The Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, alongside Philadelphia City Council member Quetcy Lozada, right, and Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker greets supporters at Freddy & Tony’s Restaurant, a locally owned Puerto Rican restaurant on Oct. 27, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ?(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is slated to deliver what the campaign is calling her “closing argument” Tuesday night at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., as she aims to reach undecided voters in the final stretch of the presidential election.
Just a week out from Nov. 5, the Democratic presidential nominee will use her final pitch to voters to “turn the page” from former President Donald Trump, Harris campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a Tuesday morning call with reporters.
The Ellipse, a large grassy area just south of the White House, was the site of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, remarks urging his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol.
Harris and Trump remain neck and neck in polling, both nationally and in swing states, in a race that could very well be decided by only a handful of voters across those battleground states.
In the press call, the Harris campaign previewed the contents of the veep’s highly anticipated speech, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people.
For many undecided voters or those who are “questioning whether or not it is worth it to engage in the election at all,” Harris’ speech is an “opportunity for the vice president to intimately speak directly to that segment of the electorate’s sense of frustration, their sense of exhaustion with the way that our politics have played out under the Trump era — and offer them directly a vision that something is different, that something different is possible,” said Michael Tyler, Harris campaign communications director.
The veep is set to focus on “what her new generation of leadership really means, and centering that around the American people, what they care about, and that she’s going to make clear that she’s committed to ensuring that their needs and priorities are her top priority,” said O’Malley Dillon, who noted that Harris will touch on her vision, values and plans.
“You’re going to hear her really speak to middle-class families and what they’re worried about, and what she’s going to do about it, and she is going to very much focus the speech on them, on the American people, unlike what we hear from Donald Trump, which is his focus on himself, and we know that that is a pretty stark contrast,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Harris campaign Co-Chair Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman, said the veep will “use the powerful symbolism of the location to remind Americans that Trump is someone so all-consumed by his grievances and his power and his endless desire for revenge that he is not focused on the needs of the American people.”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continues to face a backlash following comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s series of racist and vulgar remarks during a Sunday night rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, including calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
“I think just seeing what’s happened over the course of the last 48 hours, the growth of support in some of our targeted Puerto Rican community, and some of our battleground states, obviously we have strength there to come in, but we obviously have seen a lot of movement and growth over the course of the last several days based on the response to what happened with Trump’s event,” O’Malley Dillon said.
With Trump set to hold a Tuesday rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania — a city and state with large Puerto Rican populations — the Democratic National Committee is launching a new billboard campaign across the Keystone State underscoring Hinchcliffe’s remarks.
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