With just over two weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election and the race in a dead heat, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here’s the latest:
At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump attacked his opponent and the Biden administration, claiming they haven’t properly supported the western part of the state after it was battered by Hurricane Helene last month.
He repeated an incorrect claim that the federal government doesn’t have enough money for hurricane victims because it is being used to help immigrants in the country illegally.
“They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina,” he said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund gets replenished every year by Congress and is used to pay for recovery from natural disasters. The agency said that money is only used for disaster-related efforts and hasn’t been diverted to support border issues.
“Did I?” she said while getting off Air Force Two in Michigan. “I did.”
Harris also gave a thumb’s up.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the Republican nominee’s comments “dangerous” and said they had been debunked on a bipartisan basis.
Jean-Pierre noted that 5,500 federal personnel were in North Carolina and Florida after Helene and Hurricane Milton. And she said $2 billion in federal assistance had been approved for those affected in North Carolina.
“They are dangerous,” Jean-Pierre said of Trump’s remarks. “They are unhelpful. It is not what leadership looks like.”
Under sunny skies in Greenville, North Carolina, most of the thousands of supporters of Donald Trump seemed cheerful and upbeat while in the queue to hear the former president speak inside East Carolina University’s basketball arena.
Several people interviewed said immigration and the economy, particular inflation and taxes, were among their greatest concerns. Some remain worried about the ultimate electoral outcome in North Carolina and that they expected any final Election Day result nationally to be challenged by whichever side is trailing.
“I feel like that no matter who wins there’s going to be problems,” said Emma Macomber, 76, of New Bern, a registered unaffiliated voter wearing a pro-Trump hat. “Yes, it bothers me, but I put it in God’s hands and accept whatever happens.”
Early in-person voting historically has been favored by Democrats in North Carolina, with Republicans more inclined to cast ballots on Election Day. But GOP officials have emphasized this cycle voting during the 17-day period that began last week.
Monica Loch of Mebane, a registered Republican in her late 50s, said she tried to vote on the first day but the lines were too long for her to wait. But she was resolute to vote. Loch sounded resigned to a painful path to a final electoral result.
“I can only hope and pray that Trump does win — and I’m not sure,” Loch said. “I’m not sure with the climate of everybody being quite honestly so nasty and stuff. I cannot get a good read on it.”
Harris was asked a question from an audience member about maternal mortality in the U.S. She said the U.S. needs to do better and that abortion rights are one piece of better healthcare for women.
Republican Liz Cheney, who’s campaigning with Harris, said she thinks there are many “pro-life people who have watched what is going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need.”
Asked by a reporter how likely he felt he was to win North Carolina, the Republican nominee turned to the line of supporters behind him.
“Let me ask you, do you think I’ll win North Carolina?” he asked.
“He’ll win,” responded one of the people behind him.
Visiting the Asheville area Monday, Trump alleged that Gov. Roy Cooper had not done a good job responding to Hurricane Helene.
Cooper held a briefing earlier on Monday where he asked Trump to “not share lies or misinformation” about the disaster response.
The first question for Harris during a moderated conversation with Republican Liz Cheney was about how she’d help make it easier for people in the “sandwich” generation, who are caring for their parents and also their small kids.
The voter, Alexandra Miller, has a 7-year-old and a 72-year-old mother who she also cares for, and she teared up explaining it to the Democratic nominee. She says it’s impossibly hard and expensive.
Harris says “this issue for me is a matter of dignity.” She says she will restructure so Medicare covers the cost in-home healthcare for older people, so there would be assistance.
She’s campaigning with Republican Liz Cheney and talking to a group of voters in suburban Pennsylvania. She says Donald Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric has dominated American discourse for too long.
She says it’s been used “in a way that has been using the power of the presidency to demean and divide us.”
She says Americans are exhausted by Trump’s rhetoric and ready for a return to caring about neighbors.
Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards noted he also owns McDonald’s franchises and that Trump had learned to make French fries a day earlier.
He presented Trump with what he called a “French fry certification pin.” Trump held up the pin affixed to a piece of paper.
Mike Stewart, owner of Pine View Buildings, thanked the Republican nominee for visiting the region and offered to pray for him.
Putting a hand on Trump’s shoulder, Stewart prayed to God, “I ask that you anoint Donald Trump.”
Cheney is campaigning with Harris in battleground states Monday. She says the most conservative value of all is to be “faithful to the Constitution.” And she believes Harris will be, and more importantly, Republican Donald Trump will not be.
Cheney says Trump’s actions after the violent Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol show he doesn’t take the U.S. Constitution seriously.
The women were talking in a conversation moderated by a GOP strategist. They began their day in Pennsylvania. The women spoke to a crowd of voters, sitting in front of signs that read: “Country over Party.”
He visited a part of Asheville heavily damaged by the hurricane. There were huge piles of debris near where he stopped, with abandoned cars and many buildings smashed or knocked off their foundations.
Trump again criticized the federal government for what he said was not a good enough job helping people recover. He said that if elected president, he would stand with the region until “the communities are fully rebuilt.”
Walz said on “The View” that his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris “actually worked at McDonalds. She didn’t go and pander, and disrespect McDonald’s workers, by standing there in your red tie: Take a picture.”
Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonalds on Sunday, gleefully working the fry station and answering questions from reporters in the drive thru.
Walz was also asked on “The View” to name one nice thing about Trump, but demurred. He offered only that one positive is, “He will not be president again.”
But he said that wasn’t the same as Republican former President Donald Trump’s constant, deliberate misstatements.
“I do think it’s important that we’re careful about how we speak,” Walz said of making previously misleading statements, that he later had to correct. Those included talking about his service in the National Guard and past travel to China.
“But I think the public sees,” Walz added, “Just the massive amount of misinformation that gets out there,” driven by Trump.
Walz was asked about how the Democratic ticket would bring change after Election Day.
He pointed to Harris proposing expanding Medicare funding so that it covers home-care costs for the “sandwich generation,” or Americans caring for aging parents and children at the same time.
“I think she’s really leaning into these issues that impact people first,” Walz said, “Those are pretty big differences.”
Walz, also the governor of Minnesota, is on the same set weeks after Harris herself made a View appearance. She was asked then about what she’d do different in the White House than what’s been done by President Joe Biden, but failed to name major changes.
Walz said of one of his unofficial campaign slogans, “Mind your own damn business,” is a good way to live, making Americans better neighbors.
Western North Carolina will recover, Gov. Cooper said at a storm recovery effort briefing Monday in Asheville, but they “don’t need the election process to hurt recovery efforts.”
Cooper said a bipartisan bill that he signed increases opportunities to vote, giving county boards and voters more flexibility, but disinformation and misinformation that hurts the people they’re trying to help “needs to stop.”
Many storm survivors lost everything and they want help and truth, he said.
“We should work together to give them both,” Cooper said. “Storm recovery cannot be partisan. To truly help people, we must check party politics at the door and get this job done.”
One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.
“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”
On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.
“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”
▶ Read more about Trump’s comments on Arnold Palmer.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who was trying to hold Trump liable for his jailing that he said was retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir.
The justices did not explain their reasoning in the brief, routine order.
Cohen had asked the high court to revive a lawsuit filed after his early release from prison during the coronavirus pandemic was quickly reversed. Authorities said he wouldn’t accept some conditions of his release, but Cohen said he’d only asked if he could speak to the media about his memoir. He sued Trump, then-Attorney General William Barr and prison officials.
Cohen served time after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance charges in 2018. He said Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential bid. Trump has denied wrongdoing.
She made the comments during an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” about revamped White House tours. The interview aired Monday morning.
Asked by Deborah Roberts if it would be tough to leave the White House, Biden said “we’re starting a new chapter of our lives, a new journey.”
Roberts asked if her husband made the correct decision to stop his bid for another four years.
“It was the right call, yes,” the first lady said.
Kamala Harris’ campaign and affiliated Democratic groups raised about $633 million for the quarter, which ended last month, pushing their total to over $1 billion and maintaining a large financial advantage over Republican candidate Donald Trump in the election’s final sprint.
The vice president’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties raised more than $359 million in September alone.
But Harris’ campaign is spending heavily too. It raised about $222 million on its own in September, only to pay out about $270 million over the same period — helping to boost a large advertising push.
The Harris campaign and affiliated committees entered October with $346 million on hand, according to federal filings.
Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and affiliated groups previously reported raising $160 million in September. By October, they had $283 million in the bank.
Reproductive rights measures are on the ballots in 10 states after heated debates over how to describe their impact on abortion — and that’s just in English.
In 388 places across the U.S. where English isn’t the primary language among communities of voters, the federal Voting Rights Act requires that all elections information be made available in each community’s native language.
Such translations are meant to help non-native English speakers understand what they’re voting for. But vague or technical terms can be challenging, even more so when it comes to Indigenous languages that have only limited written dictionaries.
For example, there’s no single word for abortion in the native language of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in Colorado’s Montezuma County. New York’s referendum doesn’t even use the word “abortion,” making it all the more challenging to convey intent, advocates complain. And how exactly should the science of “viability” in the Florida and Nevada measures be explained in the oral traditions of the Seminole and Shoshone tribes?
The Navajo and Hopi tribes get more material translated than most, and they have more than enough voters to sway outcomes.
▶ Read more about translating ballot measures into other languages.
Voters remain largely divided over whether they prefer Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris to handle key economic issues, although Harris earns slightly better marks on elements such as taxes for the middle class, according to a new poll.
A majority of registered voters in the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research describe the economy as poor. About 7 in 10 say the nation is going in the wrong direction.
But the findings reaffirm that Trump has lost what had been an advantage on the economy, which many voters say is the most important issue this election season above abortion, immigration, crime and foreign affairs.
“Do I trust Trump on the economy? No. I trust that he’ll give tax cuts to his buddies like Elon Musk,” said poll respondent Janice Tosto, a 59-year-old Philadelphia woman and self-described independent.
An AP-NORC poll conducted in September found neither Harris nor Trump had a clear advantage on handling “the economy and jobs.” But this poll asked more specific questions about whether voters trusted Trump or Harris to do a better job handling the cost of housing, jobs and unemployment, taxes on the middle class, the cost of groceries and gas, and tariffs.
▶ Read more about the poll.
Donald Trump went to a barbershop in the Bronx section of New York for a segment with commentator Lawrence Jones that aired Monday on “Fox & Friends.”
He took questions from clients at the business about immigration, energy and taxes. The barbers wore a black shirt with the phrase “Make Barbers Great Again.”
One of the clients asked Trump if, once he generated enough revenue with some of his proposals, it would be possible to eliminate federal taxes.
“There is a way. There is a way,” Trump said, adding that in the 1890s, people did not have to pay income taxes.
The business owner, who leases the building, told him his main challenge was paying for his energy bill, which had shot up from $2,100 to $15,000 in the last seven months.
“What?” Trump said. “How many heads can you take care of? That’s a lot.”
Trump asked how much average hair cuts cost and how much they had gone up. He was told they had gone up from a range between $12 and $15 to between $30 and $40.
Toward the end of the visit, Trump told the men “you guys are the same as me. It’s the same stuff. We were born the same way.”
For Rona Kaufman, the signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump.
It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she observed during a question-and-answer at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It’s in her own family.
“The family that is my generation and older generations, I don’t think anybody is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican, ever,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. “My sister has a Trump sign outside her house, and that is a huge shift.”
How big a shift? Surveys continue to find that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she’s an exception.
Still, any shift could have enormous implications in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election is like no other in memory, coming amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year.
▶ Read more about Jewish voters in this election.