Kamala Harris has arrived in Nevada, where Donald Trump held a rally less than an hour earlier.
The state is featuring heavily in the itineraries of both candidates. “We need you to vote, Nevada. You are going to make the difference in the outcome of this election, and I thank you,” Harris said at the event in Reno.
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The Democrats have not lost Nevada since 2004. The so-called “Silver State” has leant left in recent years, but only by narrow margins, thanks to urban centres such as the largely Democratic Las Vegas and the evenly divided Reno in the north-west.
But as our North American correspondent Farrah Tomazin writes here, the bulk of Nevada is made up of smaller, rural areas that lean Republican, and a third of the state’s voters are registered independents.
This means either Trump or Harris could win next week depending on who can mobilise more people to turn up on election day to vote on issues that resonate.
In a battleground fuelled by tourism, gaming and hospitality, few issues matter more to voters than the economy. Nevada has the highest petrol prices in the country (up to $US5 a gallon – or $1.91 a litre) and the second-highest grocery prices ($US294.76, or $425.44 on average per week).
Harris describes Trump as someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and he’s out for unchecked power”. “If elected, Donald Trump on day one would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she says.
“When I am elected, I will walk in with a to-do list, on behalf of you. And at the top of my list is bringing down your cost of living. That will be my focus every single day as president.”
She pitches her cost-of-living policies: a middle-class tax cut, the first federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries, to make housing more affordable by building more homes and taking on corporate landlords who buy up properties and jack up rents, and to raise the minimum wage and removing taxes on hospitality tips.
