But his focus was the economy – a top campaign issue – and he promised to slash household energy bills by 50 per cent as he warned: “If Kamala is reelected, your costs will go up and your lights will go out.”
Trump’s pledge to boost fracking, a process to extract oil and natural gas from shale, is also a dig at Harris.
She supported a ban on the practice, a major industry in western Pennsylvania, during her first run for president in 2019. And while she insists now she would not ban fracking, Trump has hammered her over the issue.
If Harris is elected, “day one, there’s no fracking, and that’s the end of Pennsylvania,” he warned later at a speech in Reading, 100km northwest of Philadelphia.
Under Trump the United States exported more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported, but was never close to genuine independence from foreign energy, with imports from Russia in particular spiking.
The US has been smashing records for production of oil, natural gas and renewable power under Biden, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
NECK-AND-NECK
Trump is polling neck-and-neck with Harris in the Keystone State, the once-thriving epicentre of the American industrial heartland, which is considered one of the biggest prizes in the Electoral College system that decides US elections.
Although Biden’s family base is in Delaware, he grew up in Scranton and remains enormously popular in the county where it is located, which he won by nine points as he claimed the state in 2020.
Harris has maintained a nationwide polling lead of two to three points since mid-August and has been gaining on Trump on the economy, boosted by easing inflation and a robust jobs report last week.
But polls in Pennsylvania and the other six swing states have been much closer.
And new Gallup polling shows Trump outperforming Harris 54-45 per cent on the economy as he touts proposals for a tariff-led manufacturing “renaissance.”
Pennsylvania is seen as a working-class bastion, and both candidates have visited regularly.
