Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump return to the campaign trail this week as the presidential nominees head toward a Sept. 10 debate showdown — but with the GOP standard-bearer casting doubt it will even happen.
Harris will look to keep the momentum from her Democratic National Convention going with a bus tour in south Georgia that will end with a Thursday evening rally in Savannah as her campaign looks to expand the electoral map. Trump has events planned in the so-called “blue wall” swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as he works to try cutting off Harris’ clearest path to the presidency.
Some Democrats hailed Harris’ Thursday night DNC nomination acceptance speech as ushering in a pragmatic progressivism that could appeal to swing voters in the eight swing states that should decide the presidential race. Republicans, however, have panned the speech as divisive, vague on policy prescriptions and mostly silent on issues like inflation and immigration.
The nominees and their campaign teams this week will enter a new phase of their unexpected campaign clash as they try to ding their opponent in the run-up to their Philadelphia debate — if it still goes down in 15 days.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump wrote in a Sunday night social media post, appearing to question the spelling of the ABC correspondent’s last name, which is spelled Karl.
“They’ve got a lot of questions to answer!!! Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!” Trump added, prompting a response from a top Harris campaign aide Monday morning.
“Trump should honor his commitment to debate VP Harris on ABC on Sept 10 and he should reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone,” Brian Fallon, Harris campaign senior adviser for communications, wrote on X. “The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored.”
At a stop Monday at a Falls Church, Va., Vietnamese restaurant, the former president suggested going ahead with the debate, but “on another network.”
The nominees will be back on the trail after a new national poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University released Sunday put Harris up by 7 percentage points among registered voters. But one Republican strategist, granted anonymity to be candid, recently stressed in an interview that “Donald Trump out-performs polls — he always has, and I think that’s true again.”
One Trump ally, GOP Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, expressed the same view during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program.
“It’s a close race, but I think that Donald Trump is greatly positioned to win,” Donalds said. “Donald Trump has never polled this well in 2016 or in 2020. She’s running way behind Hillary Clinton and way behind Joe Biden at the two similar times in those two presidential races.
“Kamala Harris hasn’t discussed anything of substance to this point. So when she starts going through substance, through policy, like her economic policy, people start to understand that it’s not going to bode well for her.”
‘Hell of a month’
But Democrats sharply disagree, citing the energy last week during their convention at Chicago’s United Center and on the ground in the crucial battleground states.
“I think the vice president now has a very good chance to win it. She’s certainly going to win the popular vote by millions of votes, and I think she has a great chance to win many of the battleground states,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told ABC News on Sunday. “And I intend to do everything that I can to see that she wins.”
Sanders and other Democrats are betting Harris’ more-positive message will inspire some Democratic voters who had lost confidence in Biden to cast ballots this fall. What’s more, they hope Harris can attract independents who are, in Sanders’ words Sunday, “growing tired and fatigued with Trump.”
Sanders, who remains popular with voters in the party’s far-left faction, addressed Republicans’ gripes that Harris has been too vague in laying out her agenda.
“In all fairness to the vice president, you know, she’s been the candidate for all of one month. And it’s been a hell of a month,” Sanders said. “You have to organize the convention, select a vice presidential [candidate], get out on the campaign trail. So, they are still working through their policies.”
Harris and her team also has contended they are still working through when — and with which media outlet — she will sit for her first major interview as the Democratic nominee. Trump and his Republican surrogates argue she is playing it safe and refusing to answer tough questions about her policy views.
She is slated to mostly interact with voters this week on the Georgia bus tour, though it is possible she might take some questions from her traveling press poll — though such interactions typically are brief and surface-level.
Trump, meantime, is slated to hold a town hall and take questions from voters Thursday evening in La Crosse, Wis.
But two former Clinton administration officials say Harris has the momentum.
“Harris’s acceptance speech positioned her as a center-left Democrat in the mold of Joe Biden rather than Bernie Sanders,” Elaine Kamarck and William Galston wrote for the Brookings Institution. “And as if to show that Republicans have not cornered the market on patriotism and American exceptionalism, she told her audience that tog ether, they had the opportunity to write the next chapter of the most extraordinary story ever told.
“Harris’s speech, which the convention received with unfeigned enthusiasm,” the duo added, “did nothing to interrupt the momentum of one of the most explosive campaign launches in American history.”
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