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1 month ago
Kamala Harris says Donald Trump's language 'demeans office of the presidency'
Good morning, US politics readers.
There are now only 15 days to go until voting day and the attacks traded between the two presidential candidates – Kamala Harris (D) and Donald Trump (R) – are intensifying. On Sunday, Harris celebrated her 60th birthday and gave an interview with Rev Al Sharpton on MSNBC.
Sharpton asked her about Trump calling her a “shit vice-president” at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
Harris, who became the first black vice-president and woman in the role after Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election, responded:
The American people deserve so much better. That is how I come at it. And to your point, the President of the United States must set a standard – not only for our nation but understanding the standard we as a nation must set for the world.
We representing the United States of America walk into rooms around the world with the earned and self-appointed authority to talk about the importance of democracy, of rule of law and have been thought of as a role model … of what it means to be committed to certain standards, including international rules and norms, but also standards of decorum.
And what you see in my opponent, a former President of the United States, demeans the office. And I have said – and I am very clear about this – Donald Trump should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States. He has not earned the right … and that is why he is going to lose.
The presidential race is essentially deadlocked, both nationally and in so-called battleground states. The contest on 5 November will be decided by the slimmest of margins. In order to appeal to voters in the critical swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), both Trump and Harris are trying to appeal to moderate, swing voters and ensure their bases are enthused enough to go out and vote.
Later today, Harris will be targeting suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – holding a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney that will be moderated by Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.
Trump has three North Carolina stops on Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. He beat Biden in the state by 1.3% in 2020, but the polls this year are extremely tight, giving the Democrats a rare chance of winning the state.
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Harris cheers proposal to expand contraception coverage under Obamacare
The Biden administration has proposed allowing women with private health insurance to receive birth control without a prescription, in a major expansion of contraception access.
The rule is under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and comes as Kamala Harris and Democrats nationwide seek to make voters aware of their support for reproductive rights ahead of the 5 November election.
Here’s what Harris had to say about the proposed rule:
Today, our Administration is proposing the largest expansion of contraception coverage in more than a decade. This new proposed rule will build on our Administration’s work to protect reproductive freedom by providing millions of women with more options for the affordable contraception they need and deserve. That includes coverage for no-cost over-the-counter contraception without a prescription for the first time in our nation’s history. These lower contraception costs would be in addition to the billions of dollars that women have already saved on contraception under the Affordable Care Act which President Biden and I have strengthened since taking office.
On Thursday, former Democratic US President, Barack Obama, is expected to campaign with Kamala Harris in Georgia, a state Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. Michelle Obama plans to join Harris for a rally - to encourage people to get out and vote - in Michigan on Saturday as early voting begins in the state that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016, before Biden took it back in 2020.
Barack Obama, who become America’s first black president when he was elected in 2008, campaigned for Harris for the first time, appearing alone in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in early October. He held a rally for Harris in Las Vegas over the weekend on the first day of early voting in Nevada.
As my colleague Michael Sainato notes in this story, the Obamas and Harris have a friendship stretching over two decades.
Harris was an early supporter of Obama’s presidential campaign in the closely contested 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, and one of the few elected officials in California to back him over Hillary Clinton for the party’s nomination.
Trump allies spending millions to dissuade voters in key states from polls
Peter Stone
Key rightwing legal groups with ties to Donald Trump and his allies have banked millions of dollars from conservative foundations and filed multiple lawsuits challenging voting rules in swing states that are already sowing distrust of election processes and pushing dangerous conspiracy theories, election watchdogs warn.
They also warn that the groups appear to be laying the groundwork for a concerted challenge to the result of November’s presidential election if Trump is defeated by Kamala Harris.
America First Legal and the Public Interest Legal Foundation together reaped more than $30m dollars from the Wisconsin based Bradley Impact Fund and its parent, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, from 2017 through 2022, according to a financial analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy.
Lawsuits filed by the groups, which overlap with some Republican party litigation, focus in part on conspiratorial charges of non-citizen voting, which is exceedingly rare, and bloated voter rolls, and pre-sage more lawsuits by Trump if his presidential run fails, in an echo of his 2020 election-denialist claims, say watchdogs.
“It seems clear that the lawsuits these rightwing groups are bringing attacking the integrity of the voting rolls, methods of voting and how the ballots are counted are an attempt to make it harder for people to vote, disenfranchise and intimidate legitimate voters, and create confusion,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission.
Noble added: “At the same time, they also appear to be laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the election after November 5, if Trump loses.”
You can read the full story here:
Trump to campaign in North Carolina as Harris visits three swing states
As we mentioned in the opening summary, Donald Trump will be campaigning in North Carolina – a crucial swing state – today.
The Republican presidential nominee is visiting the city of Asheville to survey the damage Hurricane Helene brought last month.
Communities in western North Carolina have been reeling since the storm ravaged the region, killing about 100 people and destroying homes and causing widespread power outages.
Trump has falsely accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of deliberately diverting assistance away from Republican areas.
As well as visiting Asheville, Trump will be holding a rally in Greenville this afternoon, before attending a meeting of 11th Hour Faith leaders, alongside his son Eric and Dr Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, former US housing secretary, in Concord. You can keep up-to-date with Trump’s campaign schedule here.
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, will join Republican Congresswoman and vocal Trump opponent Liz Cheney in Chester County, Pennsylvania, for a campaign event before heading to Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and Oakland County, Michigan.
There are mounting concerns from Trump’s Republican allies that crippling damage from Hurricane Helene will depress turnout in the battleground state’s conservative mountain regions.
Trump won about 62% of the vote in 2020 in the 25 counties declared to be a disaster area after Helene, while Biden won about 51% in the remainder of the state. New emergency voting arrangements have been put in place by the state board of election covering some of the most devastated counties.
The Hill/Decision Desk HQ’s polling average shows North Carolina is too tight to call with confidence, with Harris, the US vice president and Democratic nominee, trailing behind Trump by 0.7 percentage points.
More than one million North Carolinians have already voted in the November general election, according to estimates. More than 400 early voting sites opened as scheduled on Thursday.
New finance filings show Harris campaign's huge financial advantage in presidential race
The Harris campaign reported raising $221.8m (£170.4m) in September, compared to Trump’s campaign raising $62.7m (£48.2m), the Washington Post reported after new federal campaign finance filings showed her huge financial advantage in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.
The Federal Election Commission filings, released yesterday, also showed that the Democratic National Committee raised $98.6m (£76m) last month, compared to the Republican National Committee raising $37.8m (£29m).
The Washington Post reported:
New reports filed on Tuesday showed that Harris’s primary fundraising vehicle for big-dollar donations, the Harris Victory Fund, brought in a staggering $633m (£486m) during the third quarter. That was more than four times as much as the $145m (£111m) that the victory fund’s GOP counterpart, the Trump 47 committee, brought in, according to reports filed last week.
Despite that huge spending edge and Harris’s sprawling ground game, her campaign has still struggled to significantly outpace Trump in key swing state polls. The vice president’s campaign has a much larger footprint than Trump’s, which relies on outside groups to help it turn out voters, and her advisers are worried about whether they will have enough money to secure victory. Harris’s advisers believe that the race remains close in all of the key swing states, and point to the high cost of targeting hard-to-reach and infrequent voters in seven very different states.
Harris is running a campaign that is about three times the size of Trump’s operation, spending more money on ads and having more staff, volunteers and a larger surrogate operation than her Republican opponent, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign spending.
The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, is making an unexpected visit to Ukraine today to reaffirm Washington’s support of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he meets him later.
Austin is also expected to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov. US backing is crucial if Kyiv is to get support from other allies for proposals Zelenskyy believes are necessary to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield and ahead of any peace negotiations.
There are concerns that a second Trump administration could suspend military support for Kyiv, at a time when Ukraine is in desperate need for financial support and military equipment, much of which is supplied by the US. Kamala Harris seems set to follow Joe Biden’s policy towards Ukraine, supplying Kyiv with military aid and supporting them diplomatically. She has ruled out meeting one-on-one with Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine unless leaders from Kyiv are involved.
“It’s been absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has been able to do what it’s done,” Austin told reporters.
“It’s been able to do that, of course, because of the fact that we have supported them from the very beginning, and we’ve rallied some 50 countries to be a part of that support,” he added.
Kamala Harris says Donald Trump's language 'demeans office of the presidency'
Good morning, US politics readers.
There are now only 15 days to go until voting day and the attacks traded between the two presidential candidates – Kamala Harris (D) and Donald Trump (R) – are intensifying. On Sunday, Harris celebrated her 60th birthday and gave an interview with Rev Al Sharpton on MSNBC.
Sharpton asked her about Trump calling her a “shit vice-president” at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
Harris, who became the first black vice-president and woman in the role after Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election, responded:
The American people deserve so much better. That is how I come at it. And to your point, the President of the United States must set a standard – not only for our nation but understanding the standard we as a nation must set for the world.
We representing the United States of America walk into rooms around the world with the earned and self-appointed authority to talk about the importance of democracy, of rule of law and have been thought of as a role model … of what it means to be committed to certain standards, including international rules and norms, but also standards of decorum.
And what you see in my opponent, a former President of the United States, demeans the office. And I have said – and I am very clear about this – Donald Trump should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States. He has not earned the right … and that is why he is going to lose.
The presidential race is essentially deadlocked, both nationally and in so-called battleground states. The contest on 5 November will be decided by the slimmest of margins. In order to appeal to voters in the critical swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), both Trump and Harris are trying to appeal to moderate, swing voters and ensure their bases are enthused enough to go out and vote.
Later today, Harris will be targeting suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – holding a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney that will be moderated by Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.
Trump has three North Carolina stops on Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. He beat Biden in the state by 1.3% in 2020, but the polls this year are extremely tight, giving the Democrats a rare chance of winning the state.
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