MADISON, Wis. >> Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump clashed for support Wednesday in the battleground state of North Carolina, holding competing rallies roughly 50 miles apart a day after President Joe Biden appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.”

In Rocky Mount, Trump expressed outrage over Biden’s remark, telling a rally crowd that “you can’t be president if you hate the American people, and there’s a lot of hatred there.”

In Raleigh, Harris made no mention of Biden’s comments, instead emphasizing a message of unity as her campaign reaches out to moderate Republicans and independents, particularly women. She was introduced onstage by a former Republican voter who supported Trump in 2016.

“Here is my pledge to you as your president,” Harris told the crowd. “I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to the challenges you face. I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”

She added: “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

Earlier in the day, Harris had tried to separate herself from Biden.

“Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” Harris told reporters as she prepared to board Air Force Two outside Washington, although she pointed out that Biden had “clarified his comments.”

Harris has been pressed to distance herself more broadly from Biden, an unpopular incumbent who is also her boss, putting her in a difficult position. Her campaign has resisted having them appear together on the trail. Biden is seen as an undisciplined communicator, and his comments Tuesday undercut a speech Harris delivered that same night in which she made unity a major theme.

Tuesday night, Harris delivered her closing argument speech at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House, intentionally standing where Trump had almost four years earlier when he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and sparked a violent insurrection.

Harris cast her rival as a “petty tyrant” and a person “consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power” while presenting herself as a fighter who would usher in a new generation of leadership and unite the nation.

Shortly after Biden’s remarks went viral on social media, Sen. Marco Rubio R-Fla., came onstage at Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday night and relayed the president’s remarks to the crowd, amid a chorus of boos. The Trump campaign quickly tried to tie Biden’s comments to Hillary Clinton calling some Trump supporters “deplorables” in 2016 and sent out fundraising messages referencing the controversy.

Trump has repeatedly demonized Democrats, describing them at times as “the enemy within,” “communists,” “these lunatics” and “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

But Wednesday at the Rocky Mount rally, he insisted it was the rhetoric from the Democratic side that was the problem. “For the past nine years, Kamala and her party have called us racists, bigots, fascists, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis and they’ve called me Hitler,” Trump said, adding, “They’ve demeaned us. They’ve demonized us and censored us.”

Polls in North Carolina show a race that is virtually tied, as is true across the seven battleground states and the nation as a whole. Later Wednesday, Harris was scheduled to hold a rally in Pennsylvania. In the evening, both she and Trump had rallies planned in Wisconsin, reflecting how both campaigns are competing for a narrow slice of undecided voters in the battleground states who could decide the election.