Suspicious mail containing white powder sent to election offices in at least 16 states
(NEW YORK) — The FBI and Postal Service are investigating suspicious mail containing a white powder substance that was sent to election offices in at least 16 states this week, according to an ABC News canvass of the country.
None of the mail has been deemed hazardous so far — and in one case, the substance was determined to be flour — but the scare prompted evacuations in some locations.
Election offices in New York, Tennessee, Wyoming, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Colorado received the suspicious packages. Similar suspicious mail was addressed to offices in additional states — Arizona, Georgia, Connecticut and Maryland among them — but investigators intercepted them before they reached their destination.
The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a statement Tuesday that they were investigating letters containing white powdery substances. A law enforcement source said at this point none of the packages were believed to be hazardous.
“We are also working with our partners to determine how many letters were sent, the individual or individuals responsible for the letters, and the motive behind the letters,” the statement read.
At least some of the packages were signed by the “United States Traitor Elimination Army,” according to a copy of a letter sent to members of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center obtained by ABC News.
Election offices office in Kansas and Wyoming were evacuated on Monday, officials said, and the ventilation system in the Missouri secretary of state’s office in Jefferson City was briefly shut off as a precaution. The North Carolina Board of Elections did not receive any packages with white powder, but an official there told ABC News they are putting in place new safety precautions in light of the incidents in other states.
This latest incident marks the second time in the past year that suspicious mailings containing a white powdery substance were sent to election offices. Last November, similar envelopes were sent to elections offices in five states — four of which tested positive for fentanyl, the FBI said at the time.
In the intervening months, several offices have taken steps to train staff on how to handle poisonous material sent in the mail. In Milwaukee, for example, election workers recently received training on how to administer Narcan.
The National Association of Secretaries of State released a statement urging an end to the “threatening and intimidating actions towards election officials” during recent election cycles.
“This must stop, period,” the statement read. “Our democracy has no place for political violence, threats or intimidation of any kind.”
(WASHINGTON) — Once dubbed the longest general election ever, the 2024 presidential race has been flipped on its head.
A rapid ticket shuffle in the Democratic Party means what is typically a year of campaigning will be boiled down to just 10 weeks as newly-nominated Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump hit the trail after their party conventions.
Harris will be looking to maintain her momentum and Trump, in turn, will try to blunt any further progress for Democrats after President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside resulted in a significant energy shift.
“What the Harris campaign did was bring polling back to normal, and normal in a polarized age means dead heat races nationally,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told ABC News. “Now we have what’s clearly a tied race going forward.”
Next up as the race kicks into high gear, Ayres said, will be a laser-focus on the handful of swing states that will determine the electoral college winner — an area where Trump’s generally had the upper hand this cycle.
Harris this week is campaigning with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, in Georgia for the first time. Trump is ratcheting up his appearances with stops in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The shorter campaign generally favors Harris, strategists on both sides of the aisle said, but still presents challenges for both candidates.
“The compressed calendar has reduced the surface area of attack for the Trump campaign,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “Having to navigate a 100-day window of scrutiny is preferable to having to endure a year’s worth of attacks from your opponents.”
It also makes it likelier Harris can keep the momentum last until Americans begin casting their ballots, which in some places starts as early as late September.
“They’re peaking at the right time,” Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright said of the Harris-Walz ticket. “And that’s what you want to do in politics because the worst thing you can do — and Trump may be suffering from this — is peak too soon.”
Still, it means less time for Harris to deliver her message to voters, who may have questions about where she stands on certain policies given her limited agenda rollout since her late entry as the nominee. Trump, meanwhile, has name recognition and legislative positions stretching back nine years.
“It’s harder for the Harris campaign to get her policies out in a short campaign,” said Douglas Herman, who led Barack Obama’s mail strategy in 2008 and 2012. “It’s harder to fill in all of the details in a short campaign.”
“The major objective for the Harris campaign is to continue to put meat on the bones for the voters,” Herman added.
Plus, if any serious blunders are made, there is less time for Harris to bounce back.
Her next big test will be her promised interview since becoming the nominee. No date has been set, though Harris said she would get her team to schedule an interview before the end of the month.
“The real risk of Harris avoiding the media for an extended period of time is first, it can’t go on forever,” said Madden. “And second, it just builds up anticipation for that first interview or press conference and turns it into a major event. That just creates added pressure on the performance.”
Then next month, Harris and Trump will meet for their first debate hosted by ABC News. The showdown, set for Sept. 10., will be held at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
There will also undoubtedly be unknown external factors that will impact the campaigns over the next 70 days.
“This race is so close now that I can’t help but believe it’s going to be decided by events that haven’t happened yet,” said Ayres. “When we think back on what’s happened over the last six weeks, it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict what might happen over the next six or 10 weeks.”
(NEW YORK) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff blasted remarks made by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who said Vice President Kamala Harris “doesn’t have anything to keep her humble” because she does not have biological children.
“We know that all parents, no matter how you become one, make the same sacrifices and revel in the same joys of raising children as any parent anywhere,” Emhoff defended his wife while speaking at a campaign event in Brooklyn, New York, Wednesday evening.
“As if keeping women humble, whether you have children or not, is something we should strive for. It is not,” the second gentleman said. “Women in this country will never humble themselves before Donald Trump.”
Emhoff referred to Sanders’ comment as “unbelievable,” and he expressed his appreciation for his wife, ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff, and their “big, beautiful, blessed family.”
Harris is the stepmom to Cole and Ella Emhoff, her husband’s children from his first marriage.
Kerstin Emhoff jumped to Harris’ defense as well, responding to a video of Sanders on X.
“Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families. That keeps you pretty humble,” she wrote Tuesday.
Sanders had been speaking at a Michigan town hall with former President Donald Trump on Tuesday when she made the comments. “So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” she said.
During a visit Wednesday to a Bitcoin bar in Greenwich Village, New York, Trump was asked about Sanders’ remarks and whether Harris should be attacked for not having biological children.
“Well, I just don’t know what I think about it, you know,” Trump said during the event.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance previously commented on Harris and other women for not having children with his well-known “childless cat ladies” comment.
In the 2021 clip, which only recently resurfaced, Vance accused Harris and the Democrats of being “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
There has been much backlash to Vance’s remark, and some have even made mocked the comment by making it their own. Most famously, Taylor Swift signed her endorsement for Harris as a “childless cat lady.”
ABC News’ Will McDuffie, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Fritz Farrow, and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris’ replacement of President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket could keep the electoral battlefield confined to the typical handful of swing states after the electoral map appeared to be mushrooming in Republicans’ favor.
After Biden’s ruinous debate performance last month, Republicans boasted and Democrats feared that blue and blue-leaning states like New Hampshire, New Mexico, Virginia and even New Jersey were suddenly in play. But now, operatives in both parties predicted that having a Democratic nominee who’s not dogged by such weighty baggage takes those states back off the table, recalibrating the race back to the Rust and Sun Belts.
“She definitely helps us play less defense,” one source familiar with Harris’ campaign’s strategy said. “States that were blue-leaning states that became more competitive post-debate based on early polling seem to be shifting back.”
Democratic alarm was high after last month’s debate, when Biden’s bumbling performance sent Democrats into a tizzy and had Republicans dreaming about a landslide victory.
Handwringing over traditional swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina in the Sun Belt was exacerbated by discussions of having to bolster states where Democrats should waltz to victory but could prove competitive as Biden’s poll numbers cratered.
“I was getting calls pretty much on a daily basis with concern,” said Henry Roybal, the chair of the Santa Fe County Democratic Party in New Mexico.
Now, “New Mexico is off the map,” he said.
The story is the same elsewhere.
Conversations with operatives in traditionally noncompetitive states echoed Roybal’s account, even if they believe that former President Donald Trump still would have struggled to carry their electoral votes and there wasn’t definitive polling to prove he could.
After the debate, one senior New Jersey Democratic strategist insisted Biden could have won their state by a mid-single-digit margin after winning it by about 16 points in 2020. The state is now “completely off the table,” the person said.
Some Republicans aren’t entirely convinced.
Harris ran a dysfunctional 2020 presidential campaign and had to drop out before any primary votes were cast, and her approval ratings at the start of her nascent campaign are low. And while the blue-leaning states are still safer for Harris than traditional swing states, Republicans maintain any slip ups could keep them in play.
“It all depends upon how Kamala Harris runs her campaign and how she performs under the enormous pressure of a presidential contest. She did not acquit herself well when she ran for the 2020 nomination,” said GOP pollster Whit Ayres.” If she’s a whole lot better than she was then, then conceivably, those states could be off the table again. On the other hand, if she does not perform well, I think all those states are potential Trump pickups.”
Trump is not giving up on those states. He is blitzing Harris with attacks on her record, labeling her a “California liberal,” and will hold his second joint rally with Ohio Sen. JD Vance, his running mate, in St. Cloud, Minn, on Saturday, firing up his voters in a state no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1972.
“As more voters understand how dangerously liberal Kamala Harris is, President Trump’s chances in these traditionally-Democrat strongholds will only get better,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.
Still, other Republicans concede that Harris’ candidacy introduces stiffer headwinds than existed when Biden topped Democrats’ ticket. Underscoring the point, a New York Times/Siena College poll released Thursday found Harris and Trump statistically tied, an improvement from earlier this month when the same poll found Trump ahead of Biden by 6 points.
“I expect Harris will be stronger. I mean, you just can’t help but be stronger, regardless of performance level,” said New Hampshire GOP strategist Mike Dennehy. “And so now it’s just a question of how well she does on the stump and in debates.”
“It’s too early to know exactly, but my overall summary is she probably stems the bleeding and raises the floor, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s going to be able to put away states that she needs to,” Virginia-based Republican strategist Zack Roday added.
Now, the race is expected to shift back to the seven swing states that were at the top of the battleground map at the start of the race, with the source familiar with the campaign’s strategy telling ABC News “we’re seeing a reversion to what we expected this race to be pre-presidential debate.”
All seven states are anticipated to be decided by razor-thin margins, with millions of dollars dumped in by both campaigns. Already, Harris has hit the campaign trail in Wisconsin, a marquee swing state.
Harris’ campaign released a memo Wednesday saying it “intend[s] to play offense in each of these states, and have the resources and campaign infrastructure to do so.”
“This campaign will be close, it will be hard fought, but Vice President Harris is in a position of strength – and she’s going to win,” Campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon wrote.
Taking Republicans’ stretch states off the table as much as she can is a key part of remaining competitive in the true battlegrounds. The universe of campaign finance is gargantuan but finite — and every dollar spent in New Jersey or New Mexico is one not spent in Arizona or Michigan.
“The one thing it likely changes is, right now, the ground game,” said one national GOP strategist. “Are they going to shift resources out of specific swing states into other states because the map doesn’t feel as large for Democrats anymore to have to defend territory?”
And Harris’ ability to prevent a landslide for Trump is not just key for her — it’s also important for Democrats’ hopes for the House of Representatives and Senate.
Several key down-ballot races are being held in both swing states and blue-leaning states, and Harris’ ability to keep the margin at the top of the ticket competitive in battlegrounds and expansive in states she wins — rather than a blowout for Trump, as was speculated with Biden — would be a massive boon to congressional contenders.
“It’s critical. If you’re a Senate or a governor candidate or a congressional candidate, you can run ahead of the top of the ticket by a handful of points, three or four. You can’t run ahead at the top of the ticket by 10 or 12 points,” Ayres said.
Biden, he added, “definitely could have gotten blown out.”