WASHINGTON – With less than three weeks until Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have spent the past week focusing on undecided voters in a race that is tight in the polls.
In Doral, Florida, Trump spoke for an hour to undecided Latino voters Univision Town Hall and Vice President Harris have entered conservative waters in 30-minute interview with Fox News with news anchor Bret Baier.
Undecided Latino voters from across the country asked Trump 12 questions on topics including the economy, immigration and reproductive rights. Trump rarely answered questions, often straying off topic and joking that the hardest question he was asked was to list three virtues he admired in his opponent.
“It looks like she has the ability to survive,” Trump said of Harris.
In an attempt to reach moderate and undecided Republicans, Harris conducted a somewhat sensitive interview with Baier that focused on the Biden administration’s immigration policies and Trump’s rhetoric.
The interview also gave Harris a scarce opportunity to distinguish herself from President Joe Biden – a question she hesitated when asked earlier on the daytime show “The View.”
“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and like every new president who takes office, I will bring my life and professional experiences as well as fresh and new ideas to the parliament,” she said. “I represent a new generation of leaders.”
Harris will spar with Baier
The opening of the interview with Baier prompted a flurry of questions about migration at the southern border, to which Harris frequently interrupted her answers. He pressed her on why the Biden administration had rolled back Trump-era immigration policies.
Immigration has become the most essential issue for voters, which Trump focused on in his re-election campaign.
Harris focused on how U.S. immigration should be fixed and how the White House negotiated a border security agreement with the U.S. Senate that was bipartisan until Trump told GOP lawmakers to withdraw from the agreement.
Harris said Americans “want solutions and they want a president of the United States who doesn’t play political games on this issue.”
She also tried to emphasize how she would unite the country, touting Republican support.
Harris’ campaign has aligned itself with Republicans who have rebuked Trump, such as sending Republicans to Harris and hiring former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming as a campaign surrogate in courting moderate Republicans.
Harris’ campaign also frequently singled out dozens of Trump administration officials who no longer support the former president.
“The Enemy Within”
Harris also criticized Trump’s recent remarks in which he referred to Democrats as the “enemy within.”
The most combative part of the interview came when Baier played a clip of Trump’s Fox News town hall with women, during which host Harris Faulkner asked him about his comments about the “enemy within.”
At the town hall, Trump said: “this is the enemy from within and he is very dangerous; they are Marxists, communists and fascists and they are sick.”
However, the clip Baier played showed a different reaction than Trump and in which he did not make any threats.
“I’m not threatening anyone,” Trump said in the recording in which Baier played for Harris. – They are the ones threatening. They conduct false investigations. I was examined more often than Alphonse Capone.”
Harris noted that the clip “didn’t represent what he was saying about the enemy within.”
“We both know he talked about turning the American military against the American people. He was talking about prosecuting people involved in peaceful protests,” Harris said.
“He talked about locking people up because they didn’t agree with him. This is a democracy, and in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to take criticism without saying he’s going to lock people up for it.”
Latino voters question Trump
Both campaigns tried to attract Latino voters, the second largest group of eligible voters.
Before the Univision town hall began, Trump said he was reaching out to Latinos.
Latino voter preferences still largely resemble the 2020 presidential election, when Biden defeated Trump 61% to 36%, winning the Latino vote, according to the Pew Research Center.
According to the Pew Research Center, Harris currently has a smaller lead over Trump among Latinos, 57% to 39%.
Harris already had a Univision town hall with undecided voters, but Trump’s meeting was postponed due to Hurricane Milton.
One viewer, Carlos Aguilera, who works as a utility manager in Florida, said he saw how climate change was affecting his industry and asked Trump if he still believed climate change was a hoax.
Trump did not answer the question and said he was not interested in the weather but in nuclear weapons. He said that if Harris wins, the United States will enter another world war.
Several voters asked Trump about his plan to curb inflation and create jobs.
Trump blamed inflation mainly on the Biden administration. He said he would drill for oil to lower the cost of living. Trump also said he would implement a combination of tax breaks and tariffs to bring companies to the U.S. to create jobs.
“Under this administration, we will put companies into a tax system – we call it positive taxation – positive taxation,” Trump said. “We are going to take businesses to a level that you have never seen before in this country.”
Mass deportations
Several voters asked Trump questions about immigration.
Former farmworker Jorge Valazquez from California said that for many years he picked strawberries and cut broccoli in the fields. He said many of these workers are undocumented and asked Trump what his plans to mass deport these workers would mean, especially with regard to food prices.
Trump has said he supports legal migration and those jobs will be available to Black and Latino workers. Apart from promising mass deportation millions of immigrants in the country without authorization, Trump has proposed ending several legal pathways for immigrants, such as humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status.
“A lot of the jobs that you do and that other people do are being filled by people coming in,” Trump said of immigrants. “And the African American population, and especially the Latino population, are now losing their jobs because of the influx of millions of people.”
Another listener, Guadalupe Ramirez from Illinois, asked Trump what his plan was to fix the U.S. immigration system. She asked why he wouldn’t support the bipartisan border security agreement reached by the Senate and the White House.
Trump praised his previous immigration policies and then criticized Democratic-led cities like Chicago.
“Democrats are weak,” Trump said. “Don’t forget that Democrats run Chicago.”
Trump did not answer questions about why he told GOP lawmakers to abandon the border agreement.
The final question on immigration came from Jose Saralegui of Arizona, who said he was a registered Republican but undecided. He asked about Trump’s comments about Springfield, Ohio, where not only Trump but several GOP lawmakers falsely claimed that legal immigrants from Haiti were eating human pets.
Saralegui expressed concern that Trump had called for the legal status of these immigrants to be revoked – as many of them have TPS due to unstable conditions in Haiti – and asked Trump: “Do you really believe these people eat pets?”
Trump did not answer whether he believed the claim, but said he was simply “saying what has been reported” and that Haitians “eat other things they shouldn’t, too, but that’s all I’m doing,” the report says.
These claims have been widely debunked. The Wall Street Journal was found. a woman from Ohio who filed a police report about her missing cat and accused Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating pets. The woman later found her cat, but the Trump campaign relied on these rumors, even though they were deemed unfounded.
“You have a city, a beautiful town, where there are no problems and all of a sudden 30 or 32,000 people came to the city, most of them don’t know the language, and they’re just looking everywhere for translators,” Trump said. “Well, I guess we can’t just destroy our country.”
Saralegui and many audience members who asked questions used translators.
Reproductive rights
Yaritza Kuhn from North Carolina asked Trump about reproductive rights. Kuhn said Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, wrote about her support for abortion and reproductive rights in her recent book. Kuhn asked Trump if he agreed with his wife.
Trump did not answer whether he agreed with his wife, but said: “I told Melania she has to follow her heart.”
“I want her to do whatever she wants,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to go against what I think.”
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