U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump sparred over how women should be treated in society as they looked for votes Thursday in Arizona and Nevada, two Southwest political battleground states.
Polling shows Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Trump, the Republican candidate, are virtually tied in the two states. Arizona and Nevada are among seven closely contested states across the 50-state country that are likely to determine the national outcome in next Tuesday’s election.
In the other 43, polling shows Trump or Harris with either decisive or comfortable leads.
Appeals to Latino voters are central to the campaigns in both Arizona and Nevada. Trump won Arizona in his successful 2016 campaign for the presidency but lost it to President Joe Biden in 2020. Democrats won Nevada in both elections.
Migrants crossing from Mexico into the United States across the border in Arizona are at the center of the political debate in the state. Trump has pledged to finish the border wall he started during his 2017-2021 White House tenure. He has also vowed to round up and deport undocumented migrants living in the U.S., while accusing Harris of being weak on controlling the influx of migrants.
Harris has said she will look to enact legislation calling for tougher asylum rules at U.S. entry points to curb the tens of thousands of migrants crossing into the U.S. She supports an immigration bill drafted by a bipartisan group of U.S. senators that Trump leaned on Republican lawmakers to kill earlier this year.
Pop icon Jennifer Lopez is to join Harris on stage Thursday night at a rally in Las Vegas, the U.S. gambling mecca.
Trump has scheduled an interview in Arizona with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and a rally in neighboring Nevada.
Harris and Trump met only once face to face in a debate, but trade insults and taunts every day from rally stages, in campaign ads and over the airwaves.
Their latest dispute is over the treatment of women.
Trump said at a rally on Wednesday in the Midwest state of Wisconsin that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not.”
He cast the remark as paternal, but it served to remind his critics of his history of misogynistic statements and a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse of a New York writer in the 1990s.
Trump told supporters that his advisers had urged him to stop proclaiming his desire to protect women, saying they had called it “inappropriate.”
But he told rally-goers, “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.’”
Polls show Harris with a wide lead among female voters; Trump substantially leads with men.
Harris quickly jumped on Trump’s remark, writing on X, “Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body. Whether you like it or not.” On Thursday, she said that Trump’s views on women showed that he does not understand “their rights and their ability to make decisions about their own lives.”
Nearly 62 million people have already voted at polling stations or by mail. More than 155 million voted in the 2020 election, about two-thirds of them early or by mail and a third of them on the official Election Day.
The importance of battleground states like Arizona, Nevada and the five others cannot be overstated.
U.S. presidential elections are not decided by the national popular vote but through the Electoral College, which turns the election into 50 state-by-state contests, with 48 of the states awarding all their electoral votes to the winner in that state. Nebraska and Maine allocate theirs by both statewide and congressional district vote counts.
The number of electoral votes in each state is based on population, so the biggest states hold the most sway in determining the overall national outcome, with the winner needing 270 of the 538 electoral votes to claim the presidency.
Polls show either Harris or Trump with substantial or comfortable leads in 43 of the states, enough for each to get to 200 electoral votes or more. Barring an upset in one of those states, the winner will be decided in the remaining seven states, where both Harris and Trump have staged frequent rallies, all but ignoring the rest of the country for campaign stops.
Polling in the seven states is easily within the margins of statistical error, leaving the outcome in doubt in all seven.
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