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 Wednesday evening.
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.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here’s the latest:
Unions face a moment of truth in pivotal blue wall states
Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are competing for workers in blue wall states with deep union roots.
Harris is rallying in union halls, standing alongside Michigan’s most powerful labor leader, while Trump fires back from rural steel factories, urging middle-class workers to trust him as their true champion. They’re making their case in starkly different terms. Campaigning for Harris, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain says the American dream now depends on electing Democrats.
But Harris failed to secure two key union endorsements that went to President Joe Biden, who calls himself the most labor-friendly president in U.S. history. The International Association of Firefighters and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters both declined to endorse anyone. Any break in labor movement unity can have an amplifier effect in a place like Michigan, where most people have a family member or close friend in a union.
Many Midwestern communities once core to the labor movement have shifted to the right as jobs moved overseas. And non-college-educated white voters have been voting more conservatively, concerned about cultural issues involving race and gender.
Trump has seized on these trends while accusing Harris of mandating electric vehicles in the home of America’s Big Three automakers. Trump also labeled Fain a “stupid idiot” and praised Tesla CEO Elon Musk for firing workers who went on strike.
Michelle Obama to lead turnout-minded ‘Party at the Polls’ with celebs in Atlanta
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.”
Some Republicans support Harris in Pennsylvania as Trump pursues Latino votes
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.
Trump emphasizes hypermasculinity as Obama says men who sit out don’t show strength
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.”
Republicans challenge more than 63,000 voters in Georgia, but few removed, AP finds
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.
Trump’s idea that high tariffs are an economic cure-all is deeply flawed, economists say
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.
Georgia judge blocks new rule requiring hand-counting of ballots
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.
