Trump doesn’t mention embattled GOP candidate Mark Robinson at North Carolina rally
(WILMINGTON, N.C.) — Former President Donald Trump returned to the key battleground state of North Carolina for a rally Saturday, but declined to mention Mark Robinson — his party’s nominee for governor in the state.
The rally went on amid the allegations surrounding the Republican lieutenant governor, who the former president had previously supported and called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Robinson, who did not appear at the rally, was accused of posting inflammatory comments on the message board of a pornography website more than a decade ago, according to a report published Thursday from CNN.
The embattled gubernatorial candidate had not been expected to attend Saturday’s rally. Trump has not given any indication that he intends to pull his endorsement of Robinson.
In a statement Sunday, Robinson’s campaign said four key staffers had “stepped down” from the campaign: general consultant and senior advisor Conrad Pogorzelski, III; campaign manager Chris Rodriguez; finance director Heather Whillier; and deputy campaign manager Jason Rizk.
“I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors. I look forward to announcing new staff roles in the coming days,” Robinson said in a statement.
Trump has campaigned for Robinson multiple times during this election cycle, including inviting him to speak at his rallies in North Carolina this year and hosting him at his Mar-a-Lago estate for a fundraiser last year.
People close to the former president told ABC News that they were bracing for the Robinson story on Thursday. The campaign was planning to put more distance between Trump and Robinson, but initially did not have plans to push him to drop out, sources said.
Robinson’s beleaguered campaign, however, did come up at a rally headlined by vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Walz insinuated that Trump was no “different” from Robinson.
“We got folks running as Republicans for governor that are proud to refer to themselves as Nazis. Let’s not pretend that there’s a gradual difference between the folks that are running here– that they’re running together,” Walz said.
ABC News’ Isabella Murray and Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — When President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, some Democrats feared the party would lose his “Scranton Joe” appeal to Rust Belt voters. But early signs indicate Vice President Kamala Harris, the likeliest candidate to replace him, remains competitive in the key region.
Biden had particularly strong appeal to older voters and white voters without a college degree during his campaign, helping keep hopes alive of drawing an inside straight to reelection through Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three “blue wall” states that are at the heart of any Democrats’ path to victory — where those voters hold immense sway. Replacing him atop the ticket, the conventional wisdom went, threatened that hold those three key states along with them.
Harris’ coalition appears to be that of a more traditional candidate. She has brought young and racially diverse voters back into the fold more than Biden, early polls show, possibly helping her offset any drop-off with other demographics — a decrease that has not emerged substantially in those surveys.
“It’s not going to be her base of voters, but she’s not going to get crushed, and that’s all that matters,” Jim Ananich, the former Democratic leader in the Michigan state Senate, said of older, white voters. “The new rising electorate, the Black and brown community, women, younger voters, she’ll make up for it. And I’m saying this is perceived. I don’t even know if it’s a real deficit.”
“I’m not as worried about it as others may or may not be,” he added. “I can’t tell you today we’re going to win, but I don’t feel like we’re going to lose. I think the election’s up in the air.”
Fox News polls released last week showed Harris and Trump statistically tied in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, improvements from Biden’s standing in the three states.
Fox News’ Michigan poll from April showed Biden with 50% support among voters over 65 years old and 31% support among white voters without a college degree. This month, those numbers were 45% and 34%, respectively. Biden took 34% support among men and 31% among white men, with Harris boosting those numbers to 36% and 36%, respectively. Each also got 26% support among self-identified independents.
In Pennsylvania, Biden had 46% support from senior voters and 33% support from white voters without a college degree. Harris matched him among voters 65 years old and up and saw support from white voters without a degree jump to 41% since April. Biden took 40% support among men and 36% support among white men, numbers that jumped to 45% and 42% for Harris, respectively. Biden took 28% support among self-identified independents, a figure that rose to 30% for Harris.
And in Wisconsin, Biden had 49% support from senior voters and 33% support from white voters without a college degree. Those numbers rose to 51% and 40% for Harris this month, respectively. Biden took 40% support among men and 39% support among white men, while Harris took 40% and 41% support, respectively. Independent support for the Democratic ticket rose from 30% for Biden to 35% for Harris.
In all three states, Harris also improved upon Biden’s standings with younger and non-white voters.
Taken together, the early data rebuffs the idea of a drop for Harris in a critical region that carried Trump to victory in 2016 and helped spur his loss four years later.
“I’m not going to tell you, ‘oh, everything’s going to be amazing,’ no. But I also don’t know that I accept the premise that there’s a real problem there,” said J.J. Balaban, a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist.
Wisconsin Democratic strategist Ben Nuckels said some are overhyping that there is a problem.
“Honestly, I don’t know what that speculation is. She has had a tremendous momentum, she’s raising tons of money. I think that there’s maybe some beltway politicos that are making some assumptions that perhaps they shouldn’t,” Nuckels said.
Harris so far is leaving nothing to chance.
One of her first rallies after Biden dropped out was in Milwaukee, and she is anticipated to blitz several swing states next week, likely including in the upper Midwest. Her potential running mate could hail from a key Rust Belt state. And more reinforcements are on the way.
“We already have 600 staff on the ground in the blue wall, and we’re adding another 150 to that region in the first two weeks of August,” Dan Kannien, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director, told reporters Monday.
“The vice president is strong in both the blue wall and in the Sun Belt and we are running hard in both,” he added, referencing the reach of states from Arizona and Nevada to Georgia and North Carolina, where Harris is anticipated to perform better than Biden given the more diverse electorate there.
Republicans still aren’t sold.
Beyond the poll numbers, GOP strategists told ABC News that Biden’s historic appeal in the upper Midwest would be tough to beat. A son of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden offered blue collar bona fides, they said, that Harris, who cut her teeth in San Francisco liberal politics, could face headwinds trying to match.
“Joe Biden’s background was tailor made for the Rust Belt, given his generation and his issue cluster and where he was from, so it’d be hard to replace him with anyone who has more of a potential for Rust Belt voters,” said veteran Pennsylvania GOP strategist Chris Nicholas. “It’d be hard to find a Democrat with more natural appeal to the Rust Belt states.”
Republicans also speculated that Harris could be enjoying a sugar high as the result of her whirlwind ascent to the top of Democrats’ ticket. But Harris and Trump are engaged in a pitched race to define her, the outcome of which could prove determinative to the vice president’s standing.
“She certainly has enthusiasm here. But I think we need to get past the shiny-new-penny stage and get into hardball politics, what her record says, what the Trump attacks will be,” said Wisconsin GOP strategist Brandon Scholz. “I don’t think you’ve even seen that scratch the surface.”
And there are still issues that offer Trump fertile ground for attacks.
Chief among them is inflation, which Trump had been hammering away on before Biden dropped out and is anticipated to continue to focus on with Harris as his opponent. Former Rep. Mike Bishop, R-Mich., said that line of attack could prove particularly effective with the kinds of blue-collar workers who dominate the Rust Belt amid stubbornly high frustrations over inflation.
“We do have a very blue-collar populace here,” Bishop said. “She’s going to have to cater to them and prove to them why their lives are better over the past four years and try to put together some kind of plan to show that she can continue that process going forward.”
“Most people do consider their pocketbook and their family and their family budget, I think absolutely that’s an important issue. I don’t know how you can get past that,” he added.
Still, Democrats are essentially jubilant over Harris’ chances. Biden’s chances of reelection were widely perceived to have taken a near-fatal hit after his cataclysmic debate last month, and having a candidate to just make the race competitive again has Democrats feeling the wind at their backs.
“On the ground, things feel great … the momentum has completely flipped,” Nuckels said.
“All the polling showed [Biden] was down, all of it,” he added. “It was going to be a very, very difficult race, and something major needed to happen in order for him to gain that momentum back. But it was not headed in the right direction.”
(WASHINGTON) — With fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah intensifying throughout the weekend, White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said the U.S. is doing “everything we can to try to prevent this from becoming an all-out war there with Hezbollah across that Lebanese border.”
“We have been involved in extensive and quite assertive diplomacy,” Kirby told ABC’s “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday.
Asked if escalation in the region is inevitable, Kirby replied that there are “better ways” to return Israeli citizens back to their homes to avoid a heightened conflict. On cease-fire negotiations, he told Stephanopoulos that “We are not achieving any progress here in the last week to two weeks.”
Kirby also reiterated that the U.S. was “not involved” in Israel’s covert pager and walkie-talkie attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon last week.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Vice President Kamala Harris will face a National Association of Black Journalists panel in Philadelphia on Tuesday where race in her campaign will be a likely topic, something she has shied away from focusing on — a stark contrast from her 2019 run for president.
At a similar NABJ panel interview in July, former President Donald Trump got into a fiery back-and-forth with reporters and falsely questioned Harris’ race.
“So I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly, very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said during that heated exchange. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris — the child of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, both immigrants to the United States — has not directly responded to Trump’s comments. In an August interview with CNN, after being asked to comment on the personal attacks Trump has lobbied at the vice president surrounding her racial identity, Harris dodged.
“Same old, tired playbook,” she told the network. “Next question, please.”
And when asked to comment on the same attacks during ABC News’ debate last week, instead of speaking about her own racial identity, Harris chose a more generic answer.
“I think it’s a — a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people,” she told ABC News’ David Muir.
MORE: READ: Harris-Trump presidential debate transcript Harris is not new to people questioning her so-called “Blackness.” During her presidential run in 2019, Harris faced questions about whether she was Black enough to identify as a Black candidate.
“I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black,” Harris said on “The Breakfast Club” radio show in February of that year. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”
Harris’ 2019 campaign also put a larger focus on race compared to her current run for president.
At the NBC debate in 2019, Harris strong-armed her way into the opportunity to take on then-Vice President Joe Biden on efforts to desegregate public schools, specifically school busing programs.
“As the only Black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” Harris said, interjecting as the moderators were moving on to someone else.
During that debate, Biden brought up his ability to work with politicians across the aisle, fondly recounting his relationship with segregationist Sens. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia. Harris, who directly benefited from busing programs, jumped in to respond.
“It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris continued. “And you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
In another departure from her time as a candidate in 2019, as vice president, and as Biden’s running mate during his bid for reelection, Harris hardly mentions one of her top issues: Black maternal mortality.
In 2020, Harris had a section on her website’s issues page devoted to “Health Justice For Black Communities,” with a commitment to “fight to end the Black maternal mortality crisis.” Now, her website only says she’ll “combat maternal mortality” more generally. She introduced the Maternal CARE Act to tackle the issue while in the Senate. The bill mentioned “Black women” 10 times.
Despite being asked multiple times by reporters about the unsubstantiated claims made by Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating residents’ pets, Harris has declined to comment.
ABC News has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on the shift between her two presidential campaigns, and whether this is part of political calculation ahead of the general election. They have not responded by the time of publication.
The NABJ discussion will take place at the headquarters of Philadelphia’s NPR station WHYY and will be moderated by Politico’s Eugene Daniels, WHYY’s Tony Mosely, and theGrio’s Gerren Keith Gaynor.
“We look forward to our members and student journalists hearing from Vice President Harris as our panel asks the tough questions that are most pressing to the communities served by NABJ members,” NABJ President Ken Lemon said in a statement last week.
Her NABJ appearance marks her third high-profile interview since announcing her candidacy — following sit-downs with CNN and WPVI-TV in Philadelphia.