Trump and Harris Campaigns Focus on Winning Key Blue Wall States

WASHINGTON – A furious final sprint in this year’s historic presidential election will begin on Labor Day, as the two major parties’ campaigns dig in for a pitched battle in a handful of swing states that will determine the outcome.

An extraordinary series of events that began at the end of June with a historically early general election debate and culminated three weeks later in late July with the sitting president exiting the race, is bringing into focus a contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris is positioning herself as a visionary consensus-builder, but Trump is working to brand her as hyper-liberal. The former President has also unleashed a plethora of insults on Harris, and attacked her for flip-flopping on fracking and border security, even though Trump himself has flip-flopped on a host of issues in the campaign – including immigration visas, Cryptocurrency, electric vehicles, banning TikTok and Florida’s abortion rights ballot initiative.

Meanwhile, Trump tells voters he’d avoid foreign wars, while Harris criticizes him for remarks last year that he’d act like a dictator during his administration’s first day. Harris recently told supporters in Savannah that, following a recent Supreme Court decision, Trump would be in the clear to do as he wishes inside the White House.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also did the same on Saturday and Sunday. The pair visited Georgia in late August. They’ll hit the same battleground states that Trump did last week in a series of campaign stops on Monday.

For Harris, it’s off to the labor-heavy city of Detroit and on to Pittsburgh, where she’ll hold her first joint campaign event with President Joe Biden since he left the Democratic ticket. Walz will be in Milwaukee.

Then, it will be up to the vice presidential picks and top campaign surrogates to do the heavy lifting for several days, as Trump and Harris prepare for a consequential face-off.

The candidates are set to meet for the first time on Sept. 10 at a debate hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia, even as a potentially deal-breaking dispute over whether the mics will be muted in between turns has continued.

Both have reasons to debate. Trump has been slipping in the polls; Harris is still introducing herself to voters.

Harris’s Labor Day Push: Harris and Walz, joined by Biden, to target pivotal Rust Belt states

Labor Day weekend has traditionally marked the unofficial kickoff to the general election, as campaigns transitioned from a task of voter registration to one of persuading those same voters and, finally, turning them out to vote.

But with polling showing tight contests in the swing states, all three could be crucial.

These are generally considered to include Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Republicans have also said they will contest Minnesota and Virginia, but neither of those two states is considered a toss-up, and now that Harris and Walz are on the ticket, Democrats’ numbers in the blue-leaning states are improving.

Voting will start soon in some of those states as absentee ballots begin to go out in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this month. North Carolina will begin sending its absentee ballots on Sept. 6. Early voting begins in September in four states, including Minnesota and Virginia.

To both campaigns, it’s the Blue Wall

Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes are seen as crucial to both campaigns roads to victory, though both sides are charting fallback routes.

Vance and Trump both traveled to Pennsylvania last week. Harris visited twice in August and is dispatching Walz this Thursday and Friday.

Harris’s latest visit On her latest visit Harris traveled with Walz and their spouses to western part of the state. They flew into Pittsburgh, taking a bus tour through deep-blue Allegheny County into the more rural Beaver County, which Trump won, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

It’s an approach the Harris campaign says it plans to build on with bus tours in other battleground states that extend beyond the major cities.

You gotta hold the margins in counties you might lose a bit. Lose, you know, 60-40 instead of 70-30 for example,” said Dan Kanninen, battleground states director of the Harris-Walz campaign. “You want to go expand the gains that Democrats have made in the suburbs with independents and moderate Republicans on issues like abortion or on January 6.

Trump has quickened the pace in recent weeks in an effort to blunt Harris’ momentum, blanketing the battleground states with rallies and other appearances.

He held events every day of the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago, crisscrossing the country. In addition to Pennsylvania, Trump held two rallies last week in Michigan and one in Wisconsin.

In fact, the three so-called “Blue Wall” states had been Democratic bulwarks for decades but Trump won them in 2016 on his way to winning the presidency.

Biden won them back in 2020, and now the Trump and Harris campaigns are dueling over them. The states represent the easiest pathway to victory for Ms. Harris, even as her campaign touts another route through a group of western and southern states that includes Georgia and North Carolina and is known as the Sun Belt.

It puts Harris ahead in all three Rust Belt states, while trailing slightly or tied in the southern battlegrounds, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. She has tightened the gap with Trump and also made Pennsylvania a statistical dead heat.

What I think that Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz have done really effectively is build the coalition back together,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters during a roundtable hosted by Bloomberg News during the Democratic convention.

Harris is going to the right places, he said of her visit to the western part of his state. “The fact that she showed up there, talked about issues on their minds, really, really gives me a lot of hope and optimism,” Shapiro said.

Trump is hammering a familiar message on trade protectionism in the hard-hit Rust Belt, which lost so many manufacturing jobs to overseas business over several decades. These northern swing states have large electorates of white, working-class voters who have been receptive to Trump’s messaging on the economy and immigration.

Trump on Thursday promised during his rally at a steel plant in Michigan to restore the American auto industry – traditionally based in the Detroit area – to its former greatness.

“We’re going to get the auto workers’ jobs back like it was 30 years ago,” he said.

The powerful United Auto Workers union has endorsed Harris, prompting Trump to lash out at the union president during the rally. He also brought an autoworker up on stage who started a Facebook group called Autoworkers for Trump 2024.

Trump won the state by just 10,704 votes in 2016. Biden beat him there by 154,000 votes in 2020.

It feels “a whole lot like 2016” in Michigan right now, Michigan Republican Party Chair Pete Hoekstra said USA TODAY.

In 2016, Trump railed against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which helped him win over blue-collar voters.

“We were getting a lot of interest from union workers, a lot of interest from UAW workers and we ended up doing very, very well,” Hoekstra of 2016.

As president, Trump renegotiated NAFTA. Now, he’s promising more tariffs and zeroing in on a new target his supporters believe will resonate with blue-collar workers: the push under the Biden-Harris administration for more electric cars. Trump said the focus on electric vehicles will kill the auto industry and promises that he will have the federal government reverse course if he wins.

Hoekstra called it a “powerful issue” in Michigan and spoke to appealing to union workers, who he believes are among the key swing votes in 2024.

In 2016 we did well, better than average, with those voters,” Hoekstra said. “We’ve lost some of them because they went to ‘Union Joe in 2020’ but we’re going to get those back.”.

Trump campaign battleground state spokeswoman Rachel Reisner said Harris doesn’t resonate particularly well with working-class Americans in the swing states, pointing to her past opposition to fracking for oil and natural gas – a position she has reversed – as well as high levels of inflation and undocumented immigration during the Biden administration.

“She’s been very anti-working-class America,” Reisner said.

Harris has emphasized the economy on recent visits-and her support there from the auto workers union. She says she’ll go after price-fixing on food and groceries if she’s elected and expand tax credits for the middle class.

She points to legislation she cast the deciding vote on, and Republicans are trying to repeal, as evidence that she would prioritize reducing the price of prescription drugs. She has also said that with congressional approval she would offer first-time homebuyers $25,000 in assistance to help them make their down payments.

Trump, she says, will give tax breaks to the wealthy, and she has equated his proposed tariffs on imported goods to a national sales tax.

Harris has the endorsements of an array of powerful unions, including the National Education Association, the United Steel Workers, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Culinary Union in Nevada.

She tends to bring up Biden, who’d enjoyed considerable labor support before he exited the race, to union-heavy audiences.

Biden, reminding one of his having walked the picket line in Michigan last fall, was met with chants of “Union Joe” at the DNC.

Yet Biden faced criticism during the Michigan primary from uncommitted voters for continuing to arm Israel in its war in Gaza against Hamas. Harris sent her campaign manager back to the state in August for a new round of listening sessions with Arab American and Muslim leaders.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said during the DNC Harris has “the opportunity to have a new start” on the Middle East as the nominee.

“I actually feel pretty good about Michigan. I think Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are in some ways tougher fights,” the Harris campaign surrogate said. “She’s got to do it all.”

To win those states, the Pennsylvania-born congressman said, “We’ve got to win the economic argument.”

We’ve got to make the case that we are party that’s going to reindustrialize America and reenergize the working and middle class.” Trump was in Wisconsin for a town hall Thursday with Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who endorsed the former Republican president.

Another well-known former Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has also endorsed Trump recently. The Trump campaign is trumpeting the endorsements in key swing states as a sign it is reaching out to a broad range of voters.

Republicans held their convention in Milwaukee, and Harris tried to needle Trump during Democrats’ convention by holding a rally in the same arena. Walz’s home state of Minnesota borders Wisconsin, making it an easy state for him to swing into repeatedly throughout the final stretch of the campaign.

Harris has been tapping into Biden’s appeal there. He’ll visit on an official trip this Thursday, after laying low for the past several weeks.

Hillary Clinton never visited the state in 2016, a fact many of Harris’ top staffers are painfully aware of. Wisconsin tipped the election in Biden’s favor four years later, when he reclaimed the blue wall.

“Wisconsin makes beer, cheese, brats and presidents. Our ticket knows it. Our voters know it. The Republicans know it–they put Donald Trump in Wisconsin for the Republican National Convention for that exact reason,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler. “As Trump said, I think if we win Wisconsin, we win the whole thing.”

Campaigns tout war chests, offices, staff size

Among advantages Harris’s campaign touts is a strong war chest of $540 million and an early investment in staff and offices.

“We are in position to play hard and aggressively across all the battlegrounds. By contrast, the Trump campaign did not do that,” said Kanninen, battleground states director of the Harris-Walz campaign.

According to its campaign, Harris has more than 312 offices and 2,000 staffers in the so-called battleground states, and she made a $150 million television ad buy in August. Harris’s campaign says it has $370 million in TV and digital ads reserved after Labor Day.

The Trump campaign touts that it has “hundreds” of paid staffers in the battleground states and nearly 400 GOP offices funded by the former president’s operation, but didn’t break out how many of those are new and how many existed previous to the campaign. Trump campaign political director James Blair posted on X that there are 21,000 trained “Trump Force 47 Captains,” in the battlegrounds, referencing the campaign’s volunteer program.

Kanninen added that while Trump was busy defending himself, largely unsuccessfully, against 34 felony counts in court, Democrats were building a full-scale operation which Harris took over from Biden.

“I know they talk about building some paid component at the end here. That’s never very effective, as compared with a volunteer-driven organization that has time to build relationships and trust, which is what we’ve been doing,” he said.

Much of Trump’s get out the vote operation is being handled by outside conservative groups – not traditional, and putting the effort outside the campaign’s direct control.

Hoekstra, of the Michigan GOP said, “I may not be able to hold them accountable or have any control over them, which is fine. My only point is that it is not bad that we have more organizations participating in GOTV, and I think the organizations that are involved can lead themselves.

These are talented people,” he said. “I’m going to stay in communication with them as much as I can legally, but I’m going to let them run because they’re quality people.