Georgia sees record amount of early voting – report
The day is not over, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia has seen a record amount of early voting on the first day polls have been open:
More than 200,000 voters have cast ballots in Georgia during the first day of in-person early voting according to state elections officials, shattering the state’s record. #gapol https://t.co/mrjIq41dx2
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) October 15, 2024
This is not necessarily indicative of how the swing state, where many polls have shown Donald Trump with a narrow lead, will end up voting in November.
Key events
Harris has spent the town hall addressing very specific policies, focusing on a list of plans to boost the middle class, and help Americans though an affordability crisis.
“I’m going to extend tax deductions to $50,000 every first time homeowner, wherever they are, whatever their race, will benefit if they are first time homebuyer with a $25,000 down payment assistance, everyone is going to benefit from my plan to extend the Child Tax $6,000 for the first year of their child’s life,” she said.
In a substantive discussion, Harris also repeatedly emphasized that policies that will benefit Black Americans will help everybody.
Charlemagne: “I had a politician tell me once that if you’re running for a national election, it’s bad electoral strategy to say you are going to do things for Black people, which is why a lot of politicians don’t speak directly to their plans for black people.”
Harris: “I don’t I don’t know that that’s true. I think that what is true is that I am running to be president for everybody, but I’m clear eyed about the history and the disparities that exist for specific communities.”
Kamala Harris joins town hall hosted by Charlamagne Tha God
The vice president has joined a town hall in Detroit, hosted by Charlamagne Tha God. “This is a margin-of-error race. It’s tight. I’m gonna win. I’m gonna win, but it’s tight,” she told him.
The event is being streamed live on iHeartRadio. Prior to the town hall, Harris stopped by the Norwest Gallery of Art for a conversation with Black men about entrepreneurship.
As early voting begins in Georgia, a county judge in the state has ruled that local officials cannot refuse to certify election results.
The ruling from judge Robert McBurney on Monday night rebukes and argument from Donald Trump and his allies that local election officials should have the discretion deny the certification of election results.
McBurney found that “the superintendent must certify and must do so by a certain time” – with no exemptions. The ruling could help protect the elections against rogue officials, encouraged by Republicans who have falsely alleged widespread fraud in elections.
“While the [election official] must investigate concerns about miscounts and must report those concerns to a prosecutor if they persist after she investigates, the existence of those concerns, those doubts, and those worries is not cause to delay or decline certification,” McBurney wrote. “That is simply not an option for this particular ministerial function in the superintendent’s broader portfolio of functions.”
Tim Walz is spending the day in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.
Wearing a plaid shirt, Walz spoke at a farm in Volant, Pennsylvania – a small town with a population of just 125 – to tout his campaign’s agenda for rural America.
“When people think rural America, farm policy matters,” Walz said. “Crop insurance matters. Trade matters, tariff matters. But you’re bigger than that. Your families, your healthcare matters, your education matters, your roads matter, your retirement matters, all those things matter.”
He also tried to push an optimistic message, saying: “I saw the Wall Street Journal said: ‘Joyfulness isn’t a plan.’ Well, no one said it’s a plan. But it’s a hell of a lot better to be joyful than to be angry and terrible like they’re doing on the other side.”
Trump cancels CNBC interview – report
Donald Trump was scheduled to appear on CNBC this week, but backed out unexpectedly, CNN reports.
It was the second time the former president had canceled an interview recently, after declining to appear on the popular CBS News show 60 Minutes. He has instead given interviews to rightwing news outlets, and earlier today had a live conversation on economic policy moderated by Bloomberg News.
CNN reports that Trump’s campaign cited a scheduling conflict as the reason he could not appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box show.
“Trump canceled, and he was going to come on,” co-anchor Joe Kernen announced on air earlier today. He added that the network had also asked Kamala Harris to appear but that “she’s not coming on”.
There are many theories about why presidential polls have moved so little since Kamala Harris entered the race in July.
In an interview today with CNN, veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz says the atmosphere is beginning to remind him of 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, despite winning the popular vote and polls generally showing her with the edge. Here’s what Luntz had to say:
“I began to look at this as quite similar to 2016 when Donald Trump surprised voters and beat Hillary Clinton.”@FrankLuntz weighs in on the Trump debate debacle, Harris’ narrow lead, the 3 groups to watch for, and why authenticity matters in the #Election2024 pic.twitter.com/dk3i9dorJ9
— Julia Chatterley (@jchatterleyCNN) October 15, 2024
In other swing state news, Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, is suing CNN after the network revealed his history of lewd and offensive remarks on pornography websites, the Associated Press reports:
Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, announced a lawsuit Tuesday against CNN over its recent report alleging he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a pornography website’s message board, calling the reporting reckless and defamatory.
The lawsuit, filed in Wake county superior court, comes less than four weeks after a television report that led many fellow GOP elected officials and candidates, including Donald Trump, to distance themselves from Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign. Robinson announced the lawsuit at a news conference in Raleigh.
CNN “chose to publish despite knowing or recklessly disregarding that Robinson’s data – including his name, date of birth, passwords, and the email address supposedly associated with the NudeAfrica account – were previously compromised by multiple data breaches”, the lawsuit states.
CNN declined to comment, spokesperson Emily Kuhn said in an email.
Polls at the time of the CNN report already showed Josh Stein, Robinson’s Democratic rival and the sitting attorney general, with a lead over Robinson. Early in-person voting begins Thursday statewide, and well over 50,000 completed absentee ballots have been received so far.
Georgia sees record amount of early voting – report
The day is not over, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia has seen a record amount of early voting on the first day polls have been open:
More than 200,000 voters have cast ballots in Georgia during the first day of in-person early voting according to state elections officials, shattering the state’s record. #gapol https://t.co/mrjIq41dx2
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) October 15, 2024
This is not necessarily indicative of how the swing state, where many polls have shown Donald Trump with a narrow lead, will end up voting in November.
Lauren Gambino
On the first day of early voting in battleground Georgia, one of the state’s Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock, warned that Donald Trump was a “dangerous” choice for the country.
He urged Black men to consider how Trump would govern, as Harris works to shore up support from this traditionally Democratic-leaning voting bloc.
“I don’t buy this idea that there will be huge swaths of Black men voting for Donald Trump. That’s not going to happen,” said Warnock, a Baptist pastor, who preaches from the same Atlanta pulpit as Martin Luther King. “What I would urge folks to do is to show up, to understand that if you don’t vote, that is a vote – for Donald Trump, that’s the concern.”
Warnock spoke on the call organized by the Harris campaign ahead of Trump’s visit to the state today. Warnock acknowledged the work Democrats still needed to do to mobilize their “broad coalition” ahead of next month’s election, as polls show Harris drawing notably less support among Black men than past Democratic nominees.
“Do you think when the George Floyds and all of those cases emerge again that Donald Trump’s going to do something about it? No, he’s going to do just the opposite,” Warnock said. “An unhinged Donald Trump will give these officers who have behaved with brutality a free pass and immunity, and this could literally mean death in our communities. You need to vote like your life depends on it – it does.”
Lauren Gambino
Amber Thurman’s mother wants Americans to know that her daughter was not a statistic.
Thurman, a young mother and aspiring nurse, developed sepsis and died after being unable to access legal abortion and routine medical care in Georgia.
“She was loved by a family, a family that would have done anything had we known when I looked at her and reassured her that she was in the best care,” Shanette Williams said on a call organized by Kamala Harris’s campaign. “I had no clue. I had no clue that this could have been prevented, and when I found that out, everything changed.”
With the future of abortion on the line in November, Thurman’s mother has become a reluctant but powerful surrogate for Harris in the battleground state, where abortion is banned after six weeks of pregnancy. Harris has said Donald Trump and Republicans should be held accountable for ushering in the post-Roe bans that ultimately led Thurman to wait.
The campaign call was timed in advance of Trump’s visit to Georgia today for a town hall on “women’s issues” hosted by Fox News.
Williams was with her daughter at the hospital, where she waited for more than 20 hours for a routine medical procedure known as a D&C that removes remaining tissue. She developed sepsis and died in August 2022, leaving behind her young son, now eight.
“Initially, I wasn’t a political person. I’m independent. Because of August the 19th, we’ve been thrown into an arena where we have to do something to honor Amber,” Williams said through tears. “I just need to make sense of it all. My baby is not here, and it’s left us so much pain and trauma.”
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump talked more about 6 January 2021, and said that there was a term “peaceful and patriotic” and said “a lot of strange things” happened on that day, mentioning “people being waved into the Capitol” by police.
He said only “a tiny fraction” of people who came to Washington that day went down to the US Capitol after his rally close to the White House and “not one of those people had a gun” and “no one was killed”. He then, as he has done many times before, criticized the shooting by a law enforcement official of rioter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to break into the House chamber as part of the mob that had violently invaded the Capitol.
In fact, the insurrectionists smashed their way into the Capitol against outnumbered police, as they tried to stop the certification by Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the previous November’s election.
At least seven deaths, and perhaps as many as nine deaths, have been linked to the January 6 riots, including suicides among police officers some time after the event.
After fleeing for their lives, the US Congress reconvened in the early hours of 7 January 2021, to certify Biden’s win.
Trump dodges question about peaceful transfer of power if he loses election
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump was asked about a peaceful transfer of power after this November’s election. He dodged.
The interviewer on stage at the Economic Club of Chicago, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, said, moments ago: “If you look at the events of January 6, 2021, it showed to many people that America’s democracy was unruly and violent. Only three weeks to go to the election, will you commit now to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power?”
Instead of answering the question about this election cycle, Trump said that the US had a peaceful transfer of power.
There was a smattering of applause in the audience. Micklethwait said: “Come on, President Trump, you had a peaceful transfer of power compared with Venezuela but it was by far the worst transfer of power for a long time,” then added: “Would you respect the decision?”
Trump digresses with some criticism of Micklethwait. Then he comes back to the topic, but again talking about 2021.
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump just claimed that, if he became president again, he would have the right to instruct the Federal Reserve about interest rates – while saying he would not actually order the US central bank what to do.
“I think I have the right to say, ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit’. I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not the interest rates should go up or down,” he said at the Chicago Economic Club moments ago.
The president of the US traditionally does not weigh in on interest rates, allowing the Fed to make its own decisions. This doesn’t mean that the bank is not susceptible to political pressure in the wider sense, but the bank expects and is expected to make monetary policy and related decision autonomously.
Trump refuses to say if he has talked to Russia’s Putin since leaving office
Joanna Walters
Donald Trump has just declined to comment when asked directly in an event he’s appearing at in Chicago if he has had conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin since he left the White House in 2021 after being voted out of office.
The former president was asked if he had talked to Putin “since you stopped being president”, as has been stated in a book by veteran journalist and author Bob Woodward, reported last week. He asked by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait moments ago, who is interviewing Trump in an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago.
“I will not comment,” Trump said.
However, he then hinted maybe he had when he added: “But if I did it’s a smart thing. If I have a good relationship with people, that’s a good thing.”
Woodward said that Trump has held several private calls with Putin since his single-term presidency.
Joanna Walters
Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait is busy pushing back on Donald Trump’s insistence that imposing what the former president boasts would be “obnoxious” levels of tariffs on imports will have a positive effect on the US economy.
“Critics say tariffs would end up being like a sales tax,” Micklethwait said, saying that it will push up costs for US consumers.
The two men talked over each other a bit, and Trump insisted that high tariffs would force overseas manufacturers to build their products in the US to sell to American consumers.
“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that company will come into the US and build factories here. You make the tariffs so obnoxious that they come in straight away,” Trump said.
Trump argues for higher tariffs in Chicago economic speech
Donald Trump just took the stage at the Economic Club in Chicago, where he’s repeating his familiar campaign promise to enact high import tariffs to spur domestic manufacturing.
“We’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes still, further, for companies that are going to make their product in the USA. We’re going to protect those companies with strong tariffs, because I’m a believer in tariffs,” the former president told his interviewer, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.
The ex-president added:
To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm.
Economists have been skeptical that tariffs would help American manufacturers:
The day so far
Donald Trump is expected to soon take the stage at the Economic Club of Chicago, where we can expect him to outline his plans to lower prices for US consumers. But the Associated Press reports that his tariff-heavy proposals and ideas for meddling with the Federal Reserve are unlikely to undo the impact of inflation, and may instead push prices higher. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has seized on his strange behavior at a campaign event yesterday, where Trump spent more than a half-hour swaying to the music onstage. The former president said this morning that he was reacting to a pair of medical emergencies that occurred in the audience, but the Harris campaign has implied it is a sign that he is not as healthy as he appears.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The Harris campaign rejected an allegation of plagiarism brought against the vice-president by a conservative activist, CNN reports.
Early voting begins today in Georgia, and long lines of voters were spotted in at least one Atlanta-area county. Trump encouraged his supporters to vote by whatever method they chose.
Nathan Wade, a former prosecutor in Trump’s election meddling case in Georgia, is testifying behind closed doors to a Republican-led House committee.
