With just over two weeks before the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.
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When Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and Kamala Harris jumped in, a cascade of Zoom meetings with hundreds of thousands of participants popped up seemingly out of nowhere and helped propel her to the Democratic nomination.
Now organizers are trying to turn that burst of digital enthusiasm into traditional get-out-the-vote efforts like phone banking and door knocking. They’ve created a loose constellation of volunteer networks operating independently of the Harris campaign, all geared toward marshaling local or online communities behind the vice president.
People are sending postcards, texting friends, canvassing battleground states, making friendship bracelets with campaign messages, and sometimes surprising themselves by getting involved in ways they’ve never done before.
The question is whether the Zoom meetings that drew so much attention during the summer — for Black women, Black men, white women, white dudes, cat ladies, Taylor Swift fans and more — will turn out to be a short-lived phenomenon or a powerful catalyst for Harris to beat Republican nominee Donald Trump.
▶ Read more about Zoom organizing by Democrats.
But she’s not necessarily trying to sway voters there. She’s trying to highlight a make-or-break issue for Democrats: abortion rights.
Harris will seek to show how Texas’ restrictive abortion ban is creating increasing medical distress for women. During her campaign, the Democratic presidential nominee has often highlighted the increasingly perilous landscape for women since the fall of Roe, and she links it to Donald Trump, who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned the landmark abortion rights ruling.
But it’s unusual for her to do it from a state she’s highly unlikely to win. Campaign officials say the plan is a nontraditional way to capture the attention of voters in battleground states who are inundated with campaign ads and run-of-the-mill campaign events.
But Harris also thinks the issue is resonating for Republican voters, too, particularly women.
Pennsylvania is arguably the hardest fought of the battleground states and happens to have one of the fastest-growing Hispanic communities in the country, in what is known as the 222 Corridor, after the highway that connects small cities and towns west and north of Philadelphia.
It’s fertile ground for both Democrats and Republicans to test their strength among Latinos in a state where small margins decide who gets 20 electoral votes. It’s a place where Democratic nominee Kamala Harris can prove that her party still commands a large share of the demographic’s support, and where Republican Donald Trump’s campaign has been working to gain ground.
“This is the epicenter for Latino voters in Pennsylvania,” said Victor Martinez, who is of Puerto Rican descent and lives in and broadcasts his show from Allentown. “I like the fact that Kamala Harris has to keep sending people over here to listen to us and talk to us. I like it. I like the fact that JD Vance has to keep coming back. I like it, because that means that they have to pay attention to us.”
Pennsylvania’s Latino eligible voter population has more than doubled since 2000 from 208,000 to 579,000, according to the Latino Data Hub from the University of California, Los Angeles’ Latino Policy & Politics Institute. The population in cities like Allentown and Reading is now more than half Hispanic, with a majority being of Puerto Rican descent and a sizable portion of Dominican origin.
▶ Read more about the Latino vote in this election.
The Biden-Harris administration is awarding $428 million for 14 clean-energy manufacturing projects in Pennsylvania and other states hit hard by the decline of the U.S. coal industry.
One of the larger grants, $87 million, will go to a Pennsylvania company to make state-of-the-art linear generators at a plant outside Pittsburgh, a key battleground in the presidential election.
Linear generators can use any fuel source to produce low-carbon power for utilities, data centers and industry. Mainspring Energy plans to use Energy Department funds to create enough electricity annually to power more than 40,000 homes. Harris, like Biden, has pledged to help workers displaced by the transition to clean energy, a key-issue in energy-rich Pennsylvania.
Two weeks out from Election Day, the crisis in the Middle East is looming over the race for the White House, with one candidate struggling to find just the right words to navigate its difficult cross-currents and the other making bold pronouncements that the age-old conflict can quickly be set right.
Vice President Kamala Harris has been painstakingly — and not always successfully — trying to balance talk of strong support for Israel with harsh condemnations of civilian casualties among Palestinians and others caught up in Israel’s wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Former President Donald Trump, for his part, insists that none of this would have happened on his watch and that he can make it all go away if elected.
Both of them are bidding for the votes of Arab and Muslim American voters and Jewish voters, particularly in extremely tight races in the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
▶ Read more about the Mideast conflict’s role in the election.
For the past year, Project 2025 has endured as a persistent force in the presidential election, its far-right proposals deployed by Democrats as shorthand for what Donald Trump would potentially do with a second term at the White House.
Even though the former president’s campaign has vigorously distanced itself from Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation’s proposal to gut the federal workforce and dismantle federal agencies aligns closely with his vision. Project 2025’s architects come from the ranks of Trump’s administration and top Heritage officials have briefed Trump’s team about it.
It’s rare for a complex 900-page policy book to figure so dominantly in a political campaign. But from its early start at a think tank, to its viral spread on social media, the rise and fall and potential rise again of Project 2025 shows the unexpected staying power of policy to light up an election year and threaten not only Trump atop the ticket but down-ballot Republicans in races for Congress.
Through it all, Project 2025 hasn’t gone away. It exists not only as a policy blueprint for the next administration, but as a database of some 20,000 job-seekers who could staff a Trump White House and administration and a still unreleased “180-day playbook” of actions a new president could employ on Day One.
▶ Read more about Project 2025.
In-person early voting kicks off Tuesday across battleground Wisconsin, with former President Barack Obama and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz hosting a rally in liberal Madison and Republicans holding events to encourage casting a ballot for Donald Trump before Election Day.
Trump lost Wisconsin by just under 21,000 votes in 2020, an election that saw unprecedented early and absentee voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are expecting another razor-thin margin in Wisconsin and both sides are pushing voters to cast their ballots early.
Trump was highly critical of voting by mail in past elections, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud. But this election, he and his backers are embracing all forms of voting, including by mail and early in-person. Trump himself encouraged early voting at a rally in Dodge County, Wisconsin, earlier this month.
▶ Read more about early voting in Wisconsin.
Harris is set to discuss how her plan will lower costs, increase their chances for homeownership and expand job opportunities for Latino men in an interview she’s taping Tuesday in Washington with Telemundo, the Spanish-language TV network.
The campaign says Harris, running mate Tim Walz and her husband, Doug Emhoff, are giving interviews to several Hispanic media outlets this week in a bid to get her message across to Latino men.
Harris’ Telemundo interview is set to air Wednesday night.
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