Two weeks out from election day, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance told supporters at a rally in swing state Arizona that they need to pull their friends to the polls because the race could go either way.
“Here’s the scenario that I want you to consider, and I don’t mean to give you nightmare fuel here, but I’m going to do it,” Vance said to the crowd in Peoria, Arizona. “We wake up on November the sixth, and Kamala Harris is barely elected president of the United States by a 700-vote margin in the state of Arizona. Think about that. And ask yourself what you can do from now until then to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
Vance visited Arizona on Tuesday, stopping in Peoria, part of the suburban metro around Phoenix, and in Tucson, in southern Arizona, later in the day. Donald Trump plans to rally in the state on Thursday. Democrats have a host of campaign surrogates, including former president Bill Clinton and current president Joe Biden, on the schedule this week in the final stretch before 5 November .
Polling in Arizona shows a close race, with Trump holding the edge over Kamala Harris on average. Arizona went blue in an upset in 2020, delivering the southern border state for Biden.
The toss-up status of the race for the state Trump lost became the focus of Vance’s rally in Peoria, where he sought to convince supporters they needed to “work our rear ends off for the next two weeks” to get the state back in the red column.
Each person should vote 10 times, he joked, saying the media would lead with headlines saying he encouraged voter fraud. They could vote 10 times by bringing along nine of their friends to help sway the tight race toward Trump, Vance said.
During a question-and-answer portion of the event, a reporter noted how there aren’t many undecided voters and a sizable portion of the electorate in places such as Arizona have already cast their ballots. Vance agreed, but said there were still enough people on the fence that could swing the election toward either candidate. His message to them, which he reiterated in various ways throughout the rally: “You don’t have to agree with everything that I say. You don’t have to agree with everything that Donald Trump says. But who can deny the results?”
He pointed to issues acute to Arizona voters, such as higher housing costs, inflation and border security, as examples of how they were better off four years ago, under Trump. He also went after Harris for “softball interviews” and her record as vice-president, saying he feels bad for Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, because he has to defend Harris’s record.
Later, in Tucson, Vance took it further, saying it must be hard for Walz to “try to convince people that Kamala Harris actually has ideas in her head for how to govern the United States of America”. And he said that Harris’s interviews are giving more votes to Trump because “the problem with the softball interview is that you still got to be able to hit a softball. And I don’t know if Kamala Harris could hit a tee ball.”
He brought up the story of a US Marine, Nicholas Douglas Quets, who was killed in Mexico by what are believed to be cartel members last week. He criticized the Biden administration for border policies but also for not reaching out to Quets’s family, who Vance said he talked to in Tucson. He told the Quets’s family: “I promise you that calvary is coming and when Donald Trump is president, we’re going to kick the cartels’ asses, and we’re going to do it for you and for every person in this room.”
When reporters posed questions about the mass deportations at the center of Trump’s campaign promises, the crowd in Tucson cheered at the idea of deporting millions of people in the US without documentation. One reporter questioned whether Trump wants to deport Dreamers or other childhood arrivals – a group that sometimes sees bipartisan support for staying in the country. Vance said the priority was deporting violent criminals, but that deportation plans don’t stop there.
“We also have to deport people, not just the bad people who came into our country, but people who violated the law coming into this country. We’ve got to be willing to deport them,” he said. “And by the way, of course you can be humane about this. You can be compassionate about this.”
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Despite repeated attacks on early and mail-in voting, Vance encouraged people to vote in whatever way works best for them, even if he and Trump don’t personally like those methods of voting. “If we’re going to have early voting and mail-in voting and election day voting, then we need to take advantage of every opportunity we have to vote, get out there and make your voices heard,” he said at the Peoria event.
He wouldn’t commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election in Arizona, noting how some printers failed in 2022, which Maricopa county investigated and attributed to thicker paper that taxed printers. “Whether you think that was just incompetence or something else, it’s not OK,” he said. He added that the campaign is “doing a hell of a lot better in 2024 than we were in 2020” in the state.