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Welcome to the end game of the presidential campaign. While the last two months feel like a decade has passed, Labor Day and the days afterward are historically when voters begin to pay attention and, more importantly, begin to decide how they will vote.
Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris made a swing through rural Georgia as well as her first sitdown television interview with CNN. That came after polling showed her strength in the Sun Belt states like Arizona and Nevada as well as the southeastern swing states including Georgia and North Carolina.
Meanwhile, former president Donald Trump hit the midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where in 2016, he shocked the world by flipping and winning the presidency.
But unlike in the days of 2016, when Trump would hold multiple events within one day, Trump only did one event in Michigan and Wisconsin, before he did an event in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and made a stop at the Moms for Liberty conference for a sitdown chat.
Those events largely got lost amid his continuing war of words about his photo opp with the Gold Star families of US servicemembers who died at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan. Over the weekend, he posted videos of the family members defending him appearing at Arlington National Cemetery after he faced criticism for shooting a campaign video at the cemetery where many American servicemembers are buried.
Similarly, Trump’s scattershot positions on abortion and in vitro fertilization have also led him to receive criticism from his own base.
But the Labor Day holiday allows for a bit of a reset and so far, it looks like Harris’s campaign is leaving nothing to chance. On Monday, Harris was set to campaign in Michigan, a state that essentially set the parameters for the labor movement, before she heads to Pittsburgh with President Joe Biden. Biden famously earned plaudits from organized labor when he marched in a picket line last year during the United Auto Workers’ trike.
Meanwhile, Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, departed from his homestate and was set to campaign at Milwaukee’s Laborfest in Wisconsin. Democrats have long been afraid of losing Wisconsin ever since Hillary Clinton failed to campaign there and Mandela Barnes lost his Senate race to incumbent Ron Johnson in 2022.
Walz will later engage on his first solo tour of Pennsylvania. Incidentally, one mark against picking Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was that Shapiro would help lock up Pennsylvania, another Blue Wall state that Trump flipped and where he has considerable appeal.
Conversely, Trump nor his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, were set to have any public events on Labor Day, despite the fact that both have tried to refashion the Republican Party as a pro-worker party. Indeed, when Vance spoke at the International Firefighters conference, he was booed the day after Walz spoke to them and received a warm welcome.
The Harris campaign wasted no time slamming Trump and Vance in a statement.
“Donald Trump is ditching workers on Labor Day because he is an anti-worker, anti-union extremist who will sell out working families for his billionaire donors if he takes power,” campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said in a statement. “Vice President Harris is the only candidate for president who stands firmly on the side of labor and working Americans, and she is fighting to build up the middle class by cutting taxes, lowering costs, and creating opportunity.”
Indeed, the one event Trump has on the calendar is a video call with current and retired members of the United Auto Workers, UPI reported.
Trump has repeatedly clashed with Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW, who notably wore a shirt saying “Trump is a scab” at the Democratic National Convention and later during a labor council meeting at the convention, attendees welcomed Fain by chanting “Trump’s a scab.”
This does not mean that Trump will be silent this week. He will hold a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin on Saturday.
But Trump’s staggered schedule shows that he is not able to do the barnstorm schedules he did in 2016 or even 2020 while Harris is doing a Blue Wall Blitz.
