By Jeff Mason and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Vice President Kamala Harris travels to Michigan on Monday to focus on the economy, while former President Donald Trump heads to Georgia to shore up support among religious voters, as the two enter the final stretch of the 2024 campaign for the White House.
Fresh from a day of stops in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where she visited with Black men in a barbershop and talked about faith in a Black church, Harris will travel across Michigan to highlight her support for manufacturing jobs and union workers, according to a campaign official.
She also plans a rally with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, that will feature a performance by singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers.
Trump, who held a rally in New York City on Sunday that began with a series of vulgar and racist remarks by his supporters, has two events in the Atlanta area on Monday, one at the National Faith Advisory Summit and the other a rally, as he tries to win over voters in Georgia, another critical swing state.
Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck in the polls of the battleground states that will determine the winner of the U.S. presidential election. Both candidates are working hard to win over the remaining sliver of undecided and independent voters in those states while turning out their respective base supporters to vote early or show up at ballot stations on Nov. 5.
While Trump has pushed an anti-immigration message and hurled insults at the vice president, Harris has portrayed Trump as a threat to democracy after his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and the resulting raid on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Monday she will contrast their economic visions.
Harris will visit Corning Inc’s Hemlock Semiconductor facility to talk to workers and tour the assembly line, according to the campaign official, and talk about the importance of investing in manufacturing jobs. The company recently received a preliminary investment of up to $325 million via the Chips and Science Act, which the official noted Trump had criticized and Harris helped pass.
She will also tour a labor union training facility.
Trump has argued that his stewardship of the economy as president was stronger than that of President Joe Biden and Harris, despite major job losses at the end of his term during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Though the U.S. job market has been strong under the Biden-Harris administration and stock markets have reached record highs, persistently elevated prices have hammered consumers on everything from groceries to rent.
“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Trump asked his rally crowd on Sunday. The crowd answered: “No.”
Harris, meanwhile, has issued policy proposals to bring down prices and help alleviate the country’s housing crunch, while also contrasting her leadership approach with Trump, who she said would be focused on getting back at his enemies.
“He is full of … dark language that is about retribution and revenge. And so the American people have a choice. It’s either going to be that, or it’ll be me there, focused on my to-do list, focused on the American people,” she told reporters on Sunday in Philadelphia.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Michael Perry)
