Presidential Election of 2024

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      Vance and Walz’s Battle of the Network Co-Stars

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      In what could be the last prime-time showdown of the 2024 campaign, the supporting players performed against type.If a presidential election is a TV series — and partly it is, like it or not — then the vice-presidential debate is usually a departure episode: an installment that briefly shifts focus to a couple of side characters. It might be memorable or forgettable, but it is generally skippable.Tuesday’s debate between Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was a bit different. With only Kamala Harris having committed to an Oct. 23 debate proffered by CNN and Donald J. Trump having thus far declined, it may well have been the last big prime-time moment until election night.It was not, however, a bombshell-packed season-ender. The change in cast produced a change in style, in a spirited but often surprisingly collegial debate whose attacks were largely aimed offstage, at the leaders of the ticket.This was not the debate one might have expected from these candidates, each chosen in part for his media presence. Mr. Vance has been combative in TV interviews, embodying the trolling spirit of Mr. Trump’s most extremely online surrogates. Mr. Walz shot to fame on the strength of his cable news appearances and quirky viral videos, playing the down-to-earth happy warrior who mocked opponents as “weird.”Neither performed to type on the CBS stage. Mr. Vance, who can be cutting and snide in TV interviews (and has been notorious for insults like “childless cat ladies”), answered smoothly and kept mainly cordial to his opponent. Mr. Walz, while peppering his answers with folksy touches — “My pro tip of the day is this” — spoke in a nervous rush, with fewer flashes of “Coach Walz” pep.A decade of Trump has conditioned us to think of debates as rounds of Mortal Kombat, with dire rhetoric and imagery to match. Here, there was a lot of “I agree” and “I think this is a healthy conversation” amid the factual disputes and prepared critiques of the top of the ticket. You might briefly have forgotten this was America in the year 2024.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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      Inside a Pro-Harris Ad Telling Hispanic Voters She’s Friendlier Than Trump

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      Two Democratic groups — Somos PAC and Priorities USA Action — are running this 30-second ad on digital platforms in battleground states in support of Vice President Kamala Harris. The ad is targeted at Hispanic voters, and the two groups are spending $1 million on it as part of a $5 million campaign. It has both English- and Spanish-language versions.Here’s a look at the ad, its accuracy and its main takeaway.On the ScreenThe ad opens with images of smiling, hard-working people engaged in jobs often filled by immigrants from Latin America: operating a food truck, picking crops on a farm, working construction, serving coffee in a diner. The background music is light and airy.The spot then transitions to a grainy clip of former President Donald J. Trump at a rally as disturbing images pop on and off the screen. Young children are seen sleeping in cages, evoking Mr. Trump’s family separation policy. Cheering Trump rally-goers in cowboy hats hold up signs that read “Mass Deportation Now!”Then the screen brightens as Ms. Harris appears smiling in a crowd of children and adults. Her presence is followed by scenes of happy families, a young person graduating from college and more Americans hard at work.The goal of the ad seems to be shoring up Ms. Harris’s support with Hispanic voters by contrasting her approach to immigration with Mr. Trump’s.Somos PAC and Priorities USA ActionThe ScriptNarrator“Working people, including hard-working immigrants, are bringing our economy back. But while Trump threatens to separate families and weaken our economy, Kamala Harris’s balanced approach to immigration is keeping families together: by protecting our loved ones from deportation, providing a pathway to citizenship and work visas for Dreamers. With the Biden-Harris administration’s historic action, working people like us can continue to build a good life and strengthen our economy for generations to come.”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 Trump Could Persecute His Political Adversaries

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      It has become commonplace for Donald Trump to talk about how he will use the Justice Department to punish his enemies should he regain the presidency. He routinely calls for prosecuting his current opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and regularly accuses her and President Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department against him. Though there is […] More

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      Walz Says He ‘Misspoke’ About Being in Hong Kong During Tiananmen Square Protests

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      Asked by a debate moderator on Tuesday why Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota had said that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June of 1989, when he had in reality been in his home state of Nebraska, Mr. Walz said he was “a knucklehead at times.”“All I said on this was, I got there that summer, and misspoke on this,” Mr. Walz added, when pressed to explain why he has maintained, for years, that he was in Hong Kong during the anti-government demonstration and entered China shortly afterward.Mr. Walz tried to dismiss the misstatement as insignificant, saying he sometimes gets “caught up in the rhetoric.” He then pivoted to assert that his work as a teacher, congressman and governor was evidence that his community trusted his record despite his missteps.Mr. Walz has long said that he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, the day that Chinese soldiers killed hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. He has said that he entered mainland China shortly after, even as others chose not to travel there, because he wanted to forge ahead with his yearlong teaching stint in the country — framing it as a courageous act.“My thinking at the time was, what a golden opportunity to go tell, you know, how it was,” Mr. Walz told the podcast “Pod Save America” in February. “And I did have a lot of freedom to do that. Taught American history and could tell the story.”But Mr. Walz was not in Hong Kong. He was in Nebraska until that August, when he left for China, according to news reports from the time. The timeline of his trip was first questioned by Minnesota Public Radio on Monday. His campaign did not provide an explanation.Republicans have pounced on the news, pointing to it as another of a series of exaggerations and misstatements Mr. Walz has made, both large and small, that have surfaced since he was named Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.Those include a comment he made in 2018 about “weapons of war that I carried in war” as a member of the National Guard, when he never served in combat. He has also implied that he and his wife used in vitro fertilization to start their family. In fact, the couple used a different treatment, intrauterine insemination. More

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      Exchange on Climate Change Shows Gulf Between Vance and Walz

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      The devastation that Hurricane Helene wreaked across the South last week thrust the issue of climate change to the forefront of the vice-presidential debate early in its first hour, quickly demonstrating how the two major parties diverge when it comes to the threat posed by climate change.Senator JD Vance of Ohio, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, said that people were “justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” a position that might seem at odds with his running mate, who recently called the focus on the environment “one of the greatest scams.” But Mr. Vance dismissed as “weird science” those who say that carbon emissions are causing climate change.He added that he and Mr. Trump wanted “the environment to be cleaner and safer.” And he said the climate crisis would be solved by growing American manufacturing.“You’d want to reassure as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world,” Mr. Vance said, asserting that overseas manufacturing and energy production had a greater carbon footprint.The United Nations has said that “the manufacturing industry is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.”Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, responded by noting that in the past Mr. Trump had called climate change a “hoax,” before pivoting to policies passed by the Biden administration.Mr. Walz called Mr. Vance’s depiction of manufacturing a “false choice” and pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act, saying that investments in electric vehicles and solar energy had resulted in new U.S. jobs.“We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current,” Mr. Walz said. “And that’s what absolutely makes sense.”At the end of the exchange, Norah O’Donnell, one of the moderators, offered a closing comment: “The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the Earth’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” More

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      Vance’s Dominant Debate Performance Shows Why He’s Trump’s Running Mate

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      The first half of the vice-presidential debate has been the strongest illustration in this campaign so far of why it made sense for Donald Trump to pick JD Vance as his running mate. The Ohio senator is delivering one of the best debating performances by a Republican nominee for president or vice president in recent memory and making a case for Trump’s record far more effectively than Trump has ever been capable of doing.Vance’s performance has included a dose of self-conscious humanization, an attempted reintroduction to his blue-collar background and striking personal biography after weeks of effective Democratic attacks on his right-wing podcast commentary. It’s included some careful rhetorical tap dancing and policy jujitsu on issues like climate change and abortion. But mostly it’s just been an effective prosecution of the case against the Biden-Harris administration, focusing relentlessly on encouraging viewers to be nostalgic for the economy, the immigration landscape and the relative foreign-policy calm of Trump’s term.Tim Walz, on the other hand, seems affable, well meaning and, relative to Vance, largely out of his depth. He’s spending too much time partly agreeing with his rival while making a much more haphazard case against Trump than Vance is making against Kamala Harris.I think one question raised by this performance so far is why the Harris campaign has basically kept Walz away from one-on-one interviews while Vance has been out there dealing with hostile questions from Day 1 of his candidacy. It feels as though the Minnesota governor would have benefited immensely from spending some more time being grilled on the Sunday shows before he was sent out to do battle with a Republican vice-presidential nominee, who, whatever his other weaknesses, clearly knows how to debate. More

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      Meet the VP Debate Moderators: CBS News’s Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell

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      CBS News, the network sponsoring Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, is focused on providing a televised forum for voters to learn more about the candidates, Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.The job largely falls to Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, the pair of CBS political journalists moderating what may be the last event of the campaign to reach tens of millions of Americans simultaneously.Here’s who they are.Norah O’DonnellAnchor, “CBS Evening News”Ms. O’Donnell, 50, has anchored “CBS Evening News” since 2019. She has a lengthy background in political and campaign journalism. Ms. O’Donnell joined CBS in 2011 as its chief White House correspondent, after more than a decade at NBC, where she covered the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon. Before that, she was a print journalist at Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill.In 2020, just before the pandemic, Ms. O’Donnell and the CBS host Gayle King moderated a Democratic presidential primary debate in South Carolina. Ms. O’Donnell and Ms. King were co-hosts of “CBS This Morning” from 2012 to 2019.In July, Ms. O’Donnell said that she would step down from the “Evening News” after the election. She will become a senior correspondent at CBS News and contribute to its popular news program, “60 Minutes.”Like previous debate moderators, Ms. O’Donnell has not granted interviews ahead of Tuesday’s matchup. But CBS released a statement from her, in which she said her goal as a moderator was “to ensure a substantive and civil conversation that helps voters understand more about what can be complex policy positions.”Margaret BrennanModerator, “Face the Nation”Ms. Brennan, 44, has moderated “Face the Nation,” the flagship CBS Sunday morning public affairs show, since 2018. She is also CBS’s chief foreign affairs correspondent.Before she took over “Face the Nation,” Ms. Brennan covered the White House and the State Department. She joined CBS in 2012 following a career as a financial journalist at CNBC and Bloomberg Television. Her reporting has encompassed the Trump administration and significant international stories involving American diplomacy in the Middle East and with North Korea.“In a debate, we’re performing a public service and that is to tee up a conversation in which the candidates use the time themselves to make their case about why their policy is best for Americans,” Mr. Brennan said in a statement provided by CBS. More

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      Jimmy Carter cumple 100 años

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      Diecinueve meses después de ingresar en cuidados paliativos, el presidente número 39 llega al siglo de vida el martes. ¿Su deseo de cumpleaños? Votar una vez más por el Partido Demócrata.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Cuando Jimmy Carter ingresó en cuidados paliativos en su casa de Georgia el año pasado, su familia y amigos pensaron que solo le quedaban unos días de vida. Más de 19 meses después, el martes cumple 100 años y es el primer presidente de la historia de Estados Unidos que alcanza el centenario.El último capítulo de la ya extraordinaria historia de Carter está resultando ser uno de asombrosa resistencia. Este agricultor de maníes convertido en estadista mundial ha superado a lo largo de los años un cáncer cerebral, se ha recuperado de una fractura de cadera y ha sobrevivido a sus adversarios políticos. Y ahora está estableciendo un récord de durabilidad presidencial que puede ser difícil de batir.Aunque frágil y generalmente confinado en su modesta casa de Plains, Georgia, Carter no solo se ha negado a rendirse a la inevitabilidad del tiempo, sino que se ha animado en los últimos meses, según sus familiares. Ha vuelto a fijar su atención un poco más, diciendo a sus hijos y nietos que tiene un nuevo hito que quiere alcanzar: no su cumpleaños, que profesa no importarle mucho, sino el día de las elecciones, para poder votar por la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris.“Es un regalo”, dijo Josh Carter, uno de sus nietos, hablando de los últimos meses. “Es un regalo que no sabía que íbamos a recibir”.Carter ya había superado a todos sus predecesores para convertirse en el presidente más longevo, pero algunos de quienes han experimentado su terca irascibilidad a lo largo de las décadas dijeron que no les sorprendía que se acercara a su segundo siglo.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