Two weeks after Election Day, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance told supporters at a rally in the swing state of Arizona to get their friends to the polls because the race could go either way.
“This is the scenario you have to plan for, and I don’t mean to give you a nightmare, but I’m going to,” Vance told the crowd in Peoria, Arizona. “We wake up on November 6 and Kamala Harris has been narrowly elected President of the United States in the state of Arizona by a margin of 700 votes. Think about that. And ask yourself what you can do from now until then to make sure this doesn’t happen.”
Vance visited Arizona on Tuesday, stopping in Peoria, part of the suburban metro around Phoenix, and will stop in Tucson, in southern Arizona, later in the day. Donald Trump plans to rally in the state on Thursday. Democrats have lined up a host of campaign surrogates this week, including former President Bill Clinton and current President Joe Biden, in the final stretch before Nov. 5.
Polls in Arizona show that it is a close battle, with Trump maintaining an average lead over Kamala Harris. Arizona turned blue in 2020, handing Biden the southern border state.
The tally of the race for the state that Trump lost became the focus of Vance’s rally in Peoria, where he tried to convince supporters that they needed to “work on our backside over the next two weeks” to get the state back on track. red column.
Everyone should vote ten times, he joked, saying the media would lead the way with headlines saying he was encouraging voter fraud. They could vote 10 times by bringing nine of their friends to help sway the tight race toward Trump, Vance said.
During a question-and-answer portion of the event, a reporter noted that there aren’t many undecided voters and that a significant portion of the electorate in places like Arizona have already cast their ballots. Vance agreed, but said there were still plenty of people on the fence who could swing the election toward either candidate. His message to them, which he repeated in several ways during the rally: “You don’t have to agree with everything I say. You don’t have to agree with everything Donald Trump says. But who can deny the results?”
He pointed to issues acute for Arizona voters, such as higher housing costs, inflation and border security, as examples of how they were better off four years ago under Trump. He also went after Harris for “softball interviews” and her record as vice president, saying he felt sorry for Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz because he has to defend Harris’ record.
Related: An Arizona Republican official who refused to certify the 2022 midterm elections has pleaded guilty
Despite repeated attacks on early voting and voting by mail, Vance encouraged people to vote in the way that works best for them, even if he and Trump personally don’t like those voting methods. “If we’re going to vote early, vote by mail and vote on Election Day, we need to take every opportunity we have to vote, get out and make your voice heard,” he said.
He would not accept the results of the 2024 election in Arizona, noting how some printers failed in 2022, which Maricopa County investigated and attributed to thicker paper taxing printers. “Whether you think this was just incompetence or something else, it’s not OK,” he said. He added that the campaign is “doing a lot better in 2024 than it did in 2020” in the state.
