Ground Game: Rival rallies, Project 2025, and fracking

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Plus, a look at the chief architect of Project 2025, and the row over Harris’ fracking position{beacon}

By Meg Kinnard

August 05, 2024 08:33:48 AM

By Meg Kinnard

August 05, 2024 08:33:48 AM

  

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stood in the same Georgia arena four days apart last week, with rallies offering starkly different versions of the country – and raising questions about how a factionalized citizenry might embrace a Trump comeback or a Harris ascension.

Welcome to this week’s edition of AP Ground Game.

 

THE HEADLINES

Donald Trump gestures to the crowd as he arrives at a campaign rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta, on Saturday (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

A tale of two Georgia rallies

Harris and Trump’s Georgia rallies last week offered two disparate crowds in one of a divided nation’s battleground states that will decide the presidency – and the scene of 2020’s slimmest margin.

Talking more policy than her own biography, Harris implicitly blamed corporate greed, promising to attack “price gouging” and “hidden fees” for inflationary woes. Democrats promoted the biggest spending measures of Biden’s tenure as seminal investments in clean energy, domestic manufacturing such as the burgeoning electric battery plants in Georgia and infrastructure improvements that eluded previous presidents.

On Saturday, Republicans blamed those measures as the cause of higher prices and cast Harris as a radical who threatens national values. Trump offered dystopian forecasts of a Harris administration, warning of “a crash like 1929” and arguing, “If Kamala