Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday used two rallies in Wisconsin to amplify and castigate recent remarks from former President Donald J. Trump, demonstrating her campaign’s desire to drive maximum attention to him in the final weeks before Election Day.
In a state where polls show she is locked in a tied race with Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris took aim at his claims this week that he was “the father of I.V.F.” and that Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his 2020 defeat, was “a day of love.”
“The man calls himself the father of I.V.F. I mean, what does that even mean?” Ms. Harris said after playing a video montage of Mr. Trump bragging about appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. “He is the one who, by the way, is responsible for it being at risk in the first place.”
The vice president added: “When you listen to Donald Trump talk, it becomes increasingly clear, I think, he has no idea what he’s talking about.”
Ms. Harris’s stinging remarks about abortion rights and in vitro fertilization came in Ashwaubenon, a Green Bay suburb in the heart of northeast Wisconsin, a region crucial to both candidates’ prospects in the state.
Earlier, on the other side of the state in La Crosse, Ms. Harris said her Republican opponent was “gaslighting” Americans with his effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 as a mostly peaceful day. He has falsely argued that the violence was instigated not by his supporters but by forces opposed to him.
“We here know Jan. 6 was a tragic day, it was a day of terrible violence,” Ms. Harris told a crowd organizers estimated at about 3,000 at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus gymnasium. “He called it, quote, a day of love. But it points out something that everyone here knows. The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting. Exhausted with his gaslighting. Enough. We are ready to turn the page.”
Mr. Trump had been pressed on by a voter during a town-hall event broadcast Wednesday on Univision to explain why he should earn back the trust of Americans who grew disillusioned with him because of his actions, including on Jan. 6.
“That was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions,” Mr. Trump said. “It could have been the largest group I’ve ever spoken before. They asked me to speak and I went and I spoke.”
The mob attack on Jan. 6 in fact injured roughly 150 law enforcement officers and led to the deaths of several others.
Ms. Harris was joined earlier in Milwaukee and then in La Crosse by Mark Cuban, the celebrity tech billionaire who has owned a professional basketball team and hosted a reality television show.
Mr. Cuban, who appeared to be reading his remarks from his phone in La Crosse, said Mr. Trump was speaking “gibberish” about tariffs and suggested the former president was confused about his own proposals.
“Back in the ’90s and early 2000s, he was a little bit coherent when he talked about trade policies,” Mr. Cuban told the crowd. “The way he talks about trade policy, something is a little bit lost.”
Mr. Cuban, who last year endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary race before backing Ms. Harris, subsequently explained that tariffs would increase prices on an array of goods. He then described Mr. Trump as “the Grinch that wants to steal your Christmas.”
Ms. Harris’s trip was infused with efforts to ingratiate herself with Wisconsinites in ways large and small. In La Crosse, signage behind the stage featured an outline of a block of cheese. The Ashwaubenon rally took place in a convention center next to Lambeau Field, home to the locally beloved Green Bay Packers.
One of the warm-up speakers there, Kristin Lyerly, a Democrat running for an open congressional seat in northeast Wisconsin, led the crowd in an enthusiastic cheer of “Go Pack Go,” a staple at Packers games and many other social events in the state.
It was Ms. Harris’s sixth trip to the state since she replaced President Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee this summer. The three stops on Thursday represented an increase in her campaign’s typical daily velocity, and signaled an urgency to reach as many voters as possible in the final weeks before Election Day.
Polling in Wisconsin, as in other battleground states, shows a neck-and-neck race. Ms. Harris had an advantage of four percentage points in the most recent poll from Marquette University Law School, one of the most reputable surveys of the state, though most other polls have shown her and Mr. Trump within one or two points of each other.
Before Ms. Harris began her first planned event of the day at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, news broke that Israel had killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader seen as the architect of last year’s Oct. 7 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel.
Ms. Harris broke from her planned schedule and delivered brief remarks, noting Mr. Sinwar’s death and calling for an end to the war in Gaza.
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