NATIONWIDE — As President Donald Trump and his opponent, presidential candidate Joe Biden, spent most of Monday campaigning on or against climate change, their respective running mates Mike Pence and Kamala Harris made multi-state stops to pitch themselves to voters.
Kamala Harris wrapped up a day of campaign appearances in her home state of California with a star-studded fundraising event featuring former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and comedians Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph.
Rudolph famously portrayed Harris on “Saturday Night Live” when she was running to be the Democratic nominee for president. Harris tweeted her approval after Rudolph expertly played the former prosecutor during a debate appearance in a skit.
Earlier in the day, Harris appeared at a virtual town hall for UNITE HERE!, a labor union across the U.S. and Canada that mainly represents workers in the hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino gaming industries. During the event, the union’s international president D. Taylor announced the organization’s support for the Biden/Harris campaign.
“This is no time for incrementalism. We need to deal with the system and there needs to be significant change in the design of the system so that we can support working people,” Harris said.
Biden and Harris are painting themselves as champions for the working people, and have hosted several campaign events alongside different unions in the past week alone.
On Sept. 9, former Vice President Joe Biden delivered an in-person address outside of a Union Auto Workers building in Michigan on Wednesday where he promised to stand alongside the auto industry should he win the presidential election in November.
“Back in July I made the first plank of my agenda a plan to modernize American manufacturing and technology, to ensure that the future is made in America, by all of you. Today, I'm announcing some additional steps to make this plank even stronger,” Biden said.
“First, we're going to impose a tax penalty on companies that avoid paying U.S. taxes by offshoring jobs and manufacturing, only to sell those goods back to the American people,” Biden continued to a round of applause.
Vice President Mike Pence emphasized President Donald Trump’s commitment to “law and order” during a campaign stop Monday in swing state Wisconsin about 70 miles from a city where sometimes violent protests erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Pence, speaking to an enthusiastic crowd inside a Janesville hotel, credited Trump with stopping the violence in Kenosha after he sent about 200 federal officers there. Those officers were dispatched after Gov. Tony Evers had activated the Wisconsin National Guard to quell protests after the Blake shooting.
Both Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden visited Kenosha just days apart two weeks ago.
Pence said that Biden would “double down on all the policies that have led to violence in American cities.” He accused Biden of signaling a “lack of support or waning support” for law enforcement that emboldens those who oppose them.
“We are going to have law and order in every city, in every state in this country for every American of every race and creed and color,” Pence said as the crowd broke into chants of “U-S-A!”
Later in the day Pence appeared at the Big Yellow Barn, an event venue in Belgrade, Montana, just west of Bozeman. The vice president was joined by Sen. Steve Daines, who is facing a challenge from Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock.
Pence was originally scheduled to attend a fundraiser for the Trump re-election campaign earlier Monday in Bozeman, but cancelled following revelations that the event’s hosts have supported the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.