Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, have delivered radically different messages on the US campaign trail as they seek to win over undecided voters in the two weeks before Election Day.
Vice President Harris, campaigning on Monday alongside former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney in the three midwestern battleground states, argued that Trump, the former president, was a threat to democracy.
As the election draws closer, Harris has been sharpening her attacks on Trump's fitness for office, often calling him "unstable" or "unhinged" and questioning his temperament.
America represents the gold standard of democracy, but we have someone who wants to be president again saying he would be a dictator on day one.— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) Our campaign believes in American ideals and our Constitution. pic.twitter.com/dy7LAwWR2jOctober 21, 2024
"In many, many ways Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of him being president of the United States are brutally serious," Harris, 60, said at an event in Malvern in Pennsylvania, one of seven battleground states expected to decide the winner of the November 5 election.
Trump, 78, frequently rejects any notion he is a threat to democracy, arguing it is Democrats who are the real threat because of the criminal investigations he and his allies have faced for their attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Trump crisscrossed North Carolina on Monday to gin up support in the ultra-competitive state. At one stop in the hurricane-battered mountains, he urged supporters to go to the polls despite the hardships they were facing.
While Harris was suggesting Trump was unfit for office, the former president was questioning the Biden administration's competence.
Kamala Harris and Republican Liz Cheney have spoken to voters in Pennsylvania. (AP PHOTO)
Trump renewed his criticisms of the emergency management agency FEMA and sought to relate to working-class supporters by praising his nonstop efforts on his own behalf.
"I've done 52 days without a day off, which a lot of these people would respect," Trump said at a lectern backed by rubble from massive floods that hit the area last month.
With opinion polls showing a close race, the two candidates are picking up the pace, their frenzied campaign schedules underlining the importance of small pockets of voters that could put either candidate over the top.
Trump ended his day at an evangelical Christian event in Concord, North Carolina, telling a crowd he likes to think that during the failed assassination attempt against him on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, he was saved by being "knocked to the ground by a supernatural hand."
In his remarks, he avoided using some of the off-colour rhetoric he has been using in recent speeches. He said as he looks back on his life, "I now recognise that it's been the hand of God leading me to where I am today."
Evangelical leader Franklin Graham offered a prayer that Trump be elected.
"Rallies and positive poll numbers are not going to win this election," Graham said.
"It's going to be God."
At an event with Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan, Cheney sought to give Republicans who are on the fence permission to support the Democrat without worry of reprisal.
"I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, 'I can't be public.' They do worry about a whole range of things, including violence, but they'll do the right thing," Cheney said.
"And I would just remind people, if you're at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody."
Cheney and her father Dick Cheney, who was vice president under President George W Bush and is still vilified by many Democrats for his bullish defence of the US invasion of Iraq, are staunch conservatives and two of the most prominent Republicans to have endorsed Harris.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump called Liz Cheney "dumb as a rock" and a "war hawk".
He accused her of wanting to go to war with "every Muslim country known to mankind" just like her father, who he called "the man that ridiculously pushed Bush to go to war in the Middle East."