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      Are Trump’s campaign rallies energizing his base – or sowing doubt?

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      As Donald Trump emerged to a thunderous roar of approval in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Rust belt, he was back in his comfort zone among the people who once put him in power.But by the time he stepped off the stage nearly two hours later, even some of the former US president’s supporters were wondering whether his rallies are doing his re-election campaign more harm than good.Trump was on his seventh visit to Luzerne county since he first ran for president in 2016. From the stage of an indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre earlier this month, the former president looked out on thousands of the kind of blue-collar voters who helped put him into the White House by flipping the north-eastern Pennsylvania county after it twice voted for Barack Obama.Trump was back to fire them up once more as he again counts on Luzerne to help push him over the line in a swing state he almost certainly has to win if he is to be a two-term president. But much has changed in Luzerne since he first ran eight years ago.The local Republican party has been torn apart by infighting amid accusations of racism and “sledgehammer politics” over how to get Trump re-elected. Meanwhile, support for Democratic candidates in local and state elections has been steadily rising even as its own supporters describe the local party as a “a complete mess” and “useless”.As the election gets off the ground, political strategists on both sides say that the outcome in Luzerne county and much of the rest of north-eastern Pennsylvania is likely to be decided by turnout in a region where a lower proportion of people vote and so there is greater scope to boost support.Local Republican leaders saw the rally as an opportunity for Trump to take the initiative after evidently being thrown by suddenly facing Kamala Harris after months of leading Joe Biden in opinion polls. Harris has not only erased Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania, but recent polls put her three or more points ahead.Frank Scavo, a businessman and ardent Trump supporter who was part of a coup that took hold of the county Republican party earlier this year, was clear before the rally about what he wanted to hear from Trump.“These rallies fire up the base to go out there and knock on doors. His base will walk on fire for him, but plenty of other Republicans don’t vote. Are they demoralised? Do they think their vote doesn’t count? Most of it is apathy. But if we don’t get people out there knocking on doors, Trump’s not going to win Luzerne county,” he said.“But to do that, Trump’s got to focus on the message and not get distracted by personal attacks. Trump’s a good communicator. He’s got the issues, commonsense issues, most of them economic, not social. He should leave the attacks on Kamala to others, at least until the debate.”That’s not how things worked out.Trump repeatedly broke away from the prepared speech about economics to make rambling claims that Harris was both a fascist and a communist, to attack her laugh as that of “a crazy person” and a “lunatic”, and to claim he was more beautiful than the vice-president. He also spent time debating aloud with himself how to pronounce the name of the CNN anchor Dana Bash.By the time he stopped speaking 100 minutes later, a large number of the arena’s 8,000 seats had emptied.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenA hard core of local supporters, some wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m voting for a convicted felon”, remained alongside traveling groupies who follow Trump from rally to rally. But in rural cities such as Wilkes-Barre, there is also a contingent who go along to political rallies for the entertainment value, to see a former president on a Saturday afternoon when there is not much else going on, or to help weigh up how to vote. Some of them were not impressed.“He reminded me why I’m not going to vote for him this time,” said Jenny, a local businesswoman who did not want to give her full name because she didn’t want to alienate customers.“I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in the front yard. I voted for him again in 2020 but didn’t put the flag out that time. I’ve been thinking of voting for him again because Biden’s been so bad for the economy and Kamala won’t be any better. But after listening to that, I’m actually afraid of Trump being president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Perhaps he was always like that but he seems worse, more unstable.”The county Republican party split earlier this year over how to win back voters like Jenny and get others to the polls. More than half the leadership quit after a “grassroots” Trump-aligned faction set up a breakaway organisation, Luzerne County Republicans.The county chair, PJ Pribula, resigned in March along with other officials after losing the fight. In his resignation letter, Pribula accused the insurgent group of “sledgehammer politics and intolerance”.“For two years, myself and my executive board have spent 90% of our time and resources fighting the 10% because their twisted beliefs run contrary to what our Republican Party stands for,” he wrote.“They realize that if they are deceitful enough, loud enough, obnoxious enough and demanding enough, they will find a path to the inside. Over the past few weeks, I have seen this group and their candidates making in-roads I never would have believed possible and in seeing that, I realize that it is my time to go.”Pribula told the Scranton Times-Tribune that the new leadership was pushing a hate-filled agenda.“They’d put things on their sites being against gays, lesbians, African Americans, anybody who didn’t fit their cookie-cutter mold they are against and that’s not how I am and that’s not how the Republican party is,” he said.Scavo served as the treasurer of the insurgent group shortly after his release from 60 days in prison for illegally entering the Capitol building during the 6 January 2021 riot. He said he organised a trip of about 200 people to the Trump rally in Washington that day because he objected to the conduct of the vote count in Pennsylvania.In 2019, Scavo expressed regret for the wording of a series of anti-Muslim comments on social media, as well as falsely claiming Barack Obama is Muslim, when he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the state legislature. Shortly afterwards, he was voted out as chair of a local school board.Scavo denies that the new Republican party leadership in Luzerne county is pushing a racist agenda. He said the ousted chair and his staff were going to cost Trump the election because they were elitist and unwilling to listen to voters.“The previous leadership didn’t want to have any resistance or turbulence so they didn’t engage with the grassroots,” he said.“There’s a lot of people that don’t vote, so our job is to find them and then say it’s time to vote. Simple. They didn’t seem to understand that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublican twitchiness about the election in Luzerne county is in part driven by the success of Democratic activists in pulling back support that collapsed after Obama left office. However, Ed Mitchell, a veteran Democratic strategist in Wilkes-Barre who previously worked for one of Pennsylvania’s members of Congress, said little of that is down to the Democratic party itself.“I have a personal philosophy as a consultant that the parties don’t really matter anymore. At the national level, they can raise enormous amounts of money, but our state party isn’t very effective here in Pennsylvania and our local Democratic party in the county is a complete mess. They’re useless,” he said.Instead, Trump’s opponents in Luzerne county drew lessons from his defeat of Hillary Clinton and decided the Democratic party was a part of the problem.View image in fullscreenAlisha Hoffman-Mirilovich volunteered for Clinton in Pennsylvania but became frustrated with how Democratic campaign staff disdained local advice on the issues that mattered in Luzerne county.“It was mostly outside organisers telling locals what to do and not necessarily listening. I myself stopped volunteering because of the way that I was treated and some things that were happening at the time,” she said.“They all packed up and left within the week after the election. But this is my home and I decided we needed to do something.”Hoffman-Mirilovich launched Action Together NEPA, a non-partisan social welfare organisation permitted to campaign on issues but not directly in support of individual political candidates, to work on increasing voter turnout.The group did what the local Democratic party failed to do and banged on thousands of doors to talk policy not personalities.“Because of Trump, we now have something where if you just even mention Republican or Democrat it’s just very divisive in communities, which is much different when you are from a non-partisan organisation that’s issues-led. I have talked to candidates who go to knock on doors and get thrown off of porches even though they’re from the community. They are told to go,” she said.“But people are at least willing to talk to us and we find out what’s important to them, not what the party thinks is important. The largest issue in Luzerne county is corruption. It comes up over and over again.”Hoffman-Mirilovich traces that back to the “kids for cash” scandal in which two Luzerne county judges, elected to the positions as Democrats, sentenced hundreds of children to prison terms for petty offences in return for millions of dollars in bribes from the private company incarcerating them. Some of the children were as young as eight years old and sentenced for offences such as jaywalking and smoking on school premises.Other corruption scandals since then have kept the issue alive. Hoffman-Mirilovich said that has fed into a distrust of the system that extends from suspicion about corporate greed driving inflation to the loading of the US supreme court with conservatives to strip away democratic protections and the constitutional right to an abortion.The Democratic share of the vote in Luzerne county has risen with each election since Trump’s 2016 victory, including the race for Pennsylvania’s governor two years later and a seat in the US Senate. Biden narrowed the gap with Trump in 2020 and then the Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro, won the county in his election for governor in 2022.Democrats have also made inroads into the county government in which Republicans previously held all but one of the 11 commissioner seats. At the last election, the Democrats picked up four seats.Mitchell credits Action Together, which said it knocked on 36,000 doors in Luzerne county to get Shapiro elected, and other activists, more than the local Democratic party.Some Republicans say, more in hope than expectation, that Biden quitting the presidential race will cost the Democrats voters who were loyal to the president because he makes much of having spent part of his childhood in Scranton, a city in the neighbouring county.But Hoffman-Mirilovich sees the opposite effect, saying Harris has opened up new possibilities. She said voter turnout in Wilkes-Barre is lower than in the rest of the county in part because it has a younger demographic that is less likely to vote.“We are finding talking to some of these voters that they are now energised with Kamala as the top of the ticket. They are excited about voting for the first time,” she said.“Some people, if not most of them, didn’t want to see the same matchup from 2020.”Scavo is not unaware of the success of the get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Democrats and has been working to match it. The Republicans have driven up party registrations over the past couple of years to nearly match those of the Democrats.But Scavo said Trump then has to get those voters to turn out on election day. He agrees with Hoffman-Mirilovich that it will come down to turnout and thinks Trump needs to do more to make sure his supporters vote.“My father keeps saying: ‘If I vote for Trump, what’s Trump going to do?’ And I’m thinking, if you’re asking me that, then Trump isn’t getting the job done because you should know what he’s going to do on day one,” he said.“So how does Trump win? He stops with the personal narratives of ‘I was prosecuted, persecuted, tried’, and all the personal stuff against Kamala. He needs to start talking to the person that’s disengaged by saying: ‘We’re going to lower your cereal, egg and meat prices. We’re going to lower your energy cost, your gas. We’re going to re-establish the border and have mass deportations.’ That’s the message he’s got to focus on, and then people will come out and vote.” More

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      ‘Georgia’s ours to lose’: Trump and Harris camps zero in on swing states

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump brace themselves for what promises to be an ugly and bruising sprint to the finishing line in November, both presidential candidates’ campaigns are turning their sights back on the handful of desperately close swing states where the battle is likely to be decided.Georgia is coming into view as a critical battleground for both leaders as they struggle to gain voters’ attention in an epochal election. On Wednesday, the vice-president will travel from the White House to southern Georgia to hold her first campaign event in the state with her recently anointed running mate and former high school football coach, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.The duo will go on a bus tour of the region, attempting to reach out to diverse voting groups including rural areas where the former president is strong, as well as suburban and urban districts in Albany and Valdosta, where large Black communities are among their target demographics. On Thursday night, Harris is scheduled to cap the tour with a rally in Savannah, where she will talk to Georgians about the stakes of this election.The intense focus on Georgia by the Democratic campaign underlines that they are not resting on their laurels after what most commentators have agreed was a pitch-perfect convention in Chicago last week. Despite the pronounced bounce in popularity that Harris has enjoyed since she dramatically switched with Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket five weeks ago, the race remains essentially neck and neck.The latest poll tracker by 538 for Georgia puts Trump 0.6% ahead of Harris in Georgia, with Harris on 46.0% and Trump on 46.6%. That is bang in the middle of the margin of error – and suggests that the state is open territory for the two candidates.In Sunday’s political talkshows, Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s closest surrogates, underlined the importance of Georgia to Trump’s re-election hopes. “If we don’t win Georgia, I don’t see how we get to 270,” he told CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the number of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency.Graham added that he would be accompanying Trump to what he called a “unity event” in Georgia soon. He predicted that if Trump played the right game in the state he would win.“I do believe Georgia’s ours to lose. It’s really hard for Harris to tell Georgians that we’re on the right track – they don’t believe it,” Graham said.The problem for Graham and other top Republican advisers is that Trump frequently blatantly ignores their guidance. In his most recent trip to Georgia, Trump ranted about the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, whom he still blames for failing to back him in his attempt to subvert the 2020 election – and whose support he now needs to prevail in November.Graham implicitly admitted to CNN the trouble that the attack on Kemp had caused but insisted: “We repaired the damage, I think, between Governor Kemp and President Trump.“He’s going to put his ground game behind President Trump and all other Republicans in Georgia.”Three days after the Democratic convention, which went off in a blaze of red, white and blue balloons and an ecstatic response from delegates, the Harris-Walz campaign is now laser-focused on that same ground game. The key is to turn the palpable surge in energy that exploded from the Chicago convention into hard work making calls and knocking on doors in Georgia and the other six battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The chairperson of the campaign, Jen O’Malley Dillon, released new data on Sunday which she said demonstrated the positive impact of the convention throughout the battleground states. Chicago marked the biggest week so far in Harris’s nascent pitch for the White House, she said, with volunteers signing up for almost 200,000 shifts during the week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMoney also continues to pour in, with the campaign raising $540m in five weeks – a record in US presidential campaign history. About $82m of that was received during convention week.O’Malley Dillon said that it was all a sign of Harris building on her momentum: “We are taking no voters for granted and communicating relentlessly with battleground voters every single day between now and election day – all the while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums.”A leading Harris surrogate, the Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis, appeared on Fox News Sunday to try to convince right-leaning voters and undecided independents that they could safely back Harris. “She’s come to the middle,” Polis said, when asked about some of the more progressive policies Harris previously espoused but has since dropped – including a ban on fracking and Medicare for all.Polis added: “She’s pragmatic. She’s a tough leader. She’s the leader for the future.“She’s going to be a president for all the American people.”As the euphoria of the convention fades, Harris has already begun to face tougher questions, notably when will she expose herself to tougher questions by facing an interviewer. The Democratic candidate has so far studiously avoided a sit-down with any major news outlet.Quizzed himself about Harris’s resistance to being questioned, Cory Booker, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, told CNN: “As this campaign goes on, she’ll be sitting for more interviews”.“She’ll be engaging in debates,” Booker said. “I think she wants to do more.”With the battleground states all still essentially anyone’s to win, there are growing fears that Trump might be tempted to unleash another conspiracy to overturn the result should he narrowly lose in November. There are numerous indications that Trump and his Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters may be laying down the foundations of a challenge.At a rally last week in Asheboro, North Carolina, Trump said: “Our primary focus is not to get out the vote – it’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”Trump’s running mate, the US senator from Ohio, JD Vance, was asked by NBC News’s Meet the Press whether he believed the election would be free and fair. “I do think it’s going to be free and fair,” he replied.Then he added: “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that happens. We’re going to pursue every pathway to make sure legal ballots get counted.” More

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      Harris and Walz Venture Into Less-Friendly Terrain to Court Pennsylvania Voters

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      Before their convention that this week will signal the final sprint to November, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, headed out on a brief bus tour on Sunday to fire up voters in perhaps the most crucial battleground state in the 2024 election.As they toured western Pennsylvania, their play for support beyond the state’s more liberal cities was apparent at the team’s first stop, a field office in Rochester, Pa., in the largely conservative Beaver County: Ms. Harris picked up a volunteer’s cellphone to speak with a resident from Erie, a northwestern city in one of the state’s swingiest counties, which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 but Joseph R. Biden Jr. won four years later.“I love Erie,” Ms. Harris said. “At some point we’ll get to Erie.”Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz were joined on the outing by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, traveling in two new campaign buses from the Pittsburgh airport, where they arrived on Air Force Two to greet a small group of supporters.Recent polling of Pennsylvania shows a close race between the Harris-Walz ticket and the Trump-Vance ticket.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas are the two main drivers of Democratic support in Pennsylvania, a state whose 19 electoral votes could decide the presidency. Recent polling shows a neck-and-neck race there between Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, with some surveys showing Ms. Harris gaining a narrow edge recently.Mr. Trump is also increasing his presence in Pennsylvania — on Saturday he held a rally in Wilkes-Barre and another is set in York on Monday, while Senator JD Vance of Ohio, his running mate, campaigns in Philadelphia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Urged to Focus on the Economy, Trump Leans Into Attacks of Harris

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      Former President Donald J. Trump in a campaign speech on Saturday bounced among complaints about the economy and immigration, wide-ranging digressions and a number of personal attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, including jabs at her appearance and her laugh.At a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Trump swung from talking points on inflation and criticisms of Democratic policy as “fascist” and “Marxist” to calling illegal immigrants “savage monsters” and saying that rising sea levels would create more beachfront property.Mr. Trump blamed Ms. Harris for high prices, in what was effectively an inversion of her remarks at her rally in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, where she said Mr. Trump’s proposed import tariffs would amount to a “Trump tax” on groceries. The former president argued that she had placed a “Kamala Harris inflation tax” on average Americans over the course of her term as vice president and that, if elected, he would lower prices on consumer goods, just as she has said she would do.“Yesterday, she got up, she started ranting and raving,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris’s explanation of her economic agenda in North Carolina. He mocked her remarks that, he said, suggested he would tax “every single thing that was ever invented.”Mr. Trump’s advisers have urged him to emphasize his economic policy plans, which, according to polling, many voters trust more than Ms. Harris’s, and some Republicans have hoped he would leave behind his characteristic personal attacks, including his frequent insults of Ms. Harris’s intelligence and appearance.But at two events earlier this week — a speech in Asheville, N.C., and a news conference in Bedminster, N.J. — both billed as opportunities to discuss the economy, Mr. Trump veered into personal attacks against Ms. Harris, which he said he was “entitled” to do.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump campaign reset goes awry in Pennsylvania as he attacks Harris

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      Donald Trump tried to reset his campaign at a rally in battleground Pennsylvania on Saturday as polls show Kamala Harris pulling ahead in key swing states.But the former president quickly broke away from the prepared speech about economic issues to launch personal attacks on Harris including accusations that her agenda is both communist and fascist, and that she has “the laugh of a crazy person”.Trump’s written speech before a mostly filled 8,000-seat indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre focussed on economic policy, although a part of the audience left before he finished speaking. Some Republican strategists had hoped the former president could regain the initiative by zeroing in on issues on which opinion polls say voters have greater trust in Trump than the Democrats, such as inflation.Trump attacked Harris as part of the Biden administration for the surge in prices that has hit many Americans hard and described increased household costs as “the Kamala Harris inflation tax”.“She was there for everything,” he said in attempting to pin Biden’s policies on her.Trump also likened Harris’s pledge on Friday to tackle high grocery costs by targeting profiteering by food corporations, and to bring down housing and prescription drug costs, to the Soviet Union’s economic system.“In her speech yesterday, Kamala went full communist,” he said. “Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls. You saw that never worked before … It will cause rationing, hunger and skyrocketing prices.”View image in fullscreenThe former president challenged voters to ask themselves whether they were “better off with Kamala and Biden than you were under President Donald J Trump”, a question that many in Pennsylvania might answer in his favour.But the impact was soon lost as Trump once again veered repeatedly away from the script with rambling discourses from immigration to China and trans people, often based on outright falsehoods.At one point, he even acknowledged that was what he was doing.“They’ll say he was rambling. I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he said.The audience, some wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m voting for a convicted felon” and chanting “Fight, fight, fight” in reference to the former president’s words shortly after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt last month, urged Trump on.When he returned to the script, Trump attacked Harris for her previous opposition to fracking, an unpopular stance in Pennsylvania, which is a major fracker, but he will not have helped himself in the Rust belt by saying he would cut spending on infrastructure such as renewing bridges and roads, which has provided jobs in the region.Trump also challenged Harris’s legitimacy as the Democratic presidential candidate, describing it as “a coup” against Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Joe Biden hates her. This was an overthrow of a president,” he said.Trump confused some in the audience with what appeared to be a claim that if Harris could become the candidate without a primary election, then so should he because he is so popular among Republicans.“I said, so why are we having an election? They didn’t have an election. Why are we having an election?” he said.Trump described Harris’s decision to pass over Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, as antisemitism in an apparent reference to debate about whether Shapiro’s support for Israel, including work for the Israel embassy in the past, would damage the Democratic campaign because of the war in Gaza .“They turned him down because he’s Jewish. That’s why they turned him down. Now, we can be politically correct and not say that. I could say, well, they turned him down for various reasons. No, no, they turned him down because he’s Jewish,” said Trump.“And I’ll tell you this, any Jewish person that votes for her or a Democrat has to go out and have their head examined.”Through it all, Trump repeatedly returned to personal attacks on Harris, including a bizarre discourse on how she laughs, a mannerism that has proven popular among many younger voters in particular.“Have you heard her laugh? That is the laugh of a crazy person. That is the laugh of a crazy, the laugh of a lunatic,” he said. More

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      ‘He has a proven track record’: behind Tim Walz’s appeal to workers

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      Vice-presidential picks have little effect on who wins a presidential election, many political scientists say. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s choice as her running mate, could prove the exception to that rule. Not least because of his track record of successfully appealing to working people.Angela Ferritto, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, voiced confidence that Walz will help the vice-president win in three pivotal states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin: “I strongly believe that Governor Walz will help the ticket. He has a proven track record of accomplishing things for working people.”Ferritto noted that as Minnesota’s governor, Walz enacted paid sick days, guaranteed more protection to construction workers against wage theft, and gave teachers greater negotiating power “over class sizes so they can give students the attention they need”.Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, said Walz had an underappreciated strength that is political gold. “He gets policies out of the left-right divide and gets people to agree that this is the right thing to do,” she said. “Who’s for large class size? Who’s for poorly paid teachers? Who’s not for letting Mom and Dad have time with their new baby? He has a way of taking ideology out of policies and making them seem like things we can get together on.”Steve Rosenthal, a political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said Walz had another important trait – he is the type of candidate blue-collar workers would be happy to have a beer with. Walz likes to hunt and fish, he was long a union member while a teacher, and his financial disclosure forms show he owns no stocks or bonds.“What the two parties’ vice-presidential picks say is that both sides recognize the critical nature of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,” Rosenthal said. “I think Walz is a huge addition in those states.”He explained that people normally focus on who is at the top of the ticket, but “to the extent Harris has someone who can represent her in those three states, he can be a big help. He can camp out in those states. He can walk a picket line and go to union halls. He can be a huge plus.”While history shows that vice-presidents don’t often move voters to the polls, with Walz things “could be a little different”, said Lake, noting that Harris’s selection of Walz was getting huge attention partly because it was the biggest, early decision of her presidential campaign. “I think Walz definitely helps in terms of the blue wall strategy [of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin]. It’s great to have someone from the midwest on the ticket. His story is great and complements hers.”On paper, political experts say, Walz should be an alluringly strong running mate because he served in the army national guard for 24 years, was a high school teacher for two decades and coached his football team to a state championship. Moreover, Walz, a 60-year-old father of two, grew up on a farm in a Nebraska town of just 300 people.Ever since Walz’s selection was announced, he and Harris have trumpeted his rural roots and decades of public service, while Donald Trump and his campaign have rushed to portray Walz as “dangerously liberal” and in other unflattering ways. In recent days, the Harris and Trump campaigns have been rushing to put forward clashing definitions of Walz, and which side prevails in defining him to the nation could have a major effect on how much Walz boosts the Democratic ticket.“A handful of national polls show that 60% and up of voters say they don’t know enough about Walz to have an opinion,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Milwaukee-based Marquette Law School Poll. “The Republicans are pushing hard to paint him in a negative way. Things are wide open as to whether he will be defined as a Minnesota dad or the socialist governor of Minnesota.”The Trump campaign’s attacks “are really exploding on him”, Franklin said, adding, “If Walz deals with them effectively, more power to him. If he ends up being swiftboated, just like John Kerry was, that’s not so good.”JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has accused Walz of leaving the military early to avoid serving in Iraq, but Walz says he retired from the national guard in 2005 to run for Congress, months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy to Iraq.Many Democrats voice confidence that Walz will beat back the Trump-Vance attacks and be a boon to the ticket. They point to his superb communications skills – he’s down to earth, clever and humorous, and he came up with the term “weird” to describe and deride Trump and Vance. Many Democrats applaud the policies he ushered in as Minnesota governor, including 12 weeks’ paid family and medical leave, free breakfasts and lunches for public school students, strong protections for reproductive freedom, and free college tuition at public universities for students from families making less than $80,000 a year.Even though studies have shown that vice-presidential picks usually affect election results by only a small margin, Walz’s addition to the ticket – and his midwestern, pro-worker bona fides – could make a crucial difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won each of those states by less than 1% in 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn June, Emerson College Polling and the Hill did a poll in Minnesota that found that Walz was plus 12 with women, minus nine with men, and plus 11 with 18-to-29-year-olds. Spencer Kimball, director of Boston-based Emerson College Polling said Walz could certainly help Harris attract and motivate younger voters. “Younger voters had moved away from Biden, not necessarily to Trump, maybe to a third party,” Kimball said. “What we’ve seen recently is the youth vote moving toward Harris, and I think Walz helps double down on that. The youth vote is one of the Democratic party’s bases. To get young people excited about the race is a potential gamechanger and can help reset the election map.”With regard to the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Ken Kollman, director of the University of Michigan’s center for political studies, said that there was “a big mother lode” of votes in Detroit and that voter turnout in Philadelphia and Milwaukee was hugely important. “The national election may very well hinge on turnout in those areas,” he said, adding that he didn’t think Walz would make much difference in those three cities.Walz could prove important, however, Kollman said, in making overtures to Democrats and blue-collar voters who have gravitated to Trump. “There is a group of Trump supporters who are pretty liberal on issues, which is one of the paradoxes of Trump’s appeal – people who actually rely on or believe in government support and active government intervention in their lives, their industry or their company.”Kollman said that Walz, because of his rural background and pro-worker record, “might be able to get some of them to break away from Trump. That remains a big question.”Lake, the pollster, agreed that Walz “can provide an opening” to voters leaning toward Trump, but said that Walz’s personal appeal alone could not win over many Trump-leaning voters. Lake said the “whole ticket has to improve” its efforts to reach them and persuade them.Ferritto of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO voiced optimism about Walz’s ability to win over Trump voters. “He flipped a congressional district that borders Iowa from red to blue,” she said. “He wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that unless he appealed to blue-collar voters.”Some, perhaps many, blue-collar Trump supporters will never hear Walz’s or Harris’s message, Ferritto acknowledged, because they are inundated from one side. “But I believe there are blue-collar voters who are willing to listen,” she said. “They want to hear facts. They want to hear about achieving real results. I do believe that Walz can reach those voters.” More

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      New poll shows Harris four points ahead of Trump in three key swing states

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      A major new poll puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in three key swing states, signaling a dramatic reversal in momentum for the Democratic party with three months to go until the election.The vice-president leads the ex-president by four percentage points in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, 50% to 46%, among almost 2,000 likely voters across the three states, according to new surveys by the New York Times and Siena College.The polls were conducted between 5 and 9 August, in the week Harris named midwesterner Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and a former high-school teacher, as her running mate on November’s Democratic ticket.It provides the clearest indication from crucial battleground states since Joe Biden pulled out of the race and endorsed Harris amid mounting concerns about the 81-year-old’s cognitive wellbeing and fitness to govern for a second term. The results come after months of polling that showed Biden either tied with or slightly behind Trump.Harris is viewed as more intelligent, more honest and more temperamentally fit to run the country than Trump, according to the registered voters polled.The findings, published on Saturday by the New York Times, will boost the Democrats, as Harris and Walz continue crisscrossing the country on their first week on the campaign trail together, holding a slew of events in swing states that are likely to decide the outcome of the election.On Saturday, the candidates held a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, a state the Biden-Harris ticket won by more than two points in 2020.While only a snapshot, Democrats will probably be heartened to see that 60% of the surveyed independent voters, who always play a major role in deciding the outcome of the race, said they are satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 45% in May.The swing appears to be largely driven by evolving voter perceptions of Harris, who has been praised for her positivity and future-focused stump speeches on the campaign trail. In Pennsylvania, where Biden beat Trump by just more than 80,000 votes four years ago, her favorability rating has surged by 10 points since last month among registered voters, according to Times/Siena polling.Harris will need to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – crucial battleground states that Biden clinched in 2020 – if the Democrats are to retain the White House.The latest polls will probably further anger Trump, whose few recent campaign events have largely been dominated by ire – and apparent disbelief – at the rapid shift in momentum since naming JD Vance, the Ohio senator and former venture capitalist, as his running mate amid a celebratory atmosphere at the Republican national convention less than a month ago.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance, who has been derided as “weird” by the Democrats as he doubles down on 2021 comments about the US being run by “childless cat ladies”, is broadly viewed unfavorably or unenthusiastically by the majority of independents, Democrats and registered Republicans, the new poll found.But Democrats still have work to do to communicate Harris’s vision for the country. The poll found that 60% of registered voters think Trump has a clear vision of the country, compared with only 53% when asked about Harris.Crucially, Trump is also still leading when it comes to confidence over handling the economy and immigration – two of the three key issues for voters, according to polls.Still, Harris has a 24-point advantage over Trump when it comes to abortion, an issue which Democrats hope will help get out the vote in key swing states such as Arizona and Wisconsin. Harris is also viewed significantly more favorably when it comes to democracy than Trump, who continues to face charges related to his alleged role in subverting the 2020 election results and the 6 January insurrection in Washington.In a statement to the Times, Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s chief pollster, said the new polls “dramatically understated President Trump’s support”, citing surveys conducted in the days before the 2020 election that overestimated the margin of Biden’s victory. More