Harris to outline her ‘pragmatic’ economic vision in Wednesday speech
Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, speaks during an event at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre September 20, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris will define her economic views as “pragmatic” during a policy speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday as her team thinks she is making up ground against former President Donald Trump on the economy, a senior campaign official said.
In the speech, Harris plans to tell voters that “as a capitalist she understands the limitations of government” and that the government must “work in partnership with the private sector and entrepreneurs,” according to the senior official, granted anonymity to preview Harris’ speech. The official notes Harris will make clear “she is unafraid to hold bad actors accountable if she needs to.”
Harris is also expected to evoke former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal agenda brought America back from a steep economic downturn during the Great Depression, in her remarks, according to another senior campaign official.
The vice president will also argue that her economic philosophy is “rooted in her middle-class upbringing” and contrast that with Trump’s “gilded path to wealth,” as part of a larger values argument, the senior official said.
“For Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers. Not those who build them. Not those who wire them. Not those who mop the floors,” Harris is prepared to say Wednesday.
In drawing that comparison, Harris will highlight the “pressures of making ends meet” that she’ll say her mother experienced trying to balance a budget late at night at the kitchen table.
The remarks, to be delivered at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, comes as Harris and her advisers see an opening to erode Trump’s edge on the economy in voters’ eyes as many Americans get to know the vice president, a senior official said.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the ABC News presidential debate earlier this month found that the economy was the top issue for voters, with 91% saying it was an important issue for them. In that poll, voters trusted Trump to do a better job handling the economy than Harris by 7-point margin. A recent NBC News poll out Sunday showed Trump led Harris in dealing with the economy by a 9-point spread.
Harris has made the economy and the cost of living a focal point of her campaign. In recent weeks, Harris has rolled out proposals to give first time homebuyers $25,000 down payment assistance for first time homebuyers, increasing the small businesses start up tax credit tenfold to $50,000, and a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life.
(WASHINGTON) — The 2024 voting season officially kicked off Friday, as voters in three states can now line up at early voting polling sites or election offices to cast their ballot.
Early in-person voting sites opened throughout Virginia, on Friday, marking the first state to offer their voters that option. The state’s early voting sites will remain open until Nov. 2.
Over 1,796,000 votes were cast early in person in Virginia in the last presidential election, roughly 40% of the total vote, according to data from the Virginia Department of Elections. An additional 962,877 Virginia voters cast their 2020 ballot through the mail, with roughly 574,000 submitting their mail-in ballot before Election Day, according to the election data.
While the voters will be lining up at the polls in Virginia, voters in two other states will have the opportunity, starting Friday, to cast their ballot in person through a different method.
Minnesota and South Dakota are among 23 states that allow voters to hand in their absentee ballots in person to an election office or other designated location instead of mailing them.
In the last presidential election, over 1.9 million Minnesota voters voted via absentee, with 1.7 million of those ballots being returned before election day, according to the state’s Office of the Secretary of State.
Roughly 57% of the total Minnesota 2020 election ballots were cast before Election Day, according to the state data.
The office does not have data on the number of 2020 voters who opted to hand in their absentee ballot to an office.
Roughly 83,000 South Dakota voters cast their ballot through in-person absentee drop-off before Election Day in 2020, according to South Dakota’s secretary of state office.
Voters in a handful of other states who requested an absentee ballot can soon start checking their mailboxes, as this weekend also marks the deadline for some election offices to begin sending out their absentee ballots.
Idaho, Maryland, New York and West Virginia are all required to send out their absentee ballots Friday to all voters who requested one, according to the respective states’ election offices.
North Carolina must send out absentee ballots to military and overseas voters on Friday, according to the state’s election office.
Delaware, Indiana, New Jersey and Tennessee are required to send absentee ballots to their voters by Saturday, according to the states’ respective election offices. Some counties in Oklahoma may start sending their paper ballots to voters on that day, too, according to the state’s election office.
Experts predict there will be a large number of early voters this election season as the voting method has risen in popularity.
During the 2020 election, more than 69% of votes cast in the election were done through either mail-in ballots or early in-person voting, according to election data compiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab.
By comparison, only 40% voted early in the 2016 election and 33% in the 2012 election, the data showed.
(WASHINGTON) — Over one-third of Gen Z are worried they’ll need to move away from their hometowns due to climate change — and a majority of those in the generation across the political spectrum said politicians need to be held accountable, according to a new poll out Wednesday from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation.
The findings come from a new report that looks at the way Gen Z — those born between 1997 to 2012 — is experiencing and worrying about water issues in the context of climate change — as well as who they believe is responsible to address them. It’s a snapshot from a larger report on the generation’s feelings on climate issues due out in a few months.
“[Gen Z] have been seeing water, and water and climate their whole lives,” Moira Mcdonald, program director for the Environment Program at the Walton Family Foundation, told ABC News. “Their lives have essentially been punctuated by these big moments — the Gulf oil spill back in 2010, the Flint, Michigan, drinking water crisis with lead in the water. They had everyday exposure to the rising seas and warming ocean issue the last few years.”
The poll found that among those in Gen Z who worry they’ll need to move due to climate change, 73% believe it will be because of a water issue such as water pollution, flooding risk, lack of access to clean drinking water and the risk of drought.
The poll also found that 31% of Gen Z are concerned their generation won’t have enough clean water in the future, 72% are concerned about pollution in their waterways and 66% are worried about the health of the fish and oceans.
Among voting age Gen Zers, the poll found that 88% believed politicians are responsible for addressing water issues related to climate change.
Stevie O’Hanlon, communications director for the youth-led climate advocacy organization Sunrise Movement, explained that young people want to see political action on climate issues.
“We have seen a climate change before our eyes for essentially our entire lives, and we look on to a future when we are the age of people like Joe Biden and Donald Trump with a lot of fear about what’s going to happen in the next 50 years,” O’Hanlon said. “Young people are demanding real action from politicians to stop the climate crisis and protect our rights to clean air and water.”
During the 2024 election cycle, climate change has not been polling as a top issue for U.S. voters across all age groups, but some, like Evergreen Action’s senior communications director Holly Burke, say that it may grow in political importance as Gen Z and younger generations age into the voting population.
“Only the eldest of Gen Z are currently able to vote and fully in the electorate and regularly voting. So I think we’re really only beginning to see this demographic shift, but I think it’s already had a huge impact,” Burke told ABC News, citing the political pressure from young activists that spurred national climate action investments including the Inflation Reduction Act.
“[Young climate activists have] already had some big successes, and I think as they become a bigger part of the electorate, they’re only going to become more influential,” she added.
Researchers found that worries around water — and more broadly around climate change — spanned the political spectrum.
Eighty-two percent of voting-age Gen Zers identifying as Republicans and 96% of those identifying as Democrats said they believe that politicians and governments are “very or somewhat responsible” for improving the quality of water resources, according to researchers.
Burke said climate advocacy has been a “deeply partisan” issue for a long time. But noted that she has seen a shift in Republicans’ willingness to engage on climate issues among young conservatives, but said she hasn’t yet seen that change in the larger party.
“I can’t imagine that Republicans are going to immediately come around to the kind of bold climate solutions that I’m looking for, but I would love to have them at the table in a real discussion about how we can reduce emissions and things we can agree on to get done,” she said. “That would be a tremendously positive change.”
Some young conservatives have banded together to push their party toward more engagement on climate issues. The American Conservation Coalition, a nonprofit organization made up of young political conservatives (aged 18-35), was founded in 2017 with a mission to, “build the conservative environmental movement.”
“Organizations like ACC that represent young conservatives who care about this issue send a pretty clear signal to our leaders that this is an issue that will continue to be really important,” ACC’s Vice President of Communications Karly Matthews told ABC News. “But I also think there’s a really rich history of environmental conservation in the conservative movement, in the Republican Party, and that was kind of not emphasized as much or lost a little bit when climate change became kind of this polarizing topic.”
Matthews said she agreed that climate issues “will continue to be depolarized, and I think that’ll be shown from the general populace of young people, kind of uniting on this issue.”
As for Mcdonald of the Walton Family Foundation, when asked by ABC News whether her organization’s research suggests change will move up the ranks of political priority as more of Gen Z reaches the voting age, she replied, “I have my fingers crossed.”
The poll, conducted online by researchers between Aug. 6-14, defined Gen Z as people aged 12 to 27 years old. The poll had a sample of 2,832 and a sampling error of +/- 2.9 points.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/Julia Beverly/Getty Images
(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.
