Kamala Harris and rival Donald Trump are campaigning in critical battleground states Sunday seeking 11th-hour advantages in a deadlocked White House race, as new polling shows the vice president underperforming among some traditional Democratic voter demographics.
Harris was in North Carolina, a state hard-hit by a hurricane two weeks ago that devastated several communities and left more than 235 people dead across the US Southeast, as she seeks to counter Trump’s claims that federal agencies have done little to help storm victims.
Her boss, President Joe Biden, was in Florida assessing the damage from more recent Hurricane Milton which raked across the southern state and highlighting the federal government’s commitment to rescue and recovery efforts.
With just 23 days before the November 5 election, Republican former president Trump and his running mate Senator J.D. Vance continue to thrust the federal disaster response squarely into the presidential race.
Asked on ABC Sunday talk show “This Week” whether Trump has been accurate in describing the federal response as incompetent, Vance said “it’s to suggest that Americans are feeling left behind by their government, which they are.”
Biden took an aerial tour of the devastation in Tampa Bay and nearby St. Petersburg, and received a briefing of storm response efforts.
While he described the impact as “cataclysmic” in some neighborhoods, Biden said Florida was fortunate it was not worse.
“It’s in moments like this, we come together to take care of each other, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans,” the president said.
Trump was set to appear at his own rally in Arizona, where he will reinforce his border policies and amplify his aggressive — often false — rhetoric about migrants.
A day earlier he held a roundtable with Latino leaders in neighboring Nevada, another swing state with a substantial Hispanic population.
– ‘Concerned’ –
The events come as new polling shows Harris has not stanched the flow of Latinos from the Democratic fold towards Trump, even as he pushes his sharply anti-immigration message.
Data from the latest New York Times/Siena College poll show Harris underperforming other recent Democratic nominees among likely Latino voters, currently earning just 56 percent of the demographic compared to Trump’s 37 percent, a margin of 19 points.
Biden’s 2020 margin among Latinos was 26 points, while Hillary Clinton’s was 39 points in 2016.
And while Harris has large advantages with women, particularly women of color, she is struggling to gain traction with Black male voters, a growing number of whom are leaning towards the brash Republican who said in July that Harris, who is the nation’s first Black and first South Asian vice president, “happened to turn Black” a few years ago.
“Yes I am concerned about Black men staying home or voting for Trump,” House Democrat James Clyburn told CNN’s “State of the Union” show Sunday.
Harris, in a likely appeal to those very voters, headed Sunday to Greenville, a North Carolina city where African-American students staged the historic 1960 sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, a civil rights protest.
Polling shows Harris and Trump neck and neck including in the seven swing states that are likely to determine the outcome of the election.
An NBC News national poll released Sunday shows a 48-48 percent tie.
“As summer has turned to fall, any signs of momentum for Kamala Harris have stopped,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, who conducted the survey with a Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “The race is a dead heat.”
Both candidates hold campaign events in the biggest swing state prize of all, Pennsylvania, on Monday.
A Harris heavyweight surrogate, Democratic ex-president Bill Clinton, was on the trail Sunday in battleground Georgia, where he spoke at Mount Zion Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation.
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