At Dueling Rallies, Harris Stresses Unity as Trump Attacks Biden’s ‘Garbage’ Remark

MADISON, Wis. — With six days left in the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump hopscotched the battleground states Wednesday as they sought to wring support from an electorate already in the full throes of early voting.

Their trips provided a clash of imagery and messaging that has defined the final sprint of their razor-thin race for the White House.

Across three states, Harris offered a message of unity and pledged to be “a president for all Americans.” In North Carolina, she was introduced by a woman who had voted for Trump in 2016. “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy from within,” Harris later told a crowd of thousands in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

Trump delivered a portrait of a nation under siege by sinister forces that only he could conquer. He sought especially to amplify a muddled remark from President Joe Biden in which he appeared to call Trump’s supporters “garbage.” In the kind of attention-grabbing stunt he has long favored, Trump held a news conference in Wisconsin sitting in a Trump-branded garbage truck — and even took the stage for his evening rally near Green Bay wearing an orange garbage collector’s reflector vest and a tie underneath.

“I have to begin by saying, 250 million Americans are not garbage,” Trump said at the start of the rally, wildly overstating the number of people who support him.

Both candidates began their day with rallies in North Carolina and ended it with events in Wisconsin, with Harris adding a stop in between in Pennsylvania, a signal about which states remain most competitive as Election Day nears.

They also brought along celebrities who spoke to their respective cultural appeals. In Wisconsin, Trump was accompanied by Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback who retired after the 2010 season. Harris held her final rally of the day in Madison, Wisconsin, with singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams and hipster folk band Mumford & Sons, among others, opening for her.

In what may be this election’s closest thing to an “October surprise,” a comedian’s racist jokes about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally Sunday have been reshuffling the messaging from each campaign. Prominent Puerto Rican stars including Jennifer Lopez and Bad Bunny quickly expressed support for Harris. And Trump lost his endorsement from reggaeton star Nicky Jam.

In a sign of how much the controversy may have broken through to the public, Google searches Monday for the name of the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, surpassed those for Taylor Swift, one of the world’s most famous musicians.

Hinchcliffe had made a joke onstage Sunday that disparaged Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” Biden tried to denounce that racist language in a video call with Hispanic supporters Tuesday night. But he garbled his words, saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

The White House and Biden later said he was describing the racist language as “garbage,” not Trump supporters.

Trump unleashed a torrent of criticism, joined by his allies. His campaign quickly tried to tie Biden’s comments to Hillary Clinton calling some Trump supporters “deplorables” in 2016 and sent out fundraising messages referring to the controversy.

Trump has repeatedly demonized Democrats, describing them at times as “the enemy within,” “communists,” “these lunatics” and “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

But Wednesday at two rallies in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, he insisted that the rhetoric from the Democratic side was the problem. “For the past nine years, Kamala and her party have called us racists, bigots, fascists, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis and they’ve called me Hitler,” Trump said in Rocky Mount, adding, “They’ve demonized us and censored us.”

He said Biden, Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, had demeaned his supporters, telling the audience that “you can’t be president if you hate the American people, and there’s a lot of hatred there.”

The vice president made no reference to Biden’s remarks at her three rallies Wednesday. But earlier in the day, she sought to separate herself from the controversy when she spoke with reporters.

“Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” she told reporters as she prepared to board Air Force Two outside Washington, although she pointed out that Biden had “clarified his comments.”

Harris has been pressed to distance herself more broadly from Biden, an unpopular incumbent who is also her boss, putting her in a difficult position. Her campaign has resisted having them appear together on the trail. Biden is seen as an undisciplined communicator, and his comments Tuesday undercut a speech Harris delivered that same night in which she made unity a major theme.

On “The Rickey Smiley Morning Show” on Wednesday, Walz tried to go on the offensive, denouncing the rhetoric used against Puerto Ricans at the Trump rally in New York. “That is the exact opposite of what people are hungry for,” he said.

Polls in the battleground states show a race that is virtually tied, as is true in the nation as a whole.

Across the seven battleground states, about 36% of registered voters have already cast ballots, according to early voting data reviewed by The New York Times. The early voting rates vary wildly by state. More than half of North Carolina’s voters have cast ballots, but just 19% of Pennsylvania’s have done so, reflecting cultural voting patterns and ease of voting.

The early-voting rates are helping determine where the campaigns hold rallies in the final days of the race.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee County’s early voting rate has lagged behind the rest of the state, prompting the Harris campaign to plan a Friday night event in Milwaukee with a to-be-announced musical act.

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Trump’s first stop Wednesday was in Rocky Mount, an impoverished section of northeastern North Carolina, where Barack Obama energized Black voters on his way to winning the state in 2008, the last Democratic presidential nominee to do so.

On the road to the rally, Trump saw a very different scene from the one that greeted him Tuesday in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, where people wearing Trump gear lined the streets, cheering him and waving giant flags bearing his name.

In Rocky Mount, as Trump’s motorcade drove by, young Black residents stood on their front lawns in front of small houses. Some silently filmed the procession; one man stood on his porch and raised his middle finger.

But the arena, the Rocky Mount Event Center, which seats up to 4,000 people, was filled nearly to capacity with mostly white Trump fans.