Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sought to shore up political support among what they considered essential voting blocs on Sunday, with polls showing them locked in a tight presidential race on Nov. 5.
With Election Day less than a month away, the Democratic vice president visited a black church in Greenville, North Carolina, as part of her campaign’s “soul to the polls” campaign. Her Republican opponent was in Arizona, seeking support from blacks and Latinos as he seeks a second presidency, after a rally in California a day earlier.
Both candidates are trying to gain a decisive lead among the votes who have not yet decided who they will support. Surveys show that early voting, which typically favors Democrats, is down 45% from previous election years — a sign that there may be millions of undecided voters.
Trump has now moved from condemning early voting as a plot by Democrats to engineer his defeat against Joe Biden in 2020 to urging people to vote early and by mail.
A recent poll from ABC News and Ipsos found support split across the genders, with women voting 60-40 for Harris and men voting for Trump by a similar margin.
Trump needs white women, who supported him in greater numbers in 2020 than in 2016 — but also black men. On Sunday, he argued that his former colleague President Barack Obama’s call last week for black men to support Harris “based solely on the color of her skin, and not on her policies” was “deeply offensive.”
Georgia Democratic Senator Ralph Warnock told CNN on Sunday: “Black men will not vote for Donald Trump in significant numbers.” But fellow black Democrat Jim Clyburn, a congressman from South Carolina, told CNN, “Yes, I am concerned” about black men voting for Trump.
A New York Times poll released Sunday showed Harris performing below the last three Democratic candidates for the White House among Latino voters.
The election could amount to a fractional increase in support for each of them. An NBC News poll released Sunday found the candidates in a “dead heat” nationally with 48% support. The poll found that voters view Trump’s first term more favorably — but also that voters view reproductive rights as a key motivational issue, which could hurt the former president after three of his appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion .
A CBS News poll, also released Sunday, found that the presidential race is more than just two conflicting ideologies — but that there is a fundamental disconnect.
For example, most Trump supporters said aid for victims of Hurricanes Helene and Milton was not reaching affected people — while Harris’ supporters said it was. Trump supporters said the economy was bad; Harris supporters said it was good. Trump voters said U.S.-Mexico border crossings were increasing; Harris’ voters said they were disappointed.
Trump voters, especially men, said gender equality efforts had gone too far; Harris voters didn’t say far enough. But both agreed that social media was unreliable and had made it harder to find things to agree on and to separate fact from fiction.
But the response to the two recent hurricanes that hit the southeastern U.S. continued to dominate the Democrats’ campaign. On Sunday, Biden was expected to examine the damage Milton inflicted on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where he would announce $600 million in funding for damaged power grids.
Response to hurricanes remains Democrats’ political concern. Harris was scheduled to hold a post-church campaign rally in a state hit hard by Helene, where the speed of the federal disaster response to the storm has come under intense politicization. A day earlier, the vice president was photographed for the second time in a week preparing disaster relief supplies.
One volunteer commented “it takes a village” as they loaded diapers into boxes. “You’re absolutely right,” Harris replied.
That came as the Wall Street Journal reported that some of the earlier backlash against Helene had come in the form of Patriot Front, an organization that the Anti-Defamation League has concluded is a white supremacist group — and which used misinformation as recruitment tool. tool.
With Arizona, Nevada and Georgia possibly leaning toward Trump, and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin possibly leaning toward Harris, losing North Carolina would cost Trump the 16 electoral college votes needed to reach the winning threshold of 270. The state narrowly voted for Trump. 2020.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that he would reject Harris and Biden’s call to bring Congress back to Washington to approve more relief funding after the hurricane.
“It can wait,” Johnson said, pointing to $20 billion in additional disaster funding recently approved. He claimed that only 2% of that funding had been distributed. Once states have assessed, calculated and submitted their “actual needs,” “Congress will convene and in a bipartisan manner we will address those needs.”
Johnson accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of being “slow to respond”. He said: “They have not done the job that we all expect and hope they will do, and that will be a lot of thought in the coming days.”
But as Harris’ support appears to be waning in recent weeks, even after a series of TV appearances, there have been reports of rising tensions between her campaign and the Biden White House. The president canceled a trip to Germany to focus on the hurricane response. But now it is reported that he has moved the trip to Friday.
According to Axios, Biden aides remain hurt as the president is pushed out of his re-election bid over questions about his age. He is 81 – just three years older than Trump.
Harris’ team believed Biden let her down by holding an impromptu news conference while she was holding a rally in Michigan.
Biden was expected to meet on Sunday with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with whom Harris feuded earlier this week. An aide to Harris, 59, told the newspaper that the president’s team is “too caught up in their feelings.”
