Heading to the Great Lakes region on Thursday in the US presidential campaign: Kamala Harris is heading to Wisconsin to chase votes from moderate Republicans, and Donald Trump is traveling to a working-class constituency in Michigan.
The race for the White House between the Democratic vice president and the former Republican president, which is extremely undecided, was also spiced up on Thursday by revelations about former First Lady Melania Trump's pro-abortion stance.
Kamala Harris is heading to Wisconsin on Thursday, one of the seven swing states in the November 5 presidential election.
The indirect voting system means that in the United States, the presidential election is not decided by the votes cast throughout the country, but by those of electors designated by each state.
The 59-year-old vice president is traveling to the "birthplace of the Republican Party", according to her campaign team, namely a former school in the city of Ripon, located an hour's drive from Lake Michigan, in the north of the United States.
Strategic county
On this historic site, where meetings were held for the creation of the Republican Party in 1854, the Democratic candidate will be accompanied by former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.
Having become a de facto spokesperson for American conservatives opposed to Donald Trump, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney has already called for a vote for Kamala Harris.
The Democratic candidate wants to speak directly to moderate Republicans to call on them to transcend partisan divisions in the name of the country's best interests, according to her campaign team.
Like her, Donald Trump knows that the election will probably be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes, those of voters who are still undecided or demobilized, in the famous "swing states".
He chose to target not only one state on Thursday, Michigan, but also, within that state, an ultra-strategic county: Saginaw.
This working-class constituency, historically Democratic, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and then by a very slim majority for Joe Biden in 2020.
Badly hit by the deindustrialization of the 2000s and then by the financial crisis of 2009, Saginaw is emblematic of the battle for the popular vote.
The former president also continued on Thursday to criticize the response of Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden to the deadly hurricane Helene, the day after visits by the two Democratic leaders to areas ravaged by wind and flooding in the southeast of the country.
Melania Trump pro-choice
"This is the worst-managed storm of all time at the federal level, but their management of the border (with Mexico) is worse!" wrote the Republican on his Truth Social platform.
He is resuming his main campaign message, around illegal immigration out of control according to him, which would compromise the security and prosperity of Americans.
His wife Melania Trump has invited herself into the campaign on a hot topic of all: the right to abortion.
"Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her body? The fundamental right to individual liberty that a woman has (...) gives her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes," she writes in excerpts from her memoirs, to be published Tuesday.
The Democratic campaign team immediately seized on the subject, asserting in a press release: "Unfortunately for women in America, Mrs. Trump's husband does not agree with her at all."
According to polls, Kamala Harris, a fervent supporter of the right to abortion, has a clear advantage on this specific subject over Donald Trump.
The Republican, who presents himself as the "protector of women", boasts of having contributed to the reversal of jurisprudence of the American Supreme Court, which in 2022 put an end to several decades of protection of the right to abortion at the federal level.