On the Screen

The ad toggles between two former Trump administration officials who are shown speaking directly to the camera: Kevin Carroll, who was a senior counselor to the Homeland Security secretary, and Olivia Troye, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser. Ms. Troye is also shown looking on behind Donald Trump in the White House when he was president.

The ad briefly shows the infamous 2019 hurricane map held up by Mr. Trump that was altered with a black marker to show a path into Alabama, as Mr. Trump had falsely suggested was forecast.

Images of disasters flash by: homes damaged by a hurricane or destroyed by raging wildfires, a sky turned orange by smoke. Mr. Trump is seen, in a photo, staring directly at the camera, and in a video clip, tossing paper towels to storm victims in Puerto Rico as if he were shooting basketball free throws.

As the music becomes more upbeat, Ms. Harris is shown meeting with storm victims. Mr. Trump is seen alone on an airport tarmac and then shaking hands with guests applauding him in the White House. The book version of Project 2025 — a policy guide written by Trump allies — briefly fills the screen, then gives way to images of Mr. Trump as president, speaking angrily and glowering from the lectern of the White House briefing room.

It concludes with video of Ms. Harris handing out meals at a Red Cross station and consoling more disaster survivors, a glimpse of an American flag, and a last word from Ms. Troye.

The Script

Carroll

“I worked in the Trump administration.”

Troye

“Never in a million years did I ever think that I’d be working in the White House with a president that didn’t care about the American people.”

Carroll

“He would suggest not giving disaster relief to states that hadn’t voted for him.”

Troye

“I remember one time, after a wildfire in California, he wouldn’t send relief because it was a Democratic state. So we went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas, to show him: These are people that voted for you. This isn’t normal. The job of the president is to protect Americans regardless of politics.”

Carroll

“If Trump’s elected again, there will be no one to stop his worst instincts. He’ll have yes-men to help him to implement Project 2025’s agenda. Unchecked power, no guardrails.”

Troye

“They will be serving one man. I am voting for Kamala Harris because she will put the safety and security of every American first, whether they voted for her or not.”

Accuracy

The only assertions made are the recollections of the two former Trump administration officials.

The Takeaway

The timing and placement of the ad are as important as what it says. Parts of Georgia and North Carolina are only now beginning to recover from Hurricane Helene, and much of the country just watched on television as Hurricane Milton blew across Florida.

The Harris campaign aims to warn voters that if Mr. Trump were president and another natural disaster struck, his response would be governed by politics.

It is a tricky path for the vice president: She wants to be seen as overseeing a competent Biden administration response to the hurricanes, even as she seeks to weaponize the storms against Mr. Trump. Her message appears to be that however bad things now may be, they would be worse under Mr. Trump.

“We all need to go out there and look people in the eye and tell them why we’re for Kamala and Tim,” Mr. Clinton added. “We need to do that, and I think it’s much more effective, and I think it has been for a long time.”

Lapsing into his practically customary blend of pundit and storyteller, Mr. Clinton went on: “The biggest voter impact that I saw way back when Hillary ran in 2008 was the endless number of front-porch rallies, front-yard rallies. Go see Americans where they live, and because of social media, it reaches other people that you’re doing it.”

Some Democrats have puzzled over how best to deploy the former president, one of the most gifted politicians of his generation but a figure shadowed by a personal and policy record that has come under renewed scrutiny since he left office in 2001. Republicans have tried to frame some of his remarks on immigration as critical of Ms. Harris, and suggested that her deployment of Mr. Clinton, who turned 78 in August, was a stale strategy.

The state Democratic Party chairwoman, Representative Nikema Williams, hardly seemed bothered by the former president’s longevity: When she spoke on Monday, she went as far as to cite Mr. Clinton’s 1992 victory in Georgia. (Senator Bob Dole carried the state against Mr. Clinton in 1996 by about 27,000 votes.)

And Mr. Clinton received warm receptions from rank-and-file Democrats in places like Albany and Fort Valley, where party strategists wanted him to rally supporters in oft-overlooked areas before the start of early voting on Tuesday.

Deborah Terrell, 68, who was among the people who gathered to see Mr. Clinton on Monday in Columbus, predicted that he would “tap into those people that can remember how good it was for them” during his presidency. She said his longstanding ties to the state, which he toured with fixtures of Democratic politics in south and central Georgia, gave him lasting credibility among party stalwarts.

“It’s like a friend that’s saying ‘Go out and vote,’” Ms. Terrell said, noting how Mr. Clinton’s travels through less populated places signaled that voters would not be neglected if they lived in parts of Georgia beyond vote-rich metro Atlanta.

Mr. Clinton, who is scheduled to headline a bus tour of rural North Carolina this week, picked up that argument later as he explained the merits of visiting places like Columbus.

“It’s a statement,” Mr. Clinton said, “of who matters.”

This is Ms. Harris’s first formal interview with Fox News, whose day-to-day programming is heavy on conservative punditry that often explicitly supports her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.

It could also represent an opportunity for the Democratic nominee three weeks ahead of Election Day.

Ms. Harris will have a chance to deliver her message to a viewership that may be skeptical of her candidacy. Her willingness to appear on Fox News may aid the perception that she is open to facing tough questions. And she can reach a swath of independent voters, more of whom watch Fox News than CNN or MSNBC, according to research by Nielsen.

Senior Democratic officials have long shown hostility toward Fox News, going so far as to formally bar the network from hosting a primary debate in 2020. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to sit for a Fox News interview. President Biden has not appeared on the network since taking office, though he has jousted at news conferences with its senior White House correspondent, Peter Doocy.

But a thaw has occurred.

Ms. Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was interviewed on “Fox News Sunday” the past two weekends. (Mr. Walz’s aides reached out to Fox to schedule his second appearance.) In recent months, the network has also welcomed a string of Harris supporters, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is now such a regular that he cheekily told Democratic convention-goers, “You might recognize me from Fox News.”

Mr. Baier’s interview with Ms. Harris is scheduled to air on the same day that Fox is set to broadcast an unusual town hall in which Mr. Trump plans to field questions on subjects like abortion, child care and day care from an all-female audience.

Ms. Harris has appeared across a range of traditional and niche media outlets in recent weeks.

On Monday, she used interviews with Roland Martin and The Shade Room, an online entertainment publication, to further her pitch to Black voters, arguing that Mr. Trump had engaged in a decades-long pattern of racist behavior.

On Tuesday, she is set to record a live interview in Detroit with Charlamagne Tha God, host of the syndicated morning radio show “The Breakfast Club,” which is particularly popular with Black millennials.

Last week, she sat for interviews with “The View,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Howard Stern Show.” Ms. Harris sat for a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on CBS last week. Mr. Trump refused to appear on the program and accused CBS of bias; the network said he had committed to an interview and then reneged.

Mr. Trump is a frequent presence on partisan Fox News shows like “Hannity”; he has also kept up a heavy schedule of interviews on podcasts and other alternate media, including a video game celebrity’s streaming page. On Tuesday, he will be interviewed by the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, John Micklethwait, at the Economic Club of Chicago.

The study, which interviewed roughly 1,000 women nationwide in June — before President Biden stepped aside in the race in July and Ms. Harris ascended to the Democratic Party’s nomination — and then again in September, found that women are now more enthusiastic about voting and more satisfied with their choices — even if they’re not switching.

The survey from KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, also found a rise in the share of women who said abortion was their most important issue, and that women have grown to trust Ms. Harris’s reproductive rights policies.

But for Black and Hispanic women the economy remains issue No. 1, by a wide margin. Both groups were roughly 30 percentage points more likely to mention inflation and rising costs as their top issue.

But Ms. Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket has also made women more comfortable on those issues. A slim majority of Hispanic women said Ms. Harris is more trusted on the economy, compared with 35 percent saying they trusted Mr. Trump more. Black women trust Ms. Harris to handle the economy by a much wider margin, which also grew from June, when many Black and Hispanic women said they did not trust either party to do a better job addressing household costs.

Overall, more women now say that they trust Ms. Harris over Mr. Trump to do a better job addressing rising costs, 46 percent to 39 percent. Mr. Trump was previously ahead on this metric, when Mr. Biden was the presumptive nominee.

The study also dug into the social nature of voting among women. Among Ms. Harris’s supporters, 63 percent said most of their friends would be voting for Ms. Harris, while 7 percent said most of their friends would pick Mr. Trump.

Among Mr. Trump’s supporters, 59 percent said most of their friends were voting for him, while just 4 percent said most of their friends would pick Ms. Harris.

But women who were planning to vote for Mr. Trump were more likely than those supporting Ms. Harris to say they were not sure about their friends’ political allegiances (34 percent vs 28 percent).

Among women with either a spouse or partner, 80 percent said their partner votes the same way, and just 7 percent said their spouse or partner votes differently. More than one-in-10 said they do not discuss politics with their spouse or partner.

But big differences emerge when voters were asked when they were offended.

Nearly half — 46 percent — of the group said that they had been offended recently. Ms. Harris won that group by a margin of more than 80 percentage points.

But it was a different story among the 23 percent who said that they had been offended by Mr. Trump, but further in the past. Mr. Trump won that group by roughly 40 percentage points.

Donald Trump wins voters who said they found him offensive, but not recently, by a wide margin

Has Donald Trump ever said anything that you found offensive?

The question of offensive rhetoric has been a feature of Mr. Trump’s candidacy as long as he has been running for president. He began his first run for the presidency in 2015 by claiming that Mexico was sending “rapists” into America. He won that election after a tape surfaced in which bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. More recently he falsely claimed that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets.

And for nearly as long, his Democratic opponents have tried to appeal to voters who might find him offensive.

“Of course Haitian immigrants aren’t eating cats and dogs,” said Marquez Miller, 33, of Orange Park, Fla., who said he intended to support Ms. Harris in November. “They’re new to the country, so for their president to say that is horrible.”

But the Times/Siena data shows that Mr. Trump’s language is not necessarily a liability for all voters.

Ariel Roe, 23, a recent college graduate in New York City who is about to start a job in accounting, says she has had issues with things Mr. Trump has said before but still plans to vote for him.

“I don’t love the things he’s said in the past; grabbing women by the you know what,” she said. “But with politicians, nobody can be perfect.”

Ms. Roe said that while she is aligned with Democrats on some issues, Mr. Trump’s economic policies win out.

The group who said they had been offended by Mr. Trump in the past but still support him was mostly white, but was also more likely to be Latino than voters overall. They were more likely to be men, and less likely to be college-educated, than the rest of the public.

And they were more politically disengaged, and much less likely to be regular news consumers than the broader electorate.

“I don’t pay much attention to the news,” said Cristal Bailey, 52, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. “But I know Trump is honest. And yeah, he’s a little racist, but I feel like he might just be as racist as your next-door neighbors.”

Ms. Bailey, who is Black, said she planned to support Mr. Trump in November despite his past racist comments because she believes that he cares about real people and their problems.

Shirley Trevino, 49, of New Braunfels, Texas, said she had been offended by what she called Mr. Trump’s “locker room talk,” but said she planned to support him in November. “I don’t agree with some of the things he says,” she said. “He’s pretty blunt. I’m the same, but there’s a time and place.”

“I’m not offended by things he says about Hispanic people, because he’s speaking a lot of truth,” added Ms. Trevino, who is Hispanic. “People are coming here illegally and they need to go through the process. We have a process to make sure we weed out bad people who are coming here.”

Few of Mr. Trump’s core supporters said they had ever found him offensive.

But over the past year slightly more voters have said that they had recently taken offense with something Mr. Trump said. Nearly half of voters now say they have found Mr. Trump offensive recently, up from 41 percent in April.

Mr. Barrett’s campaign has strongly denied the allegation and characterized it as a one-time “proofing error” that is inconsistent with the campaign’s other advertisements aimed at Black voters.

“On Nov. 6 vote for Tom Barrett” reads the information box at the center of the full-page advertisement, which appeared in the Oct. 2 issue of The Michigan Bulletin, a Black-owned alternative weekly that has published in the Lansing area for 30 years. At the bottom of the page, the disclaimer “Paid for by Tom Barrett for Congress” appears.

As of Sunday, more than a week after publication, the campaign had yet to publish a correction. A representative said that The Bulletin’s publisher notified the campaign about the error over the weekend and that a corrected version of the ad would run in the next issue.

“Our campaign has been committed to outreach to the Black community and Black leaders,” Jason C. Roe, a spokesman for Mr. Barrett’s campaign, said. “The goal is to earn more support from Black voters, and this was nothing but a proofing error.”

Mr. Roe noted that the campaign sent mailers to Black households on Oct. 2 and Oct. 9 that include the correct election date.

The complaint from the state Black caucus notes that a similar advertisement — but with the correct election date — appeared in an Oct. 9 issue of City Pulse, another local weekly publication, which does not have Black owners.

Chris Jackson, the executive director of the Black caucus, said that the group learned about the advertisement after readers shared photos of it with their elected officials.

“At best, Tom Barrett and his campaign have committed a shocking oversight which will undoubtedly lead to confusion by Black voters in Lansing — in part because they still do not appear to have made any attempt to correct the record,” reads the complaint, which was signed by the chairwoman and vice chairwoman of the Black caucus. “And, at worst, this ad could be part of an intentional strategy to ‘deter’ Black voters by deceiving them into showing up to vote on the day after the 2024 election.”

In Michigan, it is a felony to use “bribery, menace, or other corrupt means or device,” such as intentionally spreading false information about the election process, to “deter” an individual from voting.

“If Tom Barrett and Tom Barrett for Congress intentionally spread election misinformation to disenfranchise Black voters, they could be guilty of a felony and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” the complaint reads.

Mr. Barrett is running against Curtis Hertel Jr., a Democratic former state senator who represented the Lansing area. Ms. Slotkin, a Democrat, is running against Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman, for an open Senate seat.

“There is a very big difference between Donald Trump and how I will be president of the United States,” she said, citing his false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio and detailing her plans to cut taxes for the middle class during an appearance on The Shade Room, a digital entertainment publication with more than 29 million followers on Instagram.

“And I cannot impress upon people enough that this is somebody — Donald Trump — who intends to take us backward,” she added.

The Harris campaign is facing pressure to shore up support from voters of color, who are normally reliable Democratic constituencies, and from Black men in particular. Polls show that Ms. Harris is receiving significantly lower support from Black men than President Biden did in 2020. The slip from Mr. Biden’s 2020 numbers among that voting bloc is striking: 70 percent said they would vote for Ms. Harris in November, down from Mr. Biden’s 85 percent in 2020.

In her interview with Justin Carter of The Shade Room, Ms. Harris acknowledged the challenge, saying: “Black men are no different from anybody else. They expect that you have to earn their vote.”

The most substantive piece of the Monday rollout was the economic plan targeted to those male voters.

The plan, called the “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” expands upon Ms. Harris’s “opportunity economy” pitch, building upon efforts to address the unique barriers that the demographic faces in starting businesses and building wealth.

Ms. Harris’s plan calls for providing one million loans that would forgive up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs and people of other races to start a business, in an effort to close the capital gap that Black people often face.

The plan calls for expanding access to affordable banking options that will allow Black men and others to tap into more capital that they often cannot access because of high fees and other barriers. The plan also promises to devise a regulatory framework for protecting cryptocurrency assets, which more than 20 percent of Black Americans own or have owned.

Ms. Harris’s proposals also seek to create more mentorship and apprenticeship opportunities, and call for new investments to help more Black men become teachers. And the plan would begin a health initiative focused on the diseases that disproportionately affect Black people — such as sickle cell, diabetes and prostate cancer — by expanding preventive screening programs.

Under the plan, Ms. Harris also pledges to legalize marijuana nationally and to ensure that Black men, who were once disproportionately jailed for using and distributing marijuana, can benefit from its business potential.

Her softening support among Black men has so alarmed Democrats that former President Barack Obama issued an urgent call last week for the voting bloc to drop “excuses” and rethink their reluctance to support the vice president. (Ms. Harris dodged when asked on The Shade Room whether she agreed with Mr. Obama’s comments, saying that she was “very proud” to have his support.)

Black men, particularly younger ones, have been steadily slipping from the Democratic Party, frustrated that their experiences are not reflected in policy as much as other groups’. Ms. Harris’s economic proposal appears to confront those concerns head-on.

A statement from the campaign announcing the plan said Ms. Harris “knows that Black men have long felt that too often their voice in our political process has gone unheard and that there is so much untapped ambition and leadership within the Black male community.”

On Sunday, the vice president rallied voters in eastern North Carolina, a rural part of the battleground state with many Black residents who often say they feel ignored by national campaigns.

And on Monday, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking firm, the Harris campaign began airing a new ad in Philadelphia that seemed aimed in part at addressing the sexism that Mr. Obama suggested was weakening her support.

“She’s had our back since Day 1,” says the ad’s narrator, a community activist whose name is given as Anton. “Let’s be honest and get a reality check. Women know how to make things happen.”

The campaign also released an ad in Michigan targeting Black workers. The spot features a worker named Gerald arguing that Ms. Harris, unlike Mr. Trump, “has a history of fighting for the American worker.”

“The middle class built this country: our blood, our sweat, our tears,” he says. “We’re the ones that sacrificed to allow these billionaires to make their billions.”

Ms. Harris’s push for Black voters will continue on Tuesday at a town hall hosted by Charlamagne Tha God, host of “The Breakfast Club,” a nationally syndicated show that is particularly popular with Black millennials. Campaign surrogates will also sell her new policy plan as they address Black communities in battleground states.

“The vice president is going to continue to talk about what she plans to do for all Americans. But I think that we believe, and the vice president believes, it is absolutely OK to talk about how this policy agenda is going to change the lives of millions of Black men once she’s able to get it done as president,” said Quentin Fulks, her principal deputy campaign manager.

The plan reflects a series of issues that Ms. Harris has heard firsthand in conversations with Black men across the country, the campaign said, particularly during a nationwide “Economic Opportunity Tour” she began last spring. During those events, she discussed the Biden administration’s accomplishments, including building wealth and increasing access to capital for minority-owned small businesses.

Still, Mr. Trump has been able to make inroads with Black Americans by pitching himself as stronger on the economy.

Mr. Trump and his allies have made the push for Black men by marketing gold sneakers to them, campaigning with rappers and claiming without evidence that those who cross the border are taking what he called “Black jobs.” Mr. Trump’s surrogates have held listening sessions in a cigar bar in Philadelphia while contending that the Democratic Party has abandoned Black voters.

In another interview released on Monday, the pundit Roland Martin asked Ms. Harris what she made of Mr. Trump’s focus on Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia for his false claims about voter fraud in 2020, and of his comments that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”

She did not use the word “racist” in her response but suggested that race was implicitly a factor in his choosing to talk about those cities, which have large Black populations.

“If you just look at where the stars are in the sky, don’t look at them as just random things,” Ms. Harris said. “Look at the constellation: What does it show you?”

Maya King contributed reporting from Philadelphia and Atlanta.

Her line of attack marked an attempt to turn the tables on Mr. Trump, who for months had suggested that President Biden was too old to be president and accused him of hiding from the American people. And it underscored her efforts to present herself as the candidate of change and Mr. Trump as a relic of the past, as she forms a closing message in the final weeks of her campaign.

“From him, we are just hearing from that same, old tired playbook,” she said. “He has no plan for how he would address the needs of the American people. He is only focused on himself.”

Ms. Harris’s rally, which attracted about 7,000 people, was aimed especially at urging supporters in a presidential battleground state to cast their ballots before Election Day. Early voting begins on Thursday in North Carolina. “The election is here,” she said.

It was also meant to mobilize Black voters, a critical Democratic constituency whose support for Ms. Harris is drifting compared to 2020, polls have found. A survey of Black likely voters from The New York Times/Siena College found that roughly eight in 10 Black voters plan to vote for Ms. Harris — an overwhelming majority, but more than 10 points short of the support Mr. Biden had four years ago. The softening of support was especially pronounced among Black men — 70 percent of whom said they planned to support her.

Roughly four in 10 residents of Greenville are Black, and the city is surrounded by rural communities with significant Black populations that often say they are ignored by national campaigns. A Democratic presidential candidate has not won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008. A Times polling average shows Ms. Harris within one point of Mr. Trump in the state, which he almost certainly must win to reclaim the White House.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond on Sunday to a request for comment about Ms. Harris’s remarks. Mr. Trump, speaking at a rally in Prescott Valley, Ariz., on Sunday, cast himself as an indefatigable campaigner, who can give multiple long speeches each day and keep up with the rigors of political travel.

“Who the hell can do this two, three times a day?” Mr. Trump said. “So I speak for hours, mostly without a Teleprompter.” And he mocked reporters for seizing on any mispronunciation of a word to claim “he’s cognitively impaired” or “he’s getting old.”

After avoiding the media during the initial rollout of her truncated campaign, the vice president has embarked on a blitz of interviews recently, both with mainstream journalists and on nontraditional settings like podcasts. She appeared on a “60 Minutes” special last Monday; CBS said that Mr. Trump had agreed to be interviewed on the program as well, but then backed out.

Ms. Harris also released a letter from her doctor on Saturday declaring that she was in “excellent health” and possessed the “physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Ms. Harris’s allies say the final three weeks of the campaign will focus on engaging the Black voters who have not yet committed to casting their ballots for her. Through town hall-style events, get-out-the-vote efforts geared toward Black men and the use of campaign surrogates, Democrats hope to consolidate their base of Black voters around the party once more.

They also plan to ramp up efforts to counter what they see as misinformation about Ms. Harris’s record on criminal justice, and they are holding events at historically Black colleges and universities to engage Black voters during their season of homecoming celebrations.

On Tuesday, Ms. Harris will sit for an interview in Detroit with Charlamagne Tha God, one of the nation’s most popular Black radio hosts, on his nationally syndicated show.

“The job of any great candidate in their campaign is to, number one, listen, and I think the Harris campaign has been listening and is addressing that concern pretty aggressively,” said Quentin James, the co-founder and CEO of the Collective PAC, an organization that supports Black political candidates.

Last week, the Harris campaign unleashed one of its biggest weapons: Mr. Obama, the nation’s first Black president. At a campaign event in Pittsburgh, Mr. Obama suggested that, although some voters cite the economy or immigration for their skepticism of Ms. Harris, he suspected another factor was playing a role.

“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 said, in blunt comments that represented a remarkable, if calculated, risk to win support with the election close at hand.

Jeffrey McIlwain, 59, who attended the Greenville rally on Sunday, said he had come to a similar conclusion after talking with some of his male friends and family.

“I think they have a problem with a woman in the White House,” said Mr. McIlwain, a retired bonds trader and banker who lives in Durham.

But polls also suggest a broader anxiety among some Black voters that Democrats have not made life measurably better for them, even though they back the party in overwhelming numbers. Forty percent of African American voters under 30 said the Republican Party was more likely to follow through on its campaign commitments than Democrats were.

Ms. Harris’s weekend visit to North Carolina also included local outreach efforts as the state recovers from the devastation of Hurricane Helene last month. On Saturday, she helped put together care packages at a barbecue restaurant and met with local Black elected officials and faith leaders.

Then, before her rally on Sunday, Ms. Harris attended a service at a predominantly Black church in Greenville as part of her campaign’s wider initiative to engage Black faith voters, which will include a “Souls to the Polls” initiative centered around churchgoers.

At the church, the vice president condemned efforts to spread misinformation about post-storm relief efforts. Mr. Trump and Republicans have amplified many false claims, although Ms. Harris did not name the former president in her remarks.

“Instead of offering hope, there are those who are channeling people’s tragedies and sorrows into grievances and hatred,” she said, arguing that their goal was “to play politics for other people’s heartbreak.”