By NBC News
What to know about the campaigns today
- Former President Donald Trump heads to battleground Georgia for a town hall in Zebulon this afternoon and a rally with Turning Point Action in Duluth tonight.
- Vice President Kamala Harris is holding a town hall in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, hosted by CNN
- Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, is campaigning in Nevada, with remarks in Las Vegas and Reno this afternoon.
- Harris' vice presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has a campaign event in St. Paul and will deliver remarks at a campaign reception in Louisville, Kentucky, this evening.
- Former President Bill Clinton is stumping for Harris in Phoenix.
Multiple Arizona Trump supporters agree Democrats are the “enemy from within”
Alex Tabet
Reporting from PEORIA, Arizona
Following Trump's recent comments calling Democrats the "enemy from within" NBC News spoke with Trump supporters here who wholeheartedly agreed with the former president.
“I think Democrats are bound to determine to destroy our country and make us like Venezuela. They want to destroy the middle class,” Sally Foree, 66, said, agreeing with Trump’s characterization.
Another voter, Neil Rubin, 64, told NBC that the Democratic party "has been taken over by leftist, communist, Marxist Democrats."
“So yes, Donald Trump is correct,” Rubin added.
Another voter, John Crann, 66, told NBC News that he agrees with Trump and believes Democrats have "no morals, no values anymore."
Member of the Insane Clown Posse endorses Harris: 'I want her to win'
Alexandra Marquez
One half of hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse endorsed Harris during an interview on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."
"I want her to win because she's a Democrat and I love my mom," Violent J told "Daily Show" correspondent Troy Iwata during a segment in which Iwata showed the rapper digitally altered photos of the major party presidential and vice presidential nominees in clown makeup.
Earlier in the segment, Violent J spoke about Trump, telling Iwata, "Now I know why I hated Trump, that wall s---," and referring to Trump's attempts to build a wall along the southern border.
He also praised Democrats broadly, saying "Democrats are basically saying less taxes on the poor, more taxes on the rich."
Asked about Harris running mate, Walz, Violent J added, "“I’m absolutely opinionless on that man." He also spoke unfavorably about Vance, using a derogatory term.
Police arrest suspect in shooting incidents at Harris campaign office in Arizona
Alex Tabet
Rebecca Shabad
Alex Tabet and Rebecca Shabad
Police in Tempe, Arizona, have arrested a 60-year-old man suspected of shooting at a Democratic National Committee office over the last two months and hanging suspicious bags of white powder from political signs in a nearby village.
Police announced the arrest late yesterday and identified the suspect as Jeffrey Michael Kelly. He was charged with several felonies, including the unlawful discharge of a firearm, shooting at a nonresidential structure and committing an act of terrorism, and misdemeanor criminal damage.
Tempe police also allege that the suspect posted several political signs hung with suspicious bags of white powder and lined with razor blades in the village of Ahwatukee, Arizona.
Last month, the police said officers responded to the DNC office, which organizes and campaigns for Harris, after staff members reported they noticed what appeared to be gunshots through the office’s front windows. Earlier in September, police said the same office’s front windows appeared to be hit by a pellet or BB gun.
Read the full story here.
Battleground states flooded with voting lawsuits weeks out from Election Day
Adam Edelman
Political parties and groups have filed nearly 100 lawsuits across seven battleground states that could shape how votes are cast and counted ahead of Election Day and the legal battle that’s expected to follow.
The majority of suits were brought by Republicans and allied groups who are focused on rooting out alleged voter fraud, despite the lack of evidence of its occurring in a widespread way, particularly around mail ballot procedures and noncitizen voting.
Many suits have sought to purge voter rolls or bolster signature and voter identification requirements — or invalidate ballots that don’t meet them — while others have looked to revamp different aspects of election administration, including reducing the use of ballot drop boxes and instituting unusual vote-counting protocols, like requiring that ballots be counted by hand.
Lawsuits from Democrats and allied groups have focused mostly on expanding voting access by trying to extend registration deadlines or appealing for broader interpretations of laws about absentee ballots and voter identification.
Read the full story here.
Harris campaign targets Gen Z voters in the final stretch of the election
Nnamdi Egwuonwu
Harris’ campaign is launching an early voting pushtargeting studentson battleground state college campuses. The effort consists of concerts, block parties and tailgates, in addition to a new seven-figure targeted ad buy focused primarily on reaching students through social media platforms.
The ad buy will geographically target students in battleground states across platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube Shorts. Some of the ads, according to the campaign, are designed tomirror popularsocial media trends.
The “Vote for Our Future” tour will put the campaign’s principals alongside high-profile surrogates working tomobilize young votersacross the battlegrounds, not just engaging the students, but also encouraging them to register to vote and vote early.
Read the full story here.
John Kelly, who was the White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, is speaking out about what he sees as the dangers of a second Trump term. In a series of interviews with The New York Times, he sharply criticized Trump, saying he fits “the definition of a fascist.” NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for "TODAY."
MoveOn launches ‘brat’-inspired ad targeting young voters
Megan Lebowitz
Raquel Coronell Uribe
Megan Lebowitz and Raquel Coronell Uribe
The progressive organization MoveOn said today it's spending $250,000 on a Charli XCX-inspired ad targeting young, infrequent voters in a get-out-the-vote effort.
The 15-second digital ad, first shared with NBC News, spoofs Charli XCX’s song “Guess” off the artist’s rereleased “brat” album. It will run across Meta platforms as a video and a gif in key battleground states.
“We have been reaching beyond traditional GOTV methods to remind young people their vote is their power and can affect our daily lives 365 days of the year,” MoveOn spokesperson Britt Jacovich said in a statement.
MoveOn said the ad is part of a $1.2 million digital campaign in support of the Harris-Walz ticket and key congressional races and targets 1.63 million so-called surge voters — people who are new and vote infrequently, lean Democratic, skew younger and cast their first ballot after the 2016 election.
Vance emerges as Trump’s explainer-in-chief
Henry J. Gomez
Alec Hernández
Henry J. Gomez and Alec Hernández
Vance’s willingness to regularly take questions from mainstream news outlets has added an unofficial duty to his role as Trump’s running mate: explainer-in-chief.
In interviews, at news conferences and while speaking with reporters on his campaign plane, Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, often finds himself having to defend, decode or “well, actually” whatever provocative Trump comment made most recently.
That time Trump questioned whether Harris is really Black? “I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris,” Vance contended.
When Trump disparaged Detroit, a majority-Black city in battleground Michigan? Trump, Vance said, “was just talking honestly about the fact that Detroit has been left behind.”
And when Trump name-dropped a Democratic congressman when he warned about an “enemy within” and stoked fears of chaos justifying military intervention on Election Day? “The enemy within,” Vance offered, “are people that Kamala Harris let into this country unvetted, unchecked and undocumented.”
Read the full story here.
Obama urges young men not to give up on the political process in new podcast with NBA players
Shaquille Brewster
Former President Barack Obama made a direct plea for young men not to get frustrated at the slow pace of political progress as he made the case to support Harris for president on the inaugural episode of a new podcast hosted by NBA players.
“A lot of young people — a lot of young men — they get frustrated, and they say, ‘Well, nothing’s happened,’” Obama told NBA All-Star Tyrese Halliburton, 24, and producer Tommy Alterin a clip first shared with NBC News. “But let’s say — when I was president I didn’t cure racism, I didn’t eliminate poverty. But 50 million people got health insurance. That didn’t happen before, and that saved lives and made people’s lives better.”
Obama added that the reason to vote is that there is somebody “who can see you, knows your life, cares about you,” who will be making “a million decisions” that will hopefully “make your lives a little bit better each year.”
The podcast, “The Young Man and the Three,” is a rebrand of a show that was called “The Old Man and the Three,” which had more than a million YouTube subscribers, with an overwhelming young and male audience.
Read the full story here.
Analysis: How Harris and Trump are making their closing arguments
Chuck Todd
Given the tumultuous nature of the Trump era in general and the twists and turns that of the 2024 campaign specifically, it’s hard to believe we are most likely at the end game of this historic election cycle and (knock on wood) it’s ending more normally than any campaign featuring Donald Trump has ended so far.
I accept that the phrase “so far” is doing a lot of work in the above paragraph — and to be clear, I’m talking about campaign-shaking events, not Trump’s penchant for crude or uncomfortable remarks. Clearly, something unforeseen can still happen, but I’m not sure we’ll have any new event that would dramatically affect either candidate’s vote share in this late stage of the race. But if you aren’t prepared for the unexpected in politics anymore, then you haven’t been paying attention!
But what has been different — so far! — about this campaign in these last few weeks is how semi-, sorta, kinda conventionally both campaigns are behaving.
For one thing, the campaigns appear to agree on who the final persuadable voter is: a Republican or Republican-leaning independent who doesn’t like Trump personally but is skeptical of Vice President Kamala Harris’ perceived liberal politics.
In a polarized nation, local governments are oases of compromise and community, study finds
Alexandra Marquez
Local governments are uniquely able to combat growing national polarization, according to a new study out today from the nonprofit research organization CivicPulse and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The study, which involved interviews with more than 1,400 local elected policymakers and local civil service leaders, found that 87% of those surveyed said political polarization negatively affects the country “a great deal” or “a lot.” But just 31% of local officials said that political polarization negatively impacts their local communities to that extent.
“Political polarization, which is dominating the media at the national level, really is not dominating life at the local level at all,” Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund supporting research and education, told NBC News about the report.
Dividing responses by population size, the survey found that local officials from smaller communities see fewer negative effects from polarization than those from larger communities. While 46% of officials from communities with 50,000 or more residents said their community is negatively affected “a lot” or “a great deal” by polarization, just 28% of local officials from communities with 1,000 to 10,000 residents said the same.
Read the full story here.