Barry Soper: Harris is reading from a familiar political playbook

As political promises go, they should be familiar to all of us- lifting children out of poverty, removing red tape and building much needed houses more quickly, and giving women the right to decide their fertility.

Kamala Harris told her audience she remembered sitting at her mother's yellow formica table as she struggled to put food on it and juggled household bills.

It's as though Harris was reading from the Jacinda Ardern political playbook - and if she was, she should remember how our former Prime Minister's popularity plummeted after she failed to deliver on her promises, and how the fear she instilled in some of us over Covid wore thin after many of us got it and survived.

But in her final set piece address to kick off the last week before next week's poll, Harris was more convincing than Ardern ever was, essentially because she has an opponent in Donald Trump, who's off the planet.

If Americans can't see that then you'd have to ask whether they belong to the real world. If they're again willing to support a man who urged them to riot on the Capitol just up the road from where Harris was speaking to overturn the result putting Joe Biden into office, you would have to ask what galaxy they are in.

And if Trump loses next week, then expect the same sort of rhetoric that we heard the last time he lost - that the election was rigged. He's already started banging on about vote rigging in the weathervane state of Pennsylvania, where he falsely claims two and a half thousand voter forms were filled out by one person.

Trump claims Biden and Harris hate Americans and will do everything to crush the Republicans if ever they hold power again.

But he's done nothing to distance himself from the bile that came out of a comedian's mouth at his own wind-up rally who said "there's a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean called Puerto Rico."

Well, Puerto Ricans are actually American citizens. Those living on the island can't vote in US general elections, but millions of them have moved to the mainland United States and can fully participate in elections, and many have taken up residence in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

You can see why the Democrats have kept Biden away from their campaign though when he gave his response to that, saying -"the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters."

That was reminiscent of Hiliary Clinton's faux-pas in the final two months of her battle against Trump in 2016 when she described half of Trump's supporters as "deplorables". The comments were seized on by Trump supporters as evidence of the Democrats’ contempt for some Americans.

Immigration is the centrepiece of Trump's campaign, with him declaring this week that he'll enact the death penalty for any immigrant who kills an American citizen or a cop.

As Harris' campaign rally was just getting underway, Joe Biden's motorcade was pulling up in the driveway to the White House.

As he was about to turn in for the night, he would have heard the cheering crowd and was probably thankful that it wasn't him who was taking the stage. Harris told the fawning crowd that if Trump walks into the Oval Office next January he'll have a list of enemies, whereas she would walk in with a “to-do list”.

But like all political lists, they are not all that easy to do, ask Ardern.

Barry Soper is a New Zealand political journalist, and has been featured regularly on radio and television since the 1970s. Currently, Soper's main role is political editor at Newstalk ZB, a radio network in New Zealand.