In battle between Trump and Harris, both campaigns target the Blue Wall

WASHINGTON – A furious final sprint in this year's historic presidential election will begin on Labor Day, as the two major parties’ campaigns dig in for a pitched battle in a handful of swing states that will determine the outcome.

After a shocking series of events, which began with a historically early general election debate at the end of June and ended with the sitting president dropping out of the race in late July, the contest between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is coming into focus.

Harris is casting herself as a forward-looking consensus builder, while Trump tries to portray her as extremely liberal. The ex-president has also launched a bevy of insults at Harris and assailed her for flip-flopping on fracking and border security, even as he has reversed himself on several issues in the campaign, including immigration visas, cryptocurrency, electric vehicles, banning TikTok and Florida's abortion rights ballot initiative.

Trump is meanwhile telling voters that he'd prevent foreign wars, as Harris chastises him for comments he made last year about acting like a dictator on the first day of his administration. Harris told her supporters last week in Savannah, Georgia, that after a recent Supreme Court ruling, Trump would effectively be immune from prosecution no matter what he does in the White House.

A brief period of respite before the busy season settled over both campaigns ahead of the upcoming push.

Following several hurried days on the trail, which saw him visit Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in quick succession, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, took the weekend off from campaigning.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, did the same on Saturday and Sunday. The pair visited Georgia at the end of August. They’ll hit the same battleground states that Trump did last week in a series of campaign stops on Monday.

For Harris, it’s a visit to the labor-heavy city of Detroit and on to Pittsburgh, where she’ll hold her first joint campaign event with President Joe Biden since he left the Democratic ticket. Walz will be in Milwaukee.

Then, it will be up to the vice presidential picks and top campaign surrogates to do the heavy lifting for several days, as Trump and Harris prepare for a consequential face-off.

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The candidates are expected to meet for the first time on Sept. 10 at a debate hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia, even though a potentially deal-breaking dispute over whether the mics will be muted in between turns has continued.

Both have reasons to debate. Trump has been slipping in the polls; Harris is still introducing herself to voters.

Harris' Labor Day Push: Harris and Walz, with help from Biden, to target pivotal Rust Belt states

Labor Day weekend has typically served as the symbolic start to the general election, with campaigns shifting their task from voter registration to voter persuasion, and, eventually, voter turnout operations.

With polls showing tight contests in the swing states, all three efforts could be critical.

The swing states in 2024 are generally considered to be Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Although Republicans have also said they will contest Minnesota and Virginia, neither is considered a toss-up and now that Harris and Walz are on the ticket, Democrats' numbers are improving in the blue-leaning states.

Voting will begin soon in some of those states as absentee ballots begin to go out in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this month. North Carolina will start sending its absentee ballots on Sept. 6. Early voting begins in September in four states, including Minnesota and Virginia.

For both campaigns, it’s the Blue Wall

Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes are viewed as essential to both campaigns’ paths to victory, although both sides are mapping alternative routes.

Vance and Trump each went to Pennsylvania last week. Harris visited on two separate occasions in August and is sending Walz this Thursday and Friday.

Harris on her most recent trip went with Walz and their spouses to the western part of the state. They landed in Pittsburgh and took a bus tour through deep-blue Allegheny County into the more rural Beaver County, which Trump won, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

The approach is one that Harris' campaign intends to build on, with bus tours that go beyond the major cities, in other battleground states.

“You have to hold the margins in counties you might lose a bit. Lose, you know, 60-40 instead of 70-30 for example,” Dan Kanninen, battleground states director of the Harris-Walz campaign, said. “You want to go expand the gains that Democrats have made in the suburbs with independents and moderate Republicans on issues like abortion or on Jan. 6.”

Trump has ramped up his campaigning in recent weeks to try to blunt Harris’ momentum, blanketing the battleground states with rallies and other appearances.

He held events every day during the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago, crisscrossing the country. In addition to Pennsylvania, Trump made two appearances last week in Michigan and one in Wisconsin.

The three so-called “Blue Wall” states were Democratic bulwarks for decades until Trump won them in 2016 on his way to winning the presidency.

Biden got them back in 2020, and now the Trump and Harris campaigns are engaged in a struggle. The states represent the easiest pathway to victory for Harris, even as her campaign touts another route through a group of western and southern states that includes Georgia and North Carolina and is known as the Sun Belt.

Harris has a slight lead in all three Rust Belt states, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, but is trailing slightly or tied in the southern battlegrounds.

She has closed the gap with Trump and turned Pennsylvania into a statistical tie.

“What I think Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz have done really effectively is build the coalition back together,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters during a roundtable hosted by Bloomberg News during the Democratic convention.

Harris is going to the right places, he said of her visit to the western part of his state. “The fact that she showed up there, talked about issues on their minds, really, really gives me a lot of hope and optimism,” Shapiro said.

Trump is hammering a familiar message on trade protectionism in the Rust Belt, a region that has been hard hit for decades as manufacturing jobs moved overseas. The northern swing states have large electorates of white, working-class voters who have been receptive to Trump’s messaging on the economy and immigration.

During his rally Thursday at a steel plant in Michigan, Trump promised to restore the American auto industry – historically centered in the Detroit area – to its past glory.

“We’re going to get the auto workers’ jobs back like it was 30 years ago,” he said.

The powerful United Auto Workers union has endorsed Harris, prompting Trump to lash out at the union president during the rally. He also brought an autoworker up on stage who started a Facebook group called Autoworkers for Trump 2024.

Trump won the state by just 10,704 votes in 2016. Biden beat him there by 154,000 votes in 2020.

Michigan Republican Party Chair Pete Hoekstra told USA TODAY it feels “a whole lot like 2016” in Michigan right now.

In 2016, Trump railed against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which helped him win over blue-collar voters.

“We were getting a lot of interest from union workers, a lot of interest from UAW workers, and we ended up doing very, very well,” Hoekstra said about 2016.

Trump renegotiated NAFTA as president. Now he’s promising more tariffs and zeroing in on a new target his supporters believe will resonate with blue-collar workers –  the push under the Biden-Harris administration for more electric cars. Trump argues the focus on electric vehicles will kill the auto industry and pledges to have the federal government reverse course if he wins.

Hoekstra said it’s a “powerful issue” in Michigan and talked about appealing to union workers, who he views as a key swing vote in 2024.

“In 2016 we did well, better than average, with those voters,” Hoekstra said. “We’ve lost some of them because they went to ‘Union Joe in 2020’ but we’re going to get those back.”

Trump campaign battleground state spokeswoman Rachel Reisner argued that Harris’ record doesn’t play well with blue-collar Americans in swing states, pointing to her past opposition to fracking for oil and natural gas – which she has reversed course on – and high levels of inflation and undocumented immigration during the Biden administration.

“Her record has been very anti-working-class America,” Reisner said.

Harris has stressed the economy in recent visits – and her support there from the auto workers union. She says she'll go after price-fixing on food and groceries if she's elected and expand tax credits for the middle class.

She points to legislation she cast the deciding vote on, and Republicans are trying to repeal, as evidence that she would prioritize reducing the price of prescription drugs. She has also said that with congressional approval she would offer first-time homebuyers $25,000 in assistance to help them make their down payments.

Trump, she says, will give tax breaks to the wealthy, and she has equated his proposed tariffs on imported goods to a national sales tax.

Harris has the endorsements of an array of powerful unions, including the National Education Association, the United Steelworkers, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Culinary Union in Nevada.

She makes a point of bringing up Biden, who enjoyed strong support from labor before he dropped out, in front of union-friendly crowds.

After reminding the audience that he’d walked the picket line in Michigan last fall, Biden was met at the Democratic National Convention with chants of “Union Joe.”

Biden ran into trouble during the Michigan primary, though, with uncommitted voters for continuing to arm Israel in its war in Gaza against Hamas. Harris sent her campaign manager to the state in August for a new round of listening sessions with Arab American and Muslim leaders.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told USA TODAY during the convention that Harris has “the opportunity to have a new start” on the Middle East as the nominee.

“I actually feel pretty good about Michigan. I think Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are in some ways tougher fights,” the Harris campaign surrogate said. “She’s got to do it all.”

To win those states, the Pennsylvania-born congressman said, “We’ve got to win the economic argument.”

“We’ve got to make the case that we are the party that’s going to reindustrialize America and reenergize the working and middle class.”

Trump was in Wisconsin for a town hall Thursday with Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who endorsed the former Republican president.

Another former Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also endorsed Trump recently. Trump’s campaign is touting the endorsements in swing states as a sign it is reaching out to a broad range of voters.

Republicans hosted their convention in Milwaukee, and Harris sought to tweak Trump during the Democrats’ convention by hosting a rally at the same arena. Walz’s home state of Minnesota borders Wisconsin, making it an easy state for him to repeatedly visit over the final stretch of the campaign.

Harris has been tapping into Biden’s appeal there. He’ll visit on an official trip this Thursday, after laying low for the past several weeks.

Hillary Clinton failed to visit the state in 2016, as several of Harris’ top staffers are painfully aware. Wisconsin tipped the election in Biden’s favor four years later, when he reclaimed the blue wall.

“Wisconsin makes beer, cheese, brats and presidents. Our ticket knows it. Our voters know it. The Republicans know it –they put Donald Trump in Wisconsin for the Republican National Convention for that exact reason,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler argued. “As Trump said, I think if we win Wisconsin, we win the whole thing.”

Campaigns tout war chests, offices, staff size

Of the advantages Harris’ campaign touts is a strong war chest of $540 million and an early investment in staff and offices.

“We are in a position to play hard and aggressively across all the battlegrounds. By contrast, the Trump campaign did not do that,” said Kanninen, battleground states director of the Harris-Walz campaign.

Harris has more than 312 offices and 2,000 staffers in battleground states, according to the campaign, and made a $150 million television ad buy in August. Harris' campaign says it has $370 million in TV and digital ads reserved after Labor Day.

The Trump campaign says it has “hundreds” of paid staffers in the battleground states and nearly 400 GOP offices funded by the former president’s operation, but it didn’t specify how many of those are new and how many existed previous to the campaign.

Trump campaign political director James Blair posted on X, formerly Twitter, that there are 21,000 trained “Trump Force 47 Captains,” in the battlegrounds, referencing the campaign’s volunteer program.

Kanninen said that as Trump was busy defending himself unsuccessfully against 34 felony counts in court, Democrats were putting together a robust operation, which Harris took over from Biden.

“I know they talk about building some paid component at the end here. That's never very effective, as compared to a volunteer-driven organization that has time to build relationships and trust, which is what we've been doing,” he said.

Much of Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation is being handled by outside conservative groups, which isn’t traditional and puts the effort outside the campaign’s direct control.

Hoekstra of the Michigan GOP said he might not be able to hold the groups accountable or exercise control over them, but he believes that having more organizations participate in GOTV is a good thing and is confident in their leadership.

“These are talented people,” he said. “I’m going to stay in communication with them as much as I can legally, but I’m going to let them run because they’re quality people.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump and Harris begin Labor Day push with visits to Blue Wall states