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    Harris and Walz Venture Into Less-Friendly Terrain to Court Pennsylvania Voters

    Before their convention that this week will signal the final sprint to November, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, headed out on a brief bus tour on Sunday to fire up voters in perhaps the most crucial battleground state in the 2024 election.As they toured western Pennsylvania, their play for support beyond the state’s more liberal cities was apparent at the team’s first stop, a field office in Rochester, Pa., in the largely conservative Beaver County: Ms. Harris picked up a volunteer’s cellphone to speak with a resident from Erie, a northwestern city in one of the state’s swingiest counties, which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 but Joseph R. Biden Jr. won four years later.“I love Erie,” Ms. Harris said. “At some point we’ll get to Erie.”Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz were joined on the outing by their spouses, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, traveling in two new campaign buses from the Pittsburgh airport, where they arrived on Air Force Two to greet a small group of supporters.Recent polling of Pennsylvania shows a close race between the Harris-Walz ticket and the Trump-Vance ticket.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas are the two main drivers of Democratic support in Pennsylvania, a state whose 19 electoral votes could decide the presidency. Recent polling shows a neck-and-neck race there between Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, with some surveys showing Ms. Harris gaining a narrow edge recently.Mr. Trump is also increasing his presence in Pennsylvania — on Saturday he held a rally in Wilkes-Barre and another is set in York on Monday, while Senator JD Vance of Ohio, his running mate, campaigns in Philadelphia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Test Your Knowledge of Chicago, the D.N.C. Host City

    The Democrats are arriving in Chicago, the country’s third-largest city, for their first in-person convention in eight years. The gathering comes at a pivotal time for the party, which switched its presidential nominee only weeks ago, and for the city, which is regaining its swagger after a pandemic slump.How much do you know about Chicago? Take our quiz to find out. More

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    Social Media Influencers to Speak at the Democratic Convention

    A speaking slot at a national party’s nominating convention is among the most coveted prizes in American politics, offering veteran officeholders and up-and-comers alike the chance to speak to — and be seen by — an entire nation.At the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago, five of those rare slots will go to a group that most likely would be unfamiliar to previous convention planners: social media influencers.Convention officials said each night would include at least one influencer. The speakers are Deja Foxx, Nabela Noor, Carlos Eduardo Espina, Olivia Julianna and John Russell, a group of millennial and Gen Z influencers who, collectively, have well over 24 million social media followers.They will speak on the same podium as President Biden; the Democratic nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota; and party luminaries, including two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, among others.“This feels very affirming,” said Ms. Foxx, 24, a reproductive rights activist from Arizona who worked on Ms. Harris’s first presidential campaign. She’ll speak about abortion rights on Monday night in a program that will also feature Mr. Biden. “I don’t take it lightly that I’m speaking on the same night as the president of the United States,” she said.Amber Rose spoke on the first day of the Republican National Convention.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Urged to Focus on the Economy, Trump Leans Into Attacks of Harris

    Former President Donald J. Trump in a campaign speech on Saturday bounced among complaints about the economy and immigration, wide-ranging digressions and a number of personal attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, including jabs at her appearance and her laugh.At a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Trump swung from talking points on inflation and criticisms of Democratic policy as “fascist” and “Marxist” to calling illegal immigrants “savage monsters” and saying that rising sea levels would create more beachfront property.Mr. Trump blamed Ms. Harris for high prices, in what was effectively an inversion of her remarks at her rally in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, where she said Mr. Trump’s proposed import tariffs would amount to a “Trump tax” on groceries. The former president argued that she had placed a “Kamala Harris inflation tax” on average Americans over the course of her term as vice president and that, if elected, he would lower prices on consumer goods, just as she has said she would do.“Yesterday, she got up, she started ranting and raving,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris’s explanation of her economic agenda in North Carolina. He mocked her remarks that, he said, suggested he would tax “every single thing that was ever invented.”Mr. Trump’s advisers have urged him to emphasize his economic policy plans, which, according to polling, many voters trust more than Ms. Harris’s, and some Republicans have hoped he would leave behind his characteristic personal attacks, including his frequent insults of Ms. Harris’s intelligence and appearance.But at two events earlier this week — a speech in Asheville, N.C., and a news conference in Bedminster, N.J. — both billed as opportunities to discuss the economy, Mr. Trump veered into personal attacks against Ms. Harris, which he said he was “entitled” to do.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Harris Campaign Reserves $370 Million for Swing-State Fall Ad Blitz

    $200 million of that will be spent to reach voters on their phones and other devices, as Kamala Harris’s aides race to define her while drawing a contrast with Donald Trump.Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign announced on Saturday that it was reserving $370 million in advertising to begin after Labor Day and run through the November election, including $200 million on digital ads.The Harris campaign said it believed this was the largest digital ad reservation ever in American politics, reflecting the need to reach voters on their phones and other devices. Just $170 million is being reserved so far on television, as traditional television audiences continue to fragment and shrink.“This is a modern campaign in 2024 and we’re not just stuck in the times of old, where 80 percent of the budget has to be on television,” Quentin Fulks, Ms. Harris’s principal deputy campaign manager, said in an interview.The Harris campaign did not say how much it would spend in each state. But it said its purchases of television advertising would total twice what President Biden’s 2020 campaign spent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, four times what he spent in Georgia and six times what he spent in Nevada, the least populous of the battleground states.The Harris campaign is advertising now in seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — as part of a $150 million summer ad blitz. Mr. Fulks said advertising would continue in all of those states as well as nationally.For now, Mr. Fulks said the campaign was focused on “aggressively defining” Ms. Harris in her early weeks as a presidential candidate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How The Times Is Covering the Democratic National Convention

    Lisa Lerer, a New York Times politics reporter, will cover the D.N.C. with a host of colleagues, building a makeshift office at the event in Chicago.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Next week in Chicago, the Democratic National Convention will cap off a few tumultuous weeks for the Democratic Party: President Biden dropped out of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris secured the nomination and soon selected her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in one of the fastest vetting processes in modern history.Lisa Lerer, a political correspondent who has reported on five presidential elections and joined The Times in 2018, has covered all the fast-breaking chaos this summer. She is part of a Times team of reporters, editors, photographers, audio journalists and I.T. specialists who will cover the D.N.C. from a “mobile office” inside the convention.In an interview, Ms. Lerer discussed how she focused her coverage for a multiday event like the D.N.C., which begins Monday, how The Times has prepared for the occasion and what she is looking forward to learning. This interview has been edited and condensed.What is the atmosphere going into the convention?There’s a ton of excitement for this convention. In 2020, Democrats had a virtual convention, which was largely like a television production because of the pandemic. Now we’re returning to a more standard convention, but it’s unique because the ticket was just picked in the past month. There are a lot of Democrats who are very anxious about this race and were anxious about President Biden’s prospects for months. And now there’s pent-up energy being released.There’s this unbelievable sense of enthusiasm in the party. There’s a level of energy that I think many of us who have covered politics for a while haven’t seen since, on the Democratic side, Obama ran in 2008.What are you doing to prepare? Are there certain lines of coverage you’re already thinking about?Normally you start planning for a convention several weeks out. This year that was really hard to do because there were so many things happening: the debate, which really scrambled the race. Then there was the period when it wasn’t clear whether Biden was going to remain on the ticket. Then there was an assassination attempt on Trump, and there was the Republican Convention, and then vice presidents were picked. An outrageous amount of transformative political events happened in a tight period of time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How to Watch the 2024 DNC Live

    The Democratic National Convention will begin in Chicago on Monday, about a month after Republicans held their convention in Milwaukee.It runs through Thursday, when Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to take the stage during prime time. While conventions are traditionally used to formally nominate the party’s presidential candidate, Ms. Harris was voted in through a virtual roll call earlier this month. Even so, the party’s gathering will be a high-profile affair as top Democrats make the case for a Harris-Walz administration.Here’s how to watch it (all times are Eastern):How to stream the D.N.C.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Abortion Rights Advocates Hit the D.N.C.: Free Vasectomies and an Inflatable IUD

    This convention is likely to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics.While delegates are in Chicago for next week’s Democratic National Convention, they will engage in the typical pageantry and traditions: They’ll vote for their nominee, pose for photos with elected officials, and show off their state with cool buttons or themed hats.They will also have the option of getting a free vasectomy or a medication abortion just blocks away.A mobile health center run by Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, which serves much of Missouri and part of southern Illinois, plans to park itself near the convention and offer those services early next week to anybody who makes an appointment, delegate or not. (There is so much interest in the vasectomy appointments, I’m told, there is already a waiting list.)It’s a way of showcasing how reproductive health care providers have had to get creative when operating in or near states like Missouri, which borders Illinois and has a near-total abortion ban.But it also underscores the way this convention, more than any other, is going to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics.For years, many Democrats believed too much talk about abortion rights might drive away moderate or religious voters. Four years ago, at the Covid-dampened convention of 2020, President Biden did not utter the word abortion in his speech. Neither did Vice President Kamala Harris (although she did refer briefly to racial injustice in “reproductive and maternal health care.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More