WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris is using a New Hampshire campaign stop on Wednesday to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses — presenting a pro-entrepreneur plan that may soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and large corporations to pay higher taxes.

She wants to expand from $5,000 to $50,000 tax incentives for small business startup expenses, with the goal of eventually spurring 25 million new small business applications over four years. Harris is making the announcement while visiting the Portsmouth area, across the Piscataqua River from Maine.

New Hampshire has been reliably blue in recent presidential elections, but the trip could also have some benefit across state lines since Maine splits its electoral votes, allowing candidates to win some without carrying the full state. Still, it marks a rare deviation from Harris spending most of her time visiting a tight group of Midwest and Sun Belt battlegrounds likely to decide November’s election.

Since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris, the vice president has focused on the “ blue wall ” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that have been the centerpiece of successful Democratic campaigns.

She’s also frequently visited Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, all of which Biden narrowly won in 2020, and North Carolina, which she’s still hoping to flip from Republican former President Donald Trump.

Wednesday’s stop comes after Harris marked Labor Day with Monday rallies in Detroit and Pittsburgh and before she heads back to Pittsburgh on Friday — marking her 10th visit to Pennsylvania in 2024. By contrast, Wednesday is her first visit to New Hampshire in years.

Trump has called for lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% — a break with Biden who in his budget proposal in March suggested setting the corporate tax rate at 28%. Harris has released relatively few major policy proposals in the roughly six weeks since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, but has not suggested she’s planning to deviate greatly from his administration on tax policy.

The small business plan Harris is presenting Wednesday has lots of facets that many in the business community would like. But that contrasts another proposal Harris unveiled last month, where she promised to help fight inflation by working to combat “price gouging” from food producers that she suggests have driven grocery store prices up unnecessarily.

Harris has built her campaign around calls to grow and strengthen the nation’s middle class — and suggested that rich Americans and large corporations should “pay their fair share” in higher taxes.

Biden, who similarly built his campaign around promoting the middle class, won New Hampshire by 7 percentage points in 2020, but Trump came much closer to winning it against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, the Harris campaign notes that it has 17 field offices operating in coordination with the state Democratic party across New Hampshire, compared to one for Trump’s campaign.

Some of the state’s Democrats were angry that Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to make South Carolina the first state to vote in the party’s presidential primary this year — displacing Iowa’s caucus and a first-in-the-nation primary New Hampshire held for more than a century.

Despite that, New Hampshire pressed ahead with an unsanctioned primary. Though Biden didn’t campaign in it, or appear on the ballot, he still easily won via a write-in drive.

Trump is nonetheless hoping to use what happened to his advantage, posting on his social media account that Harris “sees there are problems for her campaign in New Hampshire because of the fact that they disrespected it in their primary and never showed up.”

“Additionally, the cost of living in New Hampshire is through the roof, their energy bills are some of highest in the country, and their housing market is the most unaffordable in history,” the former president wrote. “I protected New Hampshire’s First-In-The-Nation Primary and ALWAYS will.”

Nearly a year ago, Danish wind energy giant Orsted scrapped two offshore wind farms planned off New Jersey’s coast, saying they were no longer financially feasible to build.

Atlantic Shores, another project with preliminary approval in New Jersey, is seeking to rebid the financial terms of its project.

And opponents of offshore wind have seized on the disintegration of a wind turbine blade off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in July that sent crumbled pieces of it washing ashore on the popular island vacation destination.

Leading Light was one of two projects chosen in January by the state utilities board. But just three weeks after that approval, one of three major turbine manufacturers, GE Vernova, said it would not announce the kind of turbine Invenergy planned to use in the Leading Light Project, according to the filing with the utilities board.

A turbine made by manufacturer Vestas was deemed unsuitable for the project, and the lone remaining manufacturer, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, told Invenergy in June “that it was substantially increasing the cost of its turbine offering.”

“As a result of these actions, Invenergy is currently without a viable turbine supplier,” it wrote in its filing.

The project, from Chicago-based Invenergy and New York-based energyRE, would be built 40 miles (65 kilometers) off Long Beach Island and would consist of up to 100 turbines, enough to power 1 million homes.

New Jersey has become the epicenter of resident and political opposition to offshore wind, with numerous community groups and elected officials — most of them Republicans — saying the industry is harmful to the environment and inherently unprofitable.

Supporters, many of them Democrats, say that offshore wind is crucial to move the planet away from the burning of fossil fuels and the changing climate that results from it.

New Jersey has set ambitious goals to become the East Coast hub of the offshore wind industry. It built a manufacturing facility for wind turbine components in the southern part of the state to help achieve that aim.

Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick is taking aim at his Democratic opponent and tugging at Pennsylvania’s heartstrings in a new campaign ad showing the impact of fentanyl — and the open border policies that allow it to flow freely — on American families.

In the 30-second spot, Blair County Sheriff Jim Ott speaks solemnly into the camera, sharing his experience with fentanyl, not only as an officer of the law, but also as a bereaved father.

“Three high schoolers die from fentanyl every day. As a sheriff, I see it. As a father, it happened to me,” Ott said, while a piano played softly in the background.

Then comes the attack.

“If the border was secure, chances are my son would be alive today,” Ott continued.

“We can’t bring back the people we’ve lost. But we can get rid of the weak politicians like Bob Casey who let it happen.”

Fentanyl killed 4,000 Pennsylvanians last year, and the McCormick campaign hopes to pin the drug epidemic and its death toll on Casey, a three-term incumbent who is leading in the polls. 

Record-breaking illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Biden administration has fueled GOP messaging, which highlights the role of lax border security as a culprit for fentanyl deaths.

The Ott ad is the latest shot fired in the Casey-McCormick race, a hotly contested battle in a major swing state where ad spending is predicted to break records this cycle.

In July, Casey attacked McCormick, who was CEO of Bridgewater Associates when the company held a $1.7 million stake in China’s largest synthetic opiate manufacturer. McCormick fired back, calling Casey the “ultimate liar and hypocrite” when it turned out the senator holds a three-cent stake in the same company in his personal stock portfolio.

Now the fentanyl blame game has reached the southern border.

Last week, a PAC supporting McCormick ran an ad with the Beaver County sheriff tying “Casey’s open border policy” to fentanyl, drug dealers, and human traffickers. 

This week, there’s a new sheriff in town repping McCormick — and he’s not holding back.

“If I could talk to Senator Casey, if this happened in your family, wouldn’t you give as much as you could give? Wouldn’t you provide whatever is needed to make sure you gave the safety to try and stop it from coming into your home?” Ott said in a two-minute version of the ad.

But other advocates fighting the fentanyl crisis don’t place the blame on Casey.

Last week Casey hosted Gregory Swan, the founder of Fentanyl Fathers, at his Pittsburgh home with other families affected by the fentanyl crisis to hear their stories.

Swan’s group, which educates America’s youth about the dangers of fentanyl, featured one of its surrogates in a commercial with Casey, and defended his record on the issue.

“In terms of the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, he got that through as a federal law. So he’s no lightweight when it comes to” fentanyl, Swan told The Post.

The law he refers to sanctions the manufacture and trafficking of illicit fentanyl and its precursors by Chinese criminal organizations and Mexican cartels.

Still, Swan isn’t fully sold on Democrats’ policy solutions.

“The border is not secure. That’s an issue with us,” Swan said.

“Democrats are definitely the owners of the influx of migration, which has brought the drugs. You have a lot of people who are unvetted. It’s pouring, pouring in.”

Beyond stopping Chinese fentanyl precursors and prevention through awareness, Swan said, “You need someone with cojones to take care of the cartels.”

McCormick’s offered an aggressive solution, telling The Post: “We should identify the cartels as terrorist organizations,” and “use our military capacity,” to destroy them.”