About 25 million votes have already been cast as Harris, Trump beat the battlefield By Reuters

Written by Jarrett Renshaw and James Oliphant

PHILADELPHIA/DULUTH, Georgia (Reuters) – Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris told a town hall in Pennsylvania on Wednesday that her administration would be different from President Joe Biden’s, as Donald Trump campaigned in Georgia, another battleground state.

“My administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” Harris said during a televised CNN townhall.

His comments come as many polls show Biden is struggling to beat Harris and that voters are eager for a new approach with the Nov. 5 election two weeks away.

Answering many questions from the audience, Harris vowed to deal with higher grocery prices, said it’s time to end the war in the Middle East and called Trump “a danger to America’s well-being and security.”

About 25 million voters have already cast ballots, either by early in-person voting or by mail, according to tracking data from the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

Several states, including the battleground states of North Carolina and Georgia, set records for their first day of early voting last week.

“Georgia’s votes are high,” Trump said at a religious-themed “votes and believers” event in Zebulon, Georgia. “The votes in all the states are, in fact, at a high level. We are doing very well and hopefully we can fix our country.”

The strong early turnout comes as Vice President Harris and former President Trump remain neck-and-neck in seven hotly contested states.

Pennsylvania and Georgia are among the seven states in the field that will decide who wins the presidency, and both candidates are likely to spend a large part of their campaigns visiting them.

Trump in recent days has sought to rally people from the Christian evangelical community, hoping they will put aside any concerns about his outlandish comments such as his legend about Arnold Palmer’s makeup.

Trump, who has made campaign rallies a staple of his political career since 2015, said in Zebulon that it is “sad in many ways” that his time running for office is coming to an end. If he wins on November 5, he will serve his second and final term.

“We have been doing this for nine years, and it has been up to 12 days,” he said.

After Zebulon, Trump was speaking in Duluth, Georgia, at a rally with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Also present was country music star Jason Aldean, who encouraged attendees to vote early, with a message. that Trump is slowly accepting after criticizing the practice for years.

Harris participated in a CNN town hall in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, in an effort to rally a dwindling number of undecided voters to support him and help turn the tide in a deeply divided race where even a small percentage of the vote could be critical.

Earlier in the day, he echoed the views of Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who told The New York Times that the former president met the “standard definition of a dictator” and his supporters.

Harris, who has argued that Trump is a threat to American democracy, called Trump’s comments quoted by Kelly “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous.” Trump’s campaign denied Kelly’s account, calling it “outrageous news.”

The vice president tried and failed to get Trump to agree to a second presidential debate on CNN after he was tipped to win the first and only presidential debate between the candidates, which took place in September on ABC News.

Harris held a narrow 46% to 43% national lead over the former president in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll.