Presidential Election of 2024

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      House Condemns Biden and Harris Over Afghanistan Withdrawal

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      Ten Democrats joined the G.O.P.-led effort to rebuke 15 senior members of the Biden administration for the failures of the Afghanistan withdrawal in a symbolic vote.A bipartisan House majority passed a resolution on Wednesday condemning President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and 13 other current and former members of the administration over their roles in the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, after 10 Democrats joined all Republicans in delivering the rare and sweeping rebuke.The 219-to-194 vote was the House’s final roll call before members departed Washington to focus on the election, in which control of the chamber is up for grabs. Though the resolution was uniquely broad and direct in condemning the president, members of his cabinet and top advisers in a personal capacity, instead of as an administration, the vote was symbolic because the measure carries no force of law.Still, the participation of 10 Democrats — almost all of them facing tight re-election contests — buoyed the Republicans behind the effort to formally hold senior administration officials primarily responsible for the failures of the withdrawal in the summer of 2021, which left 13 U.S. service members dead. Democratic leaders have dismissed the resolution as a politically biased crusade.“Ten Democrats just joined me in condemning Biden-Harris admin officials who played key roles in the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal,” Representative Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement on social media after the vote. “I am glad these colleagues put politics aside and voted to do what was right — deliver accountability to the American people.”While the bipartisan vote was a political punch to the Biden administration at the height of a critical campaign season, the move stood as a far cry from the sort of legislative consequences that Republicans had threatened to wield against Mr. Biden when they began the various investigations into his administration’s policies and his personal conduct.“After their laughingstock flop of an impeachment investigation, they’re flailing about now to attack the president or the vice president however they can,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who opposed the Afghanistan measure, said after Wednesday’s vote. “The country sees it as cheap election-year antics and games.”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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      3 Takeaways From Kamala Harris’s Interview on MSNBC

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      As Vice President Kamala Harris parses out the details of her agenda, she has favored broad strokes over detailed policy papers. Only recently has she begun sitting for interviews, which have elicited few details about what her presidential administration might look like.Little about that careful approach changed during a 25-minute interview with Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC that was broadcast on Wednesday night. It was Ms. Harris’s first one-on-one interview on cable television since becoming the Democratic nominee.In her discussion with a friendly interviewer, the vice president again presented herself as a champion of the middle class and hit many of the same themes from her pro-business economic speech earlier in the day. She largely avoided direct questions about how she would govern and why some voters remain fond of former President Donald J. Trump’s stewardship of the economy.Here are three takeaways from Ms. Harris’s interview.Harris had roundabout answers to open-ended questions.Ms. Ruhle’s first question was about how Ms. Harris might respond to people who hear her proposals and say, “These policies aren’t for me.” The MSNBC host’s second was about why voters tend to tell pollsters that Mr. Trump is better equipped to handle the economy.Ms. Harris responded to the fairly basic and predictable questions with roundabout responses that did not provide a substantive answer.Instead of offering any explanation for why Mr. Trump polls better on the economy — a matter that has vexed Democrats as President Biden has overseen a steadily improving economy — Ms. Harris instead blasted Mr. Trump’s record. She blamed him for a loss of manufacturing and autoworker jobs and said his tariff proposals would serve as an added sales tax on American consumers.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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      Rep. Clay Higgins Posts, Then Deletes, Racist Comments About Haitians

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      Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, advanced racist claims about Haitians in a post on social media that was subsequently deleted on Wednesday.Mr. Higgins’s post on X was a response to an Associated Press article about a court filing by the leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit group. The group invoked a citizen’s right to file charges against former President Donald J. Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, his running mate, for knowingly making false claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, that caused panic, the filing said.Mr. Higgins repeated some of those claims in his post on X.“These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters,” he wrote.“But damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” Mr. Higgins continued, referring to the date of the presidential inauguration.Mr. Trump has pledged, if elected, to “get them the hell out,” referring to migrants in Springfield, most of whom are in the United States legally and have filled jobs in local industry.Mr. Higgins’s post appears to have been deleted after he faced backlash. Democrats seized on his post. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, said in a statement that Mr. Higgins “must be held accountable for dishonorable conduct that is unbecoming of a member of Congress.”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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      Donald Trump Cut Ties to Some Online Fund-Raisers

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign cut ties late last week with a number of digital firms that had been fund-raising for the campaign and slashed the commission that the remaining vendors can retain by 10 percentage points, according to four people briefed on the changes.The moves come as Mr. Trump has fallen far behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the cash race, and they suggest that the Republican operation is seeking to narrow its donor outreach in the final weeks of the campaign to those contributors who are most immediately profitable.Mr. Trump’s campaign told the digital fund-raising companies that were being retained that their share of incoming donations was being reduced to 59 percent of new donations solicited. At least some of the firms had previously gotten as much as 70 percent of the first donation they recruited to the campaign, said the four people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, declined to answer specific questions about the changes. “President Trump is a fund-raising machine who has built the most robust list of grass-roots donors ever in politics which will fuel his return to the White House,” she said.Under the new arrangement, the Republican firm that has overseen Mr. Trump’s online fund-raising for much of the year, Launchpad, had been set to receive 1 percent of every new donation given, according to two people briefed on the matter.But at least some senior campaign officials had been unaware of that plan. After The New York Times inquired about it, the two people said that the 1 percent payment for Launchpad would not be put into place.Launchpad declined to comment.The world of digital donor list brokering and fund-raising is obscure and lucrative.The outside fund-raising firms that the Trump campaign had been working with own independent lists of regular Republican contributors. The firms then solicit those people to ask them to contribute to Mr. Trump. In exchange, the firms received a significant cut of the first donation given.This process of prospecting for new donors can be profitable for a candidate because it costs nothing and nets some money. Perhaps most important, the contact information for the new donors is given to the campaign, which can solicit them repeatedly.Mr. Trump already has amassed, by far, the largest list of small donors in Republican politics. Two people said that one reason for the change was that roughly 86 percent of the donations that outside firms were collecting were already part of the Trump database of emails.Mr. Trump’s donor list is seen as among his most valuable campaign assets, constructed over nearly a decade in politics.Maggie Haberman More

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      Trump Is Briefed on Iranian Assassination Threats

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      U.S. intelligence agencies had previously tracked a potential Iranian assassination plot. The Trump campaign said in a statement that the threat is now heightened.Former President Donald J. Trump was briefed on Tuesday by U.S. intelligence officials about “specific threats from Iran to assassinate him,” according to his campaign.U.S. intelligence agencies had previously tracked a potential Iranian assassination plot earlier this summer, with officials stressing that they did not consider the threat related to the shooting in July that wounded Mr. Trump. Earlier this month, another man was arrested by the police after he was found lurking with a gun near Mr. Trump’s golf course in Florida. The federal government will pursue a charge of attempted assassination against that man, and there is no evidence to suggest that plot was related to Iran.Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that the threats from Iran were part of “an effort to destabilize and sow chaos” and that “intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months.”A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged the briefing took place but declined to answer questions or provide any specifics. It is not clear if the intelligence officials provided new details about existing threats by Iran against Mr. Trump or if spy agencies had gathered information about new plots against him.Iranian hackers seeking to influence the 2024 election breached Mr. Trump’s campaign and then sent excerpts from documents pilfered from the campaign to people associated with President Biden’s re-election campaign this summer, though law enforcement officials said that the recipients of those materials had not responded. Iranian hackers also tried to breach the Biden-Harris campaign.Iran has also engaged in an ambitious and brazen effort to spread disinformation about the election. The effort appears intended to undermine Mr. Trump’s campaign, according to officials, but they have also targeted Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting a wider goal of sowing discord and discrediting American democracy.Russia and China have also engaged in disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing American elections. American spy agencies have assessed that Russia favors Mr. Trump, seeing him as skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine, and U.S. officials announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns this month.Julian Barnes More

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      Bernie Moreno Under Fire Over Comments About Suburban Women

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      Bernie Moreno, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, is facing criticism over demeaning remarks he made last week against women who support abortion rights, including from Nikki Haley, the former Republican presidential candidate and one of the most prominent women in her party.Speaking on Friday at a town hall in Warren County, Ohio, Mr. Moreno characterized many suburban women as “single-issue voters” on abortion rights, suggesting that older women should not care about abortion because they were too old to have children.“It’s a little crazy, by the way — especially for women that are like past 50,” Mr. Moreno said, drawing laughter from the crowd. “I’m thinking to myself: I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”In a social media post on Tuesday morning quoting Mr. Moreno’s remarks, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, addressed the Senate candidate: “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend.”Ms. Haley, who was former President Donald J. Trump’s top rival in the Republican presidential primaries this year, has endorsed his candidacy even as she has offered advice and criticism to him and the party from the sidelines.In interviews on Fox News, Ms. Haley has said that the party needs a “serious shift” to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, saying this month that Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “need to change the way they speak about women.”“You don’t need to call Kamala dumb,” Ms. Haley said, adding that “she didn’t get this far, you know, just by accident” and that “she’s a prosecutor. You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence or looks or anything else.”She added that “when you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up, too.”Democrats have embraced abortion rights as an issue that they see as advantageous to them, spotlighting Mr. Trump’s bragging about appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to end the constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade, and pinning their hopes of winning control of the Senate on abortion initiatives. Voters, by a wide margin, say they trust Ms. Harris to handle abortion over Mr. Trump. More

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      Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Evolution

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      It was only a little more than a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had few qualms about airing his politics.Earnest and optimistic — perhaps naïvely so — he rushed onto the national stage to discuss issues he cared about: immigration, social justice, inequality, democracy in action. He penned columns in national newspapers espousing his views, spun up foundations and philanthropic efforts and hired hundreds of people to put his vast riches to work on his political goals.That was Mark Zuckerberg in his 20s. Mark Zuckerberg in his 40s is a very different Mark Zuckerberg.In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Mr. Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington. He and others at the top of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company.As recently as June at the Allen and Company conference — the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho — Mr. Zuckerberg complained to multiple people about the blowback to Meta that came from the more politically touchy aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes.In short — he was over it.His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all.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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      These Voters Are Anti-Trump, but Will They Be Pro-Harris?

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      Emily Brieve, a Republican county commissioner in Michigan, voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020. Her campaign website highlighted her opposition to abortion rights. And until this year, she had never considered voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.But to Ms. Brieve, 42, the people with whom Mr. Trump surrounds himself seem increasingly “extreme.” His running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, is “divisive” and “robotic,” ripe for caricature on “Saturday Night Live.” And after Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominees helped overturn Roe v. Wade, she thought some state abortion restrictions went too far.“I’m still not 100 percent sure how I’m planning on voting,” Ms. Brieve, of Caledonia, Mich., said in an interview. “I just know that I’m not supportive of Trump, and I won’t vote for Trump ever again.”In a bitterly divided nation, relatively few Americans are genuinely torn between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Ms. Brieve represents a different yet crucial kind of undecided voter: one who has ruled out Mr. Trump but is grappling with whether to support Ms. Harris, write in someone else or skip the top of the ticket entirely.In recent elections, center-right voters who have recoiled at the direction of the Republican Party — particularly college-educated suburbanites — have played significant roles in Democratic victories, helping propel President Biden in 2020 and shaping key 2022 midterm contests.Now, in the final stretch of this campaign, Democrats see opportunities to expand that universe of voters. The party is betting that since Mr. Trump was last on the ballot, he has disqualified himself with more Americans who detest his election denialism and conspiracy theories, as well as his party’s abortion bans.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