At the Ellipse, Harris offers voters “a different path.”

TThe iconic columns of the White House glowed behind her. In front of her, thousands of supporters held “USA” signs and wore wristbands that glowed red and blue on the Ellipse’s lawns. A week before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris decided to give her prime-time closing argument to Americans, not from one of the seven closely contested states, but from the same location in Washington, DC, where Donald Trump had rallied his supporters on June 6. January 2021 to try to atone for his 2020 election defeat.

The location was the point. Harris wanted voters to remember Trump's defiance that day — when he didn't act to protect Vice President Mike Pence from rioters chanting for his execution or listen to pleas from his fellow Republicans to turn back supporters who were attacking law enforcement at the Capitol attacked — and whatever else he's done in the years since, as he continued to deny the election results and promised to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters convicted of assault.

In an energetic 30-minute speech, Harris urged voters to elect her and “turn the page” on Trump.

“We know what Donald Trump has in mind: more chaos, more division and policies that help those at the top and hurt everyone else. “I offer a different path,” she said.

Harris compared Trump to a “petty tyrant” who is “unstable,” “obsessed with revenge” and wants “uncontrolled power.” She said he wanted to go back to the Oval Office “to focus not on your problems, but on his.” Trump has signaled his support for military tribunals for political enemies, promised to purge the federal bureaucracy of workers who disagree with him , and declares he will use the military against opponents he calls “the enemy within.” Trump would come to the Oval Office with an “enemies list,” Harris said. She will show up with a “to-do list.”

Early voting is underway in almost every state, and polls show the race is dead. Trump's campaign team has tried in recent days to contain the fallout from racist jokes and sexist comments from speakers at his rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Harris, meanwhile, has worked to fend off defections from the left over their support for arming Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza. During the speech, several protesters in different parts of the crowd began chanting, “Stop the genocide!” and were led away by police. One person unfurled a pink banner reading “Kamala: No guns for Israel” before it was removed.

Harris has also tried to persuade Republicans alarmed by Trump's autocratic comments to vote for her, campaigning with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and running ads in which Republicans explained why they were voting for her voices.

Harris has laid out a number of forward-looking ideas for the country in recent weeks, trying to describe a positive vision of what she could achieve if voters agree to support her. During her speech Tuesday night, Harris pledged to protect women's access to abortion and reproductive health care, and she said she would work to lower costs for Americans. She outlined a plan to cut red tape for homebuilders to ease the housing shortage that is driving up prices. She said she would penalize companies that overwhelm consumers with food. She proposed expanding Medicare to include home care.

Trump's campaign has pounced on these proposals, urging voters to ask why, as No. 2 in the White House, she hasn't done more to enact her policy wish list over the past four years. Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign's national press secretary, said voters should blame Harris for inflation, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and crime caused by new immigrants. “Kamala's first day in office was over 1,300 days ago and she has worked hand-in-hand with Joe Biden to destroy our country for the last four years – but now she is lying about her record because she has no policy solutions to offer.” Leavitt said in a statement following Harris' speech Tuesday night. “As for President Trump, his closing argument to the American people is simple: Kamala broke it; He’ll fix it.”

But many Harris supporters at the rally focused less on what Harris would do if she got the Oval Office and more on preventing Trump from returning there. Gretchen McMullen, 64, came to Washington from Accokeek, Maryland, to see Harris speak. She wants to be able to tell her newborn granddaughter about it when she's older and “show her what side of history I was on.” McMullen is retired from the Army and now works as a case manager helping seriously injured veterans. She said Trump's public statements that he would use the military after the “enemy within” alarmed her. “The thought that my comrades would evict themselves scared me,” she said.

Mitzi Maxwell, 69, decided to fly from outside Orlando, Florida, to attend Harris' speech after her 88-year-old mother told her, “I think we have to go.” Maxwell has postcards for the Harris campaign and waved signs in support of Harris in her hometown of Howey-in-the-Hills. But Maxwell wanted to come to Harris' speech about the Ellipse to help restore the site itself. She wanted to be here personally, she said, to “help rid this beautiful place of the negativity and heartache of the terrible tragedy of January 6th.”