Why Harris couldn’t bring herself to name Trump at her final election rally
During a rally in Pennsylvania last month, Kamala Harris told the crowd "Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged" before playing videos of him talking about the "enemy within" the US.
But in her final rally speech on Monday night , a star-studded event at the Carrie Blast Furnaces in Pittsburgh, she failed to name her opponent once.
The move appears to be an attempt to end her campaign on a positive note , leaving the nation with the message that she is fighting "for" rather than "against something".
But it also comes after the former president spent weeks tearing into Ms Harris by suggesting she has an unhealthy obsession with him.
It has become a hallmark of the former president's rally to play a compilation clip of Ms Harris saying "Donald Trump" over and over again while he comically puts his hands over his ears.
"All she can talk about is Donald Trump. Can you believe it?", Trump, 78, joked during his rally in Salem, Virginia on Saturday.
After playing the footage of Ms Harris, he told the audience: "She's supposed to be talking about economic development, which she knows nothing about. She kept saying: 'Donald Trump this'... She has got a massive and untreatable case of Trump derangement syndrome."
His attacks may well have gotten under Ms Harris's skin. But her final speech was also a return to a key campaign message on unity and democracy — a theme that may have been watered down in recent weeks by mud-slinging and name calling, culminating in the moniker "fascist".
During the event at the former steel works on Monday night, Ms Harris said being a leader was "not based on who you beat down, it is based on who you lift up" and she vowed that "instead of stewing over an enemies list, I will spend every day working on my to do list full of priorities to improve your life, because ours is not a fight against something, it is a fight for something".
'Turn the page'
Ms Harris said the election was an opportunity to "finally turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division".
"In a democracy, true leadership understands that the leader listens to the experts and listens to people who disagree with them," she told the audience during her brief remarks before flying to Philadelphia.
"I will listen to people who disagree with me because I do not believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy. In fact, I will give them a seat at the table. That is what real leaders do."
Also notable from Ms Harris's Monday night Pittsburgh event was that several men sat directly behind Ms Harris at the rally, perhaps in an attempt to show her appeal across the electorate.
Polling has continued to show Ms Harris has a significant lead among women , but lags behind Trump with male voters.
If the vice-president stuck to the script in her final rally, Trump spent his last speech meandering, a pattern he has taken to calling the weave.
"I may be the greatest weaver of all time, but what happens only brilliant people can do that," he said.
Which message has landed best with voters will begin to become apparent.
