NEW YORK TIMES
At her first post-debate campaign event, Vice President Kamala Harris challenged former President Donald J. Trump to a second onstage clash and sought to use her opponent’s erratic performance as a springboard into the race’s final stretch.
“I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate,” Ms. Harris said at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., less than an hour after Mr. Trump wrote in all capital letters on his site Truth Social that “there will be no third debate!”
Despite Ms. Harris’s sharp performance on Tuesday night — her team quickly said she would be willing to debate again — her campaign has indicated that it sees the race as virtually unchanged, and has tried to keep Democrats grounded by reminding donors and supporters that “elections are not won by debates.”
But at the rally, Ms. Harris signaled that she would try to make some of Mr. Trump’s debate remarks echo through the rest of the campaign. And she immediately leaned into the contrast she had aimed to draw on Tuesday night.
Ms. Harris said that at the debate, she had talked about issues that mattered to American families, like bringing down the cost of living and lifting up small businesses, as well as protecting basic freedoms. Mr. Trump, she said, had reprised “the same old show.”
“Because, you know, it’s all about him, it’s not about you,” she said in her speech at the Bojangles Coliseum, where most of the roughly 8,600 seats were filled. “Well, folks, I said it then, I say it now. It’s time to turn the page.”
Ms. Harris also mocked Mr. Trump over one of the night’s most memorable moments, when he was asked about his past threats to end the Affordable Care Act and responded that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the landmark health care law.
“You heard what he said in the debate, he has no plan to replace it,” a laughing Ms. Harris said as the crowd joined in. “He said ‘concepts of a plan.’ Oh, you all watched the debate? Concepts! Concepts! No action plan, concepts!”
Ms. Harris otherwise largely stuck to her stump speech, hitting Mr. Trump over his record and particularly his appointment of Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. That decision, she noted, set off a series of state abortion restrictions, including in North Carolina.
“And now, in over 20 states in our nation, they have what I call Trump abortion bans, including North Carolina and every single state in the South except Virginia,” she said.
Ms. Harris went on to repeat several points she made in the debate, including that several Republicans who served in Mr. Trump’s administration have said he is unfit for office, and that the former president reveres dictators more than the Constitution.
“And let us be very clear, somebody who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States,” she said. “Never again. Never again.”
Ms. Harris concluded with a warning that she has issued repeatedly to temper Democrats’ expectations, telling her supporters not to grow complacent.
“It’s going to be a tight race until the end, and we are the underdog,” she said, warning of “powerful forces” trying to discourage or stop people from voting.
“We love hard work,” she added. “Hard work is good work.”
Ms. Harris’s visit came as Democrats make a serious play for North Carolina, which was home to President Biden’s narrowest loss in 2020 but has a large and growing population of Black voters, young people and college graduates.
In Mecklenburg County, which includes the Charlotte metropolitan area, low voter enthusiasm and slumping turnout in 2020 doomed Democratic candidates running statewide. But Ms. Harris’s candidacy has renewed donor interest and lifted enthusiasm among key groups of Democratic voters, making party leaders across the state — and particularly in Mecklenburg — more optimistic.
The party’s strategy of increasing turnout in reliably blue regions like Charlotte will be tested in the coming weeks, as Democrats and allied groups try to turn out their voters. But some leaders in the area say they are seeing enthusiasm reminiscent of Barack Obama’s first run for the White House, the last time a Democratic presidential nominee won the state.
“We’re now in a place where you can walk around, so to speak, and bump into a canvasser,” said Aisha Dew, a Democratic strategist running for a State House seat in the Charlotte area. “There’s an organic excitement, I think, that we haven’t really seen since 2008.”
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