Walz debate prep underway with Pete Buttigieg as Vance stand-in
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(WASHINGTON) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s preparation for the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate with Sen. JD Vance is well underway, sources familiar with the process have confirmed to ABC News.
He’s already held some mock debates, sources said, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his personal capacity, acting as a Vance stand-in, and held policy sessions with his own longtime aides, Biden White House alumni and members of the Harris-Walz campaign team.
Buttigieg was in Minneapolis as recently as Wednesday to help him prepare. Walz has also been practicing on the road as he campaigns.
Biden White House alumni Rob Friedlander and Zayn Siddique are running the preparations. Siddique, who is currently an attorney at the firm Paul Weiss and served as senior adviser to Bruce Reed, the White House deputy chief of staff under President Joe Biden, has also been part of the vice president’s debate preparations.
Friedlander was chief of staff for the White House National Economic Council and senior adviser for communications.
Friedlander and Siddique are being supported by a larger team that includes Liz Allen, a veteran political operative who stepped down from her role as head the State Department’s public diplomacy office in August to become chief of staff on Harris’ running mate team. Chris Schmitter, Walz’s longtime aide who led his gubernatorial races and debate, is also helping along with Harris-Walz communications director Michael Tyler, sources say.
The vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News is set to be in New York City, the network has announced, with both Walz and Vance agreeing to participate. The debate will be moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” moderator and CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan.
The sources stress that the vice presidential debate won’t be the “end all be all” for Walz, who has acknowledged himself that he’s “working hard” to “try and learn the issues” but is up against Vance, who “as a United States senator, a Yale Law guy” will come prepared.
“You’ll hear me talk like I have about things that impact Americans, making sure they have the opportunity to thrive, making sure that we’re being factual in how we talk about that. And so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll work hard. That’s what I do,” Walz said about the VP debate on MSNBC in the aftermath of the presidential debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump. “I fully expect that Senator Vance, as a United States Senator, a Yale Law guy, he’ll come well prepared.”
“Debates and VP Debates don’t matter all that much in polling — this will be one of many data points for voters,” sources said about the significance of the debate, also stressing that “Vance is a skilled debater.”
The campaign sees the debate as one of “many” opportunities for Walz to present Harris’ agenda to Americans. He’ll also use the debate to introduce himself and highlight the Democratic ticket’s vision for the future.
“This debate will serve as another clear opportunity for Governor Walz to present Vice President Harris’ winning vision of a New Way Forward to the American people who are ready to turn the page on Donald Trump,” Emily Soong, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said in a statement to ABC News.
Vance’s team has not commented to ABC News on how he’s preparing for the debate. The Washington Post was first to report the details of Walz’s preparations.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — While polling sites around the country are gearing up for huge voter turnout on Election Day, data and experts predict that a majority of the votes that will decide this year’s key races will be cast months before.
In fact, many of those votes could be cast in the next few weeks.
Analysts who have been studying early-voting trends say mail-in balloting and voting done at early opening polling sites will not only be a crucial indicator for this year’s races, but also future voting methods adopted by the country.
Early in-person voting options are available for almost all registered voters in 47 states with some allowing voters to cast their ballot as early as September, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks election laws across the country.
Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who helps run the school’s election lab, told ABC News that early voting exploded during the 2020 election and its effectiveness has reshaped the way the electorate and campaigns navigate the election.
“People find it easier to navigate and return the ballot at their convenience and it gives them more chances. They’re more likely to cast a ballot with those options,” he said.
How and where voters can cast a ballot early
In addition to offering voters a chance to cast their ballot through the mail, many states offer voters two ways of casting a ballot in person: either dropping off their absentee ballot at an election office or site, known as in-person absentee voting; or at a polling machine polling place that is open prior to Election Day.
As of 2024, 22 states offer all voters who vote via absentee the option to turn in their ballot in person early, according to NCSL data.
Alabama and New Hampshire offer no in-person early voting options — something the state’s election officials have not opted to do. Mississippi only offers in-person absentee to voters who meet specific criteria such as a physical disability, or proof that they will not be in the state on Election Day, such as military members.
Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia give voters both in-person absentee and early in-person poll site options, NCSL data shows.
Eight states — California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Vermont and Hawaii — and D.C. have adopted all-mail ballots and allow voters to cast their ballots in person before Election Day. With this process, states mail ballots to all registered voters and they can send it back, drop it off in-person absentee or ballot box, or simply choose to vote in a polling site either early or on Election Day.
Some election offices will offer voters a chance to submit their paper ballots in person as early as mid-September.
In Pennsylvania, some voters may be able to cast absentee ballots in person at their county’s executive office starting Sept. 16, which is the date for when counties must begin processing applications for mail-in or absentee ballots. The Pennsylvania Department of State told ABC News, however, that counties might not necessarily have the ballots ready by that date.
Rise in popularity
Charles Stewart, the director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab, told ABC News that voting data has shown a gradual increase in votes cast before Election Day over nearly three decades.
In fact, 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. By comparison, only 40% voted early in the 2016 election and 33% in the 2012 election, the data showed.
The data did not indicate how many mail ballots were turned in person.
Stewart noted that the pandemic was a factor behind the 2020 surge in early voting, and even though there was a decrease in early voting numbers during the 2022 midterms, there was still a jump in the number of people who cast their ballots either through the mail or at an early-voting site compared to previous midterms.
“If you extend the trend line and extend it to 2022, there is only a little bit more voting by mail,” he said. “That tells me that voters have, on aggregate, returned to patterns we saw before 2020, which is that of a slowly growing reliance on convenience voting methods.”
The extra convenience isn’t the only incentive that is moving more voters to early voting, particularly mail-in ballots, according to Stewart.
Stewart said that several studies that have been published about voting behaviors have shown that voters who cast their ballot through the mail are thinking about their choices “more deeply and thoroughly.”
“I heard it from a voter the other day who said they appreciate being able to lay the ballot on the table and do the research on the issues and the candidates,” he said.
The enthusiasm has also had ripple effects, according to research conducted by McDonald.
McDonald said that data has shown that the states that opted to give all registered voters their ballot in the mail, such as Colorado, Washington and Oregon, saw the highest turnout rates in the country in 2020.
“In the early states that opted [into] mail balloting, places like Oregon and Washington, they’ve done satisfaction surveys and voters there love it, both Democrats and Republicans,” he said.
A boon for voters, election offices and campaigns
Election experts said that 2020’s jump in early voting helped to decrease long lines on Election Day at a time when the pandemic required smaller indoor crowds and social distancing.
Even though the need to decrease crowds has lessened, McDonald stressed there is still a need for “safety valves” when it comes to Election Day lines.
“It means if someone has a problem … and they try to catch their problem earlier, they have more time to rectify that problem,” he said, citing examples such as an error on their form or improper voter ID.
McDonald also cited the sudden snowstorm that hit northern Arizona in November 2022 as a major obstacle that voters and election offices faced when it came to Election Day voting.
“These are the things that can happen and campaigns kind of know they shouldn’t rely too much on Election Day because there could be things that go wrong,” he said.
Christopher Mann, the research director for the non-profit group, The Center for Election Innovation & Research, told ABC News that early voting also gives election office teams, many of whom are understaffed and underfunded, extra time to handle the large number of ballots that come through during presidential cycles.
“They can move more people around during those early weeks, especially on the weekends,” he said.
At the same time, early voting has reshaped how campaigns are conducted.
Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden pushed for their debates to take place prior to October because of early voting. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are scheduled to debate on Sept. 10 on ABC News.
Aside from the campaign trail, McDonald said that early voting also affects the campaign staffers on the ground who receive voter information from election offices.
“Then the campaigns can say, ‘OK this voter already voted, I don’t need to call them or mail them something. I can scratch them off the list,” he said.
Trump’s false claims on early voting shift dynamics
In both the 2020 election and in this year’s contest, Trump has been vocal about his distrust in early voting, falsely claiming it is not secure and pushed for only voting on Election Day.
Despite appearing in a video at the Republican National Convention encouraging Republicans to vote by mail or early if available, Trump has been criticizing early voting at his events.
“We should have one-day voting. We should have paper ballots, we should have voter ID, and we should have proof of citizenship,” he told reporters at a news conference last month.
McDonald said Trump’s rhetoric led to a major shift in the 2020 election as the number of Republicans who voted by mail dropped compared to Democrats. Prior to 2020, more Republicans cast their vote in the mail, according to McDonald.
“We can see that those patterns really haven’t restored themselves [to] pre-pandemic,” he said.
The election experts stressed that there is no evidence of fraud when it comes to mail-in ballots and, in fact, showed there is no correlation between the number of early votes cast and the outcome of the election.
“If you look at states where half of the ballots were issued before Election Day, Trump won half of that vote,” Mann said.
The experts say the election data is showing an upward trend of more voters opting to vote early versus on Election Day, with mail-in voting seeing the biggest increases, and they predict more states will expand those early voting offerings.
Stewart noted that the momentum is still there as several states failed to pass measures in the last four years that would have restricted early-voting options, specifically ending pandemic-era rules that allowed for no-excuse absentee.
Ultimately, Stewart contended that giving voters as many options to safely and properly cast their ballot leads not only to more convenience, but a stronger electorate.
“I would encourage voters to think about their own lives, their own habits, their own values and choose their mode that is keeping with all of those things,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court, faced with sagging public confidence and a deepening perception its decisions are politically-motivated, could soon play a critical role in how some 2024 presidential ballots are cast and counted and, potentially, how contested election results are certified.
“As prepared as anyone can be,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s junior justice, when asked recently about the flood of election-related lawsuits headed toward the high court.
Hundreds of state and federal cases involving disputes over the legitimacy of state voter rolls, access to voting places, and procedures for counting ballots are currently pending. A majority of them were brought by Republicans.
“It is a deluge,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank tracking the unprecedented volume of election-year litigation. “It is a strategy to sow disinformation and chaos in the election system.”
Many of the lawsuits, predicated on “conspiracy theories” and advancing tenuous legal arguments, will ultimately be tossed out on technical grounds, Weiser said. But some may reach the justices with the potential to alter voting procedures in the final weeks of the campaign, depending on how they rule.
In one closely-watched case from Mississippi, the Republican National Committee has asked a conservative federal appeals court panel to prohibit the counting of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 5. Roughly 20 states have long standing laws permitting late-arriving ballots, including Nevada, Virginia and Ohio.
“They’re saying federal law says election day means election day, which means that anything that comes afterwards was not on election day,” Weiser said of the GOP effort. “The argument has been raised in many cases across the country, and the courts have been routinely rejecting it. But given the context of the players involved, there’s now not a 0% risk that this could happen.”
In North Carolina, Republicans have sued state election officials seeking to remove 225,000 voters ahead of Election Day, claiming voter registration forms lacked the required identification information. The case is among more than three dozen GOP-led suits attempting to purge alleged ineligible voters, according to Democracy Docket, a left-leaning group tracking the litigation.
“It doesn’t strike me as implausible that you would see a case like that sharply before the Supreme Court in late October,” said University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq.
While the justices have generally sought to avoid interference in state voter registration policies and election procedures close to an election — a concept known as the Purcell Principle — they have occasionally issued rulings that have resulted in major changes.
In the past few weeks, the court has issued decisions allowing Arizona to require proof of citizenship for state voter registration and rejecting Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s bid to appear on the Nevada ballot.
“They’ve never really explained what is the ‘status quo’ and what is ‘last minute,’ and they have been incredibly inconsistent in how they applied [Purcell],” said Caroline Fredrickson, a Georgetown law professor and former president of the American Constitution Society.
Other possible scenarios for Supreme Court involvement in the 2024 election could unfold after Nov. 5, as local and state election officials tabulate ballots and certify results.
“Imagine a state such as Georgia, where you have a state election board that has in the past weeks evinced a certain tendency to invite and foment election related litigation, resisting certification of a slate of presidential electors that the state election board disfavors,” said Huq. “What happens then? Perhaps the Supreme Court would be called in to tell us.”
The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECRA) mandates that states must certify their results by Dec. 11, but does not spell out what would happen if they do not do so. There could be litigation to resolve the appointment of a state’s electors for president by Dec. 16 when the Electoral College meets to cast votes.
The law explicitly directs disputes over certification to a three-judge panel for resolution with the U.S. Supreme Court getting the final word.
“It’s certainly contemplated as a second layer fail-safe,” said Weiser, “but I’m relatively confident that all the earlier layer fail-safes are going to hold and that we’re not going to be in that scenario.”
The court could also be asked to weigh in on any attempt by members of Congress to disqualify former President Donald Trump from a second term, if he were to win the election, during certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2025.
In the case Trump v. Anderson last year, the justices unanimously ruled that states could not disqualify a presidential candidate as an “insurrectionist” under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it left open a federal process to make that determination.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says anyone who took an oath “as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution” and who then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort to the enemy” cannot hold office.
Trump’s critics allege he clearly violated Section 3 given his connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to block certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
Under the ECRA, if one-fifth of the members of the House and Senate voted to object to certification of Trump’s electors on the grounds that he is ineligible to hold office, that decision could ultimately be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
“You could imagine a kind of Bush v Gore style, very, very rapid sequence of motions or petitions being filed and making their way through the court system,” said Huq. “I can imagine that happening, although I think it’s unlikely. But I suspect the Supreme Court would make short work of it.”
Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks at a rally at the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse at Montana State University on August 9, 2024, in Bozeman, Montana. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump is set to deliver remarks on the economy in North Carolina on Wednesday as the campaign works to recenter its campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The election’s coming up, and the people want to hear about the economy,” Trump said during an interview with Elon Musk on X Monday, directly blaming the Biden-Harris administration for the current state of the economy.
The economy has been one of the Trump campaign’s central election issues this cycle — the former president often spending a considerable amount of time discussing inflation, gas prices and the job market.
“I just ask this: Are you better off now, or were you better off when I was president?” Trump said Monday night as he was wrapping up his conversation with Musk.
Last week, Trump blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the recent stock market crash and called it a “Kamala crash” — making unfounded claims that the crash happened because people have “no confidence” in Harris, while experts pointed to concerns about the health of the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve’s long wait to cut interest rates as among key reasons for the crash.
Trump has also claimed that if Harris wins in November, there could be a “Great Depression” on par with that of 1929.
On the campaign trail, Trump, even as he rails against the economy under the Biden administration, has announced sparse details on specific economic policy proposals for his possible second administration, often offering his signature “Trump tax cuts,” “Trump tariffs” and “drill, baby, drill” — a boost for the oil and gas industry — as solutions to most economic problems.
In recent weeks, however, he has touted two new policies: a proposal to eliminate taxes on tip wages and Social Security for seniors.
While campaigning in Las Vegas in June, Trump made a direct appeal to Nevada’s hospitality industry workers by announcing that the tax cuts would be the “first thing in office” he would do.
Harris also recently advocated for the same policy, drawing criticisms from Trump and his allies who called her “Copy Cat Kamala.”
“Copy Cat Kamala Harris proved she has no plan or ideas of her own to fix the economic pain and suffering that she personally inflicted on the American people for the last four years,” the campaign said in a statement.
Harris is also expected to make her first major policy rollout this week since jumping into the race with an economic policy speech.
Harris’ speech will detail her plan to “lower costs for middle-class families and take on corporate price-gouging,” a campaign official said.
The two dueling policy speeches come as the economy remains a central focus in the race to the White House for both campaigns.
Trump’s speech on Wednesday may also offer a more focused approach to contrast his vision with Harris as supporters have cautioned Trump away from personal attacks against Harris.
Both candidates have room to improve their reliability on economic issues, according to a recent CNBC poll from August, in which 40% of poll respondents said they would be better off financially if Trump wins, 21% said if Harris wins, and 35% responded saying their financial situation would not really change.
Several Trump supporters suggest the recent rise in prices at the grocery store or gas station as a reason they’re behind the former president, and younger voters are also concerned about home buying despite the president’s lack of control of mortgage rates.
“At the end of the day, we have got a lot of work to do to turn this country around. We need to secure the borders. We need to fix inflation. We need to make house prices affordable again,” Dante Bernard, a Trump supporter attending Trump’s Atlanta rally this month, told ABC News. “Less insulting and talking about people’s race or identity and more policies 100%. Let’s focus on politics. Let’s stop the name-calling.”
“It’s all about freedom, small government, less taxes. $2 gas – does everyone remember when it was $2 gas? Remember $2 Trump?” said Dan Bawler, from Carson City, Nevada, praising Trump administration policies.
Democratic voters who spoke with ABC News also say they’re concerned about the economy.
“The economy for my children, my grandchildren — I want to see them flourish and do well in a healthy economy,” said James Allen, a Democratic voter from Roanoke, Virginia.
