Harris zeroes in on Black men, Trump focuses on women as both seek to fire up key voting blocs

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both pushed Tuesday to energize key constituencies that their allies worry might be slipping away, with the
vice-president looking to reach Black men and the former president focusing on women.

Harris will appear at a town hall-style event in Detroit hosted by the morning radio program “The Breakfast Club,” featuring Charlamagne Tha God, who is especially popular with Black males. Trump, meanwhile, will tape a Fox News Channel town hall featuring an all-female audience and moderated by host Harris Faulkner.

The vice-president was also scheduled to stop by a Black-owned business in Detroit. A day earlier, she visited LegendErie, a coffee shop and record store in Erie, Pa., where she met with the husband-and-wife owners, a local pastor and other community leaders.

Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is unveiling his ticket’s plan to improve the lives of rural Americans. It’s yet another sign that in a razor-tight race, each side is trying to cut into the other’s margins of support with different voting blocs while shoring up traditional areas of strength.

The vice-president’s “Breakfast Club” appearance comes one day after she announced a series of new proposals dubbed the “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.” The ideas are meant to offer the demographic more economic advantages, including providing forgivable business loans of up to US$20,000 for entrepreneurs and creating more apprenticeships. The plan would also support the study of sickle cell and other diseases more common in Black men.

The focus on Black men sharpened last week when former president Barack Obama campaigned for Harris in Pittsburgh and said he wanted to speak “some truths” to Black male voters, suggesting some ” just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

The vice-president’s campaign says it doesn’t believe Black men will flip in large numbers to supporting Trump, especially after strongly backing Democrat Joe Biden, with Harris as his running mate, in 2020. They are more concerned about a measurable percentage of Black males opting not to vote at all.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, the first Black senator elected from the state of Georgia, issued a stark warning Tuesday to other Black men that voting for Trump will be “literally dangerous” for them.

“He will be dangerous every time you get in the car and you deal with the issue of driving while Black,” Warnock said.

He argued that Democrats’ job is to reach Black men who are deciding whether to vote at all. “The issue is folks have got to understand that if you do not vote, it’s a vote for Donald Trump,” Warnock said.

Harris’s campaign has also placed special emphasis on other male voters, including creating “ Hombres con Harris,” or “Men with Harris,” a group that is using celebrities and key elected officials to organize events on her behalf meant to appeal to Hispanic men.

As she campaigns in Detroit, Harris faces other potential challenges in Michigan, including Arab activists angered by the Biden administration’s full-throated support for Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza. Dearborn, outside Detroit, is the largest Arab-majority city in the U.S.

Still, the vice-president’s campaign expects to see strong support on Election Day from white, college-educated voters in Michigan at rates that might exceed Biden’s in 2020, and she hopes to expand the margin by which Trump lost many of the state’s key suburbs four years ago.

She’s also seized on insults Trump made about Detroit last week while campaigning there. He said if Harris wins, “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit.” He added, “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

Trump has maligned cities hosting him before, but Harris said it was proof he was “unfit to be president.” Her campaign also released an ad voiced by actor Courtney B. Vance, a Detroit native, that declares: “What Donald Trump doesn’t understand, or care to learn, is that when he said, ‘Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.’ That he should be so … lucky.”

The former president figures to do well with rural voters, but team Harris hopes to at least keep things closer. And while Harris’s support among women is strong, Trump aims to keep her from running up the score.

Trump has seen his support among women, especially in the suburbs of many key swing states, soften since his term in the White House. A September AP-NORC poll found more than half of registered voters who are women have a somewhat or very favourable view of Harris, while only about one-third have a favourable view of Trump.

To reverse the trend, Trump has sought to cast himself as being able to personally shield women from various threats, as when he suggested at a rally in Pennsylvania last month that women in America, “will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger.”

“You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” Trump said then. He’s also suggested that, should he win, women will no longer have a reason to think about abortion, after three Supreme Court judges that he appointed helped in 2022 to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that had guaranteed a woman’s right to the procedure.

Elsewhere on Tuesday, Trump has an economic speech in Chicago and a rally in Atlanta.

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Associated Press Writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.