Harris and Trump campaign in battleground states

Former President Barack Obama walks on stage during a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tucson, Arizona, on October 18.

Hitting the trail for Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona on Friday, former President Barack Obama lamented that the political rise of former President Donald Trump shows that the values of late Republican Sen. John McCarin have been “set aside.”

Obama described McCain, the former Arizona senator and his rival in the 2008 presidential election, as “a man of character” who “understood that some values transcend party.”

McCain “believed in honest argument and hearing the views of other people. He didn’t demonize his political opponents,” he added, recalling the 2008 incident when McCain corrected a woman at his campaign event who said she didn’t trust Obama and called him an “Arab.”

At the Tucson rally, Obama also questioned Trump’s competence and slammed his successor for declaring himself the “father of IVF.”

“You would be worried if your grandpa was acting like this,” Obama argued. “So, imagine it coming from a guy who wants to be given unchecked power.”

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announces that she will vote for former President Donald Trump during an event in Washington, DC, on May 22.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is in talks with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to join him on the trail in the final days of the 2024 race as he seeks to broaden his appeal among female voters, two sources familiar with the talks told CNN.

No events have been finalized, but some of the discussions have centered on a potential joint appearance at a Fox News town hall in late October, the sources said.

The talks were first reported by The Bulwark.

Trump has held a number of town halls moderated by prominent Republican women, including Govs. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kristi Noem. But GOP operatives acknowledge Haley could draw a different kind of voter.

Trump’s senior advisers privately acknowledge that some women voters don’t necessarily like Trump as a person or his rhetoric, but they think he could win them over with his policies.

The campaign has also been touting Haley’s endorsement of Trump in battleground states. A billboard, recently placed in the Milwaukee suburbs, read: “Endorsed by Nikki Haley.”

She has yet to appear with Trump on the campaign trail.

Read more here.

Early voting will begin in the key battleground state of Michigan on Saturday.

Both campaigns are keenly aware of how a win in Michigan, a traditional “Blue Wall” state, could change the electoral map.

Although the state went for Joe Biden by around 154,000 votes in 2020, it also delivered Trump a historic win when he defeated Hillary Clinton by less than 11,000 votes, breaking a streak of Democratic wins there since 1992.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump held events in the state on Friday.

Harris will be back today, meeting with faith leaders in the area before giving brief remarks at a Get Out the Vote event where Harris-Walz supporters will gather before marching to the polls to vote.

Other key states: Early voting also began in two swing states earlier this week. In North Carolina, election officials said the first day of early in-person voting Thursday surpassed 2020. Georgia saw record numbers when it began early in-person voting Tuesday.

In this October 2018 photo, then-US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis listens as then-President Donald Trump answers questions during a meeting with military leaders in the Cabinet Room in Washington, DC.

Former President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US military should be used to deal with “the enemy from within” on Election Day has reignited concerns about what he might ask US forces to do if he wins a second term as commander in chief.

And it is senior military leaders who served under him who have most clearly sounded the alarm about Trump.

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward in his new book “War” that the former president “is the most dangerous person to this country. … A fascist to the core.”

And on Thursday on ”The Bulwark podcast,” Woodward said Gen. Jim Mattis, who served as Trump’s defense secretary, had emailed him to say that he agreed with the assessment that Milley had provided Woodward. On the podcast, Woodward said the thrust of Mattis’ email about Trump was, “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.”

Trump has long had a boyish fascination with the military, idolizing World War II generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. As a teenager, he reveled in his stint at a military-style boarding school in New York.

Despite that fascination, Trump took multiple deferments to avoid service in the Vietnam War.

When he became president, Trump staffed his cabinet with senior generals. He appointed Mattis, a retired four-star general to head the Pentagon; his chief of staff John Kelly was another retired four-star general; and two of his national security advisers were three-star generals, Michael Flynn and H. R. McMaster.

Keep reading here.

In the first two weeks of October, Donald Trump and his allies directed about a third of all their spending on broadcast TV advertisements to ads about transgender health care, a significant increase reflecting a major tactical shift from previous months’ ad expenditures.

On the other side, Kamala Harris and her allies continued to put money into ads focused on taxes, character and health care, while lowering their investment in spots about abortion rights. Democrats have also abandoned an earlier emphasis on immigration and crime when Harris and her allies sought to blunt sustained GOP attacks in the weeks after she took over the ticket.

The ad tracking firm AdImpact catalogs the issues that are referenced in broadcast TV campaign ads and tracks the amount of money behind those spots. Comparing changes since August illustrates how the two campaigns and their allies are tailoring their messages and how much they’re spending to do so.

Pro-Trump campaign ads: Since the beginning of October, Republican advertisers in the presidential race have flooded the airwaves in battleground states with a series of stark attack ads, blasting Harris for previously expressing support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners, a position she took during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign.

Pro-Harris campaign ads: In the first two weeks of October, tax policy was the top issue, as spots about taxation drew about half of all broadcast TV ad spending. Taxation has been a consistent point of emphasis in Democratic presidential advertising, part of a two-pronged approach — touting Harris’ tax policies aimed at working and middle-class families while attacking Trump’s approach and criticizing tax cuts for corporations and top earners.

Read more on ad spending here.

Former President Donald Trump looks on during a rally in Detroit as Vice President Kamala Harris' face is shown in a video on screen on October 18.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump both campaigned in Michigan on Friday, barnstorming the state as they battle for its potentially decisive 15 Electoral College votes.

The two converged on vote-rich Oakland County, northwest of Detroit — where an increasingly educated, diverse population and the suburban revolt against Trump has shifted the political landscape in Democrats’ favor in recent years.

Harris told a crowd in Waterford Township that Trump was “full of big promises, but always fails to deliver” and called him “one of the biggest losers of manufacturing jobs in American history.”

She touted her support for labor unions and said she’d push the federal government and private businesses to hire more workers without college degrees.

It was a blue-collar pitch that Harris also made Friday in Grand Rapids, a Western Michigan city in Kent County, which swung from Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020, and Lansing, where she panned Trump’s record on manufacturing and told union members that the former president is “no friend of labor.”

Before closing his night with a Detroit rally, Trump also stopped in Oakland County for a roundtable in Auburn Hills. He said he’d boost American auto manufacturing by slapping steep tariffs on imported vehicles.

“I think it’s more beautiful than love, the word tariff,” Trump said.

Read more on Harris and Trump’s visit to Michigan here.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will be in battleground states on Saturday.

Here’s what their schedules look like:

Kamala Harris will mark the first day of early voting in Detroit by meeting with faith leaders in the area on Saturday. She will also give brief remarks at a Get Out the Vote event where Harris-Walz supporters will gather before marching to the polls to vote.

After that, she will travel to Atlanta, Georgia, for a campaign rally where she will encourage Georgians to early vote.

Donald Trump will hold a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.

President Barack Obama will travel to Las Vegas, Nevada, to hold a campaign rally on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign.

Bill Clinton is in eastern North Carolina as part of his four-day visit to the state to campaign to “encourage rural voters to turn out and vote for Vice President Harris and Democrats up and down the ballot.” Clinton will be in North Carolina through Sunday.

During his visit, he has been clear with the vice president’s team where he most wants to be deployed: Small, rural American towns that are not used to seeing surrogates — let alone a former president — pass through.