Harris campaign features less talk of joy and more head-on digs at Trump as Election Day nears

LA CROSSE, Wis. — Joy Olson proudly wore a “Make America Joyful Again” button Thursday while waiting in line to attend a Kamala Harris rally. But that doesn’t mean the 70-year-old retiree with the happiest name wants the Democratic candidate to shy away from taking aim at Republican Donald Trump.

“I’m tired of her being so nice sometimes,” said Olson, who called Trump “evil and scary.” She added: “I hope she calls him.”

That’s exactly what the vice president is doing as the campaign enters its final days.

Less than three weeks after Election Day, Harris is wrapping up her campaign with a dark vision for the country if Trump is returned to the White House, including airing video clips at her own rallies of the Republican candidate’s more alarming rhetoric.

“Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged and will do anything to claim unchecked power for himself,” Harris said Thursday in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

It’s a far cry from the “joy” that swirled around her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. Now that wave of enthusiasm has waned, Harris is pivoting her campaign to increasingly sharp attacks on Trump, designed to rally her supporters and win over the small universe of persuadable voters remaining in extraordinarily tight battleground states.

At her rally in La Crosse, she noted that Trump this week falsely claimed that the violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a day of love.”

“There were attacks on law enforcement,” she said, recalling the insurrection in which Trump supporters tried to block the counting of electoral votes that formalized President Joe Biden’s victory. “The American people are exhausted by his gaslighting. Enough! We are ready to turn the page!”

“Roll the clip,” she said a week earlier, directing the audience to watch a video in which the former president called for the eradication of an “enemy within” the country.

And she told radio host Charlamagne Tha God during a radio town hall this week: “Yes, we can say” that Trump threatened to bring fascism to the country.

Since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket in late July, Harris and her team have been torn between competing priorities: introducing the vice president to voters and turning the race into a referendum on the former president after Biden’s debate flop left Democrats in the brought battle. spotlight.

In the early weeks of her campaign, she tried to pick up the thread by sharing her background as a prosecutor with voters, telling stories about her upbringing and laying out her vision for how she would govern if elected.

Harris is no stranger to criticizing Trump, but the urgency and vividness of her warnings about him have increased noticeably in recent days.

‘He wants to send the army after American citizens. He wants to prevent women from making decisions about their own bodies,” Harris said in La Crosse. “He wants to threaten fundamental freedoms and rights, such as the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and the freedom to love openly and proudly those who you love.”

It marks a return to the guiding strategy first outlined by Biden aides a year ago as he was planning his re-election bid and now being deployed by his hand-picked successor.

“People are getting negative because it’s working,” said Republican strategist Brendan Buck, a former top aide to Republican Chairman Paul Ryan. “Harris had to make himself an acceptable alternative, but ultimately the coalition was always going to be more anti-Trump than anything positively pro-Harris.”

Some attacks on Trump are part of Harris’ explicit move to urge Republican voters to cross party lines, such as her rally Wednesday in Pennsylvania with dozens of anti-Trump Republican political figures. Her team sees it as a unique opportunity for Harris to broaden her base of support and tap into a pool of voters who have already rejected Trump in the past.

Former Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield said the attack on Trump gives Harris an opening with independent and even moderate Republican voters, and shifts the political conversation toward areas where she is stronger — protecting American democracy — and away from issues where Republicans often are seen as stronger, such as immigration and the economy.

“Focusing on the stakes of this election over the last few weeks could help motivate some of the voters who are otherwise tired of the process,” she said.

Greg Swagel, a 76-year-old retired yacht builder from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, showed up at Harris’ rally in Green Bay on Thursday wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and said he “absolutely” agrees that Harris is becoming more aggressive in her rhetoric. .

“She needs to put (Trump) in his place,” Swagel said. “He tells lies. He calls people names. As long as she doesn’t become him in the sense that she degrades herself.”

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Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Chris Megerian in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Todd Richmond in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.