LA CROSSE, Wis. – Joy Olson proudly wore a “Make America Joyful Again” button Thursday as she waited in line to attend a Kamala Harris rally. But that doesn’t mean the 70-year-old retiree with the happiest of names wants the Democratic nominee to shy away from taking the heat to Republican Donald Trump.
“I’m tired of her being so nice sometimes,” said Olson, who called Trump “evil and scary.” She added: “I hope she calls him out.”
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That’s exactly what the vice president is doing as the campaign enters its final days.
Less than three weeks from Election Day, Harris is closing out her campaign painting a dark vision of the country if Trump is sent back to the White House, including airing video clips at her own rallies of the Republican nominee’s more alarming rhetoric.
“Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged and will stop at nothing to claim unchecked power for himself,” Harris said Thursday in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
It’s a far cry from the “joy” that swirled around her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. As that surge of enthusiasm has eased, Harris is staking her campaign on increasingly sharp attacks on Trump meant to get her supporters to turn out and to win over the tiny universe of persuadable voters left in exceedingly tight battleground states.
At her La Crosse rally, she noted that Trump falsely claimed this week that the violent Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a day of love.”
“There were attacks on law enforcement,” she said, recalling the insurrection where Trump supporters tried to block the counting of electoral votes that formalized President Joe Biden’s victory. “The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting. Enough! We are ready to turn the page!”
“Roll the clip,” she said a week earlier, directing a rally audience to watch a video of the former president calling for rooting out an “enemy within” the country.
And she told radio host Charlamagne Tha God during a radio town hall this week that “Yes, we can say” that Trump was threatening to bring fascism to the country.
Since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket in late July, Harris and her team have been torn between the competing priorities of introducing the vice president to voters and turning the race into a referendum on the former president after Biden’s debate flop put Democrats in the spotlight.
In the opening weeks of her campaign, she tried to thread the needle by sharing with voters her background as a prosecutor, telling stories about her upbringing and laying out her vision of how she would govern if elected.
Harris has been no stranger to criticizing Trump, but the urgency and vividness of her warnings about him have noticeably ramped up in recent days.
“He wants to send the military after American citizens. He wants to prevent women from making decisions about their own bodies,” Harris said in La Crosse. “He wants to threaten fundamental freedoms and rights like the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.”
It marks a return to the guiding strategy that was first outlined by Biden aides a year ago, when he was planning his reelection bid, and that is now being deployed by his hand-picked successor.
“People go negative because it works,” said Republican strategist Brendan Buck, a former top aide to GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan. “Harris needed to make herself an acceptable alternative but ultimately the coalition was always going to be more of an anti-Trump one than anything affirmatively pro-Harris.”
Trump's team has noticed too. “Kamala’s entire campaign is based on lies about President Trump,” his campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Some of the attacks on Trump are part of Harris’ explicit outreach urging Republican voters to cross party lines, like her rally Wednesday in Pennsylvania with dozens of anti-Trump Republican political figures. Her team views it as a unique opportunity for Harris to increase her base of support and tap into a collection of voters who’ve already rejected Trump in the past.
Former Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield said attacking Trump gives Harris an opening with independent and even moderate Republican voters, and shifts the political conversation to ground where she is stronger — protecting American democracy — and away from issues where Republicans are often seen as stronger, such as immigration and the economy.
“Putting the stakes of this election front and center in the final few weeks may help motivate a slice of voters who are otherwise tired of the process,” she said.
At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Thursday evening, Harris was set to highlight Trump calling himself the “father of IVF,” as her campaign casts the Republican as a threat to women's reproductive health.
Greg Swagel, a 76-year-old retired yacht builder from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, showed up to Harris' rally in Green Bay wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and said he “most definitely” agrees with Harris becoming more aggressive in her rhetoric.
“She has to put (Trump) in his place," Swagel said. "He tells lies. He calls people names. Just as long as she doesn’t become him in the sense of lowering herself.”
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Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Chris Megerian in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Todd Richmond in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.