Democratic Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell said Monday that voters in her state still don’t know Vice President Kamala Harris, with the election just under three weeks away.
Former President Donald Trump currently holds a slight lead over Harris in Michigan, edging her by nearly 1%, according to the RealClearPolling average. Dingell, on “America’s Newsroom,” said Harris and her running mate, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “understand that they’ve got to better define themselves” in Michigan to defeat Trump and his running mate, Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, in November.
READ: Mark Halperin Warns Harris ‘Late In The Game To Be Defining Herself’
“I don’t think people know Kamala Harris yet. I do. I know how great she is. They need to feel her. We all know who Donald Trump is. I’m not going to use any adjectives I some moments would like to. But he is who he is. He’s passionate and he says what he thinks and people know him,” Dingell said. “They want to know that they know her. I think she’s trying to do that. She’s doing more media interviews, she’s doing different places.”
“I wish they would just let her go into the union hall, quite frankly. You’ve seen a lot of discussion identifying this a couple of months ago is young black men who, and it’s not her problem, it’s Democrats’ problems. And I’ve said this, it’s the way we didn’t talk about trade in 2016 in the right way,” she added. “They don’t want to be taken for granted. They feel taken for granted and they want to be talked to directly … What she’s doing in Detroit today is taking that on directly and a lot of other people are trying to go in.”
CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten expressed surprise Monday at the degree to which “young black men” have increasingly been abandoning the Democratic Party over multiple elections against Trump.
READ: CNN Host Presses Campaign Spox On Whether Black Men Aren’t Supporting Harris Due To ‘Sexism’
Harris told “The View” on Oct. 8 that “nothing comes to mind” about how she would govern differently from President Joe Biden.
“I think she’s in a very difficult position because she was his vice president. And you know, I’m still old fashioned, I think loyalty does matter. But look, we’ve got to address the economy. She’s got to take that on, she’s got to talk about what she’s going to do,” Dingell said. “I think she’s got to talk about how she’s going to protect jobs and bring manufacturing back and lower the cost of food in the grocery store and she’s got to be very clear on having what she’s going to do. And now hopefully she’s going to be doing that in the next few days as well.
Newsmax political analyst Mark Halperin warned Tuesday that she is “late in the game to be defining herself” and must “define her differences with Joe Biden.”
READ: NBC ‘Morning Joe’ Guest Reports Trump Has Massive Edge Over Kamala Harris On A Key Issue
“This was a quick campaign, but you look at her schedule, more days than not, she’s got one event, zero events, a lot of staff meetings,” Halperin said. “And so if the goal is to define herself, then she’s letting other people do it for her more than she’s doing it herself, hour by hour.”
Trump also currently has narrow advantages over Harris in five of the other top seven battleground states, with the vice president only slightly leading the former president in Wisconsin, according to the RealClearPolling averages.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.