By Jeff Mason
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters in Nevada on Saturday she supported eliminating taxes on tips, taking a similar position to her rival Donald Trump in an effort to win over service workers, an important constituency in the state.
Harris and her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, wrapped up a multi-day tour of battleground states on Saturday with their stop in Nevada, a western state that could play a pivotal role in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
“It is my promise to everyone here when I am president we will continue to fight for working families, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” Harris said.
Harris said she would work to drive down consumer prices, vowing to “take on big corporations that engage in illegal price-gouging” – corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families – and big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices.
Trump told a rally in Las Vegas in June that he would seek to end taxation of income from tips.
Harris, who officially became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee this week, has been campaigning with Walz in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona, all states that traditionally swing between supporting Republicans and Democrats in presidential elections.
To become president, a candidate need not win the national popular vote but must win 270 electoral votes. Each state has a number of electoral votes based on its population, making the swing states especially important.
She will travel to San Francisco in her home state of California on Sunday, where she is due to attend a fundraiser with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Nearly 700 people are expected at the event, which is expected to raise more than $12 million, a campaign official said.
Harris and Walz, whose selection she announced in Pennsylvania – another swing state – on Tuesday, are seeking to maintain and build on the momentum that she has generated since President Joe Biden stepped aside as the party’s standard-bearer last month.
Harris was leading Trump, the Republican former president, by four percentage points each in separate polls conducted in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, another swing state, by the New York Times and Siena College, a marked difference from polls taken before Biden quit the presidential race.
The Trump campaign released a memo from its chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, pushing back against the results. “Once again, we see a series of public surveys released with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support for President Trump,” Fabrizio said.
Nationally, Harris was ahead of Trump by five percentage points, 42% to 37%, in an Ipsos poll published on Thursday, wider her lead from a July 22-23 Reuters/Ipsos survey, which found her up 37% to 34%.
Harris has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and held rallies with thousands of supporters since becoming the Democratic candidate, regularly eclipsing the smaller events that Biden held and drawing ire from Trump, to whom crowd size has always been an important barometer of political strength.
The Harris campaign said more than 12,000 people were in the arena in Las Vegas on Saturday and police had turned away roughly 4,000 more because people in line were becoming ill as temperatures reached in the Nevada heat, where temperatures reached 109 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) on Saturday.
Harris has spent the week drawing contrasts with Trump. On Saturday, before leaving Arizona, she said she disagreed strongly with the former president about the Federal Reserve.
She said she would not interfere with the independent Fed if elected president, in sharp contrast to Trump, who on Thursday said presidents should have a say over decisions made by the central bank.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal; Editing by William Mallard)
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