For nearly a decade, Democrats have sought to frame Donald J. Trump as an aberration of the country’s democratic norms and political traditions. For Hillary Clinton in 2016, he was mounting an “an unprecedented attack” on American democracy. Four years later, Joseph R. Biden Jr. argued that Mr. Trump had eroded “the soul of the nation.”
And so it was on Tuesday night for Vice President Kamala Harris, when she stood at the site of Mr. Trump’s most infamous speech that riled up his supporters to riot at the Capitol, and tried — in a third presidential race — to unify the nation against him.
She cast Mr. Trump as a “petty tyrant.” As an impeached president seeking a return to “unchecked power.” And as a convicted felon determined to prosecute his political enemies and keep Americans “divided and afraid of each other.”
And yet, wrapped in those sharp attacks were the signs of a shifted approach. More than any of the Democratic presidential nominees who preceded her, Ms. Harris sought to balance the existential with the everyday, intertwining her argument with the economic worries that animate far more American voters.
“Here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me,” she said. “On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in, with a to-do list.”
Her approach amounts to a tacit admission of an inescapable political reality. Mr. Trump is not a fringe figure. The thunderous applause at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, not just for Mr. Trump but for some of the darker acts that preceded him, offered a vivid reminder that he has become the soul of the Republican Party. Win or lose next Tuesday, roughly half the nation has already rallied behind him.
In the final days of her campaign, Ms. Harris is trying to separate the man from his movement. Gone is the framing of Republicans as “extreme MAGA,” the catchphrase attack adopted by Mr. Biden during the 2022 midterms. Instead, in ways big and small, Ms. Harris is extending an open hand to Republicans who may have voted for the former president in the past.
She has traveled the battleground states for events with Republicans, including former Representative Liz Cheney, a conservative from Wyoming who is one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal opponents. She has promised to appoint a Republican to her cabinet. Her campaign has made a series of direct appeals to those who previously voted for Mr. Trump, reminding them that no one else sees what happens in the privacy of the voting booth.
Some in the Democratic Party — including the man who lives in the White House illuminated behind her on Tuesday — appear to be still reckoning with that new approach. Just before she took the stage, President Biden seemed to refer to those who support Mr. Trump as “garbage,” in a campaign call that quickly ricocheted across the internet, was seized upon by Republicans and the president himself soon sought to clarify on social media. Mr. Biden said he meant only the comedian at Mr. Trump’s Sunday rally who had called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”
Ms. Harris has taken pains to avoid any such confusion. When asked in an interview with Fox News this month whether voters who supported Mr. Trump were “stupid,” Ms. Harris shot back: “Oh, God. I would never say that about the American people.”
Mr. Trump, she said, is “the one who tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people.”
Yet even as Ms. Harris casts Mr. Trump as divisive, she has placed him in a far more traditional political frame of a disconnected, wealthy politician.
Mr. Trump, she frequently argues, would sell out the economic needs of the middle class for his billionaire friends. Her policy proposals have focused on tactile economic issues, like increasing coverage of elder care, lowering child care costs, creating subsidies for new home buyers and fighting high grocery prices. Even abortion has been reframed through the lens of personal freedom and medical realities, rather than loftier questions of faith or morality.
“I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to make your lives better,” Ms. Harris told the crowd on Tuesday evening. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”
Her effort is an attempt to broaden her political tent. To win the election, Ms. Harris must energize a Democratic base that reviles Mr. Trump, while winning the support of independent and Republican voters who are more concerned about their pocketbooks.
Just 7 percent of voters said democracy was the most important issue regarding their choice for president, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.
Mr. Trump has taken a very different tack.
He has forgone the traditional strategy of unifying the party after a divisive primary contest, making few attempts to reach out to Republicans who backed former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina. While she maintains her support for him, Mr. Trump prefers to talk about how “badly” he defeated Ms. Haley in her home state.
In recent weeks, he has escalated his attacks on the “enemy within,” insisting when pressed by conservative interviewers that he is referring directly to Democratic politicians and liberal activists who oppose him.
And his Madison Square Garden event was a splashy display of the power of his base and the grievances that animate them. The nearly six-hour program featured the most stalwart supporters of his movement, a group that included aides, conservative entertainers and a series of family members.
Still, Mr. Trump himself sought to capitalize on Mr. Biden’s garbage remark onstage in Pennsylvania on Tuesday evening, hoping voters might look past his own demonization of Democrats or those who disagree with him as “communists” and “vermin.”
“That’s terrible,” he said, drawing a parallel to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” remark that Republicans used as a rallying cry for years.
Mr. Trump expressed no similar condemnation of comments made at his event 48 hours earlier, when Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host, described the entire Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives.”
It was exactly that kind of inflammatory language that Ms. Harris promised to move beyond on Tuesday night. The country is divided, she acknowledged, but central to her campaign is a vow is that it doesn’t need to remain so.
“The fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them ‘the enemy from within,’” she said. “America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way.”
But even if Ms. Harris is successful in bringing together a coalition to defeat Mr. Trump, she may still be forced to contend with just how tight his hold remains over his party.
His lies about the 2020 election pervade the Republican Party, amplified for four years by conservative media, politicians and celebrities. If he wins, his supporters will not only see a new future but a rightful restoration. And if he loses, they are already primed to expect malfeasance.
As Election Day approaches, Mr. Trump has added one more claim to his roster of attacks on Democrats. The party, he’s falsely predicted, is “going to cheat” in the contest.
“It’s the only way they’re going to win,” he said this month, in Juneau, Wis. “And we can’t let it happen again.”
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