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Latino voters in focus as Trump and Harris sketch out the campaign's final 2 weeks
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There are only two more Tuesdays left in the 2024 presidential election, and both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Harris’ campaign schedules are filling up with focused stops in key swing states — and beyond.
Both candidates spent part of Tuesday continuing to make their appeals to Latino voters: Trump with a panel discussion at his golf resort in Miami, and Harris in taping an interview with Telemundo that will air Wednesday.
Trump spent the day falsely claiming Harris was taking a day off from campaigning before holding a nighttime rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, his fourth event in two days in a state that has become a must-win for his White House hopes.
Harris spent Tuesday in Washington, D.C., sitting down with NBC News for an interview as well, while former President Barack Obama rallied in Wisconsin with Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and in Michigan with native son Eminem.
Twenty million people have already cast their ballot in the 2024 presidential election, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, including more than 1 in 4 active Georgia voters.
Harris talked policy while Obama rallied in the Midwest
Harris continued to outline how she would govern if elected, as the campaign seeks to push back on criticism of the number and type of interviews she has done.
In an interview on NBC Nightly News, Harris answered a broad range of questions about her policy proposals and the contrast between herself and Trump.
Harris pointed to Trump’s actions during the January 6th insurrection, and said he tried to undo the will of the voters.
“This is a serious matter. The American people are at this point two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country," she said.
Asked if she would pardon Trump if she won the White House and he was convicted in the federal election interference case against him, Harris refused to engage.
“I’m not going to get into those hypotheticals,” she said. “I’m focused on the next 14 days.”
Harris also declined to say whether she would make concessions, such as religious exemptions, to get the support of some Republican senators to quickly pass a law enshrining abortion access.
“I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole with you right now,” she said.
In her interview with Telemundo, Harris focused more specifically on her outreach to Latino voters.
“A lot of my agenda is about creating opportunity for people to succeed,” Harris said in a preview of the sitdown that posted Tuesday night.
Harris planned to use the interview to announce a series of policies geared toward Latino men. Those measures include a plan to double the number of registered apprenticeships and remove college degree requirements for up to 500,000 federal jobs.
The Harris campaign said the vice president would also provide 1 million forgivable loans worth up to $20,000 each for Latino and other entrepreneurs, and set a goal to more than double the number of first-time Latino homebuyers to nearly 600,000.
Meanwhile on the campaign trail, Walz and Obama were in Madison, Wisconsin to mark the first day of early voting in the state.
The Minnesota governor railed against Trump’s campaign stop to a McDonald’s over the weekend so he could work the fryer.
"There is something not just nuts, but cruel about a billionaire using people’s livelihoods as a political prop," Walz said.
Speaking in Detroit, Obama said that Trump was incompetent and only wanting the power of the presidency as a means to an end, urging voters to support Harris because “we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guard rails.”
“Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them,” he said. “And ‘us’ for him is the ‘real Americans’ who support him, and everybody else who doesn’t, that’s ‘them’ — that’s the enemy.”
Speaking from New Hampshire on Tuesday, President Biden similarly sought to frame Trump as a threat to democracy, telling an audience at a Democratic campaign office in Concord, "We got to lock him up." He quickly clarified to explain he was speaking figuratively. "Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That’s what we have to do," Biden said.
The remark drew quick condemnation from the Trump campaign.
"Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square. The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy. We call on Kamala Harris to condemn Joe Biden’s disgraceful remark," Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
Trump is doubling down, especially on immigration
In Florida, Trump argued at a roundtable that the economy was better for Latinos during his four years in office, but often veered off topic. He lobbed personal attacks against Harris, calling her “lazy,” “slow” and “low IQ.”
While Latino voters have historically supported Democrats in greater numbers, Republicans hope Trump’s central focus on immigration issues and border security will help peel away support from a crucial bloc of voters.
His rhetoric around immigration and its effect on the country continues to be dire, even outside his rally settings.
“We can't take a chance at losing this election, because if we lose this election, we may not have a country anymore,” he said.
At his Greensboro, North Carolina rally, Trump continued to call migrants who enter the country illegally part of an “invasion,” vowed to oversee mass deportations and blamed Harris for violent crimes committed by some migrants in the U.S.
He spoke for nearly two hours and mixed in his usual prepared remarks from the teleprompter with lengthy asides, including boasts about his crowd size and a melancholic reflection that his time on the campaign trail is coming to an end, both for this election and potentially for good.
“It's sad, because we're sort of wrapping it up, you know that, right?,” he said. “We've been doing this for a long time. We had two unbelievable elections ... when you think, we've been doing it for, from 2015 and now we're where we are.”
Trump, who would be the oldest person to become president if he wins, has also seen an increase in verbal gaffes and distracting non sequiturs in his speeches recently. Tuesday night, he appeared to forget the word “fryer” when talking about his McDonald’s stop and mistakenly called a segment of loyal superfans known as the “Front Row Joes” the “Front Row Jacks” and “Front Row Jacks and Joes.”
“Those french fries were good,” he said. “They were right out of the — they were right out of whatever the hell they make ‘em out of.”
The final countdown for both campaigns
With 14 days to go until voting closes, the time, place and focus of each event added to the calendar gives insight into the campaigns’ closing messages and priorities to get out the vote.
Trump will headline a Turning Point USA rally in suburban Gwinnett County, Ga. Wednesday while Harris tapes a town hall with CNN in Chester Township, Pa. Thursday, Harris also heads to Gwinnett County to rally voters with Obama and Bruce Springsteen.
The Harris campaign announced Tuesday that the vice president will travel to Houston, Texas on Friday to discuss how the state’s abortion restrictions have hurt women — and to pin the blame for that on Trump. The event is also aimed at boosting support for Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, who is challenging Republican Ted Cruz for his Senate seat.
Trump also announced multiple rallies in Pennsylvania and Michigan later this week, joining events planned in Nevada and Arizona before holding an event at Madison Square Garden in New York.
NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben, Franco Ordoñez and Deepa Shivaram contributed reporting.
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