LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Republican donald trump on Saturday will hold his first public campaign rally since being injured in a assassination attemptwith an event at the battleground state of Michigan alongside his new running mate.
The joint rally with Ohio Senator J.D. Vance is the duo’s first since they officially became the Republican Party’s nominees for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump kicked off the meeting of Republicans by naming Vance as his pick for vice president and concluded it with a speech asking for unity following a July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania that left Trump with a bloody ear and resulted in a fatality.
“I’m running to be president of all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” Trump said Thursday night, in what was the longest convention speech in history. modern, just under 93 minutes.
Michigan is one of the crucial swing states that is expected to determine the outcome of the presidential election. Trump won the state by just over 10,000 votes in 2016, but the Democrat Joe Biden reversed in 2020, winning by a margin of 154,000 votes on his way to the presidency. With Vance at his side, Trump will deliver remarks in Grand Rapids, a historically Republican stronghold that has trended increasingly blue in recent elections.
Trump’s selection of Vance was seen as a move to gain support among voters in the so-called Rust Belt in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, which helped Trump achieve his surprise victory in 2016. Vance specifically mentioned those places during his acceptance speech at the RNC, highlighting his roots, growing up poor in a small Ohio town and promising not to forget the working-class people whose “jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war.”
Democrats dominated recent elections in Michigan, but Republicans now see an opening in the state as Democrats are increasingly divided over whether Biden should drop out of the race. Biden insisted he will not give up and tried to return the focus to Trumpsaying Friday that Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention presented a “bleak vision for the future.”
The 81-year-old current Democrat, who appeared in Detroit last week, is currently isolated at his beach house in Delaware after being diagnosed with COVID-19.
Grand Rapids is the largest city in Kent County, one of three Michigan counties that Trump won in 2016 but Biden flipped in 2020. It is also a area where Nikki Haley secured a substantial number of votes in the Republican primary in February, a group of voters that both presidential campaigns now hope to win over.
U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten, a Democrat who represents Grand Rapids, is among those increasing number from lawmakers calling on Biden to step aside after a disastrous debate performance.
