ERIE: Kamala Harris tore into "unhinged" Donald Trump over his threat to set the US military on political opponents as the presidential rivals held dueling events in battleground Pennsylvania. Early voting is underway in most of America, with polling suggesting an agonizingly tight race nationally and a margin-of-error tussle in Pennsylvania and the other hotly-contested swing states likely to determine the outcome. With the high-octane election tightening in the home stretch, Harris has been making a campaign issue of the Republican ex-president's increasingly authoritarian rhetoric that has prompted accusations that he is co-opting the language of fascism.
At a rally in Erie, the most evenly-divided of Pennsylvania's counties, the Democratic vice president played a video montage of Trump calling for the jailing of political opponents and repeatedly referring to "the enemy from within."
It included a weekend interview on Fox News in which Trump suggested "sick people, radical left lunatics" could be "very easily handled" by the military under a Trump administration.
Harris said Trump would persecute groups he has targeted before, including journalists, election officials and judges who "insist on following the law, instead of bending to his will.
"This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous," she warned. "Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is out for unchecked power."
While Trump has been hitting Harris over Biden administration policies, her race and her intelligence, Harris has sought to cast the Republican as a risky choice who cares more about creating fear than solving problems.
Trump -- at 78, the oldest major-party presidential candidate ever -- has also rejected calls to make public his medical records as candidates normally do, and has refused to release his tax records for the third straight election. But with three weeks to go, Trump and Harris remain locked in a bitter, neck-and-neck battle for the swing states, of which blue-collar Pennsylvania is the biggest prize.
And alarm bells have been ringing over Harris's momentum, with her support stagnant at around 49 percent in polling since mid-September.
A New York Times/Siena poll last week found Harris with 78 percent support among Black voters, against around 90 percent support for Democrats in recent presidential elections, with men accounting for most of the drop-off. Harris and running mate Tim Walz will blanket Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. — AFP
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