With a week to go, Harris, Trump trade insults

The highly contentious, tightly contested U.S. presidential election is now a week away.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, is set to deliver her so-called “closing argument” to voters in a Tuesday evening speech near the White House. Republican former President Donald Trump is campaigning in Pennsylvania, one of the seven political battleground states likely to determine the overall national outcome.

Both candidates, each disparaging the other as unfit to lead the country for a new four-year term, are looking for any small advantage to woo the sliver of voters who have not made up their minds in what could be one of the country’s closest votes in decades.

Polls show the contest in a virtual dead heat, with Harris and Trump tied in some crucial states or only narrowly ahead or behind, all within the statistical margin of error. A few thousand votes in each of the seven key states could prove crucial.

Last-minute speeches by Harris and Trump could sway some undecided voters to finally make a choice, but the campaigns’ get-out-the-vote efforts targeting their already likely committed supporters to cast their ballots in the last days of the campaign or on Election Day could prove even more decisive.

Nearly 49 million people have voted early, either at polling stations or by mail, ahead of next Tuesday’s official Election Day, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. More than 155 million voted in the 2020 election.

Before heading to Allentown, Pennsylvania, a city with a Latino-majority population, Trump spoke at his oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He described Harris as “grossly incompetent … a total trainwreck.”

But Trump took no questions from reporters and did not mention comic Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke at a Trump rally Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, claiming the Hispanic U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.”

Trump’s campaign has distanced itself from the joke. Trump has not publicly commented about the remarks but told ABC News he does not know Hinchcliffe, saying, “Someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”

Trump also maintained he didn’t hear the joke, even as it has been played on television and written about extensively. When asked what he made of the joke, he did not take the opportunity to denounce it, repeating that he didn’t hear it.

He called the New York rally “an absolute lovefest.”

Puerto Ricans living on the island are Americans but cannot vote in the election because only people living in U.S. states, not territories, can vote in presidential elections. But hundreds of thousands of people who grew up on the island have moved to the U.S. mainland, as have their relatives, and they can vote in whatever state they live in.

With hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican votes critical to the outcome in some of the battleground states, the Harris campaign quickly produced a digital ad saying Latino voters “deserve better” than what the former president represents.

A Harris campaign official told NBC News that the 30-second spot will run online in battleground states on platforms like YouTube TV, Hulu and Snapchat, where Latinos consume a lot of their media.

Pennsylvania alone, which both candidates see as crucial to winning the presidency, is home to more than 300,000 eligible Puerto Rican voters, according to the Latino Data Hub at the University of California Los Angeles.

There are also sizable Puerto Rican populations in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan, three other battleground states.

On the campaign trail, Harris and Trump have traded frequent insults.

Trump has described Harris as someone with a low IQ and said she would be like “a play toy” for other world leaders. “They’re going to walk all over her,” he has said.

Some of Trump’s former top aides from his 2017-2021 term in the White House described him as a fascist with the intent to govern in a second term as an authoritarian. Harris said she agreed with the characterization.

Trump returned the taunt to describe Harris the same way.

Harris is doing five interviews ahead of her speech on the Ellipse where she plans to portray Trump as a threat to American democracy. Local police are anticipating a crowd of about 50,000 people.

The Ellipse is the same site where Trump exhorted his supporters on January 6, 2021, to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to try to block Congress from certifying that Democrat Joe Biden had defeated him in the 2020 election.

More than 1,500 protesters were arrested for their roles in the ensuing riot at the American seat of government, where 140 law enforcement personnel were injured. The demonstrators caused $2.9 million in property damage to the Capitol as they smashed windows and doors and rampaged through congressional offices.

More than 1,000 rioters have been convicted of an array of offenses, with some of the most serious offenders sentenced to years of imprisonment.

Trump says if he wins the election, he might pardon them.

The Harris camp says that in her speech she will contrast what she says her presidency would encompass compared to a second Trump tenure, contending that Trump will be focused “on himself and his ‘enemies list’ instead of the American people,” while she will be “waking up every day focused on a ‘to-do list’ of priorities to lower costs and help Americans’ lives.”

Harris has often said it is time to “turn the page” on the Trump era.

U.S. presidential elections are not decided by the national popular vote but rather through the Electoral College vote, which turns the election into 50 state-by-state contests, with 48 of the 50 states awarding all their electoral votes to the winner in their states, either Harris or Trump. Nebraska and Maine allocate theirs by both statewide and congressional district vote counts.

The number of electoral votes in each state is based on population, so the biggest states hold the most sway in determining the overall national outcome, with the winner needing 270 of the 538 electoral votes to claim the presidency.

Polls show either Harris or Trump holds substantial or somewhat comfortable leads in 43 of the states, enough for each to get to 200 electoral votes or more. Barring an upset in one of those states, that leaves the outcome to the remaining seven states – a northern tier of three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), two states in the Southeast (Georgia and North Carolina) and two in the Southwest (Arizona and Nevada).

Polling in the seven states is easily within the margins of statistical error, leaving the outcome in doubt in all seven.

By Ken Bredemeier – voa