Former President Donald Trump has held a rally in deep-blue California, part of an unorthodox campaign move in the final stretch of the neck-and-neck United States presidential race.

The Saturday night event near the Coachella Valley — best known for its annual music festival — came just 22 days ahead of the November 5 vote.

The final stretch of the election is typically reserved for mad-dash visits to the most competitive battleground states, which include Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada this year.

That makes Trump’s stop in California — a Democratic stronghold all but assured to vote overwhelmingly for Vice President Kamala Harris — atypical. Born and raised in the state, Harris previously served as California’s attorney general and the district attorney of San Francisco and remains widely popular there.

In the last presidential election, in 2020, Trump lost in California to Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 30 percentage points.

Speaking at the rally, Trump said: “The radical left Democrats have destroyed this state, but we are going to save it, and we’re going to make it better than ever.”

“You definitely had somebody here that was horrible, Kamala,” he continued. “And now she wants to destroy our country.”

The former president then launched into a familiar stump speech that focused on misleading claims related to migrant crime in the US.

Trump called migration the number-one issue of the election, despite polls showing the economy looms largest for most voters.

Why visit California?

The visit to the state has widely been viewed as an effort to shore up wider Republican support. That is particularly needed in six key races for the House of Representatives in California.

Control of both the House and the Senate — the two chambers of the US Congress — is up for grabs this election season. And certain congressional districts in California are tightly split between Republicans and Democrats.

A victory in the six competitive House races could help Republicans retain their hold over the lower chamber.

Going to California gives Trump the “ability to swoop in and leverage this big population of Trump supporters”, Tim Lineberger, who was communications director for Trump’s 2016 campaign in Michigan and worked in the former president’s administrations, told the Associated Press news agency.

He’s “coming here and activating that”, Lineberger added.

The move may also be an effort to boost Trump’s final vote count. In the US, the victor in the presidential race is decided by the Electoral College, a weighted voting system in which states award electors to the candidates based on the state-level vote.

Nearly all states award all their electors in a winner-takes-all system: Even if a candidate wins by a small margin in a given state, they receive all the electors.

That means that a candidate can lose in the overall popular vote but win in the Electoral College system, as Trump did in 2016. In 2020, however, he lost in both measures to Biden.

Having never won the popular vote has remained a sore subject for the former Republican president. California, with its population of nearly 40 million, offers the possibility to turn out supporters who might not otherwise feel it is worthwhile to go to the polls.

“I believe Donald Trump is coming to California because he wants to win not only in the Electoral College, but he wants to win the popular vote,” Jim Brulte, a former chairman of the California Republican Party, told the Associated Press.

Battleground blitz

To be sure, Trump is sandwiching his California visit between a stop in Nevada on Saturday and a rally in Arizona on Sunday, two battleground states more typical for the final weeks of a presidential campaign.

In Nevada, Trump attended a roundtable with Latino voters, as his campaign sought to capitalise on signs that Latino men are increasingly turning away from Democrats.

For her part, Harris visited North Carolina, which was recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. She said her visit was “first and foremost to see how they’re doing in the wake of the hurricane”.

Harris was also set to promote her plan for an “opportunity economy” and meet with Black community leaders. Trump narrowly won North Carolina in 2020, but the eastern state has been trending towards Democrats in some recent polls, buoyed by its large college-educated and Black population.

Earlier in the day, Harris released the results of a health exam. It said she has “the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency”.

Releasing health exams has long been a norm for presidential candidates in the US, with Harris quickly underscoring that the 78-year-old Trump has so far not done so.

“It is clear to me that he and his team do not want the American people to really see what it is that he is doing and whether or not he actually is fit to do the job of being president of the United States,” she told reporters.

Trump’s campaign has maintained that the former president “has voluntarily released updates from his personal physician” and from the doctor who treated him after an assassination attempt in July.

“All have concluded he is in perfect and excellent health to be Commander in Chief,” his campaign spokesman said, while charging that Harris “does not have the stamina” of Trump.