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    Kamala Harris Will Make Surprise Appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ Tonight

    Vice President Kamala Harris will make a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” according to two people familiar with the plan, appearing on a live sketch-comedy show in the final days of the election as she tries to reach voters on a national platform with widespread cultural currency.With just three days left in a contest against former President Donald J. Trump that is essentially tied, Ms. Harris is looking for any possible advantage — including, perhaps, showing the country that she can take a joke. She spent Saturday campaigning in the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina and was expected to fly to Michigan when Air Force Two diverted without notice to New York City.One of the most popular recurring features on “Saturday Night Live” is having actors portray presidents and presidential candidates. The comedian Maya Rudolph has played Ms. Harris to much acclaim. Even the vice president has praised her impression. “She’s so good,” Ms. Harris said last month on the ABC talk show “The View,” adding, “She had the whole thing — the suit, the jewelry, everything.”Appearing on live television is a gamble for a presidential candidate, or any celebrity without acting experience, but previous contenders have rolled the dice, including Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2015 and Barack Obama in 2007. (Mrs. Clinton also appeared in 2008.) Few have done so in the waning days of a campaign.In 2015, Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton both joined the show during their parties’ primary races. While some politicians make brief cameos, Mr. Trump — who, as the former host of “The Apprentice,” has significant show-business experience — hosted an entire episode, although the sketches were tame and not seen as particularly hilarious.Mrs. Clinton appeared in a single sketch, as a bartender serving the version of herself played by the actress Kate McKinnon, and poked gentle — but toothless — fun at herself.“Saturday Night Live” airs on NBC at 11:30 p.m.Michael Levenson More

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    Trump and Harris Focus on Economy as They Campaign in Southern States

    The candidates outlined vastly different messages in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, with Donald J. Trump exaggerating how bad the recent jobs report was and Kamala Harris promising to bring down costs.Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump swept through Southern states on Saturday, outlining sharply divergent economic messages for voters in top battlegrounds and, in Mr. Trump’s case, solidly blue Virginia.Mr. Trump, after a week in which controversies often overshadowed his closing argument, traveled to North Carolina and Virginia, where he gave rambling speeches in which he tried to turn the race back toward immigration, the economy and transgender issues.Ms. Harris began her day at a rally in Atlanta, where she focused on her plans to bolster the economy, an approach that her advisers say has been intentional in the last days of a coin-flip race.At an event that featured food trucks and a performance by the Georgia-born rapper 2 Chainz, she said her first goal as president would be “to bring down the cost of living for you” through tax cuts and measures like expanding Medicare to help cover home care. She emphasized that message soon after at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., saying that Mr. Trump would fight for “billionaires and big corporations.”Mr. Trump, in his speeches at an airport in Gastonia, N.C. and an arena in Salem, Va., pounced on Friday’s labor report showing that employers added just 12,000 jobs last month.“These are depression numbers, I hate to tell you,” he said in Gastonia, wildly distorting the picture of what is actually a healthy economy and leaving out that the latest figures were driven down by hurricanes and a labor strike.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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    Biden Returns to His Home Turf to Make Final Pitches for Harris

    Though President Biden has made verbal gaffes on the campaign trail, the Harris campaign still considers him an asset in blue-collar communities like Scranton, Pa.In Scranton, Pa., it’s as though President Biden never left.In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden has been cast in the shadow of Vice President Kamala Harris amid concerns that his unpopularity could be a liability in her race against former President Donald J. Trump. But as he rallied union members in his hometown on Saturday during one of his last campaign events in office, Mr. Biden was in one of the few places Democrats feel he can still help Ms. Harris on the campaign trail.“When he comes into this town, he is the top of the ticket,” said Sam Kuchwara, a 70-year-old retiree and veteran who is a native of Scranton. “He’s definitely more popular here than Harris.”Scranton is certainly the exception in that respect. Mr. Biden rattled Democrats this week when he appeared to call supporters of Mr. Trump “garbage” while denouncing racist comments made by a comedian at a Trump rally. Even though Mr. Biden later explained that he had meant that the comedian’s “hateful rhetoric” was garbage, Ms. Harris had to spend time on the campaign trail distancing herself from the comment.Ms. Harris’s rallies are far more enthusiastic and energetic than Mr. Biden’s, with crowds of thousands dwarfing those at his events. But Harris campaign officials believe that the incumbent president can still provide a key benefit to Ms. Harris by rallying working-class white voters and union members in battleground states.Enter Scranton Joe.“Scranton becomes part of your heart,” Mr. Biden said to union members cramped inside a carpenter’s union hall. “It crawls into your heart. It’s real.”Mr. Biden used the speech to argue that Mr. Trump would repeal much of his domestic agenda if he beat Ms. Harris, including efforts to invest in unions. He said that even those in the crowd who disagreed with Ms. Harris should vote for her if they wanted to keep aspects of his agenda.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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    Uncertainty Reigns in Nevada With Rise of Nonpartisan Voters

    With early voting coming to a close, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris must now ensure their respective bases show up on Election Day, while chasing down those whose choice is less clear.As early voting came to a close in Nevada, many of the state’s most veteran pollsters, pundits and political operatives — no strangers to close elections and their accompanying jitters — are finding it uniquely difficult to predict what happens next.Republicans, thrilled with their surprise early voting edge, say they are well on their way to making former President Donald J. Trump the first Republican to win the state since 2004. Democrats agree that Republicans have seized an unusual and anxiety-inducing advantage, but insist that their prized organizing machine will put Vice President Kamala Harris over the top.But what’s making this presidential election different is the sheer number of voters who don’t officially identify with either party. Thanks to the state’s relatively new automatic voter registration law, nonpartisan voters became Nevada’s largest voting bloc in 2022, outpacing both Democratic and Republican registrations.Figuring out who those voters are, and how or if they will cast a ballot, has been a crucial challenge for the campaigns scrambling to find and sway those last few persuadable people. Changes in voting patterns wrought by the pandemic four years ago are also throwing prognosticators for a loop.“The Achilles’ heel of early vote analysis is that it’s really difficult to make cycle-to-cycle comparisons,” said Adam Jentleson, who was a senior aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the longtime Democratic leader, “and that has never been more true than in this cycle.”All of those factors combined mean “you are flying blind,” he added.The race is tied, according to The New York Times’s polling average. Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris have visited Nevada multiple times, emphasizing that every ballot will make a difference.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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    Nicolle Wallace Calls on George W. Bush to Denounce Trump

    Nicolle Wallace, who was a White House communications director in George W. Bush’s administration, called on Friday for Mr. Bush to have a late-hour “change of heart” and speak out against former President Donald J. Trump.Speaking on her “Deadline: White House” program on MSNBC, Ms. Wallace said Mr. Trump’s violent language about former Representative Liz Cheney had pushed her to publicly raise the question she gets “asked more than any other” off the set: “Where is George W. Bush?”Ms. Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming, has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent Republican critics, and she has campaigned extensively for his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her father, Dick Cheney, who served as Mr. Bush’s vice president, has also said he would vote for Ms. Harris.On Thursday, Mr. Trump criticized Ms. Cheney for her hawkish foreign policy views and said she should be put on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her” — a remark that drew condemnations from a number of leaders. On her program, Ms. Wallace seemed to be imploring her former boss to join that group.“These are the comments we’re talking about right now in the United States of America from someone running to hold the job he had,” Ms. Wallace said.Mr. Bush’s daughter Barbara also supports Ms. Harris and has knocked on doors for her in Pennsylvania.But Mr. Bush has ruled out endorsing in the presidential race, according to his office. Ms. Wallace said she hoped both Mr. Trump’s recent violent language and the endorsement of Ms. Harris by Mr. Bush’s daughter might sway him.“We have a right to hope that those who have stood for freedom and celebrated those who have protected it might have a last-minute change of heart in the closing hours of this campaign,” Ms. Wallace said on her program.Ms. Wallace said she had appealed directly to Mr. Bush’s office, and had been told that the former president would continue his silence. But she said that it felt “important” to make her appeal, and then showed a series of decades-old videos of Mr. Bush speaking about freedom.A spokesman for Mr. Bush, Freddy Ford, said on Friday that Mr. Bush had no comment on Ms. Wallace’s plea. Last month, Mr. Ford said in an email that Mr. Bush “retired from presidential politics many years ago” and would not endorse in the presidential race.Ms. Wallace said she was delivering her call in the spirit of a lesson Mr. Bush had imparted to her: “Leave everything I know how to do in service of our democracy and freedoms — the things he taught us to cherish — on the field.”In an interview last week with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, Ms. Cheney said she could not “explain why George W. Bush hasn’t spoken out.”“But I think it’s time,” Ms. Cheney said. “And I wish that he would.” More

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    Trump Still Can’t Stop Talking About Women

    The countdown to the election feels like an Advent calendar with a dubious remark behind each door.Vice President Kamala Harris almost never talks about what it would mean to elect a female president, nor does she speculate about why women disproportionately support her candidacy.Former President Donald Trump is talking plenty.In the past two days, he has vowed to be a protector of women “whether they like it or not.” He said that if he won the presidential election, he would want Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who is a vaccine skeptic, to work on “health and women’s health.” And, speaking with Tucker Carlson last night in Glendale, Ariz., Trump imagined a supremely violent fate for Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman who has become a prominent surrogate for Harris.“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”The remark was graphic even by the standards of Trump, who has always seen provocation as a feature, not a bug, of his political style. And it fed right into Democrats’ efforts to frame the election — the first presidential contest since the fall of Roe v. Wade — as a reckoning over bigger questions of freedom, control and women’s fundamental place in society.“Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified, and unqualified, to be president,” Harris said today on the tarmac in Madison, Wis.Trump’s defenders say he was simply making a statement about Cheney’s past support for American involvement in overseas conflicts. But the episode seemed like yet another gift from Trump and his allies to Democrats — making the final countdown to the election feel like an Advent calendar with a sexist, violent or otherwise politically dubious remark behind each door.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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    They Barter and Trade in Rural America. How Will They Vote?

    Many rural Americans engage in cashless barter systems to get food and firewood for heating and cooking. They value self-sufficiency, making them wary of government intervention.When Miki Shiverick needs firewood to heat her home, or help clearing the rusted appliances and vehicles from her property, she doesn’t go to a store or pay for services. Instead, she trades for it.For instance, preparing her land in Bergholz, Ohio for livestock over the last four years required hauling away piles of salvage, old tools and antiques from the rundown property she bought from the family of an old tinker. The place, with its barn house and five outbuildings, resembled a 12-acre junkyard.Ms. Shiverick, 56, found local scrappers willing to keep the profits from selling the rusted cars, campers, tractor parts, buried gas tanks and aluminum ingots at the local scrap yard. She also found woodsmen willing to clear trees for her in exchange for most of the wood.On this newly blank canvas, she dreams of creating a clean, natural retreat for her family with gardens that support wildlife and livestock, which she raises to promote food self-sufficiency and land stewardship.Bergholz is a rural town with a population of fewer than 600. For centuries, rural communities like Bergholz have operated in cashless barter systems built on mutual trust and neighborly relationships — a culture of self-sufficiency that has also shaped political views toward a kind of bootstrap conservatism.“People around here don’t do welfare, it’s not who we are,” Ms. Shiverick said.Ms. Shiverick bartered a bolt of linen with an Amish neighbor for a chicken coop.Rebecca Kiger for 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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    Trump Offends Women as His Campaign Reaches Out to Young Men

    How Donald Trump’s allies are honing their message to young men in the campaign’s final days.For Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who is the founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, the most frightful Halloween trick of all might be this: Women are outvoting men.“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” he wrote yesterday on X, warning that, if men stay home, Vice President Kamala Harris will be elected.“If you want a vision of the future if you don’t vote, imagine Kamala’s voice cackling, forever,” Kirk added. “Men need to GO VOTE NOW.”It was a post that managed to both bemoan and explain a dynamic that has come to define the country’s first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. The gender gap between Harris and former President Donald Trump has grown large enough that just the fact of high turnout among women is enough to spook Republicans — and yet they keep talking about women in ways that may further intensify that gap.So Kirk may well be right that they need to scare up more men.And that’s exactly what he and Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, seemed to be trying to do this morning when they appeared together near High Point University in North Carolina. Trump has opened an enormous lead among young men, and I traveled to High Point to hear Vance and Kirk’s message in a space with lots of them.“I think you guys have a lot to lose,” Vance said.“Do you want a person like Kamala Harris negotiating in private rooms with people like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?” Vance asked, not mentioning the fact that Trump has praised both dictators. “Or do you want a person like Donald Trump actually sticking up for the United States of America?”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