The Latest: Harris and Trump campaigns pivot to turnout as early voting begins
With just 21 days to go before the final votes are cast in the 2024 presidential season, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are scrambling to win over and turn out Black voters, women and other key constituencies in what looks to be a razor-tight election.
A coalition of Republicans backing Harris will campaign with the Democratic presidential nominee in pivotal Pennsylvania before she sits down with Fox News for an interview airing at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
GOP nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, will appear on TV Wednesday in two town halls — one with a woman-only audience that Fox News Channel recorded Tuesday, and the other with with Hispanics, hosted by Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language television network.
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Here's the latest:
Migrant children separated from their parents at the border during Donald Trump's presidency have shared their stories in the same Miami suburb where the Republican nominee planned to hold a town hall with the Spanish-language network Univision.
A young man identified as Billy said he was 9 when he was sent to New York for foster care. He was eventually reunited with his father after 40 days.
“As a 9-year-old, you can probably imagine how that felt,” he said. “Very traumatic. “I still have the fear of Trump being reelected and that same thing happening to me or other kids.”
The Kamala Harris campaign held the press conference in Doral, Florida, where Univision is based and where Trump has one of his golf clubs.
Trump's administration sought to deter immigration by criminally prosecuting parents for crossing the border illegally while sending their children to shelters and sponsors across the country. Little was done to keep track of them. Some parents who were deported didn't see them for years. A national outcry led Trump to reverse course. Despite federal court orders, efforts to reunite all of them continue to this day.
“We want Americans to remember what Donald Trump did,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Harris campaign co-chair. “Not just at the border, but what he did to our country.”
Former first lady Michelle Obama will headline a turnout-minded, celebrity-studded “Party at the Polls” rally in Atlanta aimed at engaging younger and first-time voters as well as voters of color.
The Oct. 29 event will be hosted by When We All Vote, a nonpartisan civic engagement group that Obama founded in 2018 to “change the culture around voting” and reach out to people who are less likely to engage in politics and elections.
The group’s co-chairs include professional basketball players Stephen Curry and Chris Paul; musical artists Becky G, H.E.R., Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lopez and Janelle Monáe; beauty influencer Bretman Rock; and actors Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Kerry Washington.
The group has hosted more than 500 “Party at the Polls” events, ranging from pop-up block parties in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Philadelphia to voter registration partnerships with professional sports leagues and music festivals. Executive Director Beth Lynk said the group chose Atlanta for Obama's appearance because of the state’s diversity and the impact that only a handful of voters can make in Georgia.
“A lot of people don’t believe that their votes have power. But they do, plain and simple,” Lynk said. “We know that democracy has to work for all of us and that’s what we will be stressing at this rally.”
A coalition of Republicans backing Kamala Harris will campaign with the Democratic presidential nominee in pivotal Pennsylvania before she sits down with Fox News for an interview airing at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
GOP nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, will appear on TV Wednesday in two town halls — one with a woman-only audience that Fox News Channel recorded Tuesday, and the other with with Hispanics, hosted by Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language television network.
As the race entered its final three weeks, Harris is expected to talk about upholding the Constitution and defending patriotism in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a vote-rich stretch of suburban Philadelphia where Democrats have held a narrow advantage in recent presidential elections. Flanking her will be former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and other GOP officials who argue that Trump is a threat to American democracy.
Trump's Univision event Wednesday afternoon in Miami will air at 10 p.m. Trump is counting on increased Latino support even as he centers his campaign on a darker view of immigration, suggesting migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
Attention, American men: Donald Trump and his allies want you to believe your vote says big things about your masculinity. The Republican nominee is amping up his hypermasculine tone and support of traditional gender roles, a reflection of the surgical campaign-within-a-campaign for the votes of men in a showdown with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
But where Harris is deploying “dudes” who use bro-ey language and occasional scolding to boost her support particularly among Black and Hispanic males, Trump’s camp is meeting men in alpha-male terms, often with crude and demeaning language.
“If you are a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said on his podcast.
As the razor’s edge contest elevates the importance of small caches of voters who are apathetic or on the fence in battleground states, both camps are reaching beyond their ideological bases.
“You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is?” former President Barack Obama scolded Black men last week in Pennsylvania, the largest battleground state. “That’s not acceptable.”
An Associated Press survey finds that more than 63,000 Georgia voters have had their qualifications challenged since July 1. That’s a big surge from 2023 and the first half of 2024, when the AP found that about 18,000 voters were challenged. But only about 1% of those challenged in recent months have been removed from the voting rolls or placed into challenged status, mostly in one county.
The challenges are part of a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to enlist Republican activists to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls.
The Georgia push is part of a national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls. The effort to remove voters has drawn scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department, which in September issued a seven-page guidance memo that aims to limit challenges and block parts of the new Georgia law by citing 1993’s National Voter Registration Act.
Donald Trump told the Economic Club of Chicago that "the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff.’”
He's defended his plan to impose high tariffs on imported goods as an economic cure-all, despite warnings from economists that businesses will have to pass the costs to American consumers, raising prices and deepening inflation.
“Inflation will vanish completely" if he's able to return to the White House, Trump insisted.
Most mainstream economists say Trump’s policy proposals would make inflation worse. Deporting millions of migrant workers and demanding a voice in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies also would send prices surging, they say.
Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a letter in June expressing fear that Trump’s proposals would “reignite’’ inflation, which has plummeted since peaking at 9.1% in 2022 and is nearly back to the Fed’s 2% target.
Last month, the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted that Trump’s policies — the deportations, import taxes and efforts to erode the Fed’s independence — would drive consumer prices sharply higher two years into his second term. Peterson’s analysis concluded that inflation, which would otherwise register 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s economic proposals were adopted.
A judge has blocked a new rule requiring Georgia Election Day ballots to be counted by hand after the close of voting. The same judge ruled a day earlier that county election officials cannot refuse to certify election results by the deadline set in law.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney late Tuesday blocked enforcement of the hand count rule while he considers the merits of a challenge by Democrats and liberal voting rights groups who raised concerns that Donald Trump’s allies could refuse to certify the results if the former president loses to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
They have also argued that new rules enacted by the Trump-endorsed majority on the State Election Board could be used to stop or delay certification and to undermine public confidence in the results.
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