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    Trump Hits Coachella, Campaigning Once Again in a Blue State

    Both presidential campaigns agree that seven swing states are likely to determine the outcome of this year’s election. California, which has not voted for a Republican in a presidential race since 1988, is not one of them.But that did not prevent former President Donald J. Trump from heading there anyway on Saturday evening to hold a rally in Coachella, which is better known for its annual music festival with headliners like Lana Del Rey and Bad Bunny than it is for being a stop on a presidential campaign trail.It was an unusual choice 24 days before the election. In 2020, Mr. Trump lost the state by more than five million votes to President Biden. Four years earlier, Mr. Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton, who got more than 60 percent of the vote. The last Republican to win the state was George H.W. Bush.Although Mr. Trump is not expected to be competitive in California, the rally showed that he could turn out a crowd. Throngs of people at Calhoun Ranch, where it was held, braved the desert sun and temperatures that hovered near 100 degrees, with several attendees requiring medical attention for heat-related illnesses.“I want to give a special hello to Coachella,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, before putting on a red Make America Great Again cap for protection from the desert sun.Mr. Trump then spoke for about 80 minutes in a rambling speech. He criticized California, Vice President Kamala Harris’s home state, as an incubator of failed liberal policies; disparaged the physical appearance of Representative Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial of him and is now running for Senate; used a crude nickname to refer to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom; and took a number of detours to praise the billionaire Elon Musk and to criticize President Biden.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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    On the Trail, Vance Is Dogged by Questions About Trump’s Loss in 2020

    Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who has faced renewed questions about the 2020 election since refusing at the vice-presidential debate this month to acknowledge that former President Donald J. Trump lost, falsely suggested on Saturday that the election had been “rigged.”“I think the election of 2020 had serious problems,” Mr. Vance said at a campaign event in Johnstown, Pa. “You want to call it rigged. Call it whatever you want to, it wasn’t OK.”Mr. Vance was asked five times in an interview with The New York Times this week whether Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, and he declined to answer each time. Taking questions from reporters at a rally at a factory for military vehicles in Johnstown, Mr. Vance again refused to acknowledge his running mate’s defeat and downplayed the severity of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol even as he condemned it.“Yes, there was a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but there was still a peaceful transfer of power in this country,” Mr. Vance said, describing the rioters as “a few knuckleheads who went off and did something they shouldn’t do.” The rioters, hundreds of whom were convicted of crimes in connection to the attack, had interrupted the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as they stormed the Capitol that day.Johnstown, which has a storied history in the Pennsylvania steel industry, is in an overwhelmingly Republican county east of Pittsburgh that Mr. Trump won by 38 points in 2020. Some members of the audience at the event, filling roughly half the seats in the venue, stood up in their chairs and booed reporters as they asked questions about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riot.Mr. Vance repeated his assertion that censorship by tech companies had hurt Mr. Trump in 2020. And he chided the press for asking him about that election, saying that he had not been asked one question about inflation or the economy.“I’m a hell of a lot more worried that American citizens can’t afford a good life in their country,” Vance said, “because Kamala Harris has been the vice president, and that is what I’m trying to change.” The audience of Trump supporters gave Mr. Vance a standing ovation, and broke out into chants of: “JD.”Later, after Mr. Vance departed Johnstown for a town-hall event in a packed airport hangar in Reading, Pa., Mr. Vance said that the attorney general would be the most important job in a second Trump administration. He vowed to “clean house” at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and to fire those people who were responsible for Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, which he characterized as “fake.”“Here’s what President Trump and I are going to do when we get in there: We’re going to fire the people responsible,” Mr. Vance said to raucous applause. More

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    A Mystery Repeats: Harris Up 4 in Pennsylvania, and Trump Up 6 in Arizona

    Being uncertain about our earlier poll results but finding almost the same numbers the next time around.A recent rally for Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh. Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAt the end of our last wave of post-debate battleground polls, there were two state poll results that didn’t seem to fit the rest.One was Pennsylvania: Kamala Harris led by four percentage points, making it her best result in the battlegrounds. It was our only state poll conducted immediately after the debate, when her supporters might have been especially excited to respond to a poll.The other was Arizona: Donald J. Trump led by five points, making it his best result among the battlegrounds. Even stranger, it was a huge swing from our previous poll of the state, which Vice President Harris had led by five points.In both cases, it seemed possible that another New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll would yield a significantly different result. With that in mind, we decided to take an additional measure of Arizona and Pennsylvania before our final polls at the end of the month.The result? Essentially the same as our prior polls.Ms. Harris leads by four points in Pennsylvania, just as she did immediately after the final debate.Mr. Trump leads by six points in Arizona, about the same as the five-point lead he held three weeks ago.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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    Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?

    Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.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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    What if Trump Wins Like This?

    If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much, or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not like Donald Trump personally, but you’ll like his policies a lot better than Kamala Harris’s. It’s a business decision.”But how Mr. Trump understands that decision could be different. If he wins like this, how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted.The way he’s talked about towns like Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitians who officials have said are there legally to work resembles deeply the rhythms of the 2016 campaign: grim conflation of real and fake problems, real people caught up in the gears of awful scrutiny and abuse, the building pressure on politicians and people often in very normal and modest circumstances, and Mr. Trump weaving everything into a fable to prove that he was right.In his campaign speeches, intermixed with the jokes and riffs, Mr. Trump often talks about political retribution, the threat of World War III, the ruin that the country’s become. In just one speech, he talked about how he would “liberate” Wisconsin from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” and about how immigrant gangs had “occupied” “hundreds” of towns and cities across the Midwest, leaving law enforcement “petrified.”Mr. Trump seems to have twisted the reason that programs like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole exist — for instance, Haiti has been deemed too unstable and dangerous to return to — into a reason for the programs not to exist. “So we have travel warnings,” he said. “‘Don’t go here, don’t go there, don’t go to the various countries’ and yet she’s taking in the worst of those people, the killers, the jailbirds, all of the worst of the people, she’s taking them in.”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 Aurora, Colo., Is Marked by Nativist Attacks

    Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took a campaign detour to Colorado, which has not voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 2004, to make the case in person at a rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.And during a meandering 80-minute speech Mr. Trump repeated claims, which have been debunked by local officials, that Aurora had been “invaded and conquered,” described the United States as an “occupied state,” called for the death penalty “for any migrant that kills an American citizen” and revived a promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.That law allows for the summary deportation of people from nations with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.” It was far from clear whether the law could be used in the way that Mr. Trump was proposing.The false tale that Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest city, was occupied by armed Venezuelans stemmed from a dispute over housing conditions.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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    The OB-GYN Running on Abortion Rights in Conservative Wisconsin

    Dr. Kristin Lyerly is looking to make inroads in a heavily Catholic part of the state.It was 7:15 a.m. on Sunday, and a blood-orange sun had turned the sky lavender. Dr. Kristin Lyerly was getting ready to leave.She had laundry going, and her bags half-packed. She felt as if she might be forgetting something. She was about to make the 400-mile drive from her home in De Pere, Wis., for a 10-day stint at a medical center in Hibbing, Minn., where she has been working as an obstetrician-gynecologist following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.Lyerly has another job, too: running for Congress.Abortion rights have become central to the fight for control of the White House and Congress, and Democrats have worked hard to bring the issue to life through the stories of women who have had abortions. Lyerly, though, is doing something a little rarer: campaigning as a Democrat who can talk about providing reproductive care in post-Roe America.She said she had bumped into children she delivered on the trail. She has been approached by women at campaign events seeking basic information about handling an unwanted pregnancy or a miscarriage. She hasn’t heeded the advice that she said she got from men suggesting she talk about the issue a little bit less.“Reproductive rights,” she told a group of teachers who gathered to knock on doors in Green Bay, Wis., last weekend, “are on everybody’s mind.”Lyerly’s district, Wisconsin’s Eighth, encompasses a rural swath of the northeastern part of the state, the city of Green Bay and the peninsula that looks like the state’s pinkie finger dipping into Lake Michigan. It is difficult territory for Democrats. Former Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican who chafed at Trump’s influence over his party, held it easily for seven years before suddenly retiring in April; a Trump-endorsed former gas station chain owner, Tony Wied, is favored to win the seat.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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    Obama Tells Black Men to Drop ‘Excuses’ and Support Harris

    Former President Barack Obama traveled to Pittsburgh on Thursday to urge voters there to choose Vice President Kamala Harris in November, aiming a message at one group in particular: Black men.The decision voters have between the vice president and former President Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent, “isn’t a close call,” Mr. Obama said as he visited with a group of campaign volunteers and officials at a field office just ahead of his appearance at a Harris rally. His message was for Black male voters whom he said might not be yet on board with Ms. Harris.Citing “reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities,” he called out what he said was flagging enthusiasm for Ms. Harris compared with the support he received when he was running for the presidency in 2008.“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve got a problem with that.“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Mr. Obama continued, adding that the “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.“When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting.”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