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    With Election Day 2 Weeks Away, 15 Million Voters Have Already Cast a Ballot

    Since the pandemic, early voting has become a broadly accepted part of American elections. But it is difficult to glean partisan advantage.With two weeks until Election Day, more than 15 million people have already cast their ballots, the clearest sign yet that voting habits were forever changed by the coronavirus pandemic and that early voting has become a permanent feature of the American democratic process.While many people cast a mail-in ballot or voted early in the 2020 election out of necessity amid a dangerous pandemic, a lot of voters are choosing to vote early in this election, too. Some are taking advantage of new laws that expanded early voting options; others simply favor the process that exploded in popularity four years ago.Many states have set records for the first day of early voting. On Thursday, more than 353,000 ballots were cast in North Carolina, a record for the swing state still reeling from Hurricane Helene. On Friday, nearly 177,000 voters cast a ballot in Louisiana, a record for the deep-red state.The shift has been starkest in Georgia, where voters have set a daily record for in-person early voting nearly every day since polls opened last Tuesday. More than 1.5 million voters have already cast an early ballot in the critical battleground state.The persistent preference of many Americans to vote early — both by mail and in person — comes after the 2020 election prompted a sea change in voting habits for the country. With many fearful of voting in person during the pandemic, 65.6 million people voted by mail that year, and another 35.8 million voted early in person in an attempt to avoid large crowds.Yet as people flood early voting centers this time around, distilling a partisan advantage or what the early vote presages for overall turnout is difficult.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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    In Trump Ad, ‘Not a Thing That Comes to Mind’ Ties Harris to Biden’s Liabilities

    Kamala Harris’s hesitancy to put daylight between her and President Biden gave Donald Trump’s campaign a big opening.Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign is running this 30-second ad on television stations across the battleground states, spending more than $10 million on it over the past six days, according to AdImpact.Here’s a look at the ad, its accuracy and its major takeaway.On the ScreenThe ad opens with a shot of what appears to be migrants running near a border wall, beneath a headline blaring, “Illegal crossings surge,” citing an Associated Press article from last December. It then shows a man shopping in the produce section of a grocery store, under the words “Prices still rising,” citing CNBC last May. A clip of a missile strike emphasizes the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, under the headline “Global chaos,” attributed to The Wall Street Journal in March. Vice President Kamala Harris is then shown smiling as if in satisfaction, her hands folded at her chin.A clip plays from Ms. Harris’s Oct. 8 appearance on the ABC show “The View,” in which she is asked if she would have done something differently from President Biden, then responds, after blinking several times: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”The screen freezes on that frame, as new all-caps headlines reflect the narration: “What would change with Kamala? Nothing.” As a split screen seems to show Ms. Harris nodding along on the right, a clip of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 plays under the headline “More weakness.” An aerial view of a ground explosion plays under the headline “More war.” A crowd of what appear to be migrants is headlined “Welfare for illegals.” And a machine counting $100 bills is shown under a last headline: “Harris would raise taxes.”Mr. Trump is then shown, shot from below as he strides across an airport tarmac, waving to a rally crowd, shaking a blue-collar worker’s hand and showing off his signature on a piece of legislation, as more optimistic headlines flash by: “Middle-class tax cuts” and “Prices were lower.”Trump for President 2024We 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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    As Trump Served Up McDonald’s Fries, Vitriol Boiled Outside

    In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, supporters of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, some in weird costumes, gathered along a roadside and screamed at one another.On Sunday afternoon, former President Donald J. Trump dropped by a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pa. He had cooked up a stunt to troll Vice President Kamala Harris, who has talked about having worked at McDonald’s one summer during college. Inside the restaurant, Mr. Trump wore an apron and dropped French fries into a vat of gurgling oil. Across the street, something much unhealthier was bubbling up.A few hundred Trump supporters were lining the shoulder of the road and holding a tailgate party in the parking lot of a strip mall right where Philadelphia ends and the suburbs begin. Another group of locals — maybe 50 people — had turned up to protest Mr. Trump’s visit. People on the two sides spent the sunny autumn afternoon screaming into one another’s faces while filming the skirmishes on their iPhones.The parking lot throbbed with hatred, fear and neighbor’s suspicion of neighbor. It became a microcosm of this year’s election, vicious and absurd. There was shouting about Project 2025 and the Jan. 6 riot. Transgender youth and vaccines. Tariffs and abortion. Fascism and communism. Mr. Trump’s supporters wore T-shirts that said “I’m voting for the convicted felon.” The other side yelled, “Lock him up.” One person wore an orange prison jumpsuit and a mask of Mr. Trump’s face.The crowd near the McDonald’s in Feasterville, Pa., on Sunday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThis is what the mood is like in a swing state, 16 days before an election. Sixteen days before this election. Nearly a decade into the Trump-era of politics, the language is apocalyptic. Social media has supercharged the crude negativity.Both campaigns are spending wildly here. You can barely turn on the television or scroll on your phone without seeing a nasty advertisement. Many ordinarily nice people seem to have gone a little mad. They’re wearing political merchandise to dive bars and posting videos of themselves fighting over yard signs. Every day, Nov. 5 creeps a little closer, and the partisan tinnitus rings a little louder.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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    Kamala Harris and McDonald’s: A College Job, and a Trump Attack

    Birtherism, meet burgerism.Vice President Kamala Harris has recalled her stint at a Bay Area McDonald’s 41 years ago in introducing herself to voters — a biographical detail relatable to millions of Americans who have toiled in fast-food restaurants.But former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly accused her of inventing it. Lacking a shred of proof, he has charged that she never actually worked under the golden arches — recalling his earlier false claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.Mr. Trump’s latest allegation also appears to be false.Whether a presidential candidate actually flipped burgers as a college student is a far less serious allegation, of course. But Mr. Trump’s seeding of doubts about Ms. Harris’s story, while insidious and outside the lines of traditional fair play in politics, advances his goal of portraying Ms. Harris as a fraud.It exploits the fact that her life story is not as well known or as well documented at this late stage of the campaign as those of most presidential nominees have been. And it gives voters who may already harbor doubts about her another invitation to dismiss her and doubt what she says.Former President Donald J. Trump is an avid eater of fast food. In 2019, as he hosted college football players at the White House, he fed them McDonald’s. Sarah Silbiger/The New York TimesMr. Trump, an avid eater of fast food who even catered a White House celebration from McDonald’s in 2019, is scheduled to visit a McDonald’s location in the Philadelphia area on Sunday. “I’m going to McDonald’s to work the French fries,” he said on Saturday in Latrobe, Pa. Asked why, an aide, Jason Miller, told reporters, “So that one candidate in this race could have actually worked at McDonald’s.”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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    Early In-Person Voting Begins in Nevada, With Obama Set to Rally Democrats

    Tony Chavez and his wife, Elizabeth, came to Cardenas Market in East Las Vegas on Saturday to pick up a few essentials — bread, three dozen eggs and ingredients for tamales.Mr. Chavez did not expect to check something else off his list. But when he saw poll workers and signs saying that he could vote, well, why not?“I already made my decision, and it’s better to be early to beat that line as well,” said Mr. Chavez, 38, with a prominent “I Voted” sticker on his all-black Las Vegas Raiders letterman jacket.“I saw the signs and was like, ‘Is that the voting?’” he added. “‘Let me just do it right now.’”Mr. Chavez, who works as a cook, was part of a steady stream of people who took advantage of that particular polling location in Las Vegas on what was the first day of in-person early voting in Nevada, which runs through Nov. 1.He declined to say whom he was supporting for president, but he said that rights for migrants and for women were important to him and that this choice “would affect my kids’ future.”Another voter, James Still, also marveled at the convenience. His wife, Jennifer, wore a shirt supporting Ms. Harris, and Mr. Still said they had both voted for her because “politicians shouldn’t tell women what to do with their bodies.” For them, as for Mr. Chavez, voting was an added benefit of coming to the store.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 Sticks Up for Detroit Against Trump

    Vice President Kamala Harris let her T-shirt do the talking in Detroit on Saturday.The black shirt — which she wore under a gray blazer as she addressed several hundred campaign volunteers in a gym at Western International High School — bore the words “Detroit vs. Everybody.” The attire was a clear response to former President Donald J. Trump, who last week disparaged what is one of the nation’s largest majority-Black cities, portraying Detroit as a decaying harbinger of America’s future under Ms. Harris.In brief remarks to the crowd on the inaugural day of early voting in the city, Ms. Harris urged her supporters to reject Mr. Trump’s division and insults.“We stand for the idea that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down, it’s on who you lift up,” she said, saying that her campaign was seeking the kind of “grit” and “excellence” possessed by “the people of Detroit.”“He spends full time talking about himself and mythical characters, not talking about the working people, not talking about you, not talking about lifting you up,” Ms. Harris added.Mr. Trump had attacked Detroit while giving remarks at an economic forum in the city on Oct. 10, earning widespread scorn from Democrats and offering fodder for a Harris campaign ad. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president,” he had warned of Ms. Harris.Black voters, especially Black men, are supporting Ms. Harris with less enthusiasm than they had for the Democratic nominee in previous elections, and Mr. Trump has tried to take advantage. The Harris campaign has lately ramped up outreach efforts to Black voters, including by releasing an economic policy agenda designed for Black men. Turnout in Detroit could help decide the race in Michigan, one of the nation’s top battleground states, where polls show an even contest.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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    Vulnerable Senate Democrat Promotes Trump Ties in New Ad

    Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, distances himself from the Biden administration and highlights his support of certain Trump administration policies in a new TV campaign ad that aired in parts of the state on Friday, signaling a last-minute appeal to the former president’s supporters in a crucial battleground state.In the ad, two voters — a married couple made up of a Republican and a Democrat in Old Forge, Pa. — praise Mr. Casey as an independent lawmaker, saying that he “bucked Biden to protect fracking and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA and put tariffs on China.”The spot aired nearly 100 times in Pennsylvania on Friday, frequently in heavily Republican areas such as Johnstown and Altoona, according to data provided by the tracking firm AdImpact.The Trump campaign quickly seized on Mr. Casey’s references to Mr. Trump in the commercial, attacking the senator on social media for “desperately trying to embrace President Trump” and saying he was “a shill for Kamala’s deranged, radical left agenda.”An official with Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in Pennsylvania said that Ms. Harris supports fracking, and that the ad was not an indication that Mr. Casey was separating himself from the vice president. When asked if Mr. Casey’s campaign had informed the Harris campaign about the ad before it aired, the official said that he would not discuss internal communications between the two campaigns.Maddy McDaniel, a spokeswoman for Mr. Casey, said that the senator “always does what’s right for Pennsylvania, regardless of party,” and that “he stands with Pennsylvanians and doesn’t care what any politician has to say about it.”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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    Trump’s Charity Toward None

    The cardinal should go to confession.Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump.At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a person who has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”Trump also offered this beauty: “I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz.” When Trump joked about keeping Doug Emhoff away from nannies, even he admitted it was “too tough.”As he did in 2016 when he crudely attacked Hillary Clinton as she sat on the dais, Trump added a rancid cloud to what used to be a good-tempered bipartisan roast.Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.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