Donald Trump is scheduled to make remarks at a rally shortly in Erie, Pennsylvania, and we’ll be following his remarks.
The rally is taking place at the Bayfront Convention Center. Trump’s next rally in Pennsylvania is slated for 5 October in Butler, about 100 miles south of Erie, revisiting the site of the attempted assassination attempt in July, according to his website.
Erie county, in the north-west corner of the state, is what’s known as a “boomerang county” by election experts. It boomeranged from Democrats to Republicans and back in recent presidential election cycles.
The county voted for Barack Obama twice, then Trump in 2016, and for Joe Biden in 2020 by a narrow margin.
Larry Hogan, a Republican Senate candidate in Maryland, criticized Donald Trump’s recent remarks calling Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
“I think that’s insulting, not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities,” Hogan said. “I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something that we could do without. I think he’s his own worst enemy.”
Trump attacked Harris at a campaign rally on Saturday, referencing her visit to the US-Mexico border on Friday and questioning her mental capacity amid the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the border crisis.
Ron DeSantis is making a concerted effort to maintain draconian limits on abortion access in Florida that have led to accusations the rightwing Republican governor is conducting a “state-sponsored intimidation campaign” against abortion rights and trampling on civil liberties in the state, writes the Guardians’s Joseph Contreras.
A near total ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in May after the state supreme court ruled that the right to an abortion was no longer covered by the privacy clause in the Florida constitution.
Passage of legislation called Amendment 4 would change the state constitution to prohibit government interference with the right to an abortion before the viability of a fetus, which typically begins around the 24th week of a pregnancy.
But registered voters in Florida have recently reported unannounced visits from law enforcement personnel that appear to be part of an all-out drive by DeSantis to use state government agencies and public funds to block passage of Amendment 4, which would enshrine in the state constitution a woman’s right to an abortion.
More context on the accusations here:
The rules are set for the vice presidential candidates Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as they prepare to take the debate stage on Tuesday.
CBS News announced the official rules, including a 90-minute slot and no audience in the studio, similar to the debate between the presidential candidates.
“For each question, the candidate who was asked the question will have two minutes to answer, and the other candidate will be allowed two minutes to respond,” reads a statement from the network. “Following that, each candidate will have one minute for additional rebuttals. And the moderators may at their discretion give candidates an additional minute each to continue a topic.”
CBS News also added that it “reserves the right to mute the candidates’ microphones, but otherwise, they will be hot.”
Republican senator Lindsey Graham said that he did not think Kamala Harris was mentally impaired, a comment Donald Trump made during a speech this weekend.
Still, he called her policies “crazy” on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
“I just think she’s a crazy liberal,” Graham said. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, I’m saying your party, your policies, are batsh*t crazy.”
The former president made this remark during a speech in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where he escalated his anti-immigrant rhetoric and attacked the vice-president after she visited the US-Mexico border for the first time in her 2024 presidential campaign.
Although Kamala Harris has a lead over Donald Trump among Latino voters, Democrats’ advantage over Republicans with Latinos is lower than it was in the past four presidential races, according to an NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll released Sunday.
Support for the vice-president is at 54% among registered Latino voters, according to the poll of 1,000 Latino voters. The former president has the support of 40% and another 6% say they’re unsure or wouldn’t vote.
The margin of error in the poll, conducted between 16-23 September, is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Harris’s advantage is a boost from Joe Biden’s standing when the president was running for a second term, but it’s still lower than the past leads Democratic presidential candidates enjoyed in 2012 (by 39 points), 2016 (50 points) and 2020 (36 points), according to the poll.
Ed Pilkington
Pete Buttigieg has been masquerading as JD Vance before Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, where Tim Walz will go head-to-head with the Ohio senator in Minneapolis.
Buttigieg may have been suffering deja vu – he posed as Mike Pence during Kamala Harris’s prep sessions ahead of the 2020 VP debate.
Walz will be able to lean on skills learned in the school classroom. Walz spent 17 years as a public school teacher, so he knows how to think on his feet – and deal with a disruptive kid.
One of the big questions of the night is likely to be whether Vance can redeem himself after a troubled start to his candidacy. Will he be able to get past all the “weirdness”, as Walz has framed it, and bring consistency to the messaging of an often chaotic Trump campaign?
From awkward encounters with doughnut shop workers, to the ongoing furor around his “childless cat ladies” remark, Vance has been the subject of online mockery that has at times appeared to engulf him. He also seems to be stuck on the same culture war issues that consume Trump.
Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, is scheduled to speak at a campaign event in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday.
The second gentleman will also be at a campaign event in Menlo Park, California, later today.
Harris was also in the Bay Area this weekend, but it will likely be her last visit to the region where she was born and raised. The San Francisco Examiner reported that campaign officials wrote on the invitation that Harris would spend the majority of her campaign’s final month in battleground states.
Jeff Flake, a former Republican senator from Arizona who recently left his position as US ambassador to Turkey, announced his endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.
“I want to support a candidate who understands that political opponents are our fellow citizens – the ‘loyal opposition’ as our parties once knew each other – not the enemy,” Flake said in a statement.
“I want to support a candidate who respects the will of the voters and would never attempt to use the powers of the Presidency to overturn an election after having been turned out by the voters,” Flake added.
Vice-President Kamala Harris is slated to rally in Las Vegas on Sunday night.
The rally is part of Harris’s latest western swing, which included walking alongside a towering, rust-colored border wall fitted with barbed wire in Douglas, Arizona, on Friday.
Harris attended a San Francisco fundraiser on Saturday and had plans for a Sunday event in Los Angeles before heading to Nevada, with a return to Washington set for Monday night.
Tonight’s speech is scheduled for 10.30pm ET.
Trump was hailed at the Georgia-Alabama football game at the University of Alabama with musicians Kid Rock and Hank Williams Jr and with two-time major champion golfer John Daly.
Trump came to the football game as the guest of Alabama businessman Ric Mayers Jr, a member of Mar-a-Lago. Mayers said in an interview before the game that he invited Trump so that he could enjoy a warm welcome.
Many University of Alabama fans, anticipating Trump’s visit to their campus for a showdown between the No 4 Crimson Tide and No 2 Georgia Bulldogs, sported stickers and buttons that read: “They’re eating the Dawgs!”
They broke out in random chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” throughout the day, a preview of the rousing welcome he received early in the second quarter as he sat in a 40-yard-line suite hosted by a wealthy member of his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the north-west corner of Pennsylvania, on Sunday. The former president is heading to a town where Biden won Erie county in 2020 by less than 1,500 votes in a key swing state.
Meanwhile, Vice-President Kamala Harris is set to hold a rally in Las Vegas on Sunday night, also looking to gain momentum in a swing state ahead of November. The rally is part of Harris’s recent western tour, which included her first visit to the US-Mexico border since she took the role at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket from President Joe Biden.
The vice-presidential candidates, the Ohio senator JD Vance and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, are preparing to take the debate stage on Tuesday.
Here’s what else is happening:
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Walz has been prepping for the debate in Minneapolis with the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, while Vance has been holding mock debates with the Republican whip in the US House, Tom Emmer, according to the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington.