Senior Republicans are pleading with Donald Trump to quit the personal attacks on rival Kamala Harris as they split over how to win November’s presidential election.

Trump continues to mock Harris as stupid and make fun of her name, as he hopes to recover from a difficult stretch during which his lead in opinion polls has all but evaporated.

On Wednesday (US time), the former president told supporters in Asheville, North Carolina, that he would open up federal lands to drilling and ease the permit process for pipelines among other measures designed to bring down consumers prices should he win the November 5 race for the White House.

He also resumed attacks on Vice President Harris’ intellect that many allies and donors had hoped he would ditch, at one point calling her “stupid” and denigrating her laugh as a “cackle”, saying: “That’s the laugh of a person with some big problems.”

Some allies, donors and advisers have expressed concern at Trump’s deeply personal attacks on Harris in recent weeks and suggested that he instead focus on what they argue are the failed policies she has promoted while in office.

On Wednesday, Trump tried to do both. However, he steered clear of broadsides challenging Harris’ racial identity, which have provoked concerns in previous events.

In recent weeks he has frequently implied that Harris, whose mother was born in India and whose father was born in Jamaica, has only recently leaned into her black identity.

“Personally it makes no difference to me what Kamala wants to identify as,” said Bill Bean, a major Republican donor who hosted Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, at an Indiana fundraiser in late July.

Bean said he had talked with Vance and Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley about the need to attack Harris on her policy record, not her identity.

Before the speech Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not address those criticisms directly, but argued Trump would beat Harris due to the Vice President’s record in office.

On Wednesday, Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s top competitor in Republican primaries this year, told Fox News that Trump needed to pivot his messaging away from crowd sizes and toward substantive policy if he wanted to connect with voters.

“The one thing Republicans have to stop doing: Quit whining about her. We knew it was going to be [Harris],” she said.

A former Trump campaign staffer told US political publication The Hill that Haley was “largely right, if it was a traditional campaign”.

“Trump doesn’t do traditional campaigns. He does name calling, and personal attacks and has a hard time talking policy because it isn’t interesting to him,” they said.

“Republicans are united in a policy message but Trump isn’t likely to get on board with that.”

Harris on the rise

Harris has shown massive fundraising figures since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month, paving the way for her to become the Democrat candidate.

National polling averages show she has opened a modest lead against Trump, while polls in the swing states likely to decide the November 5 election consistently show a tight race.

On Friday, Harris will travel to North Carolina, where she will talk about economic policy in a speech at Raleigh.

She will outline a plan “to lower costs for middle-class families and take on corporate price gouging”, a campaign official said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Trump cast his ballot in the Republican primary for federal and state offices in Florida. While he has encouraged voters to cast their ballots whenever is convenient for them, he also has said – without evidence – that early voting is corrupt and prone to fraud.

Trump’s appearance in Asheville follows an at-times rambling interview on X with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, which was marred by technical difficulties.

Last week, Trump convened a meandering press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and over the weekend he falsely accused the Harris campaign of using artificial intelligence to make her crowds at a rally in Michigan appear larger than they were.

-with AAP