Harris to have moderated conversations with Liz Cheney in 3 battleground states
Joel Angel Juarez for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON, DC) — Vice President Kamala Harris will do a series of moderated conversations with former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney in suburban cities in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on Monday — the day before in-person voting begins in Wisconsin.
With roughly two weeks until Election Day, the effort is part of the Harris campaign’s effort to reach swing voters in the crucial battleground states. Harris will speak with Cheney in the suburban areas of Chester County, Pennsylvania; Oakland County, Michigan; and Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
The conversations will be moderated by Bulwark publisher and longtime Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host and writer Charlie Sykes.
Both Harris and former President Donald Trump have events scheduled for battleground states this week as they work to win over voters in what’s expected to be a close contest. On Monday, Trump is spending time in in the battleground state of North Carolina.
Cheney voted to impeach Trump following the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and was vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. She received backlash from Trump and other Republicans for her criticism of the former president and was censured by the Republican National Committee.
Cheney is among a handful of prominent Republicans, including her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have pledged to support Harris’ bid.
Harris’ events this week will feature more interactivity where voters see the vice president taking questions — including during her town hall with CNN on Wednesday in Pennsylvania.
ABC News’ Sarah Beth Hensley contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of President-elect Donald Trump whom he tapped to co-chair the Republican National Committee for the 2024 election cycle, said she intends to step down from her position.
The move comes amid mounting speculation that she could be tapped to fill an upcoming Senate vacancy in Florida, whose Sen. Marco Rubio has been nominated for secretary of state.
“The job I came to do is now complete and I intend to formally step down from the RNC at our next meeting,” Lara Trump said in a post on X.
Should Rubio be confirmed as secretary of state in Trump’s incoming administration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would need to choose a successor to serve out the rest of Rubio’s term, which expires in 2026.
“It is something I would seriously consider,” Lara Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press.
She added, “If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t know exactly what that would look like. And I certainly want to get all of the information possible if that is something that’s real for me. But yeah, I would 100% consider it.”
(WASHINGTON) — The election will not only decide who will occupy the White House for the next four years, but also which party controls both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 seats in the Senate are up for grabs.
Republicans currently control the House while Democrats retain a narrow majority in the Senate.
See how the balance of power is playing out as election results come in:
Significant shifts and what to watch in the Senate race
Jim Justice is projected to win the Senate seat in West Virginia, which flips the state from Democrat to Republican. Incumbent Joe Manchin decided not to run for reelection, putting Justice against Democrat Glenn Elliot and Libertarian Party candidate David Moran.
ABC News also projects that former President Donald Trump will win in West Virginia. As Dan Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote for ABC News’ live election coverage, “In most years, a Senate where every state votes for the same party for Senate and president is a Senate where the Democrats fall short of a majority.”
Another Democratic seat was lost in Ohio, where Republican nominee Bernie Moreno is projected to take the Senate position previously held — for three terms — by Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent. The presumed victory makes a large Republican majority in the Senate seem all the more likely.
In Maryland, Democratic Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks is projected to win against former Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican. She is expected to replace Sen. Ben Cardin, also a Democrat, who did not run for reelection, putting the state’s Democratic Senate seat at risk in a year where the party had none to lose if they hoped to retain their narrow majority.
Alsobrooks currently serves as the first woman elected to a county executive position in Maryland, and she now seems positioned to become the state’s first Black senator. She would also be making history, as Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester are projected to be the first two Black women to serve on the Senate at the same time.
(WASHINGTON) — There is roughly a month left to go in the 2024 presidential race, yet Donald Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric to possibly challenge the outcome.
For months, he’s accused Democrats of cheating, threatened to prosecute election workers and falsely claimed noncitizens are being allowed in the country to cast ballots.
Trump’s also now telling his supporters that if he loses in November, it will be the country’s “last election” — the latest dark comment in his increasingly bleak and dystopian campaign rhetoric.
Asked for comment on his remarks, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told ABC News: “President Trump has always stated we need free and fair elections, or we won’t have a country.”
Here’s a closer look at what Trump has said to supporters on the trail in an apparent effort to sow doubt on the voting process.
Trump falsely accuses Democrats of cheating
“They cheat. That’s all they want to do is cheat. And when you see this, it’s the only way they’re gonna win,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin on Oct. 6. “And we can’t let that happen and we can’t let it happen again. We’re going to have no country.”
Trump’s claims that Democrats cheated in the previous election or are doing so in this race are baseless.
Trump’s allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were debunked by his own administration officials, legal challenges failed in the courts and recounts or audits conducted in narrowly-decided swing states all affirmed President Joe Biden’s victory.
In this same vein, he’s also accused Democrats of staging “coup” when Biden dropped out and Harris succeeded him. Harris received 99% of the delegate votes in the Democratic National Committee’s virtual roll call vote after Biden exited the race.
Top officials in key battleground states have said they are confident in the integrity of this election. Many have testified on Capitol Hill or at conferences on the steps they’ve taken to boost voter confidence and make the process more transparent.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, noting it conducts two audits after every election, told ABC News it was “confident in the integrity of county officials and election administrators across the Commonwealth, despite irresponsible statements that are not based in fact or supported by evidence.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently reiterated that the state’s elections are “secure.” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said “every valid vote will count, the election will be secure, the results will be accurate. Just like in 2020.”
Trump threatens to prosecute election workers if elected
In a post on his conservative social media site last month, Trump said if he is back in the White House, he will prosecute anyone he deems was involved in “unscrupulous behavior” in the 2024 election.
“It was a Disgrace to our Nation!” he wrote of the 2020 election. “Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”
The prosecutions, he said, would extend to lawyers, donors, political operatives and election officials.
Election officials and experts told ABC News that Trump’s comments were “dangerous” given the heightened threat environment for election administrators and poll workers.
Trump falsely claims illegal immigrants are voting en masse
“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the ABC News presidential debate on Sept. 10. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, and recorded instances of undocumented immigrants casting ballots are incredibly rare, according to officials and studies.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has recorded about two-dozen instances where noncitizens were penalized for voting between 2003 and 2023. Over that period of time, the foundation found just 1,500 proven instances of overall voter fraud despite billions of votes being cast.
The Brennan Center, following the 2016 general election, also found noncitizen voting to be virtually nonexistent. The center reported that election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution — or 0.0001%.
Trump’s mixed messaging on mail-in ballots
Trump’s messaging on mail-in voting has been incredibly mixed. At times, he’s encouraged his supporters to vote by that method and in any other way possible — and voted himself by mail in 2020. Other times, however, he’s pushed a narrative that mail-in ballots are “corrupt” or not as secure.
“The elections are so screwed up. We have to get back in and we have to change it all,” Trump falsely said during a rally in Pennsylvania this past summer. “We want to go to paper ballots. We want to go to same-day voting. We want to go to citizenship papers. And we want to go to voter ID. It’s very simple. We want to get rid of mail-in voting.”
There are a number of safeguards in place to protect the voting process, including mail-in voting, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agency has set out to combat misinformation about elections on its website.
Trump’s also targeted the U.S. Postal Service, claiming the agency may not be prepared for the election — which prompted significant pushback from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who flatly said such comments are “wrong.”
More recently, Trump amplified false claims that a significant percentage of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania (considered a key state for both campaigns) were “fraudulent.” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro pushed back that mail ballots hadn’t been sent out yet when Trump made that claim and that the state conducts two audits after each election to ensure results are legitimate.
Trump still won’t accept he lost 2020 election
Trump continues to claim that the 2020 was stolen from him. His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, the top Republican on Capitol Hill, have also recently declined to say Trump lost that election.
“We won, we won, we did win,” Trump falsely told rallygoers in Michigan on Oct. 3. “It was a rigged election.”
President Biden recently stressed he believed the election would be “free and fair” but voiced worry it would not be “peaceful.” The concern, he said, came from Trump and Vance’s recent comments.
“They haven’t even accepted the outcome of the last election. So, I am concerned about what they’re going to do,” Biden said on Oct. 4.
At times, Trump and members of his campaign have said he will accept the 2024 results so long as it is a free and fair election.
“If it’s a fair and legal and good election, absolutely,” he said during the CNN presidential debate, declining to outrightly say he would accept the outcome.
That didn’t stop him, however, from challenging the 2020 election results despite no evidence of widespread fraud or wrongdoing.
ABC News’ Soorin Kim, Lalee Ibssa and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
