Harris and Trump deadlocked in polls, new report suggests
A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked.
According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump.
One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.”
In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.
This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time.
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Updated at 17.29 EDT
Key events
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And with that, this blog is closing, thanks for following along.
You can find all the latest US elections news here.
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ABC has released the first photograph of what the debate stage will look like tomorrow:
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In case you missed it, here are six moments from Harris’s past performances that give insight to how she might approach tomorrow’s debate:
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The Biden Administration said on Monday it had finalized a regulation to help ensure that the 175 million Americans with private health insurance have access to affordable mental health services.
The 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act already requires insurers and corporate-backed health plans to provide access and payment structures for mental health care services on par with other medical services.
In practice, that is often not the case, with less than half of US adults with mental illness able to access care in 2020, while nearly 70% of children cannot receive treatment, according to studies cited by the administration.
That is partly due to a lack of mental health providers being sufficiently covered by insurance plans, leading patients to pay high out-of-pocket costs or to give up on care.
“The rule targets this network adequacy problem and recognizes that low pay for mental health providers is a major cause of network inadequacy,” said Dr. Jared Skillings, chief of professional practice at the American Psychological Association.
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Calling it “unserious and unacceptable,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected on Monday a proposal from Speaker Mike Johnson that links continued government funding for six months with a measure to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
The response frames the spending battle to come over the next weeks, the Associated Press reports, as lawmakers work to reach consensus on a short-term spending bill that would prevent a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins 1 October. Lawmakers hope to avoid a shutdown just weeks before voters go to the polls.
“There is no other viable path forward that protects the health, safety and economic well-being of hardworking American taxpayers,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to House Democrats released Monday.
Lawmakers are returning to Washington this week following a traditional August recess spent mostly working in their home states and districts. They are not close to completing work on the dozen annual appropriations bills that will fund the agencies during the next fiscal year, so they’ll need to approve a stopgap measure.
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Kamala Harris has arrived in Philadelphia, according to the press pool, where tomorrow’s debate between her and Donald Trump – the only debate between the presidential candidates currently scheduled – will take place.
It will air on ABC at 9pm local time.
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Richard Luscombe
A white supremacist group that branded itself the Terrorgram Collective drew up a list of high-profile assassination targets including at least one senator and a district court judge, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Monday.
Prosecutors allege that the two leading agitators of the group incited followers on social media to commit hate crimes against Black and Jewish people, immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove, California; and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho; face 15 counts each of soliciting hate crimes and providing material support to terrorism. US justice department lawyers filed the 37-page indictment in district court in the eastern district of California on Thursday.
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Summary
Here’s an updated summary of the day’s key politics news, as we head into what is likely to be a very intense last eight weeks of the 2024 presidential election.
On the eve of a presidential debate, a new poll published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked, 49% to 49%, among the registered voters surveyed. The poll found Harris was seen as stronger on abortion rights, while Trump was seen as stronger on the economy.
In the same poll, Harris had the advantage on mental fitness, with 61% of voters saying the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way.
Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post over the weekend that he would jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” during this year’s election. He indicated that lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials could all be targeted with prosecution.
Ten retired top military officials announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris in a letter warning that Donald Trump is “a danger to our national security and democracy”. The letter by National Security Leaders for America also sought to defend Harris against Republican attacks over the Biden administration’s chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. Harris’s campaign will air a new TV ad featuring former officials in Donald’s Trump administration warning about the threat he poses to the country, in what looks like an attempt to goad the former president ahead of tomorrow’s debate.
Meanwhile, Republican officials are raising the alarm that Trump campaign has invested far fewer resources for its voter turnout operation in battleground states than previous presidential election races.
Amid efforts by Republican-led states to purge voters from voting rolls before the election, Justice Department warned states in a public fact-sheet that such purges may be illegal.
Leaning into the importance of abortion rights as an issue, Harris campaign also released three new TV ads targeting Donald Trump on abortion ahead of Tuesday’s debate that includes comments from the Republican nominee claiming credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade. Leaders of two major left-leaning women’s organizations said the issue of reproductive rights would offer the “starkest possible contrast” between Harris and Trump at Tuesday night’s debate.
Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, postponed a rally he was scheduled to speak on Monday evening in Reno, Nevada due to wildfires in the region, his campaign said.
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DOJ warns states about voting laws, amid efforts to purge voters from rolls
Sam Levine
Amid efforts to purge voters in Republican-led states, the Department of Justice released a fact-sheet on Monday reminding states of the restrictions on removing voters ahead of the voter rolls on the eve of a federal election.
The document essentially serves as a warning to states that systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election is illegal under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Any effort to remove voters, according to the law, must also be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory.”
The document is notable because it comes as Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and Ohio have all touted efforts to remove people from the voter rolls in recent months. Many of those efforts have been misleading and have targeted people suspected of being non-citizens and have raised scrutiny from civil rights groups who are concerned the efforts may be unlawfully targeting naturalized citizens.
“Examples of list maintenance activities that may violate the NVRA include comparing voter files to outdated or inaccurate records or databases, taking action that erroneously affects a particular class of voters (such as newly naturalized citizens), or matching records based solely on first name, last name, and date of birth,” the fact sheet says.
There have also been reports of activists in Georgia and Florida using unreliable software to challenge the voting eligibility of people it believes may have moved. The DOJ guidance issued on Monday reminds states that those efforts are also illegal within 90 days of a federal election.
The 90-day blackout period, the document says, “also applies to list maintenance programs based on third-party challenges derived from any large, computerized datamatching process.”
Kristen Clarke, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, released a video urging voters to contact DoJ if they believe they have been wrongfully removed from the rolls.
“As we approach Election Day, it is important that states adhere to all aspects of federal law that safeguard the rights of eligible voters to remain on the active voter lists and to vote free from discrimination and intimidation,” she said in a statement.
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‘I had never actually heard her more upset:’ Kamala Harris as Roe v Wade fell
Speaking at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, a key swing state, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, talked about the intense impact of the conservative Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade on all the women in his life, including Harris.
He said he heard the news directly from Harris herself. “I had never actually heard her more upset. And she called to say, ‘Dougie, they actually did it, they actually did it.’”
Emhoff said Harris had personally grilled Trump’s rightwing supreme court nominees, who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent when it came to abortion.
Emhoff’s remarks come as Democrats focus on abortion rights, which is seen as Harris’ strongest issue.
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Updated at 17.28 EDT
Harris’ gun violence platform: crime is down, ban assault weapons, fund the police
Advocacy groups are continuing to weigh in on the outline of Kamala Harris’s policy priorities, posted on her website today.
It’s no surprise that Giffords, a leading gun violence prevention group headed by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, praised Harris’s policy outline on gun violence prevention, which comes in the wake of two new high-profile mass shootings in Georgia and in Kentucky.
Harris, a former prosecutor who secured the first-ever political endorsement from March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention group formed in response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has a long track record on responding to daily community gun violence, and she served as the head of the Biden administration’s newly created Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an office advocates had pushed for.
The gun control measures Harris endorses are standard for Democratic politicians: she supports legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and supporting red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
Harris’ policy overview touts her record as a prosecutor “getting illegal guns and violent criminals off California streets,” but it also highlights the Biden administration’s big investment in community-based gun violence prevention efforts, which advocates called a significant improvement from the Obama administration. Harris’ platform notes that, after a big increase in gun violence in 2020, during the early pandemic, there appears to have been a historic drop in murders in 2023. (How much decisions at the White House level had to do with either the rise or the fall in murders is deeply unclear, but the decrease in violence that Harris is pointing to is real.)
She also makes very clear that she does not support defunding the police, but instead “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them.”
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Updated at 17.34 EDT
Oprah will host a livestream rally for Kamala Harris on 19 September
This is Lois Beckett, picking up our US politics coverage from Los Angeles.
Oprah Winfrey will host a digital rally for Kamala Harris next week, multiple news outlets reported.
The event will bring together different affinity groups that have mobilized for the Harris campaign, Variety reported.
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Updated at 17.34 EDT