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      Could young voters in Michigan hand the state to Kamala Harris?

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      So few students wanted to join the campus Republican party when Abigail Sefcik began studying at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU) that she was rapidly voted in as its president.“The group was only four or five people. Nobody else wanted to do it,” she said.Four years later, Sefcik has turned her back on the Republicans and is supporting Kamala Harris for president.“In 2020, I voted for Donald Trump. I was being sucked into his void and I said some really disparaging things about other people. I did some things that I would just really call shameful when I think of them,” said the political science student in her final year at university.“But after a couple of years, I decided that there wasn’t a lot that the Republicans stood for that I really cared about.”Rejecting Trump and the Republicans was one thing, but Sefcik found little to inspire her in Joe Biden’s run for re-election. Then the president dropped out the race in July and Harris rapidly became the de facto Democratic candidate.“I couldn’t identify with Joe Biden as a good leader. When we were looking at a ticket with Biden and Trump, of course I was going to vote for Biden. But I would do so unwillingly because we know what the alternative would be,” she said.“Kamala Harris provides a way out for a lot of voters. Her youth, for one thing, has inspired a lot of young people.”A recent Harvard Kennedy School poll gives Harris a two-to-one lead over Trump among voters aged 18 to 29. Harris has the support of 64% of younger voters to 32% for Trump principally because of significantly higher approval ratings on the issues of the climate crisis, abortion rights and healthcare. Harris also scores much better with younger voters on empathy, reliability and honesty.View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy School polling director, John Della Volpe, said the findings showed “a significant shift in the overall vibe and preferences of young Americans” in favour of Harris compared with Biden.“In just a few weeks, Vice-President Harris has drummed up a wave of enthusiasm among young voters. The shift we are seeing toward Harris is seismic, driven largely by young women,” he said.The challenge for the Harris campaign is to translate that enthusiasm into votes where it matters.SVSU is one such place. The university has about 7,000 students. The vast majority can vote in Michigan, a battleground state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016.With polls showing the former president and Harris closely tied in Michigan, student votes potentially carry significant weight in a state that the vice-president’s campaign sees as a key part of her clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Leah Craig is campaigning for Harris on campus and registering her fellow students to vote. She did not volunteer for Biden’s campaign even though she would have voted for him. But Harris prompted Craig to get involved.“It was reinvigorating, to say the least. When Biden was the candidate, I wasn’t really passionate about it and it just felt like I was going into another election of the-lesser-of-two-evils kind of a thing. But the Harris campaign brought a new level of attention to a lot of issues that people of my generation are really passionate about,” she said.“We now have an easier candidate to embrace, an easier candidate to advocate for, an easier candidate to appeal to young people.”Many students at SVSU talk about Harris’s relative youth. Although at 59 she is old enough to be a grandmother to the students, they see a sharp contrast in energy and spirit compared with Biden and Trump. Noah Johnson, president of the SVSU Democrats, also credits a determined social media campaign for drawing in younger voters.“A lot of it is due to a big initial social media push. I saw it definitely resonate with some people, like Charli xcx when she tweeted out the Kamala brat thing. That was effective with young people. And similarly, like the coconut tree meme,” he said.“It’s like a permission structure. It wasn’t cool or popular to be a fan of Biden. Students were like: ‘Sure, I support his policies.’ But it was very rare to find a young person that was actively a fan of him. It was more: ‘I’ll vote for him, especially because I like him more than Trump.’ But I’ve definitely seen, especially from my less politically engaged friends, they’re actively excited to go out and vote for Kamala even if they’re not doing anything else.”Still, the Harvard youth poll found a significant gender gap, with the vice-president garnering 17% more support among young female voters than those who are male, although a majority of young men say they will vote for Harris. Sefcik said she saw that at SVSU, where the small membership of the campus Republican party is mostly male while a majority of the college Democrats are women.Trump held a rally at SVSU last week but said little to directly address younger voters or their concerns, perhaps because relatively few students attended and the former president failed to fill the 4,000-seat sports hall.A student who did attend and said he supported Trump didn’t want to give his name. Asked why not, he replied: “There’s no problem at SVSU. I feel like people are respectful of each other’s views. I have friends on both sides. But it’s not like that outside. Saying you vote for Trump could cost you a job.”Many of SVSU’s students come from rural and small-town Michigan, and grew up in Republican neighbourhoods and homes. Sefcik’s disillusionment with Trump went hand in hand with questioning her upbringing in a religious and politically conservative family. But she also became more dismayed with the Republican party as she experienced it from the inside.Sefcik said that as president of the campus Republicans, she would attend fundraising events where the donors expected to hear how she was suffering at the hands of “woke” students and liberal professors.“They want to hear about how hard it is to be a conservative college student and how the system is just not benefiting you anymore. And so you sort of learn these two or three talking points to reinforce that. But in my experience, it wasn’t hard, because people who identified as Democrats were kind and most welcoming people I ever met,” she said.The SVSU Republicans declined a request for an interview.Two days after Trump’s rally, a different student crowd turned out to hear Bernie Sanders speak in support of Harris on the campus.Sanders hit all the right notes for a young audience. Abortion rights, the housing crisis, the US moving ever closer to becoming an oligarchy. He gave a discourse on the dangers of electing Trump again, warning that if he is returned to the White House the world will have “lost the struggle” against the climate crisis.But Sanders also illustrated the gap with Harris as he called for universal public healthcare – “Medicare for all” – in contrast with her much weaker proposals for drug price controls and greater regulation of medical providers.Some of Harris’s more active supporters on campus say that she falls short on some policies but they see other strengths. Although Harris has avoided putting her race and gender at the fore of her campaign, Craig said it was important to some students.“From what I’ve observed around campus, it makes people of our demographic feel more heard and seen and that’s a really big thing, too,” she said.Several students see Harris as a break with being raised in an age of apprehension. Sefcik said people her age “grew up with the fear after 9/11 and have never known a world where we were sort of safe”. She said Trump exacerbated that with his attacks on minority groups and by packing the supreme court to strip women of control over their bodies.Craig described students who recently began at university as spending their teenage years living in the “Trump era of American carnage”.“This is all they’ve ever known. The Biden years are pretty much scrambling to undo what had been done and fix things. I feel like there’s a certain level of despondency whereas, as Harris herself said, she is about bringing joy to people, making it a little more positive and upbeat as compared to the same old. It’s a new approach,” she said.Still, the challenge of making sure students actually vote remains. There are reasons for the Democrats to be optimistic on that score. Four years ago, a historic high of 66% of American college students voted in the presidential election, a huge leap from 2016, when just 52% turned out.The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education called the increase “stunning” and attributed it to a range of factors, including student activism on “racial injustice, global climate change, and voter suppression”. Revulsion with Trump also drove a lot of people to the polls.Harris’s supporters also note that nearly half of SVSU students voted in large numbers in the midterms two years ago, just months after the US supreme court threw out the constitutional right to an abortion by overturning Roe v Wade – a larger turnout than in the rest of Saginaw county.Craig is pushing a widely heard message among Democrats that Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016 by 10,704 votes is equivalent to just two ballots in each of the state’s election precincts.“We are telling them, all it takes is taking a couple of people with you. Talk to your friends, reach out on social media. You don’t have to go knocking door to door, you don’t have to be standing out here with a clipboard. You don’t have to go do anything terribly crazy. You just have to get two people to vote,” she said. More

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      Slotkin and Rogers Attack Each Other’s Records in Michigan Senate Debate

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      A debate between Representative Elissa Slotkin, the Democrat running for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and former Representative Mike Rogers, her Republican opponent, turned bitter on Tuesday night as the candidates sought to disqualify each other with attacks over their voting records in the House.Ms. Slotkin, a third-term lawmaker, hit Mr. Rogers, who retired in 2015 after 14 years in the House, for his stance on abortion, pointing to his dozens of votes in favor of legislation that would have banned the procedure or restricted access to it.“Do not trust him,” Ms. Slotkin said, calling Mr. Rogers “unilaterally pro-life” and warning voters not to believe his promise that he would not jeopardize Michigan’s constitutionally guaranteed right to an abortion.Mr. Rogers sought to tie Ms. Slotkin to Biden administration policies he said had been bad for Michigan, including supporting emissions standards that would require two-thirds of new cars sold to be electric vehicles by 2032.“My opponent has multiple times supported E.V. mandates, trying to pick the cars that our companies have to build and the cars that you’re going to have to buy,” Mr. Rogers said.The back-and-forth highlighted the increasingly hostile tone of the race between Ms. Slotkin and Mr. Rogers, one of the few Senate races considered a tossup in the upcoming election, in which control of the chamber is up for grabs. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat who is retiring, has held the seat since 2001, and the party must hold it to have a chance of winning its uphill battle to hang onto the majority. Recent polls have shown Ms. Slotkin with a slight edge in the 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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      Harris, in Michigan, Tries to Head Off Trump’s Attacks Over Gas Cars

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      Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday sought to rebut a frequent argument from former President Donald J. Trump that she would mandate the end of gasoline-powered cars, issuing a rare direct response to her White House rival’s exaggerations and misleading claims.Speaking at a rally in Flint, a mid-Michigan city whose onetime cadre of thriving auto factories never recovered from closures in the 1980s, Ms. Harris tried to reassure voters in the state, who are being bombarded by Trump ads that claim she “wants to end all gas-powered cars.”“Michigan, let us be clear,” she said. “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive. But here’s what I will do. I will invest in communities like Flint.”The Harris campaign rally in Flint, Mich., on Friday. The vice president’s campaign has been pitching her as the candidate for the working and middle classes in the northern battleground states.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesThe politics of the nation’s slow march toward more electric vehicles have been tricky in Michigan, a battleground state that is home to the nation’s three major automakers. As the climate crisis has worsened, President Biden’s administration has required emissions standards that will most likely require about half of the new cars sold in the United States to emit zero emissions by 2032.To reach that goal, the Biden administration has offered incentives to manufacturers who produce electric vehicles and tax credits for consumers who buy them.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 Rally in Michigan Dominated by More False Statements

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      Former President Donald J. Trump held a rally on Thursday in the key battleground state of Michigan that was notable mainly for his continued false statements and exaggerations on a number of subjects as varied as the 2020 election and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.In the roughly 85 minutes that Mr. Trump was onstage, he repeated a pattern of untrue assertions that have characterized many of his events as the 2024 presidential race heads into its final weeks. The crowd of supporters in Saginaw County, which he narrowly lost four years ago, included Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman and the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican Party chairman.Mr. Trump reiterated his familiar false claim that he had won the 2020 election and made no acknowledgment of new evidence that was unsealed against him on Wednesday in the federal election subversion case. He also said his campaign was up in all polls in every swing state, while several public polls show close races and Vice President Kamala Harris leading narrowly in a number of battlegrounds.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the state of funding at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying that the Biden administration had stolen disaster-relief money allocated to the agency to give to housing for undocumented immigrants so they would vote for Democrats.He cast electric cars as a threat to the auto industry, while at the same time praising Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who has endorsed his candidacy and featured him prominently on X, the Musk-owned social media platform.Michigan was one of a handful of swing states where Mr. Trump and his allies tried to overturn his defeat in 2020 through a series of maneuvers that included breaching voting equipment and seeking to seat a set of fake presidential electors. Some of his supporters have been criminally charged in the state, where Mr. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator this year.Mr. Trump spent time in his speech taking satisfaction over his choice of running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, whose debate performance this week was applauded by many.“I drafted the best athlete,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Vance. The audience — several thousand supporters at a recreation center at Saginaw Valley State University, roughly 100 miles north of Detroit — cheered.And he mused, at one point, that instead of being on a beach in Monte Carlo or someplace else, he was running for the presidency again. “If I had my choice of being here with you today or being on some magnificent beach with the waves hitting me in the face, I would take you every single time.”Overall as of Thursday, Ms. Harris led by two percentage points in Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling average, 49 percent to 47 percent. The vice president is scheduled to return to the state on Friday, campaigning in Detroit and Flint. More

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      Walz Spoke of Gun Violence Affecting His Son. Here’s an Account of the Shooting.

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      At Tuesday’s debate, Gov. Tim Walz said that his son, Gus Walz, witnessed a shooting at a community center. A volleyball coach said Gus helped other young players to safety.Gov. Tim Walz has spoken before of a shooting last year at a recreation center in St. Paul, Minn., that he said had an impact on his teenage son, Gus. But in the vice-presidential debate with Senator JD Vance of Ohio on Tuesday night, Mr. Walz went further in saying that his son witnessed the shooting, which left one teenager seriously wounded.On Wednesday, a volleyball coach who played a central role in the response that day described what he, Gus and others experienced in the frightening moments after they had heard gunfire outside.The coach, David Albornoz, said he ran to investigate, while Gus, a team captain and an assistant coach on a boys’ volleyball team, helped guide young people in the gym to a safe location when many thought a mass shooting was occurring.“We heard the gunshots,” Mr. Albornoz said. “You hear the screaming. I had no more information than what I gathered.”The shooting, which was propelled into the national spotlight when Mr. Walz and Mr. Vance discussed how they would address gun violence in the country, was widely reported in St. Paul at the time. It took place in January 2023 outside the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center, part of the Oxford Community Center, one of the largest and busiest facilities in the city’s parks and recreation system. It is also across the street from Central High School, where Gus is a student.According to several court documents, the 16-year-old victim, JuVaughn Turner, and some of his friends were outside when a young woman got into a dispute with an employee at the recreation center, Exavir Binford.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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      JD Vance takes victory lap and mocks Tim Walz over debate gaffe

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      JD Vance took a self-proclaimed victory lap after his vice-presidential debate against the Democrat Tim Walz, appearing on Wednesday at a campaign rally in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.Vance told supporters in Auburn Hills that he thought the debate went “pretty well” on Tuesday, as snap polls showed viewers considered it to be a tie between the two vice-presidential candidates.Departing from the generally civil tone of the debate, Vance mocked Walz over his biggest gaffe of the night, in which the Democratic governor said he was friends with school shooters. (Walz seemingly meant to say he was friends with victims of school shootings.)“That was probably only the third or fourth dumbest comment Tim Walz made that night,” Vance said. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel a little bad for Governor Walz. And the reason I feel bad for him is because he has to defend the indefensible, and that is the record of Kamala Harris.”In his prepared remarks, Vance did not touch on his weakest moment in the debate, when he refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race. But when Vance took questions from the media after his speech, a reporter did ask him about the exchange, and he again sidestepped the question.“The media is obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to commonsense economic policies,” Vance said.Vance then pivoted to discussing the issue of non-citizen voting, which has become a rallying cry among Trump and his supporters. Research has uncovered little evidence to substantiate Republicans’ concerns, as voting in a federal election is already illegal for non-citizens.“We’re going to talk about election integrity because I believe that every vote ought to count, but only the legally cast votes, and that’s why we fight for election integrity,” Vance said in Michigan.Vance focused most of his remarks on attacking Harris over her economic policy proposals, blaming her for the high inflation seen earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency and accusing her of avoiding tough questions about her record. Echoing comments he made during the debate, Vance referenced his background growing up in a low-income family in Ohio to relate to Americans struggling to pay their bills.“She’s afraid of interviews, so she doesn’t talk to people, and she doesn’t realize that her economic policies are making it harder on American families,” Vance said. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to be able to afford a good life for your family, and that’s what Donald Trump and I are going to fight for every single day for the next four years.”Vance then linked Trump’s economic policies to his proposals on immigration, as the former president has called for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. An analysis released on Wednesday by the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, concluded that Trump’s mass deportation program could cost the federal government as much as $88bn a year on average.“The American media – and especially Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – they don’t want to talk about how this illegal immigration crisis is a theft of the American dream from American citizens,” Vance said. “Here’s the Donald Trump plan, and here’s the Donald Trump message to illegal aliens in this country: in six months, pack your bags because you’re going home.”Despite rehashing some of Trump’s most divisive talking points, Vance made a point to reach out to Democrats who may still be undecided in the election. Trump will probably need some of those voters’ support to carry Michigan, a state that Biden won by 3 points in 2020.“As a person who was raised by a couple of working-class, blue-collar Democrats, I want to say to every Democrat who’s watching at home [and] every Democrat who’s in this room: you are more than welcome in Donald Trump’s Republican party,” Vance said. “We’re the party of common sense. We’ve got a big tent, and you’re welcome in our movement.”And yet, when asked by a reporter how he and Trump would work to unite Americans in the face of political division if they win the election in November, Vance again lashed out against Harris.“Why do we have so much division, and why do we have so much rancor in this country’s political debate? It’s because Kamala Harris and her allies are trying to silence the American people rather than engage with them,” Vance said. “When you try to censor your fellow citizens, when you try to shut them up, you breed division and hatred.”Given Trump’s tendency to deploy personal insults and degrading nicknames against his political opponents, that explanation may not sit well with voters. Trump now has just one month left to convince Americans that he deserves another four years in the White House. More

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      ‘This man is everything’: how devoted Trump supporters took over the Republican party in a Michigan city

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      Debra Ell opened her Trump Shoppe in a dingy Saginaw strip mall back when establishment Republicans and TV pundits were still scoffing at the man who was about to remake US politics.Ell latched on to Donald Trump as a winner not long after he declared his run for the presidency in 2015. But she understood that the key to his success in her corner of swing state Michigan was to keep a distance from the local Republican party, which Ell regarded with almost as much hostility as she did the Democrats.So the Trump Shoppe was born, soon drawing in people who had never voted Republican in their lives. Ell recalls the car factory workers struggling after General Motors closed the plants that propped up Saginaw county’s economy.“There’s no way union workers were going to go into Republican offices but they came in here because Trump’s name was on the sign and said: ‘There’s no way in hell I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.’ So we had that gift, and then they wanted to know more about Trump,” she said.“We’d educate them in what he was saying and they liked it because he’s a phenomenon. We’ll never ever see anybody like Donald Trump again, ever. It’s not going to be fun anymore when he’s not around. Even if you don’t support him, it’s fun, don’t you think?”View image in fullscreenNearly a decade later, the Trump Shoppe is still in business, squeezed between Lovely Nails and an insurance company. These days, it’s busy with people buying “vote Trump” signs sporting slogans tailored to military veterans, bikers, union members, Black people and Latinos. “Cats and Dogs for Trump” signs have done well since the former president accused Haitian immigrants of eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.A blanket imprinted with a picture of Trump raising his fist in the moments after the July assassination attempt is for sale near the entrance. T-shirts carry the words Trump shouted as he walked away with blood running down his face: fight, fight, fight.But besides serving as a shrine to Trump, the office is now also the local Republican headquarters after Ell led a campaign to purge the Saginaw county party of those she derided as “Rinos” – Republicans in name only – for their lack of total fealty to Trump.She led a takeover last year by packing the local party with delegates aligned with the America First movement, a populist political philosophy embraced by Trump that promotes a nationalist agenda of unilateralism and protectionism but has frequently been accused of being underpinned by racism.Amid accusations of intimidation that on one occasion resulted in the police being called to an official party meeting, Ell’s husband, Gary, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, was installed as chair of the county Republican party.View image in fullscreen“The Saginaw county Republican party were old guard, traditional establishment people. When Debra started a Trump office here, we grew a following of people that supported Trump strictly as Trump. We built up a continual base to the point where none of the previous executive committee or officers who were not loyal to Trump are now in any leadership capacity,” said Gary Ell.But for all her success in taking control of Saginaw’s Republican machinery, Debra Ell now faces a critical question: does any of this help get Trump elected in five weeks?Saginaw is a bellwether county. Trump narrowly won it in 2016, and took Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. He lost the county and the state four years later, helping to send him to defeat in the presidential election. Victory for Trump in Saginaw and Michigan in November would be a major blow to Kamala Harris’s campaign.But some Republicans have questioned the wisdom of what they see as the Saginaw party leadership’s obsessive focus on conspiracy theories claiming the 2020 election was stolen and denial of Trump’s role in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.Thomas Roy was forced out as vice-chair of the county party by Ell and America First supporters in late 2022. “A lot of us don’t believe the election was stolen in 2020. They basically do, 100%,” he told WJRT television afterward.Roy then founded a Republican “club” to act as a rival to the local party by fundraising for more reasoned candidates – some of whom won their primaries against the America First challengers.Ell also led a campaign to unseat the director of the Michigan Republican party, Jason Roe, after just six months in office when it emerged that he had said not long after the 2020 election that Trump was responsible for his own defeat.“The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump,” Roe told Politico at the time.Since his unseating, Roe has warned that America Firsters are damaging Trump’s chances for victory this year and has described some of its candidates in Michigan state races as “kooks”.Another former local Republican official, who remains a Trump supporter, said that repeatedly “harping on about election fraud and January 6 only reminds people of the most disruptive threat to democracy in modern American history – with Trump at the heart of it”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenHe added: “He lost then because of the chaos. Reminding voters of that chaos is not the way to win this election. We should stick to talking about his strength, the economy.”Ell is having none of it. She said America First politicians are only voicing Trump’s own views. But is that the way for him to win back Saginaw county after his defeat by just a few hundred votes in 2020?View image in fullscreen“I don’t think he lost it to begin with. I was here. I was on the ground. We walked out of our office in 2020 at about 10 o’clock at night and he was 75% ahead in Saginaw County, and we were just on a cloud. There’s no way that that could change. I think they cheated,” she said.In the Trump Shoppe, cardboard cutouts of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower serve as a reminder of Republican royalty. But most of those who walk in the door are there for the man, not the party. Their views are better represented on a large television streaming Real America’s Voice, a rightwing channel peddling election conspiracy theories, which has displaced Fox News as the trusted source for America First supporters.Ell, too, is a Trump supporter first and a Republican second.View image in fullscreen“We are America First. That’s what Trump’s all about, is America First. And that’s not an arrogant, racist statement. America First is what our constitution is about,” she said.“They like to say that we’re so divided. I don’t think so. Trump’s brought up so many issues that have been buried for so long. He’s saying: ‘Why are these illegals coming in?’ He’s actually bringing us together by talking about these things. We were the silent majority that felt the hurt and the pain of what was happening to our country. We saw it and we knew it, but we didn’t have an advocate to do anything about it, so we didn’t talk about it until Trump came along.”Asked if she really believed that the US is more united because of Trump given the national political discourse and the divisions in her own party, Ell said whatever differences there may be are a result of the “left spreading disinformation”.Still, she agrees with her critics that the constant talk about alleged election fraud and the Capitol insurrection are not what most voters care about. Opinion polls consistently show that Trump is more trusted on the economy and inflation, a key issue for many voters after years of rising prices, although a recent poll for the Guardian showed that, in a blind test, Harris’s specific economic proposals – including some price controls and higher taxes for the wealthy – were more popular.Perhaps that should be the focus of the Saginaw Republicans campaign?“We talk about it plenty. Biden gave us the gift of this economy. And who, for the last three-and-a-half years, gave us that? Kamala Harris was his VP. This is her fault,” she said.For all that, recent polls consistently put Harris ahead in Michigan, albeit by the low single digits. Ell is dismissive.“In 2016, Trump was an unknown to the political world, and that’s why the Democrats and Hillary took him for granted: ‘Oh, he can’t win.’ All the polling was way off base. They thought the election was over. They did it then, they’re doing it now. The polling is similar. It’s wrong,” she said.“He’s going to win. Look at his rallies. Everyone there, including me, would take a bullet for that man because he’s going to save this country for my grandchildren. This man, at this time in history, is everything.” More

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      Harris y Trump están empatados en Míchigan y Wisconsin, según las encuestas

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      La contienda se ha estrechado en dos de los estados disputados del norte, según las encuestas de The New York Times/Siena College.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y el expresidente Donald Trump están en una contienda aún más apretada en los estados en disputa de Míchigan y Wisconsin que hace solo siete semanas, según las nuevas encuestas de The New York Times y Siena College.La ventaja de Harris de principios de agosto se ha visto ligeramente reducida por la fortaleza de Trump en cuestiones económicas, según las encuestas, un hecho potencialmente preocupante para la vicepresidenta, dado que la economía sigue siendo el tema más importante para los votantes.A menos de 40 días de las elecciones, la contienda está esencialmente empatada en Míchigan, con Harris recibiendo el 48 por ciento de apoyo entre los votantes probables y Trump obteniendo el 47 por ciento, bien dentro del margen de error de la encuesta. En Wisconsin, un estado donde las encuestas suelen exagerar el apoyo a los demócratas, Harris tiene un 49 por ciento, frente al 47 por ciento de Trump.Los sondeos también revelan que Harris aventaja en nueve puntos porcentuales a Trump en el segundo distrito electoral de Nebraska, cuyo único voto electoral podría ser decisivo en el Colegio Electoral. En un escenario posible, el distrito podría dar a Harris exactamente los 270 votos electorales que necesitaría para ganar las elecciones si ganara Míchigan, Wisconsin y Pensilvania, y Trump capturara los estados en disputa del Cinturón del Sol, donde las encuestas de Times/Siena muestran que está por delante.El Times y el Siena College también analizaron la contienda presidencial en Ohio, que no se considera un estado en disputa para obtener la Casa Blanca, pero tiene una de las contiendas senatoriales más competitivas del país. Trump lidera por seis puntos en Ohio, mientras que el senador demócrata Sherrod Brown aventaja a su oponente republicano, Bernie Moreno, por cuatro puntos.How the polls compare More