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Vice President Kamala Harris started off her campaign as a joyful warrior. Now, with less than two weeks until Election Day, the heart of our closing argument is a dire warning about the dangers of returning former President Donald Trump to office. As NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports, there are strong echoes of the 2016 election.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Vice President Harris summoned the press to her residence on Wednesday to deliver an urgent message.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable.
KEITH: She was responding to a New York Times report featuring recordings of General John Kelly. He was White House chief of staff to Donald Trump. He says his former boss meets the dictionary definition of a fascist. And in private, Trump even praised Hitler and his generals. For Harris, this was another opportunity to drive home her warning.
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HARRIS: This is a window into who Donald Trump really is - from the people who know him best.
KEITH: The Trump campaign dismissed it as a fabrication. But Trump's own words in recent days about his political opponents have given Harris plenty of fodder.
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HARRIS: He calls these Americans the enemy within...
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Booing).
HARRIS: ...And says that he would use the American military to go after American citizens.
KEITH: Rally after rally, she tells the story of January 6 and the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol.
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HARRIS: He refused to accept the will of the people and the results of an election that was free and fair.
KEITH: And it's not unlike Hillary Clinton's warning in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.
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HILLARY CLINTON: He refused to say that he would respect the results of this election.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Booing).
CLINTON: Now, make no mistake. By doing that, he is threatening our democracy.
KEITH: Now, of course, we all know Trump won the 2016 election and gladly accepted the results. Then in 2020, when he lost, he refused to accept it - even to this day. Brian Fallon worked on the Clinton campaign and is a senior adviser to Harris now. He says, eight years ago, people were skeptical of Clinton's warnings. But now, Fallon argues, it's different.
BRIAN FALLON: We're not asking anybody to suspend this belief in order to entertain, you know, these warnings. This is something that is the American people's actual experience over the last several years.
CELINDA LAKE: This isn't hypothetical anymore. It's real lived experience.
KEITH: That's Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. She says in polls and in focus groups, voters say they are worried about violence around this year's election. And the voters Harris needs to win are appalled by what happened on January 6.
LAKE: It's very mobilizing to Democratic men, who see it as a threat to democracy. It's mobilizing to women, and it's persuasive to swing women. So it's both mobilizing and persuasive.
KEITH: Women like Susan Shurina, who voted early in Alpharetta, Georgia.
SUSAN SHURINA: I supported the Democratic Party this time, although I'm a registered Republican. I'm just fearful of the rhetoric I hear from Trump. He seems to be very violent and wanting to control and vengeful.
KEITH: But it's hard to know at this point if Shurina is an outlier or part of a voting trend that could power Harris to victory. Marc Lotter, who served in the Trump administration and now works at a pro-Trump think tank, argues Harris' warnings will ring hollow with a lot of voters who already lived through one Trump term. He sees this as a desperation move from a candidate who hasn't been able to convince undecided voters she would be better for them than Trump.
MARC LOTTER: And now she's giving up on it and just going, no, I'm not going to try to convince you. I'm just going to try to scare you. And I don't see how that's going to be the winning factor at the end.
KEITH: On Tuesday, Harris is scheduled to deliver a major address from the same spot where Trump spoke on January 6, a symbolic location her advisers hope will underscore the stakes in this election. Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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