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 doing their best to win over and eliminate black voters, women and other key constituencies in what appears to be a razor-thin election.
Harris appeared at a town hall-style event in Detroit on Tuesday hosted by the morning radio program “The Breakfast Club” with Charlamagne Tha God. Trump, meanwhile, joined an all-female audience at a Fox News Channel town hall that aired Wednesday during host Harris Faulkner’s show.
Harris warned that Trump would “institutionalize” harsh police tactics that disproportionately affect black men, while Trump said Harris’ immigration policies have “devastated” black and Latino communities.
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Here’s the latest:
Take note, American men: Donald Trump and his allies want you to believe that your vote says great things about your masculinity. The Republican candidate amplifies his hyper-masculine tone and supports traditional gender roles, reflecting the surgical campaign-within-a-campaign for the voices of men in a confrontation with the Democratic vice president Kamala Harris.
But where Harris deploys “guys” who use bro-ey language and the occasional scolding to boost her support, especially among black and Hispanic men, Trump’s camp meets men in alpha male terms, often with crude and demeaning language.
“If you’re a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, said on his podcast.
While the incisive battle heightens the importance of small pockets of voters who are apathetic or wary in battleground states, both camps extend beyond their ideological bases.
“You think about calling out or supporting someone who has a history of belittling you because you think that’s a sign of strength because that’s what being a man is?” former president Barak Obama black men scolded last week Pennsylvania, the largest battlefield state. “That is not acceptable.”
An Associated Press investigation notes that the qualifications of more than 63,000 Georgian voters have been questioned since July 1. That’s a big increase from 2023 and the first half of 2024, when the AP found about 18,000 voters were questioned. But only about 1% of those challenged in recent months have been removed from voting rolls or placed in challenged status, mostly in one county.
The challenges are part of a broad national efforts coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to engage Republican activists for this purpose remove people they consider it suspicious based on the voting lists.
The action in Georgia is part of a national effort, coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies, to remove people they consider suspicious from the voting rolls. The effort to remove voters has drawn criticism from the U.S. Department of Justice, which issued a law in September Seven-page accompanying memo which aims to limit challenges and block parts of the new Georgian law by citing the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.
Donald Trump told the Economic Club of Chicago that “the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff’.”
He has defended his plan to impose high tariffs on imported goods as an economic panacea. despite warnings from economists that companies will have to pass costs on to American consumers, causing prices to rise and inflation to increase.
“Inflation will completely disappear” if he is able to return to the White House, Trump insisted.
Most mainstream economists say Trump’s policy proposals would worsen inflation. Deporting millions of migrant workers and demanding a say in Federal Reserve interest rate policy would also raise prices, they say.
Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a letter in June he expressed fears that Trump’s proposals would “fuel” inflation, which has plummeted since a peak of 9.1% in 2022 and almost 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 attempts to erode the Fed’s independence — driving consumer prices up sharply two years into his second term. Peterson’s analysis concluded that inflation, which would otherwise be 1.9% in 2026, would instead rise to 6% to 9.3% if Trump’s economic proposals were adopted.
A judge has blocked a new rule that would require ballots to be counted by hand after voting closes on Election Day in Georgia. The same judge ruled a day earlier that provincial election officials cannot refuse to announce election results within the deadline set by law.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney late Tuesday blocked enforcement of the hand-count rule as 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 argued that too new rules introduced by the Trump-backed majority in the State Election Board could be used to block or delay certification and undermine public confidence in the results.