Harris, Trump pick up the pace two weeks to Election Day

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, delivered radically different messages on the US campaign trail on Monday as they sought to win over undecided voters in the two weeks before Election Day.

Vice President Harris, campaigning alongside Republican former lawmaker Liz Cheney, attempted to convince conservative, suburban women in three Midwestern battleground states that former President Trump was a threat to abortion rights, national security and 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.

"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, Pennsylvania, one of seven battleground states expected to decide the winner of the Nov. 5 election.

Trump, 78, frequently rejects any notion that 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.

While Harris was suggesting Trump was unfit for office, the former president was questioning the Biden administration's competence.

During one of several stops on Monday in ultra-competitive North Carolina, Trump urged supporters in the hurricane-battered mountains to go to the polls despite the hardships they were facing.

He also 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.

GOD AND CONSCIENCE

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 recognize 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."

Trump's visit to North Carolina coincided with concerns among his Republican allies that crippling damage from storm Helene will depress turnout in the battleground state's conservative mountain regions.

The area hit hardest by Helene is deeply Republican. Trump won about 62% of the vote in 2020 in the 25 counties declared to be a disaster area after Helene, while Biden won about 51% in the remainder of the state, according to a Reuters analysis.

"Obviously, we want them to vote but we want them to live and survive and be happy and healthy, because this is really a tragedy," Trump said at a campaign stop in Swannanoa, population 5,300, after touring areas destroyed by the storm.

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."

Later, in Brookfield, Wisconsin, Cheney described herself as "pro-life" but said she was troubled by state abortion restrictions that had prevented women from getting the care they needed.

Cheney and her father Dick Cheney, who was vice president under President George W. Bush and is still vilified by many Democrats for his 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."