Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance called out Democratic heir apparent Kamala Harris at a campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota on Saturday.

Harris said in a 45-second YouTube video posted on July 16 that Vance would be “loyal only to Trump, not to our country” and a “rubber stamp for [Trump’s] extreme agenda.” 

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Vance countered the Vice President’s attack on his character at Saturday’s joint Trump and Vance rally with his track record of Marine Corps service and small business ownership as well as Harris’ failures in tackling the border crisis.

“Now, I saw the other day Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to this country. That’s the word she used; loyalty. And it’s an interesting word. Semper Fi: loyalty, because there is no greater sign of disloyalty to this country than what Kamala Harris has done at our southern border,” said Vance.

The senator from Ohio didn’t stop with Harris’ record as border czar under President Joe Biden’s administration. 

“And I’d like to ask the vice president, what has she done to question my loyalty to this country? I served in the United States Marine Corps. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country.”

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Vance added, “and my running mate took a bullet for this country. So my question to Kamala Harris is, what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?”

After the crowd roared with applause, Vance answered his own question.

Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) walks out with his wife Usha Vance to speak during a rally with running mate U.S. Republican Presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center on July 27, 2024, in St Cloud, Minnesota. Trump hopes to flip the state of Minnesota this November, which hasn’t been carried by a Republican in a presidential election since 1972.  (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images))

“And the answer, my friends, is nothing. So let’s send a message to the media. Let’s send a message to Kamala Harris. Let’s send a message to every hardworking patriot from Minnesota across the country. We are ready to have President Donald J. Trump back, and we’re going to work our tails off to make sure it happens,” he concluded.

A Fox News poll released Friday shows former President Trump with 46% support in Minnesota, and Vice President Harris with 52%. 

Former President Trump and Senator Vance are scheduled to give another campaign rally together Tuesday in Henderson, Nevada.

A new poll from The Wall Street Journal has found Vice President Kamala Harris neck and neck with Donald Trump after President Biden vacated the Democratic nomination for November’s election. 

“Only 37% of Biden voters were enthusiastic about him in early July, and now 81% of Harris voters are enthusiastic about her,” Democratic pollster Mike Bocian, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster David Lee, told the Journal. “This is an astounding change.”

The former president maintains a 2% lead over Harris in a two-person race, within the Journal’s 3.1% margin of error, indicating Harris has cut into the six-point lead Trump had over President Biden before Biden withdrew from the race last weekend.

When the field expands to include Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other independent and third-party candidates, the gap slips to a slender 1% lead for Trump over Harris, 45% to 44%. Part of that shift resulted from the change in voter demographics as she has galvanized Democrats and brought high levels of enthusiasm into the party. 

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Harris raised $100 million from over 1.1 million unique donors between Sunday afternoon to Monday evening after she announced she would run in place of Biden, marking what her campaign claimed to be the “largest 24-hour raise in presidential history.” 

The Journal poll does include good news for Trump, however. Republican pollster David Lee pointed out that Trump was trailing Biden in the July 2020 Journal poll by nine points. 

“Donald Trump is in a far better position in this election when compared to a similar time in the 2020 election,” Lee told the Journal.

Voters favor Trump on key issues like the economy, immigration, foreign policy and crime and lean toward Harris on abortion.

“Instead of what was shaping up to be a Trump win, America has a real, bona fide race on its hands,” veteran political scientist and New England College President Wayne Lesperance told Fox News Digital this week. “Game on.”

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A tied national poll would give Trump an advantage in the Electoral College “given the way the country’s population is dispersed,” according to the Journal. But Harris has yet to pick a vice presidential candidate, with the likes of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz; Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.; and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper likely to shake up those numbers. 

Vice President Kamala Harris drew a large crowd Tuesday afternoon in West Allis, Wis., at a rally.  (Fox News Digital)

In Michigan, Harris and Trump remain in a dead heat, according to a Fox News poll released Friday, which marked a three-point shift for Harris, up from Biden’s 46% in April polling. 

The poll found that men favor Trump by 13 points, while women back Harris by 12. Trump has a two-point advantage with voters over 45 years old, while Harris has a five-point advantage with voters under 35 years old. Whites without a college degree pick Trump by 15 points, and Harris has a three-point advantage among Whites with a degree and voters of color, who back her by 39 points. 

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The race has tightened in battleground states overall, which will prove welcome news for Democrats who pushed for Biden to drop out on word that polling indicated a collapse in those states. 

The Butler, Pa., crowd at former President Trump’s rally (Fox News)

In Minnesota, Harris has a six-point lead, while Trump has a one-point advantage in Wisconsin. The two remain tied in Pennsylvania. 

Fox News surveys in those battleground states found that Trump is meeting or exceeding his 2020 vote share when put into a two-way race with Harris, with greater support among voters who prioritize the economy and immigration as their top issues. Voters who consider abortion a top issue favor Harris. 

Harris also enjoys higher favorable ratings than Trump in each state except Michigan, where they remain tied. 

Fox News Digital’s Dana Blanton contributed to this report.  

Less than two days after effectively clinching the Democratic presidential nomination this week, Vice President Kamala Harris was introduced to a crowd of 6,000 Black women, all dressed in their sorority colors, as “America’s No. 1 lady.”

“When I was a United States senator, I would see this group of powerful leaders walk through the halls of Congress in white and blue,” Harris said at the national meeting of Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis. “I always knew I was looking at some of the most powerful advocates for justice in America.”

That night, former President Trump’s rally in Charlotte, N.C., was full of testosterone, as he recalled “The Hulkster” and Kid Rock speaking at his party convention and the night he overcame bullets “flying” at him during this month’s assassination attempt.

“They said ‘Sir, we have a stretcher for you,’” Trump recounted. “I said, ‘That’s not going to look very good if I get carried out on a stretcher.’”

Less than a week into a reframed general election, it is clear that the race between Trump and Harris is not just between a man and a woman, but about competing notions of gender roles.

Trump has built his image on hyper-masculinity from an era where men sought to present themselves as physically strong and might dismiss allegations of sexual assault by claiming “she’s not my type,” as he did before losing a civil case against E. Jean Carroll. Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White lauded Trump’s toughness as they introduced his convention speech last week.

Harris has achieved a number of firsts in an age when women could redefine power in feminine clothes, while adding issues such as maternal health and reproductive rights to the national agenda. She has made her mark in the Biden administration by leading the fight to restore abortion rights and continued to push that message during appearances this week.

In a historical coincidence, Trump not only faced off against the first woman to lead a presidential ticket, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but is now facing off against the second.

Clinton embraced the role of glass ceiling breaker in 2016 but ultimately lost to Trump, who had no qualms about physically blocking her out during a debate. Harris is eager to erase that history and taunted Trump on Thursday by accusing him of “backpedaling” after he declined to agree to a Sept. 10 debate commitment that was originally scheduled with President Biden.

Trump sounded annoyed with the excitement around Harris as he sought to diminish her during Wednesday’s rally by casting her as a lightweight liberal.

“Putin laughed at her like she was nothing,” he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has often praised.

“I’ve never seen a turnaround like this,” he added, blaming the media for the hype. “Three weeks ago, four weeks ago she was the worst politician in America. Now they say: ‘Isn’t it amazing? Look at her. She’s so beautiful.’”

The size of the divide between male and female voters will likely determine the election. Trump beat Clinton among men — 52% to 41% — while Clinton won the women’s vote — 54% to 39% — in 2016. Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump’s margins with blue-collar men helped him defeat Clinton by small margins in several swing states, where she was not able to make up enough ground with college-educated women.

The candidates narrowed the gender gap in 2020, with Biden winning women 55% to 44% and Trump winning men only 50% to 48%, according to post-election analyses by Pew.

A New York Times-Siena poll released Thursday shows Harris within a percentage point of Trump among likely voters, carrying women by 15 points but losing men to Trump by 16 points. The wider margins are closer, but not identical, to the 2016 election. The electorate has also changed: Women outnumbered men in the college-educated workforce for the first time in 2019 and continued through the pandemic, according to Pew.

Sen. Laphonza Butler, a Democrat from Los Angeles and a longtime political ally to Harris, cautioned against comparing Harris’ race to Clinton’s or defining the election by gender, arguing that Harris is building a broad coalition that includes Black women, Latinas, the LGBTQ+ community, as well as men.

“We are where we are in 2024, not 2016,” said Butler, who led the women’s political group Emily’s List before being appointed to the Senate last year.

The 2022 Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights affects both men and women, as did the pandemic, Butler said.

“We have seen our children struggle to recover, which impacts mothers and fathers,” she said. “And so to make a gender story — or to try to somehow, I think, minimize the totality of what it’s going to win this election — even if it’s going to be close, is not telling the whole story.”

That hasn’t stopped Harris from leaning hard into her vision of female empowerment. Her first official campaign video launched Thursday used the Beyoncé power anthem “Freedom,” which she also plays at campaign events. In the video and speeches this week, Harris has put “freedom to make decisions about your own body” at the center of her message, along with gun violence, healthcare, child poverty and Trump’s legal problems.

“In this moment, we are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms,” she said at an American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston on Thursday. “And to this room of leaders, I say: Bring it on.”

Harris’ message so far seems especially resonant with women, who have filled online events this week. Rochelle Allen said Harris is “our only hope right now” as she waited for her to speak in Houston.

But the 74-year-old from Detroit, who teaches at Wayne State University, is also worried and would have preferred Biden stay in the race. She came of age when women were taught to put men first and allow them to lead, even in her church where she now serves as a pastor, she said.

“There are some people who just won’t vote for a female to be the leader. That’s backwards thinking, but it is the truth,” she said. “That’s why it’s really important that everybody else get out to vote.”