On Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump stood onstage at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House, and encouraged thousands of his supporters to fight to overturn an election he falsely claimed had been stolen.
“We fight like hell,” Mr. Trump said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Droves of his backers then marched away and attacked the U.S. Capitol.
That angry image is exactly the one that Vice President Kamala Harris wants Americans to remember as she steps onstage at the Ellipse on Tuesday evening. There, with the White House in the backdrop behind her, she will deliver a closing argument for her campaign that is meant to persuade still-undecided voters to consider what the future might look like if it holds another Trump term.
“We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign’s chair, told reporters on a call Tuesday morning previewing the remarks. She said that Ms. Harris’s speech would be designed to reach a slice of the electorate that may be “exhausted” by the politics of the Trump era.
“She’s going to focus on talking about what her new generation of leadership really means,” Ms. O’Malley Dillon said, “and centering that around the American people.”
Before leaving Joint Base Andrews for a campaign trip to Michigan on Monday, Ms. Harris offered a preview of sorts when she was asked by reporters to respond to what transpired at a Trump rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City a day earlier. Over the course of several hours, speakers there targeted Black people, Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, Ms. Harris and other Democrats.
“That’s why people are exhausted with him,” Ms. Harris said before boarding Air Force Two, where she worked on the speech with advisers on the plane. “People are literally ready to turn the page.”
The promise of turning the page will be the framework for the most expansive address she has given as the Democratic presidential nominee, according to one adviser briefed on the text, who requested anonymity because the speech was not finalized yet.
Ms. Harris will spend a significant amount of time focused on running through her biography and her policy agenda, with an emphasis on plans to bring costs under control for many Americans. But Mr. Trump, and the threat she believes he poses, will remain at the spine of her argument.
The National Park Service is preparing for as many as 40,000 people to attend and hear Ms. Harris’s argument in person, according to a permit reviewed by The New York Times — a crowd that would be roughly twice the size of the capacity at Madison Square Garden.
“She has always been a voice for the people,” Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris campaign, told reporters on the call. “She has always talked about that her entire career, while Donald Trump has spent his entire career stamping his own name on stuff.”
Ms. Harris, her advisers said, will also make the argument that she represents a rejection of the coarsened and tribal politics of the past decade. According to a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College, Americans are more likely to see Ms. Harris as a change candidate than Mr. Trump, who has refashioned the Republican Party in his image.
Of course, Ms. Harris enters the final stretch of her campaign with several vulnerabilities, including her loyalty to President Biden on most of his policies, such as U.S. support of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Mr. Biden is not expected to attend the speech at the Ellipse.
In recent weeks, Ms. Harris and her campaign have been careful to present her as a separate entity from Mr. Biden without undermining the president or his policies. And despite the coarsening of Mr. Trump’s language and his bizarre and at times vulgar behavior on the campaign trail, the race remains in a dead heat. The Times’s polling average shows the two candidates essentially tied in every battleground state.
But Harris campaign officials still believe they can peel away some persuadable Americans from the razor-thin category of undecided voters, particularly white, college-educated women who may be unwilling to vote for Mr. Trump. In recent days, Ms. Harris has visited Texas and Michigan to underscore the threats to reproductive health care in Republican-led states across the country. She has invited doctors and women affected by restrictive abortion laws to speak onstage, and has been joined by household names like Beyoncé and Michelle Obama.
At the Ellipse, Ms. Harris will try to tie Mr. Trump’s behavior and his increasingly threatening language to the forces that animated the 2021 riot at the Capitol, arguing that a second Trump term would pose a dire threat to American civic life.
She will highlight a list of threats that includes possible further restrictions on reproductive rights and other plans laid out by Project 2025, the policy blueprint for a conservative presidential administration written by many of Mr. Trump’s allies. She is also expected to target some of Mr. Trump’s economic proposals, including promised tariffs that could once again fray America’s ties to other economies abroad.
But ultimately, standing on the site of a brewing riot that Mr. Trump has since tried to rewrite as a “day of love,” Mr. Harris will warn of what he could try to do with even fewer checks on his power.
Last week, the Harris campaign began publishing ads featuring a recording of John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, in which he describes the former president as meeting “the general definition of fascist.” The text in that ad argues that Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” “unstable” and “in pursuit of unchecked power.”
According to the adviser who relayed key points of the speech, Ms. Harris is expected to lace this argument throughout her speech, while urging Americans to take a step firmly out of the Trump era. After the Ellipse speech, Ms. Harris will shift into full get-out-the-vote mode, with rallies planned in North Carolina and Pennsylvania on Wednesday, with more events in battleground states planned.
On Tuesday, Ms. Harris plans to hold five interviews, including four on television aimed at voters in the battleground cities of Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as a Spanish radio interview in Pennsylvania to reach Latino voters, including Puerto Ricans.
Ms. Harris’s advisers are feeling cautiously bullish heading into the week before Election Day. On the call, Ms. O’Malley Dillon said the campaign was seeing “increased growth” among supporters in battleground states where early voting is underway.
“We see very good signs for us across the battleground states, in particular in the blue wall,” she said, referring to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, “and we see that we’re on pace to win a very close election.”
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