With 7 weeks before election, Harris and Biden keep focus on Pennsylvania

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are starting this week the way they spent much of last week — in Pennsylvania.

Biden on Monday is to address the annual National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week conference in Philadelphia. Before his visit, he announced $1.3 billion in new funding for HBCUs, bringing the total to more than $17 billion.

And on Tuesday, Harris will sit for an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia.

Former President Donald Trump spoke at the NABJ's national convention in Chicago in July, where he attacked the questioners and claimed Harris didn't always identify as a Black person. She is the daughter of a Black father and an Indian mother.

"She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage," Trump inaccurately told the journalists. "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?"

Harris graduated from Howard University, a private, historically black university in Washington, D.C.

Harris wrapped up last week in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre after spending the previous weekend in Pittsburgh preparing for her debate against Trump in Philadelphia last Tuesday.

"I am feeling very good about Pennsylvania because there are a lot of people in Pennsylvania who deserve to be seen and heard," Harris told reporters in Johnstown on Friday. "And I will be continuing to travel around the state to make sure that I'm listening as much as we are talking. ... And we're going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania."

Speaking of that debate: 58% of Americans in an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday declared Harris the winner, while 36% named Trump.

Neither Biden nor Harris will be in the Keystone State the rest of the week. Biden will be in Washington while Harris will travel to the other two "Blue Wall" states — Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump is scheduled to return to Pennsylvania next Monday when he addresses the Protecting America Initiative in Smithton, Westmoreland County. The group's senior advisers are Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence, and former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., who was one of the former president's strongest backers on Capitol Hill.

The anti-China organization ran ads during last week's debate attacking Harris in Pennsylvania and other battleground states for "opening the door to China," while the vice president used her time on stage to accuse Trump of "selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military."

Both Biden and Harris weighed on the apparent second assassination attempt of Trump on Sunday at his West Palm Beach, Florida, golf course.

"Thank God the president's OK," Biden said Monday as he left the White House for his trip to Philadelphia. "But one thing I want to make clear: The (Secret) Service needs more help. And I think the Congress should respond to their needs, if they, in fact, need more (Secret) Service people. So, that's what we're going to be talking about.'

"I am deeply disturbed by the possible assassination attempt of former President Trump," Harris said Sunday after news of the shooting broke. "As we gather the facts, I will be clear: I condemn political violence. We all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence."

Trump blamed the shooting on Biden and Harris characterizing him as a threat to democracy, even as he said the president and vice president "want to destroy our country" and characterized them as "the enemy from within" and the "real threat" in a Fox News interview.

"He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it," Trump said Monday. "Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out."

Trump is under indictment for his efforts to try to overturn the 2020 election that he lost and said in an interview that he would be a dictator on "day one" of a second term.

Meanwhile, a new report from the Wesleyan Media Project found that the economy and inflation dominated the candidates' advertising from Aug. 26 to Sept. 8 in the run up to the debate, with 97.3% of Trump ads and 48.6% of Harris ads mentioning those subjects. Harris' ads also mentioned taxes 51.6% of the time.

"In the presidential debate on Sept. 10, former President Donald Trump continued to hammer on the issue of immigration and the border," said Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. "In his TV ads over the last two weeks, however, he has mentioned the economy, inflation, and gas prices in nearly all of his 40,000 ad airings. Immigration has taken a backseat, in comparison — likely an attempt to appeal more to swing voters."

Pro-Trump outside groups, however, continued to air ads on immigration. Ads from pro-Harris groups talked about the economy and inflation along with prescription drugs. Harris cast the deciding vote on legislation that capped the price of insulin at $35 a month for Medicare recipients and allowed the health-care program for the elderly to begin negotiating prices for some prescription drugs.

Pittsburghers saw 3,046 pro-Harris ads at a cost of $4.1 million, compared with 1,929 pro-Trump ads costing $3 million, the report said.

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