LANSING, Michigan (AP) — Republican Donald Trump will hold his first public campaign rally with his new vice presidential candidate in the swing state of Michigan on Saturday since he was injured in an assassination attempt.
The joint rally with Ohio Senator JD Vance is the first for the two since they were officially named Republican nominees at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump opened the Republican convention by naming Vance his vice presidential nominee and closed it with a speech calling for unity following a July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania that left Trump with a bloody ear and one person dead.
“I’m running for president for all of America, not for half of America, because winning for half of America is not a win,” Trump said Thursday evening in what was, at nearly 93 minutes, the longest party convention speech in modern history.
Michigan is one of the key swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election. Trump narrowly won the state in 2016 by just over 10,000 votes, but in 2020 Democrat Joe Biden flipped the margin, winning by 154,000 votes on his way to the presidency. With Vance by his side, Trump will deliver a speech in Grand Rapids, a historic Republican stronghold that has increasingly trended toward Democrats in recent elections.
Trump’s choice of Vance was seen as an attempt to gain support among the so-called Rust Belt voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio who helped Trump to his surprise victory in 2016. Vance specifically mentioned those places in his acceptance speech at the RNC, emphasizing that he grew up in a poor small town in Ohio. He promised not to forget the working class whose “jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war.”
Democrats dominated recent elections in Michigan, but Republicans now see an opportunity in the state as Democrats are increasingly divided over whether Biden should drop out of the race. Biden has insisted he will not drop out and has sought to shift the focus back to Trump. On Friday, he said Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention presented a “bleak vision for the future.”
The 81-year-old Democratic incumbent, who appeared in Detroit last week, is currently isolating 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 prevailed in 2020. It is also an area where Nikki Haley secured a significant number of votes in the Republican primary in February, a group of voters that both presidential campaigns are now seeking to win over.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten of Grand Rapids is among a growing number of lawmakers calling on Biden to resign after his disastrous performance in the debate.
