The Latest: Harris keeps a focus on 'blue wall' states in the campaign's final weeks
With three weeks left in the presidential campaign, Democrat Kamala Harris is spending most of her days trying to shore up support in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as she tries to avoid a repeat of Hillary Clinton’s collapse there eight years ago.
Her schedule reflects the Democratic nominee’s focus on her most likely path to victory over Republican candidate Donald Trump. Harris’ campaign says she’s not ceding ground in Sun Belt states like North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada even though most of her time is spent elsewhere.
The vice president campaigned at a hockey rink on Monday in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she denounced Republican candidate Donald Trump as “unhinged.” She visited an art gallery in Detroit with actors Don Cheadle, Delroy Lindo and Cornelius Smith. Jr. on Tuesday, then recorded a radio town hall with Charlamagne tha God.
On Wednesday, Harris was back in Pennsylvania to stress allegiance to the Constitution as she stood just steps from the banks of the Delaware River, where George Washington crossed with his troops in a pivotal moment of the Revolutionary War.
Her pace doesn’t let up for the rest of the week.
Harris is headed back to Milwaukee Thursday as she seeks support from college-age voters.
She’ll drop by a business class at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, then hold a student rally at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She closes out the day with a rally in Green Bay.
The vice president is expected to hold meet-and-greets in Michigan on Friday. She then campaigns in Detroit on Saturday.
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Here’s the latest:
Former NBC News anchor Brian Williams will be working again on election night, anchoring a live special with results and analysis to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Amazon announced the plans on Thursday, saying the election night streamcast will begin at 5 p.m. Eastern, with no end time given. His longtime NBC colleague, Jonathan Wald, will be executive producer.
An election night telecast is a new frontier for a big streaming service, one that doesn’t have its own news operation. Prime Video was scant on details in a news release, saying the show will have results from third-party news sources and a variety of as-yet unnamed guests to talk about them.
Williams and Wald were not immediately available, according to Amazon.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is making the talk show rounds with scheduled appearances on “The View,” and “The Daily Show.”
The Minnesota governor will appear on both shows Monday, with just a few weeks to go before the presidential election. He’s heading to ABC’s “The View” after Kamala Harris was on Oct. 8. Her appearance delivered the longtime talk show’s highest ratings in three and a half years, according to ABC.
Walz will be interviewed on Comedy Central’s popular talk show by Jon Stewart, campaign officials said. Stewart, the show’s longtime leader, has come back to host once a week on Mondays.
Early in-person voting began statewide Thursday in the presidential battleground of North Carolina, including in mountainous areas where thousands of potential voters still lack power and clean running water after Hurricane Helene’s epic flooding.
More than 400 locations in all 100 counties were slated to open for the 17-day early vote period, said State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell. Only four of 80 sites in the 25 western counties hardest hit by the storm weren’t going to open.
Helene’s arrival three weeks ago in the Southeast decimated remote towns throughout Appalachia and killed at least 246 people, with a little over half of the storm-related deaths in North Carolina. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina in 2005.
Early in-person voting, which continues through Nov. 2, is very popular in North Carolina. More than 3.6 million ballots — 65% of all cast ballots — were cast this way in the 2020 general election. In the 2016 election, 62% of all cast ballots were cast during early in-person voting.
Absentee voting in North Carolina began a few weeks ago, with over 67,000 completed ballots turned in so far, election officials said. People displaced by Helene are being allowed to drop off their absentee ballot at any early voting site in the state.
On Thursday, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was expected to campaign in Winston-Salem and in Durham, where he was to be joined by former President Bill Clinton.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley were expected to appear on the “Team Trump Bus Tour” when it resumes Thursday in Rutherford County, which was among the hardest-hit areas.
As President Joe Biden left the White House on his way to Germany Thursday, he was asked about Donald Trump’s recent social media post that Kamala Harris was “the worst vice president in history.” Biden, walking from the White House to Marine One on the South Lawn, stopped and said: “You don’t listen to Donald Trump, do ya?”
Biden hasn’t had any nice words for the Republican nominee, calling him a “loser” during a campaign event earlier this week. He also said that Harris, if elected, would cut her own path as president and her “perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective is old and failed and quite frankly, thoroughly totally dishonest.”
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