Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s rally in Detroit, Michigan was the duo’s largest campaign rally to date, featuring over 15,000 voters, the campaign announced on Friday.
It added that the crowd broke the campaign’s own record of more than 14,000 voters in Philadelphia on Monday.
Noting Harris and Walz’s address to the United Auto Workers union on Thursday, the campaign said:
“The event comes on heels of the UAW’s endorsement and strong support for the Harris-Walz ticket because of their proven track record of delivering for the working class – a stark contrast with Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their anti-worker, anti-union agenda. In Michigan alone, UAW represents more than 130,000 members who will be mobilizing to elect Harris-Walz to fight for working people in the White House.”
With FiveThirtyEight’s new poll showing Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 2.1 points in the national average, here is more from Martin Pengelly for the Guardian:
On Thursday night, Amy Walter, of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, told PBS that before Harris entered the race, Biden “was behind by a significant number, not just at the national popular vote, but in those … battleground states. You can see almost six points in a state like Georgia and Nevada.
“Now, just in the time that Harris has been in the race, you have seen those numbers move pretty significantly toward Harris, four- or five-point shifts in those battleground states, which is mirroring what we’re seeing in the national poll as well.
“It hasn’t turned those states, though, from ones that favored Trump to ones that now favor Harris. It just means now that the race is no longer as lopsided in Trump’s favor as it was, say, in late July … which is why we’re calling this race a toss-up.”
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Meghan McCain, political commentator and daughter of the late senator John McCain, shared a video of Donald Trump comparing his crowd sizes to Martin Luther King Jr’s, saying:
“Vice president Harris is going to win.”
In the video McCain shared, Trump, during his rambling press conference in Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, bragged about his crowd sizes, saying, “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours ... we had more.”
Vice President Harris is going to win. https://t.co/nvoj5YLksc
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) August 8, 2024
Swing state voters are saying they are “cautiously optimistic” when they see Kamala Harris, according to a new Axios focus group report with Engagious/Sago.
One respondent, Dolly A, said:
“She thinks things out and I like that, when she talks, she does it with a sense of authority and that means a lot,” adding, “When I hear her talk, she talks eloquently and that makes a big difference to me.”
Another respondent, Jerry M, said:
“To me, I think they’re both really high energy speakers, very eloquent with their words and it kind of says to me, leadership.”
Meanwhile, respondent Sebastian P said:
“I think they bring a new ... intelligence and energy to an outgoing kind of stuffy administration.”
A lot of the swing state voters are comparing Harris to Barack Obama, with Engagious president Rich Thau, who moderated the focus groups, saying:
“Even though Harris serves alongside Biden, and is the same gender as Hillary Clinton, most respondents said that among the last three Democratic nominees, Harris is most similar to Obama.”
Harris and Walz to highlight reproductive rights and border policies in Nevada and Arizona
Ahead of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s visit to Nevada and Arizona today, the duo’s campaign announced that Harris and Walz will highlight reproductive rights and border policies during their visit.
In a statement released on Friday, the campaign team said:
“Vice president Kamala Harris and governor Tim Walz’s momentum across the battlegrounds is real and will be on full display in Arizona and Nevada, where we’ve built massive coordinated campaigns as Trump has almost no presence whatsoever.
Our campaign will continue our work to reach the diverse voters who power our victories in the southwest, highlighting the stakes of the race for reproductive rights and the vice president’s leadership to secure the border.
During this southwest swing, vice president Harris and governor Walz will highlight their positive vision for the future and Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda to drag voters in the past, and they will continue to show we are fighting to earn every vote and reach communities all across the southwest.
Donald Trump’s campaign is struggling to find coherent attack lines against Kamala Harris as the vice president’s campaign gains national ground.
The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:
Donald Trump’s campaign recognizes that it could lose in November if the election is decided on “vibes” and “energy”, according to people close to the former president, as Kamala Harris continues to ride waves of momentum with her newly announced running mate Tim Walz.
The concern has also started to open fractures inside Trumpworld, with some Maga allies criticizing Trump’s political advisers for running a campaign that may be too structurally deficient to stand up a ground game in swing states.
The Trump campaign has sketched out a strategy to hit back and are expected to try and cast the Harris campaign the most progressive US ticket of all time, as they aim to get the political messaging back on their records in office and away from coverage about Harris’s extraordinary enthusiasm with voters.
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Harris up in national polls after debate date set
Good morning,
Kamala Harris is up by 2.1 points from Donald Trump in the national average, according to a new poll released by FiveThirtyEight.
Across averages in swing states, Harris led Trump by 2 points in Michigan, 1.8 point in Wisconsin and 1.1 point in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, Trump led Harris by less than half a point while in Georgia, the former president led by half a point.
With Harris and Trump neck to neck in the polls, the two have agreed to debate on ABC on 10 September. The confirmation from the network follows recent days of suggestions from Trump that he would back out and debate on Fox News instead.
As part of this week’s campaign blitz, Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are scheduled to travel to the sunbelt states of Arizona and Nevada on Friday. Meanwhile, Trump is set to hold a rally at Montana this evening at Montana State University.
Here are other developments in US politics:
Library and free speech groups are condemenning Utah’s ban of 13 books from public schools and classrooms under a new state law, calling it a “tragedy.”
Congressional Democrats are asking what the price is for migrant crossings that have plunged since Joe Biden’s asylum ban, with some saying asylum seekers are “forced to wait in danger.”
Updated
