Election Live Updates: Harris Assails Trump Over ‘Offensive’ Remark on Women
Vice President Kamala Harris said Mr. Trump’s statement that he would protect women “like it or not” showed he didn’t understand them. Both candidates will be in the western battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada, including a rally Ms. Harris is set to hold in Las Vegas with Jennifer Lopez.
Vice President Kamala Harris rebuked former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday over his remarks about women at a rally last night, saying he did not understand “their rights and their ability to make decisions about their own lives.”
Ms. Harris was responding to Mr. Trump’s statement on Wednesday night that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not,” a remark that served as a reminder to many of his critics of his history of misogynistic statements and a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse. Ms. Harris called the remark “very offensive,” adding that it was “the latest in a series of reveals from the former president with how he feels about women.”
Ms. Harris spoke before departing Wisconsin for the western battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada, where Mr. Trump was also set to attend events with five days left before Election Day. Ms. Harris will visit Phoenix and Reno, Nev., before a late rally in Las Vegas with the pop superstar Jennifer Lopez. Mr. Trump will make a stop in Albuquerque, in reliably blue New Mexico, before stops in Henderson, Nev., and a rally in Glendale, Ariz., with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.
Both candidates’ running mates will also be on the campaign trail on Thursday. Senator JD Vance of Ohio will hold a town hall focused on younger voters at High Point University in North Carolina. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota will campaign in Erie, Pa.
Pennsylvania lawsuits: Democrats and Republicans have sued over issues with early voting in Pennsylvania. The Trump campaign succeeded in extending the mail ballot application deadline in Bucks County, after arguing that voters were improperly turned away while they were waiting in long lines for mail-in ballots. The Pennsylvania Democratic Party has also filed suit against Erie County, arguing that many voters have not received mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day.
Virginia voter purge: The Supreme Court allowed Virginia to remove about 1,600 people from its voter rolls, handing a victory to Republican officials in the state who said the move was necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting. A lower court had halted the program, saying that federal law banned states from removing voters so close to an election.
Machete threat: An 18-year-old Florida man is facing charges after the police said he threatened two Harris supporters with a machete at an early voting site. Investigators said the man was in a group of people carrying Trump flags that confronted two women holding Harris signs.
Aiming at Obamacare: Speaker Mike Johnson said this week that Republicans would embark on a “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act if Mr. Trump is elected again, putting an unpopular policy position back in the spotlight just days before the election. Mr. Trump and an all-Republican Congress already tried unsuccessfully to repeal the law, and the fierce backlash to those efforts helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018.
Arnold backs Kamala: Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor and bodybuilder who served as California’s Republican governor from 2003 to 2011, endorsed Ms. Harris, saying that Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were disqualifying and that electing Ms. Harris was the only way to reduce division and anger among Americans.
A few days after The New York Times reported that Michael Bloomberg had to be pressured into donating $50 million to support Kamala Harris, the former New York City mayor penned an opinion essay in his own media outlet saying that he “voted for her without hesitation” and encouraging moderates to do the same. “I don’t know Harris well — we have only talked a couple of times — but I’ve been impressed by the way she has run her campaign,” Bloomberg wrote.
The rapper Cardi B, who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders and then Joe Biden in 2020 but had said in May she would sit out the 2024 election over Biden’s policy on Israel and Gaza, is to appear with Vice President Kamala Harris at a Friday night rally in Milwaukee. It is unclear if she will perform or speak on Harris’s behalf, as Beyoncé did last week in Houston.
In an appearance in Bucks County, Pa., Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota denounced Donald Trump's remark at a rally on Wednesday that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not.” Walz recalled the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced in 2016 and the former president’s history of misogynistic statements, and projected a Democratic victory. “Women are going to send a loud and clear message to Donald Trump on Nov. 5 — they are going to send that message whether he likes it or not,” Walz riffed.
Walz was speaking to members of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 13 Union, as his ticket continues its outreach to white working-class voters. Vice President Kamala Harris's support is weakest with that demographic group, amid its skepticism over inflation, old grudges about free trade and new ones about student-loan forgiveness.
Detroit’s city clerk, Janice Winfrey, predicted during a news conference on Thursday that voter turnout there would range from 51 to 55 percent, which would surpass the 49.6 percent total from the 2020 presidential election. If the upper end of her estimate bears out, it would beat the 53.1 percent turnout from 2008, when Barack Obama was elected as the first Black president.
Winfrey said that the city had put together a comprehensive security plan with state and federal law enforcement partners to protect election workers and maintain the integrity of the tabulation process at a vote-counting center. That facility was swept up in a maelstrom of misinformation and outbursts by Donald Trump’s supporters during the 2020 election, when Michigan, a battleground state that he had won in 2016, flipped for President Biden
Elon Musk at a Trump rally this week at Madison Square Garden in New York.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Two weeks after making a stunning $44 billion bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, Elon Musk began to lay out a vision for his ownership of the social network. The company’s management had become biased in favor of left-wing values, Mr. Musk argued, and he would stamp out political partisanship.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” tweeted Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man.
More than two years later, the network, now known as X, is anything but. Ahead of next week’s presidential election, the platform’s algorithmically curated feeds and trending topics have become overtly political, echoing the biases of Mr. Musk, the platform’s most followed account and one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most notable supporters. Mr. Musk’s posts are a stream of grievances, conspiracy theories and partisan misinformation.
The about-face is one of many Mr. Musk has undertaken in recent years as he has increasingly embraced Mr. Trump and his allies.
He’s met with fellow billionaires and businessmen to strategize on how to elect Mr. Trump, despite criticizing similar elite gatherings last year as akin to “an unelected world government.” He has poured nearly $120 million into a fierce effort to support Mr. Trump, after criticizing other social media billionaires for getting involved in elections. And his platform has suppressed news stories from outlets he sees as biased against Mr. Trump, despite his stated commitment to free speech.
In the business world, Mr. Musk is prone to hyperbole and product predictions that sometimes fall short. But his public political turnaround — which began as he made his offer to buy Twitter — has revealed something else: a willingness to completely reverse himself on publicly expressed beliefs.
Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In purchasing Twitter, Mr. Musk has argued that he did so on the grounds of protecting free expression. As one of his first moves as the platform’s owner, he oversaw the “Twitter Files,” allowing a handful of friendly journalists to comb through old internal communications to determine whether Twitter had worked to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The company did prevent the story’s circulation, but under the impression that the material had been obtained via a foreign hack-and-leak operation. While there was no definitive link showing political motivation on Twitter’s behalf, Mr. Musk and his supporters decried what they saw as the company putting its finger on the scale to influence public opinion.
But Mr. Musk’s X has done the same. Last year, the company was found to have been slowing down access to the sites of competitors like Substack and news outlets including Reuters and The New York Times, in a process known as throttling.
Last month, after the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published an article with reportedly hacked material about the Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, X moved to stop the circulation of Mr. Klippenstein’s article and suspended his account. It was reversed only after a user on X asked Mr. Musk why the reporter had been suspended.
“I’ve asked X to unsuspend him, even though I think he is an awful human being,” Mr. Musk said in private messages seen by The Times. “Important to stay true to free speech principles.”
Mr. Klippenstein’s account was reinstated shortly thereafter, though links to his article, which was published on Substack, remain blocked on X.
As X has become more political, its owner has continued to contradict himself on his own role in the presidential election. In March, after The Times reported that he had met with Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk posted that he was “not donating money to either candidate for US President.” (More reporting from The Times showed that by the time of that statement, Mr. Musk had already been meeting with other billionaire Republican donors and businessmen to strategize on how to elect Mr. Trump.)
Last year, in a wide-ranging interview with the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Mr. Musk spoke out about a series of donations that Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, had made during the 2020 election.
“My understanding is that Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the last election, nominally in a get-out-the-vote campaign, but really fundamentally in support of Democrats,” Mr. Musk said during the interview, echoing a misleading right-wing talking point. The money — derided by critics including Mr. Trump as “Zuckerbucks” — went to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed aid to more than 2,500 election departments dealing with budget shortfalls as they adopted new voting practices during the coronavirus pandemic. The money did not support Democratic candidates.
Since his statement, Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, started his own political action committee, the America PAC, into which he has poured nearly $120 million. Much of that has gone toward funding a canvassing operation to support Mr. Trump’s campaign in battleground states as well as cash giveaways and a $1 million lottery for potential voters that has come under criticism.
Mr. Musk has targeted his efforts at voters themselves, offering those in swing states the chance to win a million dollars every day until Election Day if they sign a petition and provide his PAC with their personal information. On Monday, the district attorney of Philadelphia sued Mr. Musk and the America PAC for running an “unlawful lottery” to extract a political pledge.Mr. Musk’s lawyers have asked that the case be moved to federal court, where a judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania will decide whether to take the matter up or return it to state jurisdiction.
Other critics of Mr. Zuckerberg have remained silent on Mr. Musk’s efforts. Among them is Mr. Vance, who slammed Mr. Zuckerberg’s 2020 donations as “election meddling.”
“The simple truth is that in 2020 our oligarchs used their power and money to do everything they could to steal an election,” Mr. Vance said in a 2021 op-ed he co-wrote in The New York Post.
A spokesman for Mr. Vance declined to comment.
Mr. Musk has kept up his lottery, on Thursday congratulating a winner from North Carolina. The day before, he shared a message from his PAC, which had also been paying supporters anywhere from $47 to $100 for each potential voter they referred to sign its petition. So far, the PAC said it had doled out 87,000 checks.
“Thanks for signing our petition in support of the Constitution!” Mr. Musk wrote on X.
Elon Musk, a mega-donor to Donald Trump, is planning on spending part of his Election Day talking to voters and encouraging them to turn out for the former president. Musk just scheduled two more virtual town halls on Nov. 4 and Nov. 5, according to a list of events posted by his super PAC, America PAC.
Vice President Kamala Harris criticized former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday over comments he made the night before saying that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not.”Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday castigated remarks by her Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, who had claimed the night before that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not,” casting his comments as further proof that a second term for him would be harmful to women.
Ms. Harris, speaking from Wisconsin before leaving for campaign stops in the West, said that Mr. Trump’s comments at a rally near Green Bay constituted a “very offensive” message to all Americans in the final days of the election.
Her appearance was designed to throw the focus of a race that has been divided along gender lines squarely back onto her rival, and to counter Mr. Trump’s attempts to tie her campaign to comments made by President Biden, who this week appeared to call the Republican nominee’s supporters “garbage.”
In the days since Mr. Trump headlined a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, where speakers spewed racist and sexist language, Ms. Harris and her advisers have been more aggressive about getting in front of the news cycle and turning attention back toward the former president. As Election Day draws closer, Ms. Harris has tried to appeal to moderate Republican and independent women, particularly in the suburbs, by talking about her support for reproductive rights and casting Mr. Trump as a threat to them.
So Ms. Harris spent seven minutes focusing on Mr. Trump’s track record with women and answering three questions before reporters in Madison, Wis., before a day of back-to-back rallies held across the Sun Belt.
“It actually is very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies,” she said. “This is just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women and their agency.”
In her remarks, Ms. Harris also warned that Mr. Trump would again try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act if given a second term. As president, he tried and failed to repeal the health care law, which has since become popular with a majority of Americans.
Ms. Harris nodded to remarks this week by Speaker Mike Johnson, an ally of Mr. Trump’s, in which he said Republicans would pursue “massive reform” of the law if the former president won. Mr. Johnson, the vice president said, would provide “further validation” of Mr. Trump’s efforts.
“Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” she said.
But Ms. Harris spent the bulk of her time highlighting Mr. Trump’s remarks about keeping women safe, an approach he cast as paternal. Women in the crowd at his rally screamed their approval, but Democrats roundly criticized the comments. Droves of them pointed to Mr. Trump’s happiness about overturning the constitutional right to abortion, as well as his history of misogynistic comments and behavior toward women.
In her remarks to reporters, Ms. Harris said the former president’s statement was “offensive to everybody, by the way.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks about protecting women — which he acknowledged onstage he was making despite warnings from his advisers that such comments could be damaging to his campaign — threatened to further upend his closing message to American voters. His comments also evoked his past of using harsh or misogynistic words toward women, a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse, and the accounts of roughly two dozen women who have said he had abused or attacked them.
His first presidential race was rocked in October 2016, when leaked audio from a past appearance on “Access Hollywood” caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter.” In civil proceedings, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Mr. Trump is appealing the case.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond when asked about Ms. Harris’s comments, though the former president addressed Ms. Harris on his social media site.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing. She also said I want to end Social Security. Likewise, never mentioned it, or thought of it.”
As a candidate, Mr. Trump has expressed interest in replacing the Affordable Care Act and supporting cuts to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare. He also sought to repeal the Affordable Care Act during his tenure as president.
Heading into his Wisconsin rally, Mr. Trump had tried to seize on Mr. Biden’s comments apparently calling Trump supporters “garbage,” which he made after a comedian disparaged Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” during the former president’s rally at Madison Square Garden. Mr. Trump held a stunt involving a garbage truck in Wisconsin and wore an orange garbage collector’s vest during his speech.
But by the time Mr. Trump left the rally, his critics, including Ms. Harris, had seized on his comments about women, sensing an opportunity to shift the pressure back onto him.
“Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body,” Ms. Harris wrote on social media after Mr. Trump’s appearance. “Whether you like it or not.”
Ms. Harris had back-to-back rallies scheduled later Thursday in Phoenix; Reno, Nev.; and Las Vegas, where she is to appear with Jennifer Lopez, the Puerto Rican-American actor who is among a flood of Hispanic celebrities who signed on to help the Harris campaign in the days after Mr. Trump’s New York rally.
At a High Point, N.C., town hall hosted by Turning Point USA, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Donald Trump’s running mate, talked up Trump’s policies to an audience of younger voters. Though Vance has criticized student debt cancellation, he suggested he was willing to relieve students unable to pay debts by holding accountable colleges that set high tuition prices. “We should say, that if you are accumulating a lot of college debt, that debt is not going to follow you around for the rest of your life,” Vance said. He added that if a student has difficulty making payments, colleges should not be able to collect on their debts or garnish wages.
A decision on the legality of a contest funded by Elon Musk that awards $1 million to randomly-selected swing-state voters who sign a petition associated with Musk's pro-Trump America PAC was delayed Thursday morning after Musk's attorneys made a filing late Wednesday arguing that the case should be moved to federal court. The lawsuit was brought by District Attorney Larry Krasner of Philadelphia, who alleged that the payments to voters amount to an "unlawful lottery." The case will be heard next by Federal District Judge Gerald J. Pappert of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Howard Lutnick, the head of Donald Trump’s potential transition team, echoed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s views on vaccines in a CNN interview.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Howard Lutnick, the head of the team planning former President Donald J. Trump’s potential White House transition, said on Wednesday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had convinced him to embrace Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine claims, which have been widely debunked.
Mr. Trump has indicated that he might give Mr. Kennedy a position in his administration if he wins the election, something that could have profound implications for public health policy.
In an interview on CNN, Mr. Lutnick said he had spoken with Mr. Kennedy for two and a half hours this week, and repeated the false claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. That claim, usually proffered in relation to a vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, stems from a 1998 study that was discredited and retracted.
He described Mr. Kennedy suggesting that vaccines had become unsafe because of a 1986 law shielding manufacturers from civil liability.
That law created a federal program to compensate people for adverse effects — which are very rare — as an alternative to liability for manufacturers. It did not change anything about safety and approval requirements for vaccines, which are extensively tested and must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Mr. Lutnick, seemingly dismissing the testing and approval requirements, asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Why do you think vaccines are safe? There’s no product liability anymore.”
He also repeated a common anti-vaccine talking point that some vaccines might be safe, but children receive too many. The number of vaccines in the recommended schedule has increased as new vaccines have been developed and shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective, and as researchers and public health officials have determined the optimal number of doses. But vaccines have been streamlined over the same period, meaning that even as the number of shots has increased, the amount of antigens they contain has significantly decreased.
Ms. Collins pushed back on Mr. Lutnick, emphasizing that vaccines are tested for safety, but he doubled down.
The Trump campaign denied a recent statement from Mr. Kennedy that he had been promised “control” of government health agencies, and in the CNN interview, Mr. Lutnick dismissed a suggestion that Mr. Kennedy would lead the Department of Health and Human Services. But he made clear that Mr. Kennedy’s views were likely to be influential in a Trump administration.
Mr. Lutnick said Mr. Kennedy wanted access to data on vaccine safety — implying baselessly that it was being hidden — so he could prove vaccines were dangerous and compel companies to recall them.
“He wants the data so he can say these things are unsafe,” Mr. Lutnick said. “He says if you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the markets.”
In a clip of an interview that will appear on MSNBC later today, former President Barack Obama said that former President Donald Trump had shown consistent “disregard” for people of color. “This is somebody who has made a career out of demeaning and talking about and treating people of color in ways that indicate he does not think they necessarily are full members of the American community,” Obama told host Al Sharpton. The full interview will air at 1 p.m.
Vice President Kamala Harris, during remarks to reporters in Wisconsin, said former President Donald Trump’s remark that he would protect women whether “the women like it or not,” is “very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their rights and their ability to make decisions about their own lives including their own bodies.”
Harris also warned that Republicans will seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act if Trump is elected with a Republican-controlled Congress. “Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” she said.
Harris finished her brief remarks to reporters after about seven minutes. She took three questions and aimed to direct attention at Trump’s remarks last night about protecting women. “I think it’s offensive to everybody,” she said.
As of Thursday morning, 38 percent of registered voters in the seven battleground states — about 14.8 million people — have cast their ballots, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The early-voting rate remains highest in North Carolina (54 percent) and lowest in Pennsylvania (19 percent). Georgia’s rate is 50 percent, Nevada’s is 45 percent, Arizona’s is 43 percent, Wisconsin’s is 32 percent and Michigan’s is 31 percent.
The varying rates reflect both different cultures of early voting and the ease in which state laws allow for it. Pennsylvania is the only one of the battlegrounds without an extended period of in-person early voting, making Election Day turnout far more important there than in the other states.
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister and an ally of Donald J. Trump who has been widely criticized for his attacks on democratic norms, wrote Thursday on X that he had just gotten off the phone with the former president. “I wished him the best of luck for next Tuesday,” he wrote. “Only five days to go. Fingers crossed.”
Just got off the phone with President @realDonaldTrump . I wished him the best of luck for next Tuesday. Only five days to go. Fingers crossed 🤞
In Michigan, a battleground state where 5.5 million people voted in the last presidential election, nearly 1.8 million absentee ballots have already been returned, according to election officials. During the first five days of early-in person voting in most cities and towns, more than 100,000 people turned out each day. Donald Trump, then the president, lost the state to Joseph Biden by fewer than 160,000 votes in 2020, and polls show an incredibly tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Elon Musk at a rally for former President Donald J. Trump in Manhattan on Sunday.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Elon Musk’s lawyers, defending his online offer of as much as $1 million to swing-state voters who sign a petition pledging their support for “free speech and the right to bear arms,” are trying to move a lawsuit brought against it by District Attorney Larry Krasner of Philadelphia to federal court.
In a filing late Wednesday night, lawyers at Mr. Musk’s pro-Trump political action committee, America PAC, argued that a state court was not the proper jurisdiction for settling the legality of Mr. Musk’s petition. Mr. Musk has been ordered to appear Thursday at a hearing in the state court, the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia.
Mr. Musk has been barnstorming the country pushing former President Donald J. Trump’s candidacy. A centerpiece of that advocacy has been the petition, which asks registered voters from swing states to turn over their addresses, emails and phone numbers in exchange for $47 and a chance to win $1 million in a daily random drawing, complete with sweepstakes-style oversized novelty checks.
Some campaign-finance lawyers, as well as Democratic opponents of Mr. Musk, have argued that America PAC’s offer amounts to paying people to register to vote, which is illegal. Mr. Musk’s defenders say it is merely a contest that is open to registered voters.
Mr. Krasner filed suit against America PAC and Mr. Musk on Monday, requesting that the state court put an immediate end to what Mr. Krasner said was “indisputably an unlawful lottery.”
His filing echoed a claim made by dozens of petition signers online that they have not yet received their promised payments. On Tuesday, America PAC announced that 87,000 checks had already been sent and another 100,000 would be mailed by the end of the week.
Mr. Musk’s lawyers countered in their filing with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that “the allegations in the complaint necessarily raise federal questions that are substantial and disputed.” The filing, known as a notice of removal, essentially seeks to take a civil matter filed in a state court and have it adjudicated before a federal court instead.
It was unclear whether the hearing scheduled for Thursday morning in Philadelphia would take place. A spokesperson for Mr. Krasner’s office declined to comment.
Mr. Krasner’s lawsuit does not appear to have slowed down Mr. Musk’s efforts on behalf of Mr. Tump. On Wednesday, America PAC announced its next $1 million winner and said it would continue to announce winners each day through Nov. 5.
Voting in February in the presidential primary in Southfield, Mich. False claims spread after a formatting error in a routine report made it appear as though some people had voted twice. The error was corrected.Credit...Emily Elconin for The New York Times
Election denial activists on Wednesday seized on errors in a routine Michigan voting report to claim that multiple people were casting ballots under a single voter’s name.
The report was marred by a glitch that made it appear as though some voters had voted more than once, according to the secretary of state’s office. The report was quickly corrected, according to Angela Benander, a spokeswoman for the office.
The glitch was the result of a formatting error in a routine report generated from voter roll files, Ms. Benander said in a statement. The report counted people’s past addresses on separate lines, “resulting in the same ballot for the same voter appearing on multiple lines of information all associated with one unique voter ID,” she said.
“Each of these voters only had one vote recorded for this election,” Ms. Benander said.
The incident underscores the extent to which small glitches and mistakes — which are inevitable in the management of elections by thousands of jurisdictions and all 50 states — can be amplified by a well-organized network of election denial activists bent on elevating false claims to enforce the notion promoted by Donald J. Trump and his allies that Democrats are rigging the election.
In this case, the theory was published Wednesday by Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that frequently spreads misinformation about elections systems. A writer for the site, Patty McMurray, claimed that two co-founders of Check My Vote had issued a “bombshell” report based on Michigan’s absentee ballot information. Check My Vote is one of a number of software systems designed in the last two years enabling election denial activists to track and catch supposedly suspicious votes. But the systems rely on flawed methodology, according to elections experts who have reviewed them.
Check My Vote is a partner of Michigan Fair Elections, a subgroup of the Election Integrity Network. The network is a collection of national, state and local groups formed after the 2020 election and animated by the election lies spread by Mr. Trump and his allies. Ms. McMurray has participated in calls with Michigan Fair Elections, according to recordings of the group’s meetings reviewed by The New York Times.
Senator Bernie Sanders, on the campaign trail to back Vice President Kamala Harris, has given voice to frustrations that working-class voters say have driven them to support former President Donald J. Trump.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
At a rally in Erie, Pa., last weekend, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont laid out a bleak vision to voters.
“Working-class people are angry. And some of them are thinking about Trump,” he said, ticking off a litany of economic statistics. “The current system is broken!”
Mr. Sanders recounted tales of families living paycheck to paycheck, and described elites and the status quo as “disgraceful” and “disgusting.” He grew louder as he talked about the ravages of addictions to alcohol and opioids, reaching a shout as he got to what he called the worst addiction of all: “It’s greed!”
The crowd roared in agreement.
On the campaign trail on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Sanders is embracing a dark tone in his outreach to frustrated working-class voters, giving voice to a grimly populist message that contrasts with her campaign’s upbeat optimism.
Mr. Sanders has stumped across swing states for months, and the 83-year-old independent said in an interview that with the campaign’s end in sight, he planned to hold rallies through Election Day. His fiery speeches aim to win over voters leaning toward former President Donald J. Trump by acknowledging working-class anger over the economy. Short of that, he hopes to motivate reliable Democratic voters to turn out.
“Workers’ rights are on the table,” Mr. Sanders said. “That’s something I can’t sit out, so I will do everything I can to see that Trump is defeated and Harris is elected.”
Mr. Trump has long stoked working-class furor over what he terms a Washington elite putting down the Everyman and trying to keep Mr. Trump, a billionaire, out of the White House. He often calls the United States “a failing nation.” The playlist at his rallies invariably features “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a working-class lament that topped the charts last year, and prompts his crowds to sing along.
Ms. Harris and her allies have courted working-class voters, and she has secured the support of most major labor organizations, running in large part on President Biden’s record as what he calls the most pro-union president in history. But despite the Democrats’ wellspring of union support, some labor groups like the Teamsters have declined to endorse Ms. Harris, and many working-class voters, first animated by Mr. Trump in 2016, have retreated from the Democratic ranks over the perception that the party has grown out of touch with them.
A New York Times/Siena College poll this month found Ms. Harris’s support from white, non-college-educated voters nearly tied with the group’s support for President Biden in a 2020 election exit poll. But a CNN analysis suggested that, compared with Democratic candidates in the last three presidential elections, she could draw the smallest share of union household votes.
Mr. Sanders’s references to life under the ruling class led Rita Macomber, an Erie rallygoer and Harris supporter, to describe the Vermont senator with a phrase often applied to Mr. Trump: “He tells it like it is.”
Josh Boring, a 40-year-old member of the machinists’ union who attended the rally in Erie, said there was overlap between Mr. Sanders’s message and the energy behind Mr. Trump, which Democrats could use to their advantage. “I know a lot of people that are voting for Trump that actually like Bernie Sanders,” he said. “People on the left and Harris, they feel that anger and want to help with it.”
Mr. Sanders’s progressive reputation left some swing voters doubtful about his impact.
William Matlock, a 73-year-old former union worker at a locomotive plant, attended Mr. Sanders’s rally on Saturday and said he was already planning to vote for Ms. Harris. He described himself as a Trump-skeptical Republican with moderate political views, but said Mr. Sanders wasn’t a compelling surrogate.
“He’s a socialist and all that, so we really have not that much in common,” Mr. Matlock said, adding that he might leave to see a rally with Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, which took place around the same time in Erie. “That’s such a great weapon against her, you know? ‘Oh yeah, this communist over here, he’s voting for her.’”
But even if Mr. Sanders’s views limit his appeal in some areas, there are signs his message is amplified nationally, including to progressives who were among the most vocal to support his past presidential campaigns. The rally in Erie earned more than 800,000 views on X, and Mr. Sanders usually attracts hundreds of attendees in small, industrial cities, making his campaign events comparable in size to many held by the vice-presidential candidates. (Mr. Sanders is himself running for re-election.)
To longtime Sanders supporters, his focus on the economic divide will sound familiar.
“Where we are today is a nation moving rapidly in the direction of oligarchy,” Mr. Sanders said in an October rally in Baraboo, Wis. “That is where we are heading, unless together we reverse that course.”
“I Voted” stickers are fair game for Election Day selfies no matter where you live, but photos of marked ballots can be a little dicier.Credit...Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Your hair might look perfect. You might feel the spirit of democracy coursing through your veins. But you should still think twice before posting a selfie with your completed ballot on or before Election Day.
Ballot selfies are against the law in 13 states, according to a recent report from the nonprofit organization Lawyers for Good Government. Among the states with a ban is New York, whose attorney general, Letitia James, reminded voters last week to keep their marked ballots to themselves.
Seven states allow selfies with mail-in ballots, but not at polling locations, and nine have laws that are unclear, the report said.
Why can’t we all just smile for the camera, the way voters in Alabama, California and 23 other states can without issue? The answer has its roots in longstanding debates over the sanctity of the voting booth and the protection of political speech.
“For some folks it may seem really stupid, like, I just want to take a selfie,” said Anthony Michael Kreis,aconstitutional law professor at Georgia State University. “But it is a serious issue.”
State laws intended to protect privacy in the voting booth date to the late 19th century, when secret ballots were introduced with the goal of preventing vote buying and voter coercion. In the mid-2010s, those laws collided with the smartphone era.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire challenged a state law banning ballot selfies in 2014, claiming that it restricted free speech. Election officials there countered that the law was still necessary to prevent voter intimidation.
The New Hampshire ban was officially overturned in 2016. States including Colorado and California later amended their laws to be friendlier to ballot selfies. In other states, including New York, bans were upheld.
Voting selfies — sometimes featuring marked ballots, but oftentimes not — have become a favored tool of celebrities hoping to encourage voting among their followers: Lady Gaga, Whoopi Goldberg, Blake Lively and Jennifer Aniston all posted them during the 2020 election.
But the singer Justin Timberlake ran afoul of a ballot-selfie ban in Tennessee in 2016, telling Jimmy Fallon afterward that he had “no idea” that his ballot box photo shoot had been illegal. Although his misstep became a social media punchline, Mr. Timberlake was not ultimately investigated by the Shelby County district attorney.
State laws against ballot selfies are typically “more bark than bite,” said Khadijah Silver, the supervising attorney for civil rights at Lawyers for Good Government. Last year, a Wisconsin judge dismissed a felony charge against a school board candidate who had posted a ballot selfie to Facebook.
Still, Mx. Silver and others argue that laws prohibiting ballot selfies are an outdated infringement on the right to political speech that can serve to intimidate voters, especially young people and people of color, who could be put off by the specter of fines or prosecution. They added that there was no evidence that ballot selfies had ever been used as “receipts” in illegal vote-buying transactions — a concern commonly cited by proponents of the bans.
“It’s a problem of the laws not keeping up with technology, not keeping up with human behavior,” Mx. Silver said. “We need to be getting rid of these laws in order to establish a healthier, more welcoming culture in the voting booth.”
Some scholars disagree. The U.C.L.A. law professor Richard L. Hasen, a vocal critic of ballot selfies, argued in The New York Times’s opinion section in 2016 that laws against them remained necessary to shore up election integrity.
“There are a ton of ways to express your support for voting for or against a candidate without taking a picture of the one thing which can serve as proof of how you voted,” he wrote, “and thereby open the window up for vote buying or coercion from your employer, spouse, religious leader or union boss.”
The 2024 election is accompanied by its own set of concerns, Professor Kreis said. He pointed to Elon Musk’s recent $1 million, sweepstakes-style payouts to registered voters in battleground states, which drew criticism from legal experts who said they might violate a federal law against paying people to register to vote. (Philadelphia’s district attorney sued Mr. Musk over the scheme on Monday, calling it an “unlawful lottery.”)
Professor Kreis is not convinced that ballot selfies are a threat to fair elections. At the same time, he said, “a nuanced conversation needs to be had about exactly why these laws are put in place, and if there are alternative and less restrictive means of achieving this anti-corruption endeavor without restricting free speech,” he said.
Professor Kreis, who lives in Georgia, one of the states where it is illegal to photograph a ballot at the polls, urged his followers on X to post a cheery illustration of a peach rather than the far more fraught ballot selfie.
“I think that there are a lot of ways that people can be creative,” he said.
Former President Donald J. Trump, on Wednesday near Green Bay, Wis., added a new line to his promises to protect women. “I said, well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” he said. “I am going to protect them.”Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump said at a rally on Wednesday that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not” — remarks that he cast as paternal but only served as reminders to many of his critics of his history of misogynistic statements and a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse.
Speaking near Green Bay, Wis., Mr. Trump told the crowd that his advisers had urged him to stop using a well-worn rally line about his desire to protect women, saying they had called it “inappropriate.” In recent months, Mr. Trump has boasted on social media and in his speeches that he would protect women in America by making their communities safer and by making sure they won’t “be thinking about abortion,” as he faces increasing backlash for appointing three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
On Wednesday, he delivered similar remarks but added a new twist as he described onstage what he had told his advisers: “I said, well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”
Polls show that Mr. Trump is already facing a significant deficit with female voters in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman to serve as vice president. Ms. Harris has tried to appeal to moderate Republican and independent women, particularly in the suburbs, by talking about her support for abortion rights and casting Mr. Trump as divisive and reactionary.
The former president’s remarks on Wednesday mean that, for many voters, his closing message is being defined, in part, by racist jokes about Puerto Rico told by a comedian at his rally in New York this week and, now, a striking display of machismo.
Ms. Harris quickly sought to respond, writing on X: “Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body. Whether you like it or not.” Her campaign posted a series of videos on social media emphasizing Mr. Trump’s remarks. And it sent out a news release that blared: “In Wisconsin, Trump reminds women how little he values their choices.”
Asked to comment, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, did not address Mr. Trump’s remarks. But she said the Biden-Harris administration had left women “worse off financially and far less safe than we were four years ago under President Trump.”
“Women deserve a president who will secure our nation’s borders, remove violent criminals from our neighborhoods, and build an economy that helps our families thrive,” she said in a statement.
Image
Mr. Trump’s rally outside Green Bay.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump and his allies have made a series of misogynistic, sexualized attacks against Ms. Harris. In August, Mr. Trump used his social media website to amplify a crude remark about her that falsely suggested she had traded sexual favors to help her political career. On Sunday, at his Madison Square Garden rally, one speaker referred to Ms. Harris as having “pimp handlers.” And a super PAC financed by his ally Elon Musk released an ad that called her a “C word,” although the ad eventually revealed that the word was “communist,” rather than the slur for women.
As the gender gap widens between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, even women in his own party have warned that he risks alienating a crucial slice of the electorate. Nikki Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador before challenging him in the Republican primaries this year, criticized the recent sexist and crude attacks lodged at Ms. Harris during an interview on Fox News on Tuesday, warning that it made women “uncomfortable.”
“That is not the way to win women,” Ms. Haley said. “That is not the way to win people who are concerned about Trump’s style.”
“This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they’ve got going,” she added. “Fifty-three percent of the electorate are women. Women will vote. They care about how they’re being talked to, and they care about the issues.”
This month during a Harris campaign event in Michigan, former Representative Liz Cheney, the most prominent Republican to endorse Ms. Harris, also pointed to Mr. Trump’s crassness, particularly when it came to women, and urged them to vote against him.
“When you think about that level of instability, the level of erratic decision-making, the misogyny, that’s not someone that you can entrust with the power of the Oval Office,” Ms. Cheney said.
Mr. Trump has been accused by roughly two dozen women of sexual misconduct. In 2016, the “Access Hollywood” tape caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter.” The writer E. Jean Carroll said he raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. In civil proceedings, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll, and ordered to pay hefty fines. Mr. Trump is appealing the case.
In his attacks on Ms. Harris over the course of his rally on Wednesday, Mr. Trump repeatedly insulted her intelligence — referring to her as a “low IQ individual” and comparing her negatively to Brett Favre, the former N.F.L. quarterback who served as the event’s celebrity guest.
Image
Vice President Kamala Harris in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday. Her campaign was quick to respond to Mr. Trump’s remarks about women.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
“Kamala Harris is not fit to be president of the United States,” Mr. Trump said. “She doesn’t have the intellect, the stamina, or that special quality that real leaders must have to lead. We know what that is. It’s a special quality.” He claimed that Mr. Favre had that “special” quality.
Mr. Trump then detailed conversations that he claimed he had been having with his staff, who pleaded with him not to make the claim about protecting women.
“Sir, please don’t say that,” Mr. Trump recalled. “‘Why?’ They said, ‘We think it’s, we think it’s very inappropriate for you to say. I say why, I’m president, I want to protect the women of our country. They said — they said, ‘Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.’”
Mr. Trump then recalled his defiant response.
“So I said, I’m going to defend it and I’m going to protect women,” he said. “I’m not going to let people go into the suburbs or go into places where they live, whether suburbs or cities or farms. We’re going to protect our women at the border. We’re going to protect our women — and also, we’re going to protect our men.”
The thousands who attended the rally were rapt. Mr. Trump looked to them for validation.
“Is there any woman in this giant stadium who would like not to be protected?” Mr. Trump asked.
The room was nearly silent.
“Is there any woman in this stadium that wants to be protected?” Mr. Trump asked.
Former President Donald J. Trump and Nicky Jam at a Trump campaign event in Las Vegas last month.Credit...John Locher/Associated Press
Nicky Jam, a Puerto Rican musician who endorsed former President Donald J. Trump last month, withdrew that endorsement just days after racist remarks against Puerto Rico and Latinos made by a speaker at Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday drew widespread outrage.
The reggaeton star had stood by Mr. Trump’s side at a campaign event in Las Vegas in September as he endorsed the former president. Before Nicky Jam took the stage, Mr. Trump praised the musician’s looks, apparently believing him to be a woman. “Do you know Nicky?” he asked the crowd. “She’s hot. Where is Nicky?”
When Nicky Jam came to take the stage, Mr. Trump looked a bit befuddled.
In a video posted on social media on Wednesday, Nicky Jam said he had supported Mr. Trump because he believed that he would be best for the economy.
“Never in my life did I think that a month later, there would come a comedian to criticize my country,” he said in Spanish.
Nicky Jam’s disavowal of Mr. Trump reflects the damage that the remarks at the Madison Square Garden rally could inflict on the Trump campaign’s efforts to court Latino voters. The star was just one of the Black and Latino musicians whom Mr. Trump has featured at campaign rallies in an effort to recruit new surrogates who can sway younger men of color, an important demographic in a race that may be decided by the slimmest of margins.
Other prominent Puerto Rican celebrities — including Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and the pop phenomenon Bad Bunny — have used social media to condemn the rally remarks and to show support for Vice President Kamala Harris to their tens of millions of followers. Ms Harris had announced a plan to bring economic opportunities to Puerto Rico hours before the rally at Madison Square Garden.
In seven states and the District of Columbia, at least 80 percent of offices fielded just one candidate.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
In an election season that is setting records in some states for turnout, campaign spending and existential angst, a new survey of races nationwide offers another chart-topping statistic: Seven in 10 elective offices in this year’s general election are being sought by only one candidate.
BallotReady,a nonpartisan organization promoting civic engagement, which conducted the research, said the share of uncontested races at all levels of government, from local fire districts to Capitol Hill, was greater than in any of its past surveys in 2020, 2022 and 2023.
“Democracy is not working the way it should,” Alex Niemczewski, chief executive of the organization, said on Wednesday. “Voters don’t have a choice.”
The survey covered some 44,650 elective offices across counties with more than 50,000 residents, or about 88 percent of the nation’s population. Both partisan and nonpartisan offices were included. Most single-candidate offices were concentrated in hyperlocal jurisdictions like water-management or conservation boards, and in county governments, the data showed. Competition was more common for city, state and federal offices.
But the findings varied, sometimes wildly, from state to state. A mere 22 percent of elective offices are uncontested this fall in New Hampshire, the lowest total among states (only Connecticut, with 24 percent, came close). Alabama, 90 percent of offices on the November ballot are uncontested was the highest.
In eight jurisdictions, at least 80 percent of offices fielded just one candidate: Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas.
Uncontested races are an old and much-debated phenomenon in American politics, and even the BallotReady survey does not capture its scope. In a nation where many Republicans and Democrats have sorted themselves into separate geographic islands, many elections are so lopsided that they might as well have gone uncontested.
Ms. Niemczewski said she believed that Americans knew too little about the democratic process to be full participants. “People don’t know what’s going to be on the ballot,” she said. “They don’t know who represents them.”
The survey did not break down the list of uncontested races by party, but Ms. Niemczewski said it appeared that more single-candidate offices were in rural areas, which are predominantly Republican.
That is consistent with a study of about 29,400 partisan offices in the 2022 midterms, which found that Democrats were more than three times as likely as Republicans to not field a candidate for the job.
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/10/31/multimedia/31election-carousel-harris-phqg/31election-carousel-harris-phqg-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Madison, Wis.![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/10/31/multimedia/31election-carousel-harris-phqg/31election-carousel-harris-phqg-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment