It was the first big day of the wrestle for the Midwest that is likely to decide the 2024 election, and someone important was missing — former President Donald Trump.
The Republican nominee left it to his vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, to troll the newly minted Democratic ticket through the critical swing state territory Wednesday as a fresh 90-day race for the White House burst into life.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held two high-energy rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan that showed the euphoria inside a once-despairing Democratic Party for its two new candidates.
The Democratic nominee borrowed a trick from Trump’s playbook, performing a dramatic arrival scene aboard Air Force Two in Michigan that mirrored his past use of the bigger presidential jet before a packed airport rally. For the second day in a row, Harris appeared before thousands of excited supporters who spelled out a collective warning sign for Trump — who is known to obsess over crowd sizes. She appeared to be quickly settling into her novel role as her party’s official candidate, displaying flashes of charisma and increasing confidence as her political honeymoon showed no signs of ending.
The Trump team begins its counter-attack
Trump’s team, meanwhile, tipped its hand on how it plans to halt Harris’ momentum and discredit her new sidekick, whom she delights in highlighting as a coach, a veteran and an archetypal midwestern dad.
The former president has struggled to find a way to respond to the sudden change in his opponent after President Joe Biden bowed to Democratic fears that he was too old to serve a second term. Trump’s claims that Harris is not really Black and his deliberate mangling of her name in juvenile social media posts as “Kamabla” only underscore how he seems adrift.
Trump on Wednesday called into his safe space on Fox News from his Florida club to claim he was “thrilled” that Harris had chosen Walz, billing the Democratic team as radical and too far left for America. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” Trump said. His attacks, however, were mostly unfocused and of only limited effectiveness as he again failed to spell out a clear and concise case against his rival.
Vance was more forensic. In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he held an event that was much smaller than Harris’ outdoor rally but that directly addressed key economic concerns that preoccupy voters in the region, including high prices, the cost of housing and energy and food. “I know that we can do better. We were doing better when Donald J. Trump was president,” Vance said. In a new rhetorical twist, he all but ignored Biden and kept referring to the “Harris administration,” implying the vice president was the real power in the White House.
Harris showed in the same western Wisconsin city that she understands that the economic issues that bedeviled the Biden administration, despite a strong post-Covid-19 rebound, are a huge concern. “We will continue to fight for affordable housing, for affordable health care, affordable childcare and paid leave,” she told the crowd. “While our economy is doing well, by many measures, prices for everyday things like groceries are still too high. You know it and I know it.”
How Vance and Trump think they can trip up Harris
In another front of its emerging offensive against Harris, the Trump campaign cranked up pressure on the vice president to do a major media interview, apparently hoping to goad her into a forum in which she’s historically been more vulnerable than when delivering scripted speeches.
“I think it’s really disgraceful, both for Kamala Harris but also for a lot of the American media that participates in this stuff, to have a person who has been the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party for 17 days and refuses to take a single question from the American media,” Vance said in Wisconsin.
Harris, especially early in her vice presidency, sometimes waffled in interviews and unscripted moments, and the Trump campaign clearly sees this as a potential way to slow her strong start. But with the Democratic National Convention looming in less than two weeks, there seems little incentive yet for the Harris camp to take any risks, especially since Democrats can argue for now at least that the vice president has been spending her time frantically building a new campaign and hurriedly seeking a running mate. But such a position will be hardly sustainable in the longer term, and Harris will come under pressure to demonstrate she’s qualified to serve as president – especially amid increasing challenges to American power abroad.
The way that Vance is pursuing the vice president through the nation’s most contested political real estate was illustrated in one rather odd moment on Wednesday. As he arrived in Wisconsin and saw Air Force Two on the tarmac, he walked toward the plane in what he later said was an attempt to talk to the vice president. “I just wanted to check out my future plane,” he said.
— CutC by cnn.com
