Why Harris’ Closing Argument Is Focused More on Trump Than Her
With another election days away that could return Donald Trump to the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris will be making her closing arguments to voters next week at The Ellipse, an expansive, 52-acre oval lawn in Washington between the White House and the National Mall.
The location is no accident. It’s where Trump encouraged his supporters to help him overturn his election loss on Jan. 6, 2021, setting off a violent storming of the Capitol. “If Mike Pence does the right thing,” Trump told the crowd he had gathered that day, “we win the election.” It was a lie. Aides had told Trump beforehand that Pence had no authority to change the result.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]For Harris, the echoes of the recent past on that lawn are the point. As polling shows her and Trump essentially tied in the seven battleground states, the Harris campaign believes emphasizing the former President’s admiration for dictators and vindictive talk is the right approach in the home stretch. Focus groups in those critical states have found that undecided voters are more likely to support Harris when she talks about turning the page on Trump’s dark worldview and when they are reminded of the many people who have worked closely with Trump and don’t trust him to be President again, according to a campaign aide.
Recent reports of former top Trump officials describing him as fascist has helped the campaign lean into that message. Harris has increasingly used the word to describe Trump in recent days. A digital ad the Harris campaign released Thursday shows menacing black and white images of Trump as a voiceover from Harris cites his admiration for dictators and calls him, “unstable and unfit to serve.”
It’s a strategy that the campaign intends to continue to tee up in the coming days and emphasize further in her speech at The Ellipse on Tuesday. Harris wants Americans to be reminded of what Trump said there on Jan. 6, and link it to the former President’s recent comments laying out his autocratic vision for the Presidency. That event will follow a high-profile rally on Friday in Houston where Beyonce is expected to perform and is intended to highlight Republican abortion bans.
Trump wrote Wednesday on his social media platform that Harris’ latest critiques of him come from “her warped mind” and she’s stepped them up because she “sees that she is losing.”
A recent Trump town hall hosted by Univision gave the Harris camp plenty of new fodder. Trump said he wants “extreme power” and called his opponents “dangerous people” and the “enemy from within.” He also called Jan. 6 a “day of love” in which “nothing” was “done wrong.” Given a chance on Fox News to explain those comments, Trump doubled down, saying there was “beauty” to Jan. 6 and “it’s accurate” to call fellow Americans “enemies.”
The Harris campaign is also amplifying striking comments coming from Trump’s own former senior officials. John Kelly, who was Trump’s longest serving White House chief of staff and was Secretary of Homeland Security, told the New York Times that Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government” and recalled that Trump had told him “Hitler did some good things too.” Mark Milley, Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Trump “fascist to the core,” according to a book from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
Read more: Former Trump Aides Warn of Secret Presidential Crisis Powers
This represents a shift for Harris. After President Joe Biden made Trump’s threat to democracy an animating force of his successful run for President in 2020, he continued that strategy as his party defended the Senate in 2022 and in the re-election bid he formally kicked off in early 2024. Some party leaders complained that Biden needed to be talking more about issues like the economy. When Biden dropped out in late July, Harris took a different tack.
As she reintroduced herself to the American public, Harris initially stepped away from the gloomy predictions about a Trump autocracy and projected a forward-looking message that emphasized what she would do to reduce housing and health care costs and roll back abortion restrictions. Instead of talking about the stark danger to democracy Trump poses, Harris described herself as a former prosecutor who knew how to make a forceful case against Trump to voters. That was clear the day she took over Biden’s Wilmington campaign headquarters. Harris told gathered staff that her campaign “is not just about us versus Donald Trump.” Someone in the room shouted, “Preach!”
But, now, with just over a week remaining until the polls close, Harris’ final pitch to the voters is very much about drawing that same contrast with Trump that Biden emphasized for years. That’s been driven in part by the increasing frequency of comments from Trump that is raising anxiety among many voters about what he would do if he reclaimed presidential power. But as the race has tightened, the Harris campaign also thinks that ringing those alarm bells are what will push the few remaining voters not already in a declared camp over to her side.