Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were both fully engaged in the battle for Michigan Saturday, with the candidates campaigning miles apart with the presidency on the line – and a popular former first lady joining the fray.
Long lines at early voting stations in Kalamazoo were so substantial that voters were turning away at hour-and-half wait times.
Trump made the rare decision to forego his own bed and stay overnight in Detroit after his Friday night rally in Traverse City in northern Michigan began almost three hours late following Trump’s extended podcast interview with Joe Rogan.
He rallied thousands of supporters at an indoor venue in Novi, in suburban Detroit, with polls showing a tight race in Michigan and all seven of the battleground states.
‘This campaign is on fire – you can feel it!’ said Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain, warming up Trump’s rally crowd in Novi, a Detroit suburb.
Harris is set hold a campaign rally with Michelle Obama at the Wings Event Center in Kalamazoo later Saturday – the first day of early voting in the state.
She is considered a beloved campaign ‘closer’ who had Democrats on their feet at the party’s Chicago convention in August.
It is the 2024 campaign trail debut for the former first lady, among the most popular figures in the Democratic Party and ones a dream candidate to step in for Joe Biden, 81.
Harris supporters started lining up bright and early on the crisp fall day for the chance to get into the Democratic presidential nominee’s rally.
The event puts Harris about 100 miles away from Trump. There were already lines around the block.
She’ll be back in the state on Monday, her campaign just announced, with a rally also billed as a concert with singer Maggie Rogers in Ann Arbor.
That event is a clear move to try to run up the score among young voters, who had been drifting away from Democrats with Biden on top of the ticket.
Now, Harris is relying on young voters and women to overcome Trump’s gains among minority men, and a wild card of the states roughly 200,000 Arab American voters.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, referenced the Arab-Israeli conflict ‘as an Arab American’ in his remarks to the Novi crowd.
He said the peace process ‘is in ruins today [and] can only be restored by a return to the kind of engagement we saw during the four Trump years.’ Issa’s father was the son of Lebanese immigrants.
Longtime Trump advisor Steven Miller pointed to the polling support Trump was getting from Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan.
‘He’s going to set all kinds of records,’ Miller told the crowd in Novi. ‘That’s one more reason he’s going to win Michigan.’
More than 1.4 million people have already cast ballots in Michigan even before early in-person voting kicked off on Saturday, according to tracking by the University of Florida Election Lab.
Even President Joe Biden is getting in on the act, as he jets to Pittsburgh even after making a rhetorical stumble at his last event, in surprisingly close New Hampshire. It was there that he said ‘lock him up’ when speaking of Trump, then walking back the comment to say ‘politically.’
Biden got asked before boarding Air Force One about Trump’s comments comparing the U.S. to a ‘garbage can.’
‘Trump has no class,’ Biden responded, keeping his response clean.
The race in Michigan couldn’t be much closer. Polls have a virtual tie, with Trump leading by just a few tenths of a percent in the RealClearPolitics average.
After accusing Harris of taking it easy and spending time prepping for TV appearances, Trump plans to immediately jet to State College, Pennsylvania, where he is holding a big rally in another battleground state that is a pure tossup.
Grabbing a page from John McCain’s playbook in his race against Barack Obama, Trump is trying to use Harris’s string of celebrity appearances against her.
On Friday night, he accused his rival of ‘partying’ while Israel attacked Iran amid constant fears of an expanding Middle East conflict.
She had been accepting the high-wattage endorsement of singer Beyonce Knowles, who spoke but did not perform.
The vice president focused her speech on reproductive rights and a series of speakers shared deeply personal stories from women dealing with the Texas abortion ban.