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    Social Media Influencers to Speak at the Democratic Convention

    A speaking slot at a national party’s nominating convention is among the most coveted prizes in American politics, offering veteran officeholders and up-and-comers alike the chance to speak to — and be seen by — an entire nation.At the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago, five of those rare slots will go to a group that most likely would be unfamiliar to previous convention planners: social media influencers.Convention officials said each night would include at least one influencer. The speakers are Deja Foxx, Nabela Noor, Carlos Eduardo Espina, Olivia Julianna and John Russell, a group of millennial and Gen Z influencers who, collectively, have well over 24 million social media followers.They will speak on the same podium as President Biden; the Democratic nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota; and party luminaries, including two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, among others.“This feels very affirming,” said Ms. Foxx, 24, a reproductive rights activist from Arizona who worked on Ms. Harris’s first presidential campaign. She’ll speak about abortion rights on Monday night in a program that will also feature Mr. Biden. “I don’t take it lightly that I’m speaking on the same night as the president of the United States,” she said.Amber Rose spoke on the first day of the Republican National Convention.Hiroko Masuike/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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    Urged to Focus on the Economy, Trump Leans Into Attacks of Harris

    Former President Donald J. Trump in a campaign speech on Saturday bounced among complaints about the economy and immigration, wide-ranging digressions and a number of personal attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, including jabs at her appearance and her laugh.At a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Trump swung from talking points on inflation and criticisms of Democratic policy as “fascist” and “Marxist” to calling illegal immigrants “savage monsters” and saying that rising sea levels would create more beachfront property.Mr. Trump blamed Ms. Harris for high prices, in what was effectively an inversion of her remarks at her rally in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, where she said Mr. Trump’s proposed import tariffs would amount to a “Trump tax” on groceries. The former president argued that she had placed a “Kamala Harris inflation tax” on average Americans over the course of her term as vice president and that, if elected, he would lower prices on consumer goods, just as she has said she would do.“Yesterday, she got up, she started ranting and raving,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris’s explanation of her economic agenda in North Carolina. He mocked her remarks that, he said, suggested he would tax “every single thing that was ever invented.”Mr. Trump’s advisers have urged him to emphasize his economic policy plans, which, according to polling, many voters trust more than Ms. Harris’s, and some Republicans have hoped he would leave behind his characteristic personal attacks, including his frequent insults of Ms. Harris’s intelligence and appearance.But at two events earlier this week — a speech in Asheville, N.C., and a news conference in Bedminster, N.J. — both billed as opportunities to discuss the economy, Mr. Trump veered into personal attacks against Ms. Harris, which he said he was “entitled” to do.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 y Trump presentan un claro contraste sobre la economía

    Ambos candidatos abogan por ampliar el poder del gobierno para dirigir los resultados económicos, pero en ámbitos muy diferentes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y el expresidente Donald Trump volaron a Carolina del Norte esta semana para pronunciar lo que se anunciaron como importantes discursos sobre la economía. Ninguno de los dos expuso un plan detallado de políticas: ni Harris, que se centró durante media hora en la vivienda, los comestibles y los medicamentos con receta, ni Trump, que durante 80 minutos desperdigó varias propuestas entre reflexiones en voz alta sobre inmigrantes peligrosos.Pero ambos candidatos, cada uno a su manera, enviaron a los votantes mensajes claros e importantes sobre sus visiones económicas. Cada uno de ellos defendió la visión de un gobierno federal poderoso, uno que utilice su poder para intervenir en los mercados en busca de una economía más fuerte y próspera.Solo discreparon, casi por completo, sobre cuándo y cómo debe utilizarse ese poder.El viernes en Raleigh, Harris empezó a imprimir su propio sello a la economía progresista que ha dominado la política demócrata en la última década. Este pensamiento económico abraza la idea de que el gobierno federal debe actuar con agresividad para fomentar la competencia y corregir las distorsiones en los mercados privados.El planteamiento busca grandes subidas de impuestos a las empresas y a quienes obtienen ingresos altos, para financiar la ayuda a los trabajadores de ingresos bajos y de clase media que luchan por crear riqueza para sí mismos y para sus hijos. Al mismo tiempo, ofrece grandes exenciones fiscales a las empresas que se dedican a lo que Harris y otros progresistas consideran un gran beneficio económico, como la fabricación de tecnologías necesarias para luchar contra el calentamiento global o la construcción de viviendas asequibles.Esta filosofía anima la agenda política que Harris presentó el viernes. Se comprometió a entregar hasta 25.000 dólares en ayudas al pago inicial a cada comprador de primera vivienda durante cuatro años, al tiempo que destinaría 40.000 millones de dólares a empresas constructoras de primeras viviendas. Harris afirmó que reinstauraría de forma permanente el crédito tributario por hijos ampliado que el presidente Biden estableció temporalmente con su ley de estímulo de 2021, al tiempo que ofrecería aún más ayuda a los padres de recién nacidos.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 Campaign’s Legal Team Takes Shape as Election Battles Heat Up

    The campaign is adding Marc Elias, one of the party’s top election lawyers, to help Democrats counter what they expect to be a contentious postelection period.Amid threats of certification battles and mass voter challenges, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has assembled an expansive senior legal team that will oversee hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers in a sprawling operation designed to be a bulwark against what Democrats expect to be an aggressive Republican effort to challenge voters, rules and, possibly, the results of the 2024 election.The legal apparatus within the Harris campaign will oversee multiple aspects of the election program, including voter protection, recounts and general election litigation, and it is adding Marc Elias, one of the party’s top election lawyers, to focus on potential recounts.The legal group is headed by Bob Bauer, who served as personal counsel to President Biden for years, and Dana Remus, the general counsel to the 2020 Biden campaign, and also includes Maury Riggan, the general counsel for the Harris campaign. Josh Hsu, formerly from the vice president’s office, will join the team, and Vanita Gupta, a former director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a top Biden Justice Department official, is an informal adviser.The campaign will also lean on the top lawyers at three prominent law firms — Seth Waxman, Donald Verrilli and John Devaney — to handle litigation, and deploy local counsel to eight battleground states and four other states of interest.Mr. Elias, who has had tensions with Mr. Bauer and other Democratic lawyers in the past, will also bring lawyers from his growing firm, Elias Law Group. He has also previously worked for Ms. Harris, serving as general counsel for her primary campaign in 2020.Ms. Remus said in a statement that the legal team had been working “uninterrupted over the last four years, building strategic plans in key states, adding more talent and capacity, and preparing for all possible scenarios.”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 Interviews Since Harris Joined the Presidential Race

    A whirl of appearances in media venues large and small have defined Donald Trump’s past four weeks, as he tries to wrest attention from his new opponent, Kamala Harris.Donald J. Trump’s media strategy can be summed up with a phrase often applied to one of his erstwhile nemeses, the logorrheic New York City mayor Ed Koch: unavoidable for comment.The former president has certainly seemed that way in the month since President Biden yielded the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, upending a campaign that Mr. Trump was once convinced he would easily win.Ms. Harris has dominated the national conversation even as she has mostly avoided reporters and declined to hold a news conference. Eager to reassert himself, Mr. Trump has embarked on a cavalcade of interviews in venues large and small, popping up on a video game celebrity’s streaming page, calling into a New York City drive-time radio show and holding court from his vacation homes in Florida and New Jersey. His appearances, however, often involve sympathetic interviewers who rarely challenge his words and intersperse questions with heaps of praise.The results have been mixed. Fans enjoyed his appearances, and Mr. Trump’s news conferences were carried live on cable news. But he also set off controversies that his supporters have scrambled to clean up, such as when he told Elon Musk that some striking workers ought to be fired.A sampling of Mr. Trump’s media-heavy month:‘Sid & Friends in the Morning,’ WABC-AMDate: July 30.Interviewer: Sid Rosenberg, a longtime New York City radio personality who came to fame as a blunt-spoken commentator on Don Imus’s show (from which he was eventually fired for making offensive remarks).Notable Trump quote: “If you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat, you’re a fool, an absolute fool.”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 Campaign Reserves $370 Million for Swing-State Fall Ad Blitz

    $200 million of that will be spent to reach voters on their phones and other devices, as Kamala Harris’s aides race to define her while drawing a contrast with Donald Trump.Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign announced on Saturday that it was reserving $370 million in advertising to begin after Labor Day and run through the November election, including $200 million on digital ads.The Harris campaign said it believed this was the largest digital ad reservation ever in American politics, reflecting the need to reach voters on their phones and other devices. Just $170 million is being reserved so far on television, as traditional television audiences continue to fragment and shrink.“This is a modern campaign in 2024 and we’re not just stuck in the times of old, where 80 percent of the budget has to be on television,” Quentin Fulks, Ms. Harris’s principal deputy campaign manager, said in an interview.The Harris campaign did not say how much it would spend in each state. But it said its purchases of television advertising would total twice what President Biden’s 2020 campaign spent in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, four times what he spent in Georgia and six times what he spent in Nevada, the least populous of the battleground states.The Harris campaign is advertising now in seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — as part of a $150 million summer ad blitz. Mr. Fulks said advertising would continue in all of those states as well as nationally.For now, Mr. Fulks said the campaign was focused on “aggressively defining” Ms. Harris in her early weeks as a presidential candidate.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 The Times Is Covering the Democratic National Convention

    Lisa Lerer, a New York Times politics reporter, will cover the D.N.C. with a host of colleagues, building a makeshift office at the event in Chicago.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Next week in Chicago, the Democratic National Convention will cap off a few tumultuous weeks for the Democratic Party: President Biden dropped out of the race. Vice President Kamala Harris secured the nomination and soon selected her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in one of the fastest vetting processes in modern history.Lisa Lerer, a political correspondent who has reported on five presidential elections and joined The Times in 2018, has covered all the fast-breaking chaos this summer. She is part of a Times team of reporters, editors, photographers, audio journalists and I.T. specialists who will cover the D.N.C. from a “mobile office” inside the convention.In an interview, Ms. Lerer discussed how she focused her coverage for a multiday event like the D.N.C., which begins Monday, how The Times has prepared for the occasion and what she is looking forward to learning. This interview has been edited and condensed.What is the atmosphere going into the convention?There’s a ton of excitement for this convention. In 2020, Democrats had a virtual convention, which was largely like a television production because of the pandemic. Now we’re returning to a more standard convention, but it’s unique because the ticket was just picked in the past month. There are a lot of Democrats who are very anxious about this race and were anxious about President Biden’s prospects for months. And now there’s pent-up energy being released.There’s this unbelievable sense of enthusiasm in the party. There’s a level of energy that I think many of us who have covered politics for a while haven’t seen since, on the Democratic side, Obama ran in 2008.What are you doing to prepare? Are there certain lines of coverage you’re already thinking about?Normally you start planning for a convention several weeks out. This year that was really hard to do because there were so many things happening: the debate, which really scrambled the race. Then there was the period when it wasn’t clear whether Biden was going to remain on the ticket. Then there was an assassination attempt on Trump, and there was the Republican Convention, and then vice presidents were picked. An outrageous amount of transformative political events happened in a tight period of time.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’s Goodbye to Politics Will Begin in Earnest With His Convention Speech

    President Biden’s goodbye to a half century in national politics will begin in earnest on Monday.When he takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that evening, Mr. Biden will establish his time in office and his political legacy as the foundation for the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee.According to Biden aides who previewed the themes of the president’s remarks, he will say that she is the best person to finish a campaign he started — one that remains rooted in protecting democratic ideals and preventing a second term for former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to detail the plans.It will be a bittersweet moment for Mr. Biden, who left the race and turned the keys of his campaign over to Ms. Harris less than a month ago. Since then, she has headlined packed rallies and delivered forceful campaign speeches, and the president has largely receded from center stage.But Mr. Biden, who is supportive of Ms. Harris and appreciates the momentum around her, the aides said, plans to ramp up his campaign schedule. He has also been focused on sealing up his legacy as a one-term president — but one who pulled the nation out of an economic spiral during the coronavirus pandemic, a point he will make in his speech.On Friday, Mr. Biden left Washington for Camp David for the weekend; he was scheduled to workshop his speech with Mike Donilon, a close adviser, and Vinay Reddy, his chief speechwriter.In his speech, the president will also frame Ms. Harris’s campaign as continuing policies and ideals he has long championed. Mr. Biden’s remarks will make the case that “democracy prevailed” with his election in 2020. A win for Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, in November will mean that “democracy is preserved.”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