With 16 days until Election Day, Harris urges Black churchgoers to vote in Georgia while Trump visits a fast-food

Kamala Harris on Sunday, October 20, summoned Black churchgoers to turn out at the polls and got a big assist from music legend Stevie Wonder, who rallied congregants with a rendition of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.

Harris visited two Atlanta area churches as part of a nationwide push known as “souls to the polls.” It’s a mobilization effort led by the National Advisory Board of Black Faith Leaders, which is sending representatives across battleground states to encourage early voting. After services, buses took congregants straight to early polling places.

At both churches, Harris delivered a message about kindness and lifting people up rather than insulting them, trying to set up an implicit contrast with Republican Donald Trump’s brash style. With just 16 days left until Election Day, Harris is running out of time to get across her message to a public still getting to know her after a truncated campaign.

“There is so much at stake right now,” she said at the Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro. “We understand for us to do good works, it means to do it in the spirit of understanding that our strength is not based on who we beat down, as some would try to suggest. Our strength is based on who we lift up. And that spirit is very much at stake in these next 16 days.”

Wonder led the crowd in singing his version of Happy Birthday to the vice president, who turned 60 on Sunday. When he was done, she appeared to choke up, saying, “I love you so much.” “We’re going to make the difference between yesterday and tomorrow,” he said.

Support slipping among Black men

Black church congregations across the country have undertaken get-out-the-vote campaigns for years. In part to counteract voter suppression tactics that date back to the Jim Crow era, early voting in the Black community is stressed from pulpits nearly as much as it is by candidates.

In Georgia, early voting began on Tuesday, and more than 310,000 people voted on that day, more than doubling the first-day total in 2020. A record 5 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Harris referenced scripture as she promoted the importance of loving one’s neighbor, and then drew a contrast to the current political environment. “In this moment, across our nation, what we do see are some who try to deepen division among us, spread hate, sow fear and cause chaos,” Harris told the congregation. “The true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.”

Also Sunday, Harris sat for an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton and was asked about the idea that she might see her support slipping among Black men – some of whom might be reluctant to vote for a woman for president. Harris said she had garnered support from many key Black male leaders, adding, “there’s this narrative about what kind of support we are receiving from Black men that is just not panning out in reality.”

During the interview, she also said that Trump’s comment was an insult to the office and degraded the United States’ moral authority internationally. “What you see in my opponent, a former president of the United States, really it demeans the office,” she said, after Trump referred to her as “a shit vice president,” during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

On Monday, she will campaign with former US Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Answering questions through the drive-thru window

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump manned the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday before staging an impromptu news conference, answering questions through the drive-thru window.

As reporters and aides watched, an employee showed Trump how to dunk baskets of fries in oil, salt the fries and put them into boxes using a scoop. Trump, a well-known fan of fast food and a notorious germophobe, expressed amazement that he didn’t have to touch the fries with his hands,

The visit came as he’s tried to counter Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ accounts on the campaign of working at the fast-food chain while in college, an experience that Trump has claimed – without evidence – never happened.

After serving bags of takeout to people in the drive-thru lane, Trump leaned out of the window, still wearing the apron, to take questions from the media staged outside. The former president, who has constantly promoted falsehoods about his 2020 election loss, said he would respect the results of next month’s vote “if it’s a fair election.”

Trump did not directly answer a question of whether he might support increased minimum wages after seeing McDonald’s employees in action but said, “These people work hard. They’re great.”

Trump has fixated in recent weeks on the summer job Harris said she held in college, working the cash register and making fries at McDonald’s while in college. Trump says the vice president has “lied about working” there, but not offered evidence for claiming that.

In an interview last month on MSNBC, the vice president pushed back on Trump’s claims, saying she did work at the fast-food chain four decades ago when she was in college. “Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family,” she said, adding: “I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs.”

‘Throwing anything on the wall to see if it sticks’

Trump has long spread groundless claims about his opponents based on their personal history, particularly women and racial minorities. Before he ran for president, Trump was a leading voice of the “birther” conspiracy that baselessly claimed President Barack Obama was from Africa, was not an American citizen and therefore was ineligible to be president.

And Trump has continued to promote baseless claims during this campaign. Trump said during his presidential debate with Harris that immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets – a claim he suggested in an interview Saturday was still true even though he could provide no confirmation.

Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, said using a campaign visit to focus on the claims about McDonald’s four decades ago is a “puzzling detour,” but that Trump is “not above throwing anything on the wall to see if it sticks.”

“When Donald Trump isn’t talking about the economy and illegal immigration, he’s off topic about the things that people care about,” Marson said.