The spot begins with a photo of Vice President Kamala Harris looking chagrined next to a headline that, citing a CNN report, declares that “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” — and that a narrator reads in a scornful tone. Ms. Harris is seen forcefully explaining her position in a 2019 interview with the director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The ad flashes to a photo of Ms. Harris, edited to look as if she is standing beside a bald, mustachioed person in a bright red dress and lipstick. (It is a onetime Energy Department official, Sam Brinton, who is nonbinary and who left the administration after being charged with luggage theft.) Quotations from The New York Times, ABC News and PBS are shown to back up the narrator’s assertions, as is a questionnaire for the American Civil Liberties Union that Ms. Harris filled out as a candidate in 2019. In one frame, a photo of Ms. Harris wearing an admiring expression is shown alongside one of Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a federal position. Another photo, showing what look like orange-suited prisoners or detainees, is a publicity shot from the Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black.”

The ad ends with video of Ms. Harris alongside a drag performer, Pattie Gonia, before cutting to scenes of Mr. Trump, flanked by men and a woman in suits, greeting uniformed blue-collar workers and then showing off his signature to workers in hard hats.

The Script

Narrator

“Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.”

Ms. Harris

“Surgery, um…”

Interviewer

“…for prisoners.”

Ms. Harris

“… for prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access.”

Narrator

“It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”

Ms. Harris

“Every transgender inmate would have access.”

Narrator

“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Accuracy

The ad accurately quotes Ms. Harris explaining her actions as attorney general of California and her views as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries. It relies on both the videotaped interview and the A.C.L.U. questionnaire. But it omits some important context, namely Ms. Harris’s emphasis in the questionnaire on the need to ensure that people “who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need,” and her repeated statement that “transition treatment is a medical necessity.”

The Takeaway

Mr. Trump is working hard to portray Ms. Harris as a far-left radical who is out of touch with mainstream Americans, part of a broader effort to define her negatively for the many Americans who say they do not yet know enough about her and want to learn more.

This ad seeks to accomplish that by using gender fluidity, gender-transition surgery and the images of trans people as a cudgel against Ms. Harris over a culture war issue that affects relatively few people. It plays on anti-trans prejudices, inviting viewers to recoil from images of Ms. Harris alongside those of people who plainly do not conform to traditional gender norms, to try to portray Ms. Harris herself as out of the ordinary.

For good measure, the narrator twice refers to Ms. Harris only by her first name, which is unusual, and never by her surname.

All eyes on the economy

Kamala Harris on Wednesday is expected to deliver a detailed economic address in which she will seek to define herself as a defender of the middle class, entrepreneurs and consumers who will also take on bad actors in the business world.

The stakes of the speech are high. Harris is locked in a polling dead heat with Donald Trump, who spoke about his own vision of a “new American industrialism” on Tuesday. According to polls, many undecided voters say they want to hear more from the vice president about her plans.

Harris will seek to draw a contrast with Trump on the economy. She is expected to argue that she is not bound by ideology, an effort to shake off concerns that she’s too progressive, especially as business leaders worry about her stance on antitrust. Her speech is expected to point to her track record as California’s attorney general and as vice president in convening public-private partnerships to protect consumers and support small businesses.

In recent weeks, she has promised to help home buyers, raise taxes on big corporations and high-income Americans and offer tax breaks for small businesses. By contrast, she is expected to say on Wednesday, Trump is focused on improving the economy for the top 1 percent of society.

She’s still behind when it comes to voter perceptions of the economy. While she may have gotten a political boost from the Fed lowering borrowing costs last week, momentum that’s been captured in recent polls, over all Americans appear to still favor Trump on the matter. Consumers are still concerned about the job market and their finances.

Speaking in Georgia on Tuesday, Trump — who labeled Harris a “communist” — pitched an economic plan that was full of sticks and carrots. Among its components were issues both familiar, such as vowing to slap huge tariffs on importers that run afoul of the Republican Party’s free-trade wing, and new, such as giving foreign companies access to federal lands to move their production (and create jobs) on American soil.

That said, neither candidate has given extensive detail on their economic agendas. That could change, with Harris expected to release a roughly 80-page document soon.

In other political news: Senator Joe Manchin, the independent of West Virginia who isn’t seeking re-election, said he wouldn’t endorse Harris after she supported eliminating the Senate’s filibuster to aid abortion-rights legislation.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Caroline Ellison is sentenced to two years in prison over FTX fraud. Ellison, a former top adviser to Sam Bankman-Fried and his on-and-off girlfriend, was a star witness for the prosecution, but the judge said he couldn’t give her a more lenient sentence. Separately, Bankman-Fried is living in the same Brooklyn jail unit as Sean Combs, the music mogul charged with racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking.

OpenAI reportedly pitched the Biden administration on giant data centers. The parent company of ChatGPT submitted a document promoting the economic and national security benefits of building five-gigawatt centers across the U.S., according to Bloomberg. (Five gigawatts is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors.) It’s part of OpenAI’s push to upgrade A.I. infrastructure around the world, but building such huge data centers would be a challenge.

The F.B.I. is said to be investigating a Chinese-backed venture capital firm. The agency is examining whether Hone Capital, which has invested in 360 American start-ups, obtained trade secrets that could benefit its Beijing-based parent company or the Chinese authorities, according to The Financial Times.

A split in Silicon Valley’s approach to politics

Silicon Valley’s role in the election has been in focus, with attention on how Elon Musk and others on the right have thrown their weight behind Donald Trump.

But the campaign is also shining a light on how two other tech billionaires — Laurene Powell Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg — are taking very different approaches to politics, The Times’s Theodore Schleifer writes for DealBook.

Powell Jobs is one of Kamala Harris’s closest friends and a key player in her White House run. Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is a billionaire investor and philanthropist, and the pair have a two-decade-long relationship: Powell Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s first campaign to be San Francisco district attorney in 2003, and has given millions to an organization backing her White House run. They moved in the same elite Silicon Valley circles, and Powell Jobs has helped raise Harris’s profile.

Powell Jobs played a role in pushing President Biden not to run again. One of her top advisers circulated research to other donors after Biden’s disastrous debate that showed the president’s re-election chances were dire.

Powell Jobs and Harris were in close contact during that period as the vice president planned her moves. If Harris wins, some expect Powell Jobs to have a role, either in the administration or behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg wants nothing to do with the election. The Meta C.E.O. used to lean into liberal politics. But Zuckerberg now says he regrets much of that work, and he and the company are retreating after years of getting hammered by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The rethink extends to some of his Bill Gates-inspired philanthropy, with Zuckerberg seeing his openly political aims as ineffective.

Political engagement could only draw more scrutiny to his companies. Zuckerberg views both parties as anti-tech after years of blowback in Washington.

And while he isn’t close to Harris, he is trying to repair his relationship with Trump. He held two one-on-one calls with the former president this summer.

To be fair, Powell Jobs and Zuckerberg have different incentives and pressures. Powell Jobs is a private person who works for herself and can support whomever she wants — including her friends. Zuckerberg runs a trillion-dollar tech giant that faces political pressure from around the globe, and supporting personal projects could easily make that harder.

In related news: Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and Democratic donor, explains in a Times guest essay what’s behind Silicon Valley’s rightward shift toward Trump and his policies.

How regulators might rewrite Visa’s business model

The Justice Department’s lawsuit against Visa, the latest in an expansive effort to reshape antitrust enforcement in the U.S., lays out a broad case against the financial giant. It accuses the payments giant of maintaining a monopoly in large part by imposing, or threatening to impose, higher fees on merchants that also use other payment networks to process debit card transactions.

Now that the Justice Department has laid out its case, DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch has a few more questions about it.

What will the impact be on Visa’s business? Visa called the lawsuit “meritless” and said it would defend itself “vigorously.” For its part, the Justice Department has not yet decided what it will demand from Visa to resolve the lawsuit. One likely course of action, antitrust experts told DealBook, would be to block Visa from entering those kinds of contracts, which could reshape how it interacts with merchants and card issuers.

It’s not easy to quantify the effect of changing those relationships — that rests on how much Visa does, or does not, overcharge. But the Justice Department noted how lucrative these deals are for Visa, given the 83 percent profit margins in its U.S. debit card business.

What will the total damages to Visa be? If Visa processes government credit cards, the government could seek financial damages from that. There’s also the likely rush of plaintiffs’ cases, which have the ability to triple their damages under federal antitrust law.

Visa would probably look to settle those suits, but that legal slog could drag on for years: In June, a federal district court judge rejected a $30 billion antitrust settlement tied to litigation dating to 2005.

What could this mean for Capital One’s pending takeover of Discover Financial Services? That $35.3 billion deal has been under regulatory review since it was announced in February. Capital One and Discover have said that the deal could create a stronger competitor to Visa and Mastercard, and the Justice Department’s lawsuit could bolster that argument.

While a similar argument didn’t sway regulators in JetBlue’s attempted acquisition of Spirit, financial industry advocates quickly latched onto the line of reasoning. The Visa lawsuit “seems a strange use of limited resources when multiple regulators, including the D.O.J., are simultaneously scrutinizing the merger of Capital One and Discover,” Jessica Melugin of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, said of Tuesday’s move.

Inside the star-studded Clinton Global Initiative

Midtown Manhattan over the past two days has been chaos to navigate, thanks to conferences and meetings in New York that have drawn prominent names in politics and business.

Among them — including the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week NYC — the biggest may have been the Clinton Global Initiative, hosted by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.

Consider the huge trucks filled with sand that lined the Midtown Hilton, where the Clinton conference took place. That’s because President Biden made a surprise appearance Monday afternoon, when he received the Clinton Global Citizen Award for what Bill Clinton said was his “uncommon decency, goodness, and grace.”

The conference was a who’s who of business and philanthropy, including Emma Walmsley, the C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical giant GSK; the billionaire investor and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; and the venture capitalist Chris Sacca.

One of the event’s most memorable moments was delivered by José Andrés, the chef and founder of the nonprofit World Central Kitchen, who spoke about the war in Gaza and how seven of his aid workers were killed in Israeli airstrikes while bringing food to Palestinians. “I was supposed to be there,” he said. “I was tired, and that’s why I was not there.”

But Andrés added, “In the worst moments of humanity, the best of humanity shows up.” He described how when he was in Israel, some Israelis came up to him and said: “Jose, I have another passport, I would love to go to Gaza to show solidarity with the people of Palestine.” He also recalled a Palestinian woman telling him, “If I could go to Israel, I would go there to tell them that I don’t have anything against them.”

“These are the voices of humanity,” Andrés said.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

Wiz, which broke off talks to sell itself to Google this summer, is reportedly in discussions to sell some of its existing shares at a valuation of up to $20 billion. (Bloomberg)

Andrea Orcel, the C.E.O. of UniCredit, said on Wednesday that the Italian lender’s efforts to acquire a 21 percent in Commerzbank shouldn’t be viewed as a takeover bid, and that it wasn’t seeking board seats at the German bank. (ANSA)

Elections, politics and policy

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, independent of Arizona, wants to work in the private sector when her term ends: “That’s where the money comes from,” she said. (Business Insider)

“Hollywood is coming out in force for California’s A.I. safety bill” (The Verge)

Best of the rest

“Argentina Scrapped Its Rent Controls. Now the Market Is Thriving.” (WSJ)

Brett Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback, revealed in a congressional hearing that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. (The Athletic)

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

Election Day is the news industry’s biggest night, when voters rely on media outlets to declare state-by-state winners and keep score in the Electoral College.

But as presidential polls project a razor-thin finish that could take days to determine — and as baseless claims about voting fraud run rampant — news executives acknowledge that the onus is on them to help viewers understand the nuances of the vote-tallying process.

As a result, almost every major news organization is putting contingency plans in place to push back against a gale-force storm of misinformation and ensure that audiences trust their coverage. Their efforts will probably stretch far beyond Nov. 5, as absentee ballots are counted and close races potentially face legal reviews.

“We live in an environment where misinformation travels really fast, and we understand that the public is confused,” Julie Pace, the executive editor of The A.P., said in an interview. “There’s distrust in elections — there’s distrust in institutions in general.”

“We’ve assumed that because we’ve been doing it for so long, it was understood by the public, and that when we called a race, people believed it,” Ms. Pace added. “And we know we have got to do more than that.”

The A.P. has hired additional reporters to produce journalism that explains the wire service’s decisions, including for states closely contested by Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. NBC News is dispatching a new corps of correspondents, called “county captains,” to monitor vote-counting efforts in potentially pivotal counties.

“If there are disputes, they will be there to help us figure out what’s happening,” said Rebecca Blumenstein, the president of editorial at NBC News. “It’s ultimately going to help us earn the trust of our viewers and our readers by having people in key places.”

Much of the public doubt in the news media has been sown by Mr. Trump, whose insistence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged has remained a staple of his political talk. Polls show that many Trump supporters continue to believe his outlandish claims of voter fraud, virtually all of which were eventually dismissed by courts.

Over the past several months, Mr. Trump and his allies have steadily built up an infrastructure to fight back against an outcome that displeases him this November.

“We had prominent figures in American politics challenging the results of the election without evidence of widespread fraud,” Ms. Pace said. “So of course the public is going to be confused. We look at this as our responsibility.”

CBS News, which is also bracing for an influx of misinformation on Election Day, set up a new fact-checking and misinformation unit last year, staffed by about 20 journalists, called CBS News Confirmed. On Election Day, the unit will scrutinize any claims that might arise around issues like malfunctioning voting machines or hiccups at polling centers.

“Anything that creates doubt or sows concern and anxiety undermines our electoral system,” said Claudia Milne, the senior vice president for standards and practices at CBS News. “What we are trying to do is to make sure that voters know what’s really happening and get real information that allows them to vote and have faith in the electoral process.”

For this presidential election, The New York Times plans to deploy additional journalists across the country to follow vote counts in key counties and precincts. The reporters will track how many votes are outstanding, including the number of absentee ballots and early mail-in votes that remain to be counted. A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, said the effort was aimed at providing “greater understanding of the vote count and the ability to quickly identify any problems or disputes if, when and wherever they may arise.”

The vote-counting process involves the byzantine behind-the-scenes machinery of local and state election officials. To project winners, news organizations apply their own analysis to the available data. Fox News uses The A.P.’s proprietary election research, called VoteCast. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC work with another group, Edison Research. Each network employs its own “decision desk.”

In 2020, the process of recording mail-in and absentee ballots led to the abrupt additions of large batches of votes to the networks’ onscreen counts. Because Democrats disproportionately relied on mail-in ballots, these additional votes sometimes flipped a state from red to blue, leading allies of Mr. Trump to falsely accuse news organizations of inventing votes.

Arnon Mishkin, who oversees the Fox News decision desk, said his team had developed new models that could better estimate eventual totals from mail-in ballots. The idea is for viewers to receive more precise guidance on how to interpret early returns that may not include mail-in or absentee votes.

Fox News was at the center of the most consequential network race call in 2020: its early projection that Mr. Trump would be defeated in Arizona. No other news organization chose to predict the outcome in Arizona so early. The decision infuriated Mr. Trump, whose aides demanded that Fox News retract the call; the network refused and was ultimately proved correct.

Weeks later, Fox News pushed out a pair of top political journalists who had been involved in election night coverage. But the network stood behind Mr. Mishkin, who said that he and his team would be siloed off in a room inside network headquarters, and that he had no concerns about outside interference.

“One hundred percent of the job is to look at the numbers,” he said. “Just look at the numbers and report out what the numbers are saying.”

Asked if he had regrets about Fox News’s Arizona call, Mr. Mishkin demurred. “I joke that our stomachs were queasy,” he said. “But our brains always said this is going to be fine.”

One journalist pushed out by Fox News was Chris Stirewalt, who is now the political editor of NewsNation, a relatively new cable channel. In an interview, Mr. Stirewalt said he was taking a new approach in 2024. Rather than rely on in-house number crunchers, NewsNation will turn over its race calls to Decision Desk HQ, a start-up that provides election results. The company called the 2020 election for President Biden a day before the major networks.

“What you have to do,” Mr. Stirewalt said, “is be honest with your audience about what’s going on.”

A correction was made on

Sept. 25, 2024

:

An earlier version of this article misstated when Pennsylvania officials would count mail-in ballots. Pennsylvania law allows for the counting of mail-in ballots to begin after 7 a.m. on Election Day, not after polls close.

How we handle corrections

The shift remains nascent, largely limited to building trades and other blue-collar groups in the union-heavy Northeast. Yet, with the elections looming, it has already injected an unpredictable new element into a half-dozen races that could determine control of the House of Representatives.

In New York’s Hudson Valley, Representative Mike Lawler has collected tens of thousands of dollars more in union donations than his Democratic opponent. Further upstate, a 1,500-member electrical workers’ union that once opposed Representative Marc Molinaro is now working to re-elect him. And in New Jersey, the state’s Building and Construction Trades Council not only flipped sides to support Representative Tom Kean Jr. but helped keep the Democrat-aligned A.F.L.-C.I.O. on the sidelines.

“Institutionally, the Republicans are still anti-worker,” said John Samuelsen, the head of the 150,000-member Transport Workers Union of America, a group that has turned heads by wading into several hard-fought contests to back Republicans. But he said he was also frustrated with the Democrats who appeared to be taking union support for granted.

“It makes it more important that those individual Republicans who stand up and support workers and their trade unions not be abandoned,” Mr. Samuelsen said.

The high-profile endorsements, which often bring five-figure checks and armies of door knockers, reflect an emerging trend in American politics, where the ties that once bound Democrats and organized labor together appear to be loosening, if not exactly broken.

Last week, the 1.3-million-member Teamsters voted to stay neutral in the race for president, a blow to Democrats after years of support. Prominent Republicans, including former President Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have begun to speak in more explicitly pro-worker terms, though many labor leaders say their policies do not match their rhetoric. And leaders of some of the nation’s oldest unions increasingly find themselves grappling with how to respond to members shifting rightward.

“That might be giving cover to more down-ballot Republicans,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies unions at Washington University in St. Louis. “Ten or 15 years ago, if you staked out a real pro-union position as a G.O.P. lawmaker, you were going to be hearing from the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers.”

Democrats say they see little reason for concern, arguing that endorsements represent tactical transactions between union leaders and Republican candidates who know they need labor support to win on contested turf, rather than a more lasting realignment in the labor movement.

Many of the unions supporting Republicans like Mr. Lawler or Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania are also overwhelmingly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Some are also fighting against Republican majorities in Congress that would almost certainly block their priorities or advance outright hostile measures, like national right-to-work legislation that would cripple unions’ organizing force.

In nearly every competitive race, Democratic candidates still have support from major public-sector unions and large service worker groups, including the American Federation of Teachers and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., that are planning to spend millions of dollars helping them. And some Democrats defending swing seats, like Representatives Tom Suozzi and Pat Ryan of New York, have picked up support from law enforcement unions that typically back Republicans.

Gabby Seay, a longtime labor leader involved in a pro-Democrat turnout organization called Battleground New York, likened the Republican courtship of unions to costumed mimicry. “They are cosplaying this right now because they are feeling a little bit of heat,” she said. “But we know who they really are, and we will remind voters of that on the doors.”

And yet, even the idea of Republicans and Democrats fighting in a general election over who is more friendly to working people represents a change.

In a sprawling upstate New York district, Mr. Molinaro’s opponent, Josh Riley, is running as a staunchly pro-union Democrat and accusing Mr. Molinaro of supporting policies that have undermined American jobs. Like most of his party, Mr. Riley supports raising the minimum wage and the PRO Act, legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize and costlier for employers to retaliate.

Mr. Molinaro’s positions have more caveats, but he also uses terms like “corporate stooges” that most of his fellow Republicans scoff at. This month, he visited a picket line of striking Teamsters and said in an interview that he would vote for the PRO Act, though he has reservations. Mr. Riley remained skeptical.

“He’s telling labor that he supports the PRO Act, but it’s been sitting on his desk for two years and he refuses to put his name on it,” he said.

Mondaire Jones, a former Democratic congressman running against Mr. Lawler in the lower Hudson Valley, has made similar arguments. He pointed to Mr. Lawler’s vote to rescind a key Biden administration labor rule, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions that the Republican took from corporate political action committees. (Mr. Jones does not accept corporate PAC money.)

“The endorsement of Mike Lawler by some of these building and trades unions cannot possibly be based on policy,” Mr. Jones said, accusing some unions of “turning their backs on pro-labor candidates.”

He attributed the endorsements in part to national unions’ having “a better understanding of which candidates are pro-labor and which candidates are antilabor than some of the local leadership.”

In the two years since he took office, Mr. Lawler has won over unions representing boilermakers, electrical workers, plumbers and steamfitters who supported his Democratic opponent in 2022. On Wednesday, two more groups, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association and the transport workers, were expected to endorse him.

“When someone does the right thing, it’s not like is there an R or D behind your name,” said Kevin Elkins, the political director for the New York City area carpenters’ union.

Mr. Lawler said he believed he could stand with both businesses and workers. “It doesn’t have to be an adversarial relationship,” he said. Like Mr. Molinaro, he said he would vote for the PRO Act, though he argued that it needed changes.

He and Mr. Molinaro also took deliberate actions to help the transport workers that have paid dividends. Both bucked their party to sign a letter urging JetBlue not to interfere with an organizing drive among its jet mechanics and airline dispatchers. And they teamed up with Democrats to introduce legislation to establish new cabin air safety standards for airplanes and to stop carriers from outsourcing jet maintenance offshore.

“Lawler stepped up and took flak from Republicans in his own caucus for the T.W.U.,” said Mr. Samuelsen. “I’m not forgetting that type of help.”

Mr. Jones, on the other hand, had made little effort to court the union, Mr. Samuelsen said.

“Mondaire Jones wouldn’t recognize me if he bumped into me at a fund-raiser,” he said. “He literally bumped into me at a Nancy Pelosi event at the Democratic convention, and he didn’t know who I was.”

Mr. Jones said that explanation only “proves my point that their endorsement of Mike Lawler is not based on his pro-labor record, but rather something other than what their endorsement is supposed to be about.”

The rules are expected to be broadly similar to those for the presidential debate two weeks ago between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump.

The last time presidential running mates stood for a debate was when Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a Delaware senator, and Sarah Palin, then the Alaska governor, met in St. Louis in 2008. Nearly 70 million people tuned in to that debate, the most-watched vice-presidential clash in history. Four years ago, 58 million people watched Ms. Harris debate Vice President Mike Pence.

The question of whether the candidates should stand or sit has been determined in recent presidential cycles by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which sought an aesthetic difference for the vice-presidential contests by having the candidates be seated. But this year, Mr. Biden’s campaign, which had long been frustrated with the commission, circumvented it by separately arranging debates with the Trump campaign and television networks.

For most political candidates, it is not generally considered a matter of great consequence whether they sit or stand for a debate, barring physical limitations or a significant height disparity. Mr. Walz stands just under six feet tall, and Mr. Vance is about six feet tall.

Mr. Walz has been studying for the debate in Minneapolis and in between campaign stops. Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who is playing Mr. Vance in mock sessions, has been traveling back and forth to Minneapolis to take part in the debate preparations along with participating via videoconference.

The Minnesota governor and his debate team will decamp later this week to Harbor Springs, Mich., a tiny bayside community on Lake Michigan four hours north of Detroit by car, the people briefed on the debate plans said. There, his aides will arrange a multiday debate camp over the weekend where Mr. Walz and Mr. Buttigieg will conduct a series of dress rehearsals complete with lecterns, mock moderators and television-style lighting.

The Walz team is seeking to replicate much of the debate preparations for Ms. Harris, who took her team to Pittsburgh for a long weekend before she faced Mr. Trump this month. Walz aides and advisers involved in the debate planning said he was likely to occasionally leave his hotel in Michigan to mingle with locals and tourists.

A Walz spokeswoman declined to comment on the governor’s plans for his debate preparations.

Mr. Vance is having Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota play Mr. Walz in his debate preparations, which have taken place at the Ohio senator’s Cincinnati home and in videoconferences online. Mr. Vance has also held frequent question-and-answer sessions with journalists who travel with him, and has sat for far more interviews than Mr. Walz has since the two men joined their presidential tickets.

Mr. Walz’s debate prep is being run by two campaign advisers, Rob Friedlander and Zayn Siddique. Karen Dunn, who ran Ms. Harris’s debate preparations, has spoken with Mr. Friedlander and worked on the presidential debate with Mr. Siddique.

Others who are involved in the debate preparations and are expected to travel to Harbor Springs include Chris Schmitter, a longtime Walz aide who has worked with the governor for nearly two decades; Liz Allen, Mr. Walz’s campaign chief of staff; Michael Tyler, the Harris campaign’s communications director; and Sam Cornale, Mr. Walz’s traveling chief of staff.

This weekend, Harbor Springs is hosting its annual Festival of the Book, which last year drew 1,300 registered participants to the town of about 1,300 residents. The town is 10 miles by car around Little Traverse Bay from Petoskey, where Ernest Hemingway spent summers as a child.

Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.

Ms. Harris’s economic speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday and the policy blueprint, described by four people familiar with the matter, are part of an effort by Ms. Harris’s campaign to weave together various economic proposals into a broader, thematic message.

Over the course of her truncated campaign, Ms. Harris has released plans to offer assistance to home buyers, expand the child tax credit and raise taxes on large corporations and high-income Americans. Like her Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Harris has not offered detailed plans on many other issues.

The expected document will be a roughly 80-page overview of her economic policy priorities, though it is unclear how many specifics it will include.

A goal for Ms. Harris’s campaign is to present a tangible economic plan that it can contrast with Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint that Mr. Trump has tried to distance himself from, according to one of the people familiar with the campaign’s thinking.

During the speech in Pittsburgh, Ms. Harris will also emphasize ways to revitalize the manufacturing industry in the United States, according to a senior campaign official, leaning into a key rhetorical focus for Mr. Trump and President Biden. Overall, she is expected to present herself as a mainstream capitalist who believes the government should play a limited role in the economy.

Many voters still say they want to know more about Ms. Harris, and the economy remains the top issue in the election. In recent polls of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 12 percent of voters who are still open to changing their mind on a candidate said they had concerns about Ms. Harris’s handling of the economy. Mr. Trump led in all three states.

Mr. Trump has long enjoyed a polling advantage on the economy in this race, first over Mr. Biden and then over Ms. Harris after she replaced the president as the Democratic nominee. Many voters remain pessimistic about the economy’s direction under the Biden-Harris administration and nostalgic for its performance under Mr. Trump — and they often blame the current administration for a surging inflation rate that has fallen back to typical levels only in the past year.

Ms. Harris’s attempt to more clearly articulate her economic approach comes as Mr. Trump continues to try and define his rival’s agenda as “radical.” During an economic speech in Georgia on Tuesday, Mr. Trump labeled Ms. Harris as “communist” and called her the “tax queen.” He said her plan to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent would drive companies out of the United States.

“They love her in other countries because she forces everybody out of our country into their hands,” said Mr. Trump. He has floated a plan to lower the corporate rate for domestic manufacturers to 15 percent if elected.

Ms. Harris’s campaign has criticized Mr. Trump for his promises to raise tariffs on imports to the United States. The vice president has called his plan a “national sales tax” that would raise prices for many American families, including those on the lower end of the income spectrum.

Ms. Harris has begun to narrow Mr. Trump’s economic advantage in some recent polls, and there are some signs that Americans are beginning to feel slightly more optimistic about the economy.

A delicate balancing act for Ms. Harris is how to depart from Mr. Biden’s agenda, which she has done only sparingly since becoming the party’s nominee. Ms. Harris is seeking to raise taxes on investment gains for high-income Americans less dramatically than Mr. Biden proposed — the result of an attempt to show that Ms. Harris is more moderate than the president.

Ms. Harris has also come under pressure for a separate plan to tax the unrealized capital gains of Americans making more than $100 million. That plan, proposed in Mr. Biden’s budget, would require those wealthy Americans to pay a 25 percent tax on a combination of their regular income, like wages, and the appreciation in assets, like stocks and real estate, before they are sold.

On the campaign trail, Ms. Harris has said she supports a “billionaire minimum tax,” the name of the plan in Mr. Biden’s budget. But behind the scenes, her advisers have explored alternative ways of raising taxes on ultrawealthy Americans without targeting unrealized gains. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked the idea of taxing unrealized gains.

Outside groups that support Ms. Harris have urged her to be more direct and populist with voters about her economic philosophy — though they do not always agree on what that should look like.

The Democratic research firm Blueprint has pushed the vice president to blend a message of reducing the federal budget deficit and cracking down on “bad actor” corporations that it says unfairly rip off Americans.

“On the economy, Harris has the opportunity to thread the needle by presenting a message that focuses on lowering prices, addressing fiscal concerns and promoting targeted government action against corporations that exploit consumers,” the firm wrote in a swing-state polling memo this week.

Other liberal groups have pushed Ms. Harris to go further and pitch herself more firmly as siding with consumers over big companies.

“Harris should lay out her diagnosis for why Americans don’t have the economic opportunity she wants them to have,” Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Action in Washington, said. “This is key to connecting with voters on the economy because it helps them to understand what types of policy remedies she will prescribe if elected.”

Voters, Ms. Owens added, “want to know if the problem is that corporations have too much power and workers have too little — or if she is more worried about something else.”