices appointed by Trump bolstering the majority.
Harris has held two abortion-focused events in recent days, including one in Houston that featured pop superstar Beyoncé and one in Michigan, where former first lady Michelle Obama spoke in visceral terms about what could happen to women if Trump is elected, imploring men to take such threats seriously.
“A vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth,” Obama said Saturday.“So fellas, before you cast your votes, ask yourselves, what side of history do you want to be on?”
In the past week, Trump has become increasingly specific about how he would go after his perceived opponents and has made comments that have alarmed Democrats and some Republicans, including his claim that “the enemy from within” is a bigger threat than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, warned that Trump would rule like a dictator, met the definition of a “fascist” and has shown admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Trump has also said that on his first day back in office – a day on which he previously said he would rule like a dictator – he would fire special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his handling of classified documents.
“Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged, and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump said Thursday.
The former president has also repeatedly asserted that it is Democrats who are the threat to democracy, urging that the military should be used to handle the “enemy from within,” which he said included former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California). Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), sought to argue that Trump did not mean he would use military force against Pelosi and Schiff, but rather against “left-wing lunatics who are rioting.”
Trump’s campaign advisers, however, argue that voters are not moved by the rhetoric from Kelly and others warning of the dangers Trump poses to democracy – either because they do not believe it, because they endorse some of Trump’s hard-line ideas or because they feel Harris is the worse choice regardless. Even some of Harris’s advisers have questioned privately whether the focus is a smart one in the final stretch.
“People care about what impacts them, what impacts their families. Is Kamala Harris going to spend time with all these nonsensical attacks?” said Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman. “The remaining undecided voters who are out there are angry about how the country is being run and are going to make a decision on that. They are concerned about the economy, they are concerned about the border.”
Some of Trump’s advisers have questioned privately why Harris is not talking about abortion more and believe they still hold the advantage on the economy and immigration.
“Everyone knows who Donald Trump is 100 percent,” one of his advisers said. “What are you going to really tell voters about Donald Trump that they don’t already know?”
Harris’s advisers respond that she does not have to choose between the threat to democracy or pocketbook issues as her closing focus, but can make both pillars of her final argument. The vice president has argued that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, as well as his 34 felony convictions and the multiple legal cases pending against him, are emblematic of how he would govern – focused on himself rather than the people he is supposed to serve.
To make that case, Harris has spent significant time with former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming in the final stretch of the campaign in an effort to persuade Republicans turned off by Trump to cast their votes for her. Last week, Harris campaigned with Cheney in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where Cheney spoke about why Trump’s willingness to upend long-held democratic norms is compelling her to vote for a Democrat for the first time in her life.
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Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.