Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will center their attention on Texas on Friday with both presidential candidates holding events in the staunchly Republican state. The vice president will team up with Beyoncé for a rally aimed at highlighting the perilous medical fallout from the state’s strict abortion ban and putting the blame squarely on Trump.
Meanwhile, the former president will hold a news conference in Austin before sitting down with podcaster Joe Rogan later on.
President Joe Biden will visit a reservation in Arizona, a long-promised trip to Indian Country that Democrats hope could boost Harris’ turnout effort in a key battleground state.
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Here’s the latest:
Trump visiting Texas to tape Joe Rogan’s podcast and to criticize Harris on immigration
Former President Donald Trump on Friday is heading to Texas — his first public campaign event in the state since receiving the Republican nomination — to sit down with the most listened-to-podcaster in the country, creating another opportunity for him to highlight the hypermasculine tone that has defined much of his 2024 White House bid.
The GOP presidential nominee will hold a news conference in Austin and meet with podcaster Joe Rogan at his studio there. It is only the second time he has campaigned in the state after a Dallas visit where he addressed members of the National Rifle Association in May.
On Friday, his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, will also be visiting Texas for a rally on abortion rights with superstar Beyoncé.
Read more here.
Holocaust survivor criticizes Harris for calling Trump a ‘fascist’
WASHINGTON — A 94-year-old Holocaust survivor is criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for calling former President Donald Trump a “ fascist.”
Jerry Wartski appears in a video for Trump’s campaign, saying, “I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousands lifetimes.” He’s referring to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who he describes having murdered his parents.
In the video, Wartski rolls up his sleeve to reveal a number tattooed on his arm while he was a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
He says Harris owes Holocaust victims and survivors an apology.
Harris called Trump a fascist during a CNN town hall this week.
She said his comments denouncing the “enemy within” mean he may prove willing to target Americans who disagree with him should he win the Nov. 5 election.
Trump to return to Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum next week
MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump is returning to the site of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee just four days before the election.
Trump plans to hold a rally at the Fiserv Forum on Nov. 1, his campaign said Friday. The stop comes two days after another planned rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The state is one of the most hard-fought this year with both sides expecting a razor-close finish. Vice President Kamala Harris was in both Milwaukee and Green Bay last week.
Johnson and McConnell blast Harris over saying she believes Trump is a fascist
WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell are criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for saying she believes that former President Donald Trump is a fascist during a CNN town hall, saying her words could lead to violence.
“Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist,’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day,” the two Republicans said in their statement.
When asked if she believed Trump is a fascist, Harris replied twice, “Yes, I do.” Later, she brought it up herself, saying Trump would, if elected again, be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
The two lawmakers said they have been briefed on ongoing threats to Trump and called on Harris to take the threats seriously, adding “stop escalating the threat environment, and help ensure President Trump has the necessary resources to be protected from those threats.”
The two did not address comments coming from Trump, who at his rallies has also referred to Harris as a “Marxist” and a “fascist.”
ACLU wants South Carolina to reopen voter registration for 1,900 teens
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A civil rights organization wants South Carolina to reopen voter registration for nearly 1,900 teens after the state Department of Motor Vehicles failed to notify election officials that they checked the box to register as they got their driver’s licenses. The teens were 17 at the time they went to the DMV, but would be 18 by Election Day.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit Tuesday, a day after early voting started in South Carolina.
Lawyers for the DMV, election officials and lawmakers said they are sympathetic toward the teens, but it is too late to verify the teens are eligible and adjust the voting rolls.
A judge promised a ruling Friday after hearing arguments from both sides.
Federal judge orders Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations that she said were illegally purged in the past two months to keep noncitizens from voting.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted an injunction request brought against Virginia election officials by the Justice Department, which claimed the voter registrations were wrongly canceled during a 90-day quiet period ahead of the November election that restricts states from making large-scale changes to their voter rolls.
Thomas Sanford, an attorney with the Virginia attorney general’s office, told the judge at the conclusion of Friday’s hearing that the state intends to appeal her ruling.
The Justice Department and private groups, including the League of Women Voters, said many of the 1,600 voters whose registrations were canceled were citizens whose registrations were canceled because of bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes like a wrongly checked box on a form.
Election workers identified about 2,500 Pennsylvania voter registration forms that may be fraudulent, officials say
LANCASTER, Pa. — Officials in a Pennsylvania county say an investigation is underway after election workers identified about 2,500 voter registration forms that may be fraudulent.
The Lancaster County Elections Board and the county prosecutor plan to hold a news conference Friday to discuss the steps taken so far.
The county says the registrations in question arrived in two batches shortly before Pennsylvania’s deadline to register to vote, which was this past Monday.
Harris, Beyoncé
team up for a Texas rally on abortion rights and hope battleground states hear them
HOUSTON — Vice President Kamala Harris will team up with Beyoncé on Friday for a rally in solidly Republican Texas aimed at highlighting the perilous medical fallout from the state’s strict abortion ban and putting the blame squarely on Donald Trump.
It’s a message intended to register far beyond Texas in the political battleground states, where Harris is hoping that the aftereffects from the fall of Roe v. Wade will spur voters to turn out to support her quest for the presidency.
Harris will also be joined at the rally by women who have nearly died from sepsis and other pregnancy complications because they were unable to get proper medical care, including women who never intended to end their pregnancies.
Read more here.
Biden heads to Indian Country as Harris steps up appeal to Native American voters
PHOENIX — President Joe Biden is at last making his way to Indian Country, paying a long-promised visit to a reservation in Arizona that Democrats hope could provide a boost to Vice President Kamala Harris’ turnout effort in a key battleground state.
Biden’s visit to the Gila River Indian Community’s land on the outskirts of metro Phoenix will be his first to Indian Country as president — something he promised tribal leaders he would do nearly two years ago.
During the visit, Biden intends to formally apologize to Native Americans for the U.S. government’s role in the abuse and neglect of Native children sent to federal boarding schools to assimilate them into white society, according to the White House.
Read more here.
Allies hope a Trump win changes the system for mortgages. Some warn it will make them pricier
If Donald Trump wins the presidential election, Republicans hope he will fulfill a longstanding GOP goal of privatizing the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been under government control since the Great Recession.
But Democrats and some economists warn that, especially in this time of high mortgage rates, doing so will make buying a home even more expensive.
Read more here.
Like Biden, Harris puts focus on Trump as Election Day draws near
WASHINGTON — With the end of her abbreviated presidential campaign in sight, Kamala Harris is trying to put the focus squarely on Donald Trump and his threat to democratic institutions, echoing the strategy used by Joe Biden before he ended his reelection bid.
It’s a bet that fear of the former Republican president can rally Harris supporters and nudge undecided voters to her side in the final days. Harris’ challenge will be connecting philosophical questions about American democracy with the everyday concerns of individual Americans.
The effort will be on full display Tuesday, when Harris delivers what her team describes as her closing argument from the Ellipse, the grassy space adjacent to the National Mall in Washington. It’s the same place where Trump stood when he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in what became a bloody attempt to prevent the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Read more here.
