In swing states, Harris touts GOP support while Trump leans on anger

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump launched campaign blitzes Thursday with dramatically different approaches to attracting swing-state voters who will decide the presidential contest.

In North Carolina, Democratic nominee Harris used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her. She also promised to protect access to health care and abortion, while delighting her partisan crowds with celebrations of her debate performance Tuesday, taking digs at Trump, and cheerleading for her campaign and the country.

“We're having a good time, aren't we?” Harris declared, smiling as her boisterous crowd chanted: “USA! USA! USA!”

In the border state of Arizona, the Republican Trump pitched a tax exemption on all overtime wages, adding it to his previous proposals to not tax tips or Social Security income. But the former president squeezed those proposals, along with a nonspecific pledge to lower housing costs, into a stemwinding speech marked by his most incendiary rhetoric on immigration and immigrants themselves, name-calling of Harris and others, and a dark, exaggerated portrait of a nation Trump insisted is in a freefall only he can reverse.

“I was angry at the debate,” Trump said, mocking commentators' description of his performance Tuesday. “And, yes, I am angry,” he said. As he repeated the word “angry,” Trump's crowd in Tucson answered with its own “USA! USA! USA!” chants.

The competing visions and narratives underscored the starkly different choices faced by voters in the battleground states that will decide the outcome. Harris is casting a wide net, depending on Democrats' diverse coalition and hoping to add moderate and even conservative Republicans repelled by the former president. Trump, while seeking a broad working-class coalition with his tax ideas, is digging in on arguments about the country—and his political opponents—that are aimed most squarely at his most strident supporters.