VP Kamala Harris campaigns in La Crosse, Wis., as election nears

LA CROSSE, WIS. – With 19 days to go until the election, Vice President Kamala Harris spent her Thursday crisscrossing the battleground state of Wisconsin, including a stop in front of a largely college-aged crowd where she touted plans to encourage first-time homeownership and promised to protect reproductive rights.

"We know this election is about two very different visions for our nation — one that is focused on the past, and ours that is focused on the future," Harris told the crowd of more than 3,000 supporters gathered inside the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse's Recreational Eagle Center.

For Harris, the La Crosse stop was part of a whirlwind push to shore up support in the "blue wall" states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the latest polling shows her in a dead heat with former President Donald Trump. President Joe Biden flipped all three states by narrow margins in 2020 after Trump won them in 2016, and Harris will almost certainly need to win all of them to have a realistic shot at the White House.

As she has done in recent days on the campaign trail, Harris used the La Crosse appearance to sharpen her attacks on her Republican rival and paint a dark picture of what a second term of Trump would be like with "fewer guardrails." She pointed to recent comments made by Trump in which the former president talked about possibly bringing in the National Guard or military to handle the "enemy from within," a reference to his political adversaries who he called "sick people."

"This is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are even higher," Harris said. "It is clear Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and will stop at nothing to claim unchecked power for himself."

Joining Harris on her stops through Wisconsin — which also included events in Milwaukee and Green Bay — was Mark Cuban, the billionaire star of "Shark Tank" and former majority owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks.

Cuban called Trump "the Grinch that wants to steal your Christmas" in reference to Trump's plans for imposing new tariffs on foreign imports. In the past, Trump has suggested adding tariffs up to 20% on most foreign items, as well as 60% or more tariffs on items from China.

Trump has described the tariffs as a way of growing U.S. manufacturing and protecting American jobs. Many economists, however, including 16 Nobel Prize winners, have warned the proposal could ignite a trade war and raise inflation.

"I honestly think he used to understand how tariffs work," Cuban said. "Back in the '90s and early 2000s, he was a little bit coherent when he talked about trade policy and he actually made a little bit of sense. But I don't know what happened to him."

Speaking in Pittsburgh on Thursday, Trump's running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, pushed back against the Harris campaign's claims that tariffs would hurt the economy. Vance described the tariffs as a way of discouraging imports and boosting American manufacturing.

"If you are a business, and you rely on foreign slave labor at $3 a day, the only way to rebuild American manufacturing is to say, if you want to bring that product made by slave labor back into the United States of America, you're going to pay a big fat tariff before you get it back into our country," Vance said.

In Wisconsin, Amara Marshell, a freshman at UW-La Crosse, said she showed up to support Harris because she is concerned about what a second Trump presidency could mean for reproductive rights. Like her friend, sophomore Avery Black, Marshell is also excited about the possibility of electing the nation's first female president.

"Women deserve to have power over their own bodies," Marshell said. "We shouldn't have to not be able to get an abortion just because of a president."

Mary Holman, an 80-year-old retiree from Fort Atkinson, Wis., said she hasn't been to a rally since former President Barack Obama's first campaign in 2008. But Holman said she decided to get off the sidelines this cycle because she views the election as a fight to preserve democracy.

"Everything she stands for [in] bringing some peace and kindness back to our country is just so important," Holman said.

Anthony Chergosky, assistant professor of political science at UW-La Crosse, said Thursday's rally highlights the important role western Wisconsin — and young and independent voters in particular — will play in the election.

"Even in today's deeply partisan political climate, there is still a bit of an independent streak that runs through the western Wisconsin region," Chergosky said. "In my view, that independent streak makes this region one of the most interesting and important ones in the nation."

Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was also on the campaign trail Thursday, appearing with former President Bill Clinton in North Carolina, where the latest polls show Harris trailing Trump by less than a point. Walz will continue the campaign's media blitz next Monday with an appearance on "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.