Donald Trump goes to North Carolina for an economic speech. Can it stick to a clear message?

ASHEVILLE, NC (AP) — Donald Trump will have another opportunity Wednesday to recalibrate his bid to return to the presidency, this time with a rally and speech in North Carolina that his campaign is making a major economic address.

Set in a Democratic city surrounded by consistently Republican mountain counties, the event has both national and local implications for the former president.

Republicans are looking for Trump to focus his scattered arguments and attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris since Democrats nominated her for the presidency. Twice in the past week, Trump has found such an opportunity, first in an hour-long press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, then in a two-and-a-half-hour conversation on the platform social network X with CEO Elon Musk. .

The latest test comes in the state that gave Trump his closest statewide margin of victory four years ago and is expected to be a battleground again in 2024. Trump won North Carolina in ahead of Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 by less than 1.4 percentage points — about 74,500 votes — and can’t afford to see the state’s 16 electoral votes shift to Democrats for the first time since Barack Obama swept here in 2008.

“We look forward to welcoming President Trump to western North Carolina and talking about how he will restore our economy,” said North Carolina Republican Chairman Jason Simmons. “This visit shows that Republicans understand that North Carolina is bigger than Charlotte and Raleigh — beyond I-77 and I-95 — and that these communities here are important.

The question, of course, is whether Trump can stay on the tight reins on the economy, particularly to stick Harris with the consequences of inflation rather than go along with his usual gripes and broad grievances. Harris plans to be in North Carolina on Friday to release more details on her promise to make “strengthening the middle class … a defining goal of my presidency.”

Trump certainly beat Harris and Biden ahead of her on the economy. But he did so mostly with hyperbole, such as exhortations of a “Kamala crash … like 1929” to go with other sweeping generalizations, such as warning of “World War III” and US suburbs “shrouded by violent foreign gangs”. Trump made almost verbatim claims about Biden’s potential 2020 election.

In recent weeks, Trump has claimed that “you wouldn’t have had inflation” if he had been re-elected, ignoring global supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic; Increased spending on COVID-19, which included a massive aid package that Trump signed as president; and the global energy price effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The former president also promised an immediate fix to higher prices in another term. His main policy proposals in this regard are an increase in oil drilling (US production has reached the highest levels ever under Biden), new tariffs on foreign imports, an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire under the next administration, suspending sprawl income taxes and reversing Biden-era investments in greener energy and infrastructure.

But at Mar-a-Lago, in his discussion with Musk, on his own Truth Social platform and in more recent rallies and other interviews, Trump has shaded his own economic agenda. He is fixated on personally attacking Harris, falsely accusing her of misrepresenting her own race and ethnicity. He slipped back into old attacks on Biden and repeated the lie that his 2020 defeat was due to systemic voter fraud. Most recently, he began bashing the size and enthusiasm of the crowds Harris draws on the campaign trail, even falsely claiming that a photo of her rally was fabricated with artificial intelligence.

These factors have made it difficult for Trump to provide a sharper political contrast to the Democratic ticket, no matter how much his advisers support the idea of ​​such a recast.

An aide to Harris said Wednesday that the vice president welcomes any comparison Trump may make.

“No matter what he says, one thing is certain: Trump has no plan, no vision, and no meaningful interest in helping build the middle class,” communications director Michael Tyler wrote in a campaign memo. Tyler pointed to the pandemic’s economic slowdown and the 2017 tax cuts that targeted corporations and wealthy individual households, and predicted that Trump’s proposals on trade, taxation and reversing Biden-era policies will “send inflation skyrocketing and cost our economy millions of jobs – all to benefit the interests of the ultra-rich and special.”

In announcing his speech, the Trump campaign listed the effects inflation has had on North Carolina since Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The campaign did the same before Trump’s Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta. Trump even read the stats from the teleprompter — but only at the end of his 91 minutes at the podium and long after several thousand of the once-capacity crowd had left.

North Carolina, meanwhile, is another battleground state where Trump has to contend with the newly emboldened Harris campaign in a territory that appeared to be trending Republican with Biden as the Democratic nominee.

The Harris campaign has more than 20 offices and more than 170 employees in North Carolina. Since the vice president became the presumptive nominee, nearly 12,000 new volunteers have signed up, the campaign said; more than 9,500 volunteers worked a volunteer shift during the same period, with nearly 90% of that group doing so for the first time.

State GOP spokesman Matt Mercer said there are more than a dozen “Trump Force 47″ offices in North Carolina, with more than a dozen paid staffers working to expand the volunteer base of ” Trump Force 47 Captains” across the state.

Asheville and the surrounding area will prove key to the outcome. Nestled near the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city has a liberal cultural identity with a bohemian vibe and live music and craft beer scene that attracts students, retirees and left-leaning tourists. But the surrounding western North Carolina mountain counties have become increasingly Republican in recent election cycles.

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