2024 election updates: Harris counters racist remarks on Puerto Ricans at Trump rally
(WASHINGTON) — As we head into the final full week of campaigning before Election Day, the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll shows Kamala Harris with a slight 51-47% lead over Donald Trump among likely voters nationally — but the polls in the battleground states remain essentially deadlocked within the margin of error.
Fallout continues over racist comments made at Trump’s big rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden and Harris is preparing for her “closing argument” Tuesday night on the Ellipse near the Capitol and White House in Washington.
Of the 41,989,199 total early votes, 21,111,171 were cast in person and 21,338,290 were balloted returned by mail.
On Monday, voters in Washington, D.C., can start casting their ballots early, in person. Almost all of the states that offer in-person early voting have begun offering it by now.
-ABC News’ Oren Oppenheim
Michelle Obama uses op-ed to reiterate message imploring men to support women’s reproductive health
The former first lady repeated her passionate message on women’s health being at stake this election in an op-ed published by the New York Times on Monday,
The op-ed featured excerpted remarks from her rally in Michigan on Saturday in which she blasted Trump’s record on the issue in comparison to Harris’, and made an appeal to men to support the women in their lives. The rally marked her first campaign appearance since her speech at the Democratic National Convention this summer.
“I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” she said. “Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.”
Despite her stated aversion to partisan politics, the former first lady is ramping up her involvement in the final stretch of the 2024 campaign. She will headline a rally on Tuesday in battleground Georgia.
Harris counters dark and racist comments at Trump’s MSG rally
Harris is countering the dark and racist comments made by speakers at Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden, while the former president’s campaign tries to distance itself from the comedian who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
Harris will stump in two critical counties in the battleground state of Michigan to kick off the final full week of campaigning. First, she will visit Corning’s manufacturing facility in Saginaw before getting a tour at a union training facility in Macomb County.
The vice president will cap the day with a rally with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, in Ann Arbor. The rally will feature a concert by musician Maggie Rogers.
Trump will be in Georgia to deliver remarks at National Faith Advisory Board in Powder Springs before a 6 p.m. ET rally in Atlanta.
(LA CROSSE, Wis.) — Former President Donald Trump introduced a new campaign platform on Thursday aimed at helping Americans with the cost of IVF.
At a town hall moderated by his supporter, one-time Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, Trump said he and his team have been exploring ways to help those wanting in vitro fertilization.
“I’ve been looking at it, and what we’re going to do is for people that are using IVF, which is fertilization … the government is going to pay for it, or we’re going to get — we’ll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that,” he told Gabbard.
“We want to produce babies in this country, right?” he added.
Trump first spoke about the idea of government-funded or insurance-covered fertility treatments earlier in the day during a campaign stop in the battleground state of Michigan.
When asked by NBC News if it would be the government or insurance companies paying for IVF, the network reported that Trump said it would be the latter, “under a mandate.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s camp on Thursday night walked back comments the former president made earlier in the day suggesting he did not support Florida’s now-implemented six-week ban on abortions.
“I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time and I told them I want more weeks,” Trump told NBC.
“I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” he added, noting that he believes abortion should be a states’ issue, something he’s said before.
Later, though, Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to clarify the candidate’s remarks.
“President Trump has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” Leavitt said in a statement.
Susan B. Anthony, Pro-Life America, President Marjorie Dannenfelser also released a statement Thursday night saying she had spoken to the president, and he told her he hasn’t “committed” to how he’ll vote on Florida’s Amendment 4. The amendment, if passed, would insert language into the state’s constitution that abortions determined medically necessary by a patient’s healthcare provider would be permitted.
“He has not committed to how he will vote on Amendment 4. President Trump has consistently opposed abortions after five months of pregnancy. Amendment 4 would allow abortion past this point. Voting for Amendment 4 completely undermines his position,” her statement read.
(WASHINGTON) — When former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in July, he made an initial pitch for unity. It didn’t last long.
And he’s taken a decidedly different tack after a second apparent assassination attempt Sunday at his Florida golf club.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump laid blame for the political violence on Democrats, telling Fox News Digital the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was “causing me to be shot at” while also asserting they are “destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Harris, he posted on social media, “has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”
He also claimed, without evidence, that the suspects in both cases were “radical left” despite their motives not having been publicly determined. (Investigators are currently examining Florida suspect Ryan Wesley Routh’s frustration with Trump’s position on Ukraine, sources told ABC News. In the Pennsylvania rally shooting, the suspected gunman, Thomas Mathew Crooks, was a registered Republican but had also made a small donation to a progressive group in 2021.)
Regardless, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, doubled down on the “blame Democrats” strategy at a campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday.
“I think that it’s time to say to the Democrats, to the media, to everybody that has been attacking this man and trying to censor this man for going on 10 years, cut it out or you’re going to get somebody killed,” Vance said.
Susan Benesch, founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said Trump’s statements are “impossible not to put it in the context of his relentless use of violent rhetoric.”
“So, he’s a pot calling the kettle black,” Benesch said. “At the same time, that doesn’t mean that it is false when he says his political opponents are describing him as a threat to democracy.”
Harris and Biden condemned Sunday’s incident and shared their relief that Trump was safe. Biden called Trump and they had a “nice” conversation, the former president told ABC News. Harris said she also checked in with Trump and “told him what I have said publicly, I said there is no place for political violence in our country.”
“We can and should have healthy debates and discussion and disagreements, but not resort to violence to resolve those issues,” Harris said.
Still, Trump’s campaign has shared a list of over 50 quotes from Democrats they suggested lead to the second assassination attempt. Most of them include language from Biden, Harris and other party leaders that cast Trump as a “threat to democracy.”
The statements were often made when the lawmakers were discussing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, or Trump’s pledges to take political retribution if elected in November.
Republican leaders are also pointing to a 2023 comment from Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman in which he said Trump was “destructive to democracy” and should be “eliminated” — which Goldman apologized for, saying while he believed Trump should be defeated in the election he “certainly wish no harm to him and do not condone political violence.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked on Tuesday if President Biden would stop calling Trump a “threat to democracy” given recent developments. Jean-Pierre suggested he would not, saying he had a responsibility to “be honest with the American people” about the possible dangers posed by the former president.
Others have also noted a contrast between Democrats’ criticism of Trump and Trump’s more inflammatory — and sometimes patently false — statements on everything from election integrity to immigration to his targeting of perceived political enemies.
In one more extreme example, Trump appeared to defend the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” telling ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl “the people were very angry.” Though Trump has adamantly denied claims from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that she heard Trump say “hang” repeatedly while watching the attack unfold on television, and she did not provide further evidence for the assertion.
“He has used rhetoric to attack the peaceful transition of power. He has used rhetoric to attack his opposition. No president has ever done that before. It’s not normal and it’s not democratic,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University.
“So, when Democrats point that out, those are true facts, right?” she told ABC News.
Benesch, whose independent research team working on rhetoric that inspires violence, agreed there “is no question that the bounds of mainstream American political discourse shifted” since Trump entered politics.
“I think it is really important to recognize that he and his supporters are not the only ones who now speak in ways that normalize or even encourage violence, but he and his supporters have been doing it and are doing it much more than anybody else on the American political scene,” Benesch said.
Former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, who is now a co-host of “The View,” wrote on X that everyone has “a duty to take the temperature down” but that it was “simply dishonest for Trump [and] his allies to say his opponents shouldn’t use the very language he regularly uses: fascist, enemy within, vermin, traitors, you won’t have a country.”
The Trump campaign, in response to experts who say his own history of inflammatory rhetoric plays a large role in what’s become a heightened threat environment, told ABC News: “Only one candidate in this election has been shot at twice, and it’s not Kamala Harris.”
“The violence is coming from the political left and it’s the responsibility of Kamala Harris, as the Democrat Party nominee, to condemn the false inflammatory lie that President Trump is an alleged threat to democracy,” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “He is not, and she knows it.”
Benesch said the solution to deescalate the current atmosphere would be for leaders or influencers to convincingly condemn their own party’s language. But she expressed little confidence that would happen before the election.
“Unfortunately, nobody has a political incentive to denounce such rhetoric on their own side or in their own group, but that’s what it’s going to take,” she said. “Or such severe violence that it frightens leaders and influencers into demanding that their own supporters tone it down.”
(CHICAGO) — Former President Bill Clinton made an astounding claim at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night about the relative success of Democratic presidents when compared to their Republican counterparts in the area of job creation. The statistic is misleading, however.
“Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1,” Clinton told the audience at the United Center in Chicago.
Technically, the statistic is accurate, as long as one sets the date for the end of the Cold War at around January 1989. But the statistic omits relevant information.
To start, the Berlin Wall did not fall until November 1989. Beginning the tally in November 1989 would have shaved off some additional jobs created under President George H.W. Bush, leaving the Republicans at a net-negative job tally over the years since. That statistic would have appeared even more lopsided.
By setting his calculation to begin at the end of the Cold War, meanwhile, Clinton leaves out 16.8 million jobs created under President Ronald Reagan from 1980 to 1988.
Since January 1989, the U.S. has added 51.5 million jobs, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. During Democratic administrations, the nation has added nearly 50 million of those jobs. By contrast, Republican presidents have overseen the creation of some 1.5 million jobs over that period, according to BLS data.
In general, presidents exert limited control over the jobs created while they’re in office. Each of the last three Republican presidents – George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — ended his term in office during a period of economic difficulty.
For instance, debate persists over the extent to which George W. Bush deserves blame for the Great Recession, when some of the contributing factors took hold before he entered office. The Great Recession also weighed on the economy during the Obama presidency, but the downturn began before he took office.
In all, George H.W. Bush oversaw the creation of 2.6 million jobs, while George W. Bush helped the economy add another 2.1 million jobs. A portion of those gains is wiped out, however, by 2.8 million job losses under Trump as a result of COVID-19.
Economists disagree in their assessment of Trump’s handling of the economy after the outbreak of the pandemic.
Still, Clinton accurately notes that Democratic presidents have overseen the economy during periods of booming job growth. The economy added 23.2 million jobs during the Clinton administration, and another 10.5 million jobs during the presidency of Barack Obama.
Over the first three and half years of the Biden administration, the economy has added 16.2 million jobs.