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Republicans have criticized her for not facing media scrutiny sooner, and Trump spokesman Jason Miller accused her on Wednesday of using Walz as a “human shield.” But Harris has been content to let her campaign do the talking in the frenetic weeks since the 81-year-old Biden stunned the country by bowing out. She has reinvigorated the Democratic Party, raised more than half a billion dollars and wiped out Trump’s lead in the polls. Harris insists, however, she remains the underdog, and that the election will be won or lost in the battleground states.

In the last days of Biden’s campaign, increasingly poor polls showed his only real remaining hope of victory was through winning the three “Rust Belt” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Harris is now also targeting the four “Sun Belt” states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina as a way to give her multiple ways to win the overall Electoral College vote.

The Peach State is a particularly tough target. Biden won it by a razor-thin margin of less than 12,000 votes in 2020, in a result that Trump bitterly contested. The Republican now faces criminal charges in Georgia related to his alleged plot to overturn that vote. On Wednesday in an uplift for her campaign, the latest Fox News poll shows Harris edging Trump in Georgia, 50 percent to 48 percent.

But Trump is also stepping up his swing state campaign as he seeks to recover his poise after being wrong-footed by new flag bearer Harris. The vice president is not only two decades younger than Trump and of Black and South Asian heritage, but vying to be the first female US president. Trump will be attacking Harris’ “dangerously liberal policies” Thursday in Michigan and Wisconsin, before traveling to Pennsylvania on Friday, the campaign said.

But his team was embroiled in controversy Wednesday after a report that Trump’s entourage shoved and verbally abused staff during a politicized visit to the United States’ most hallowed resting place for its war dead. — AFP

National Public Radio reported that the incident happened when an Arlington National Cemetery official tried to prevent Trump aides from taking images in a section for those killed in recent wars, where filming and staging of political events is banned. – AFP