Harris campaign features less talk of joy and more head-on digs at Trump as Election Day nears

LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) — Joy Olson proudly wore a “Make America Joyful Again” button Thursday as she waited in line to attend a Kamala Harris rally. But that doesn’t mean the 70-year-old retiree with the happiest of names wants the Democratic nominee to shy away from taking the heat to Republican Donald Trump.

“I’m tired of her being so nice sometimes,” said Olson, who called Trump “evil and scary.” She added: “I hope she calls him out.”

That’s exactly what the vice president is doing as the campaign enters its final days.

Less than three weeks from Election Day, Harris is closing out her campaign painting a dark vision of the country if Trump is sent back to the White House, including airing video clips at her own rallies of the Republican nominee’s more alarming rhetoric.

“Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged and will stop at nothing to claim unchecked power for himself,” Harris said Thursday in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

It’s a far cry from the “joy” that swirled around her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer. As that surge of enthusiasm has eased, Harris is staking her campaign on increasingly sharp attacks on Trump meant to get her supporters to turn out and to win over the tiny universe of persuadable voters left in exceedingly tight battleground states.

At her La Crosse rally, she noted that Trump falsely claimed this week that the violent Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a day of love.”

“There were attacks on law enforcement,” she said, recalling the insurrection where Trump supporters tried to block the counting of electoral votes that formalized President Joe Biden’s victory. “The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting. Enough! We are ready to turn the page!”

“Roll the clip,” she said a week earlier, directing a rally audience to watch a video of the former president calling for rooting out an “enemy within” the country.

And she told radio host Charlamagne Tha God during a radio town hall this week that “Yes, we can say” that Trump was threatening to bring fascism to the country.

Since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket in late July, Harris and her team have been torn between the competing priorities of introducing the vice president to voters and turning the race into a referendum on the former president after Biden’s debate flop put Democrats in the spotlight.

In the opening weeks of her campaign, she tried to thread the needle by sharing with voters her background as a prosecutor, telling stories about her upbringing and laying out her vision of how she would govern if elected.

Harris has been no stranger to criticizing Trump, but the urgency and vividness of her warnings about him have noticeably ramped up in recent days.

“He wants to send the military after American citizens. He wants to prevent women from making decisions about their own bodies,” Harris said in La Crosse. “He wants to threaten fundamental freedoms and rights like the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.”

It marks a return to the guiding strategy that was first outlined by Biden aides a year ago, when he was planning his reelection bid, and that is now being deployed by his hand-picked successor.

“People go negative because it works,” said Republican strategist Brendan Buck, a former top aide to GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan. “Harris needed to make herself an acceptable alternative but ultimately the coalition was always going to be more of an anti-Trump one than anything affirmatively pro-Harris.”

Trump's team has noticed too. “Kamala’s entire campaign is based on lies about President Trump,” his campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Some of the attacks on Trump are part of Harris’ explicit outreach urging Republican voters to cross party lines, like her rally Wednesday in Pennsylvania with dozens of anti-Trump Republican political figures. Her team views it as a unique opportunity for Harris to increase her base of support and tap into a collection of voters who’ve already rejected Trump in the past.

Former Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield said attacking Trump gives Harris an opening with independent and even moderate Republican voters, and shifts the political conversation to ground where she is stronger — protecting American democracy — and away from issues where Republicans are often seen as stronger, such as immigration and the economy.

“Putting the stakes of this election front and center in the final few weeks may help motivate a slice of voters who are otherwise tired of the process,” she said.

At a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Thursday evening, Harris was set to highlight Trump calling himself the “father of IVF,” as her campaign casts the Republican as a threat to women's reproductive health.

Greg Swagel, a 76-year-old retired yacht builder from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, showed up to Harris' rally in Green Bay wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and said he “most definitely” agrees with Harris becoming more aggressive in her rhetoric.

“She has to put (Trump) in his place," Swagel said. "He tells lies. He calls people names. Just as long as she doesn’t become him in the sense of lowering herself.”

Miller reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Chris Megerian in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Todd Richmond in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, in La Crosse, Wis., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, center, takes a photo with a supporter after speaking at a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, in La Crosse, Wis., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Joy Olson, of La Crosse, Wis., wearing a pin saying "Make America Joyful Again," speaks before a campaign event for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, in La Crosse, Wis., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two upon departing La Crosse Regional Airport in La Crosse, Wis., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, en route to Green Bay, Wis. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama executed a man Thursday who admitted to killing five people with an ax and gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and dropped his appeals and asked to be put to death.

Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m. Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama. He pleaded guilty to the killings that prosecutors said began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge.

Strapped to a gurney in the Alabama execution chamber, Dearman spoke to the family members of the victims and to his own family in his final statement. “Forgive me. This is not for me. This is for you,” he said to the victims’ families before adding, “I’ve taken so much.” He closed by telling his own family, “Y'all already know I love y’all.” Some of his words were inaudible.

The lethal injection was carried out after Dearman dropped his appeals this year and asked that his execution go forward. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it’s not fair to the victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly deserve.”

Dearman’s execution was one of two planned Thursday in the U.S. Robert Roberson was scheduled to be the nation’s first person put to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, but a judge granted a request from Texas lawmakers to delay his execution. The judge’s order was expected to be quickly appealed by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

Killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Mobile, were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Randall Reed, 22. Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. All of the victims were related by blood or marriage.

In a statement read by the Alabama prison commissioner, a man who lost his daughter, sister and brother in the killings, wrote there were no words to describe the impact the murders had on him and his family. He said Dearman got to say a final goodbye to his family, but they did not.

“I so long for a final goodbye to my daughter and I would have loved to meet my grandchild,” Bryant Henry Randall, the father of Chelsea Randall Reed wrote. He said his siblings did not get to see their children grow up.

"I was stripped in many ways of happiness and the bond of family by your senseless act," he wrote of Dearman.

Robert Brown, the father of Robert Lee Brown, told reporters that his family will "suffer for the rest of their lives."

“This don't bring nothing back," he said. “I can't get my son back or any of them back.”

The execution started about 5:58 p.m., but it is unclear when the drugs began flowing. At one point, Dearman raised his head and looked around the chamber as if to inquire when they were starting. He soon after appeared to lose consciousness.

His left arm moved slightly after a guard performed a consciousness check — which involves shouting his name and pinching his arm — to make sure he is not awake when the final lethal drugs are given. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said Dearman was not awake and the arm movement was not a sign of consciousness.

When the curtains to the viewing room closed at about 6:08 p.m., his father, who was in the same viewing room as media witnesses, sobbed and repeatedly called out his son's name.

The day before the killing, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman became abusive toward her, according to a judge’s sentencing order.

Dearman had shown up at the home multiple times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m., he returned when all the victims were asleep, according to a judge’s sentencing order. He worked his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, to get in the car with him and drive to Mississippi.

As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed the rampage on drugs, telling reporters that he was high on methamphetamine when he went into the home and that the “drugs were making me think things that weren’t really there happening.”

Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to guilty after firing his attorneys. Because it was a capital murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

Dearman's former lawyers had questioned if he was competent to make the decision to plead guilty.

Before he dropped his appeal, Dearman’s lawyers argued that his trial counsel failed to do enough to demonstrate Dearman’s mental illness and “lack of competency to plead guilty.”

The Equal Justice Initiative, which represented Dearman in the appeal, wrote on its website that Dearman “suffered from lifelong and severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features" and was executed “despite evidence that he suffers from serious mental illness.”

FILE - Crime scene tape marks the home on Jim Platt Road near Citronelle, Ala., Sunday, Aug. 21, 2016, where authorities said five people were killed. (John Sharp/Press-Register via AP, File)

This undated photo from the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Derrick Dearman, scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Alabama on Oct. 17, 2024. (Alabama Department of Corrections) via AP

FILE - In this Monday, Aug. 22, 2016, photo, Derrick Dearman, 27, of Leakesville, Miss., center, is escorted into Mobile County Metro Jail in Mobile, Ala. (Lawrence Specker/Press-Register via AP, File)