PHILADELPHIA/DULUTH, Georgia (Reuters) -Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris told a town hall in Pennsylvania on Wednesday her administration would be different from that of President Joe Biden’s, as Republican Donald Trump campaigned in Georgia, another battleground state.
Harris’s attempt to distance herself from Biden comes as several polls show the president is a drag on her candidacy and that voters are eager for a new direction with less than two weeks to go until the Nov. 5 election.
Harris has mostly brushed off questions on the campaign trail over how – and to what extent – she would break from Biden on policy.
“My administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” Harris said during a televised CNN town hall. “I bring to this role my own ideas and my own experience. I represent a new generation of leadership on a number of issues and believe that we have to actually take new approaches.”
Harris’s town hall in Chester Township was an attempt to persuade the dwindling number of undecided voters to support her in a closely divided race where even a small percentage of votes could be critical.
Fielding several questions from attendees, Harris vowed to tackle high grocery prices, said it was time to end the war in the Middle East and called Trump a fascist and “danger to the well-being and safety of America.”
The vice president also tackled questions on her changing position on policies such as fracking, saying she does not believe in having “pride associated with a position” when the important thing is to build consensus on issues.
Harris has repeatedly said she wouldn’t ban fracking if elected president, a reversal of her position during her first presidential run in 2019.
Asked if she was in favor of expanding the Supreme Court to 12 justices from the current nine, Harris said: “I do believe that there should be some kind of reform of the court, and we can study what that actually looks like.”
RECORD EARLY VOTES
Nearly 25 million voters have already cast ballots, either through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots, according to tracking data from the Election Lab at the University of Florida.
Several states, including the battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, set records on their respective first day of early voting last week.
“The votes in Georgia are at record levels,” Trump told a religious-themed “ballots and believers” event in Zebulon, Georgia. “The votes in every state, frankly, are at record levels. We’re doing really well and hopefully we can fix our country.”
Trump in recent days has sought to rally turnout from Christian evangelicals, hoping they will set aside any concerns about his frequent off-color commentary like his tale about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy.
Trump, who made campaign rallies a staple of his political career starting back in 2015, said in Zebulon that “in many ways it’s sad” that his time as a political candidate is coming to a close. If he wins on Nov. 5, he would serve his second and final term.
“We’ve been doing this for nine years, and it’s down to 12 days,” he said.
After Zebulon, Trump was speaking in Duluth, Georgia, for a rally with former Fox News star Tucker Carlson and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Also present was country music star Jason Aldean, who encouraged attendees to vote early, a message that Trump is slowly embracing after denouncing the practice for years.
Pennsylvania and Georgia are among the seven battleground states that will decide who wins the presidency, and both candidates are likely to spend much of the rest of their campaigns visiting them.
Earlier in the day, Harris seized on comments by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times that the former president met the “general definition of fascist” and admired dictators.
Harris called Trump’s remarks as quoted by Kelly “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous.” Trump’s campaign has denied Kelly’s account, calling them “debunked stories.”
The vice president tried and failed to push Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after she was considered to have won the first and only presidential debate between the two candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.
Harris held a marginal 46% to 43% lead nationally over the former president in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.
(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly, Jarrett Renshaw, James Oliphant and Nandita Bose; Additional reporting by Alexandra Ulmer and Steve Holland; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Mary Milliken, Lincoln Feast, Jonathan Oatis and Deepa Babington)
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