He tried to clean up the attack he lobbed at the city just last week, when he said in another speech that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit,” if Ms. Harris is elected and added, “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” On Friday, he promised to deliver economic revitalization to the city, which has been on the rebound in recent years.

Ms. Harris, at her rally, called out the civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon. “It is devastating, and now Sinwar’s death can and must be a turning point,” she said, referring to the killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “Everyone must seize this opportunity to end the war in Gaza, bring the hostages home and end the suffering once and for all.”

But she did not call for a change in U.S. policy toward Israel, and quickly returned to her standard stump speech, criticizing Mr. Trump for only having “concepts of a plan” on health care and other policies.

Earlier Friday, Ms. Harris made stops in Grand Rapids and Lansing, where she spoke at a union hall. Mr. Trump, who lost Michigan in 2020 after winning the state in 2016, participated in a round table in Oakland County.

There are 18 days until Election Day. Here’s what else to know:

North Carolina sets a record: More than 353,000 ballots were cast in North Carolina on Thursday, a state record for the first day of early voting, signaling intense enthusiasm in a battleground state still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Helene. Former President Bill Clinton was stumping for Ms. Harris in the state on Friday.

The Obamas: Former President Barack Obama is in Arizona on Friday, campaigning for Ms. Harris. He and Michelle Obama, the former first lady, will make their first campaign appearances alongside Ms. Harris next week at rallies in Georgia and Michigan, the Harris campaign said Friday. The Obamas remain among the country’s most popular political figures, with high approval ratings from the suburban and Black voters Ms. Harris is vying to reach. At a campaign event last week, Mr. Obama admonished some Black men for not being sufficiently supportive of Ms. Harris.

Harris hits at Trump: She had a busy day of campaigning on Thursday, visiting three cities in Wisconsin. Ms. Harris amplified and condemned recent remarks from Mr. Trump saying that Jan. 6, 2021 — when his supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his 2020 election defeat — was “a day of love.” She has also started to embrace calling Mr. Trump a “fascist,” a term that his critics have floated for years, but many top Democrats had avoided using.

Trump on Ukraine: In a podcast released on Thursday, Mr. Trump inverted the facts of the war in Ukraine, blaming Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the conflict instead of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose forces invaded Ukraine.

Going off-script: Some advisers and allies of Mr. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script. At the annual Al Smith charity dinner in Manhattan, he rushed through prepared remarks, stumbling at times as he read out pointed jokes, grievances and at times profane personal attacks. But he seemed most energized when he ditched his script.

Nevada Senate race: Sam Brown, the Republican challenger to Senator Jacky Rosen, has struggled to gain ground against his low-key and well-financed Democratic opponent, with some Nevada Republicans privately suggesting that Mr. Brown’s campaign has made key missteps. The two clashed in a debate on Thursday evening.

Second homes swing: A group is pushing owners of second homes in a half-dozen swing districts in New York to take advantage of a quirk in state law allowing them to vote there instead of the location of their primary residence. The organizers believe that registering a fraction of the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who own second homes could help tip a Republican majority to a Democratic one.

Eduardo Medina , Neil Vigdor and Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Obama is hopscotching across battleground states to energize Democrats and urge persuadable voters to support Vice President Kamala Harris. Public polls show Ms. Harris trailing Mr. Trump in Arizona as she struggles to win Latino voters by the same margins that helped President Biden squeak out a 10,500-vote win in the state in 2020.

On Friday, Mr. Obama took up the Democratic attacks on Mr. Trump’s age and competence, criticizing him for his meandering rally speeches and mocking him for swaying along to music for 40 minutes to close out a town-hall event on Monday in Pennsylvania. He told voters that the Donald Trump of 2024 was an “older, loonier” version of the man who had run in 2016 and 2020.

“Have you seen him lately? You have no idea what he’s talking about,” Mr. Obama said. “You’d be worried if your grandpa was acting like this.”

The Trump campaign responded by saying that under the Biden administration, men and women across an array of races and ethnicities have faced “a terrible economy, an unprecedented border crisis and surging crime rates.”

The crowd in Tucson who cheered Mr. Obama on was a mix of longtime Democrats in vintage “Yes We Can” T-shirts and teenagers who had not been born when Mr. Obama was elected in 2008. Kierce Miller, 16, said she got out of class on Friday to attend the rally because she wanted to see the president who, as the family story goes, once held her as a baby.

Chris Warner, 18, who is studying sports business at Arizona State University, said he supported the C.H.I.P.S. Act signed by President Biden that provided $280 billion for semiconductor research and manufacturing. He said Mr. Trump had been unable to fulfill his main campaign pledge of building a border wall.

“Trump’s presidency was kind of overrated,” he said.

Tucson is home to the University of Arizona and a bastion for Arizona’s Democrats. It is a vital source of votes for the party to balance the overwhelmingly conservative voters in rural parts of the state. In 2020, President Biden won Tucson and surrounding Pima County by 20 points. But several people who attended the rally on Friday expressed anxiety over whether their neighbors would show up in the same numbers in November as Mr. Trump’s base.

“I’m a little scared,” said Lisa Grijalva, 60, a city worker in Tucson. “It shouldn’t be this close.”

Ms. Grijalva said many of her neighbors in her largely Latino neighborhood are undocumented immigrants and young adults with protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and she worries they will be rounded up if Mr. Trump follows through on his plans for mass deportations.

Mr. Trump has intensified his nativist rhetoric in the closing stretch of the campaign, continuing to claim falsely that Venezuelan gangs have taken over Aurora, Colo., and blaming migrants for rampant crime and for taking American jobs. Surveys show that more voters trust Mr. Trump than Ms. Harris to handle the border. But the Democratic rallygoers in Tucson said his comments scapegoated Latinos and immigrants.

“They think we’re all criminals and rapists and drug dealers,” Ms. Grijalva said. “I’m tired of the nonsense and chaos.”

The former president made his comments about Jan. 6 and its aftermath at a time when, just weeks before Election Day, uncommitted voters in battleground states tell pollsters that among their top concerns is that they view him as a threat to democracy.

On Friday, on his website Truth Social, Mr. Trump amplified a conspiracy theory that the attack on the Capitol was staged by the federal government, and he promoted his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election.

He reposted a meme that a user had originally posted on Thursday, which read: “January 6 will go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.” Those words appeared over two images of people swarming the outside of the Capitol building that day and waving American flags.

Earlier on Friday, on a podcast hosted by the conservative media figure Dan Bongino, Mr. Trump lamented how those arrested in connection with the attack have been treated.

“Why are they still being held?” Mr. Trump told Mr. Bongino. “Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.”

During that war, Japanese citizens were among those held in internment camps under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law Mr. Trump has said he wants to try to use for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants if he returns to the White House.

A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Voters mostly look back on Mr. Trump’s actions after the 2020 election as dangerous. Half of likely voters said his actions went so far as to threaten democracy, compared with 44 percent who said he was just exercising his right to contest the election, according to a New York Times/Siena College survey in July.

And in a recent survey from PRRI, a public opinion research firm, 53 percent of Americans — including 17 percent of Republicans — said Mr. Trump had broken the law to try to stay in power after the 2020 election.

And for undecided and persuadable voters in key battleground states that Mr. Trump is trying to win in the final stretch of the race, seeing him as a threat to democracy was among their top five concerns, with many specifically mentioning the events of Jan 6.

On Friday, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal case against Mr. Trump brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, unsealed a batch of records with extensive redactions. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have opposed the release of the information coming within weeks of Election Day.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to get Judge Chutkan to make prosecutors search for evidence of supposed undercover agents who were involved in the events of Jan. 6. She denied that request and wrote that Mr. Trump’s team had offered nothing more than “speculation” that such people existed.

Mr. Trump repeatedly offered a picture of the Capitol attack this week that downplays the violence that unfolded and maintains that he played no role in its buildup. Federal prosecutors have accused Mr. Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, culminating in the violence that took place on Jan. 6 as Congress was certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win in the electoral college.

The violence was carried out by supporters of Mr. Trump, many of whom had attended a nearby rally where he spoke and told people to “peacefully” and “patriotically” walk to the Capitol. He had urged people to come to Washington for that rally, posting days earlier on social media, “Be there, will be wild!”

Mr. Trump told an undecided voter at a Univision town hall this week that his supporters swarmed Washington that day out of anger at the election.

“They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came,” Mr. Trump said at the town hall, adding falsely, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say ‘we,’ these are people that walk down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows. But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands.”

And at an event at the Chicago Economic Club this week, Mr. Trump said: “People were angry. People went there. And I’ll tell you what, they never show that, the primary scene in Washington was hundreds of thousands, the largest group of people I’ve ever spoken before, and I’ve spoken before, and it was love and peace. And some people went to the Capitol, and a lot of strange things happened there.”

“Donald Trump is no friend of labor — let’s be really clear about that, no matter what the noise is out there,” Ms. Harris said in Grand Rapids. She promised to “work with unions to create good-paying jobs, including jobs that do not require a college degree.”

Mr. Trump hit back by promising to revitalize the auto industry through a combination of tax incentives and tariffs. As he was proclaiming at length his fondness for tariffs, his microphone cut out, leaving him visibly frustrated as he paced onstage for nearly 20 minutes.

After the technical difficulties were resolved, Mr. Trump argued that his proposals would bring an economic boom to Detroit, a city he attacked last week and whose continuing rebound he has been skeptical of. He then suggested that Ms. Harris’s tax proposals were tantamount to “economic Armageddon for Detroit.”

Throughout her speech in Grand Rapids, in Kent County, Mich. — a place Mr. Trump won in 2016 and President Biden flipped in 2020 — Ms. Harris was by turns forceful in laying out the grave stakes of the election and almost gleeful in her efforts to cast Mr. Trump as unfit for office.

Appearing to refer to Politico’s reporting that Mr. Trump was dodging media appearances because of exhaustion, she jabbed: “If you are exhausted on the campaign trail, it raises real questions about whether you are fit for the toughest job in the world. Come on. Come on.”

After stepping off his plane in Detroit, Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris a “loser” and insisted to reporters: “I’m not even tired. I’m really exhilarated.”

He then stopped by his campaign’s office in Hamtramck, Mich., a city with a significant Muslim and Arab American population whose Democratic mayor endorsed him last month.

The former president and his allies have been trying to capitalize on anger in Michigan from Arab American and Muslim voters toward the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza. Large numbers of these voters, as well as some progressives, say they may not vote for Ms. Harris.

On Friday, Mr. Trump was greeted by Hamtramck’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, and dozens of supporters, many of them Muslim or Arab American men. “We had a history of disconnect and miscommunication with the Republican Party,” Mr. Ghalib said. “Now we are here to end that disconnect.”

Mr. Trump told his supporters that he wanted to urgently achieve peace in the Middle East. But earlier, he still offered praise for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the Gaza war, saying that he was “doing a good job.”

Ms. Harris began her remarks at an evening rally in Oakland County by saying the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “must be a turning point.”

“Everyone must seize this opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, bring the hostages home and end the suffering once and for all,” she said.

But in a sign of her weakness with the state’s Arab American voters, Ms. Harris named just one Arab American official — one who was appointed, not elected — who is supporting her.

Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump both held events in Oakland County, a suburban area that was once solidly Republican but, like many suburbs, has become gradually more blue as many educated and upscale voters who live there recoiled from Mr. Trump. Democrats are hoping to run up large margins in Oakland County and places like it.

Mr. Trump, after his visit to Hamtramck, took part in what was billed as an economic round-table in an Oakland County community, Auburn Hills. The participants spoke more about policing, education and concerns over fluoride in the water than about inflation.

But he opened his evening rally, in downtown Detroit at Huntington Place, with an appeal to Detroit’s economic potential. “They’ve been talking about comebacks for so long, but we’re going to bring it back, better than it ever was,” Mr. Trump said.

The remark felt like an effort to clean up the attack he lobbed at the city last week, when he said in another speech here that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Ms. Harris won.

Mr. Trump also repeated his hard-line stance on immigration, including false and exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants and crime. He stumbled reading the teleprompter, inaccurately referred to the number of days left until Election Day, and closed with an unusual aside exhorting his supporters to tell their friends to “get your fat husband off the couch, get that fat pig off the couch” and “vote for Trump.”

The Trump campaign has been hammering Ms. Harris over the economy in Michigan, with Mr. Trump repeatedly making promises to bring the auto industry and manufacturing back — claims he also made in 2016 but struggled to fulfill in office. His campaign has been focused on appeals to blue-collar workers and the middle class.

Ms. Harris tried to counter that outreach during an early-evening visit to a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing.

Under Mr. Trump, she said, “thousands of Michigan auto workers lost their jobs,” adding, “And if he wins again, we can expect there will be more of the same.”

Michigan is among the states Ms. Harris must almost certainly win, alongside Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to defeat Mr. Trump. The candidates are essentially tied, according to a New York Times polling average.

In interviews, Democrats say Michigan is as close as they have seen. Their efforts to capture the state, which Mr. Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020, have been complicated by the war in Gaza and by the decisions of some national unions, like the Teamsters and the International Association of Firefighters, not to make an endorsement for president, after both groups backed Mr. Biden in 2020.

“I’m not used to it being this tight,” said Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan. “It’s close. It’s close.”

Ms. Harris’s campaign is open about its intent to peel away suburban voters from Mr. Trump. In a memo first reported by CBS News, the campaign said it planned to capitalize on the former president’s “unprecedented weakness in the suburbs” to win Michigan. Ms. Harris leads Mr. Trump by five percentage points among suburban likely voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll of Michigan. Exit polls from 2020 showed Mr. Trump winning that group.

Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat, said the party had built a powerful campaign infrastructure, unlike Hillary Clinton’s operation, which many Democrats believe took the state for granted.

“It’s not like 2016,” Ms. Dingell said of the Clinton campaign. “They thought it was done. Now they know it’s not done.”

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.

On the Screen

The ad opens with a view of the kind of suburban voter Mr. Moreno has criticized recently — and who could tip the scales in battleground races across the country: a woman who looks to be around 50, college educated and living comfortably. She sits behind a wooden coffee table on a plush leather couch in a spacious living room; tall windows with rich wood trim and leafy views serve as her backdrop. She is dressed casually, in a green button-down over a black shirt and jeans, and speaks directly into the camera over a light soundtrack of a quirky melodic line.

She utters only a few words before another woman appears in her place, then another and another — seven in all — each in the same spot, seamlessly taking turns delivering a broadside against Mr. Moreno over his remark at a recent town hall that older women who care about abortion rights are “a little crazy.”

A few headlines and the names of the publications in which they ran appear at the center of the screen, like reviews in a movie ad. “Bernie Moreno calls focus on abortion rights ‘a little crazy,’” reads one. “Moreno says abortion isn’t ‘an issue’ for women past 50,” says another. “Bernie Moreno has called for national legislation banning abortion,” warns a third.

The Script

FIRST woman

“Bernie Moreno thinks I’m a little crazy.”

SECOND woman

“Because Bernie Moreno thinks it’s crazy that women care about abortion rights.”

THIRD woman

“He says that for older women like me, it’s not really an issue."

FOURTH woman

“And I’m thinking, Bernie, how is this an issue for you?”

FIFTH woman

“But Bernie Moreno’s against abortion even in cases of rape or incest.”

SIXTH woman

“And he’s for a national abortion ban to overturn how we voted in Ohio.”

SEVENTH woman

“Bernie Moreno, I am 100 years old, and I’m definitely not crazy.”

Accuracy

The first two headlines cited are quoted accurately; the third edits a quote but does not alter the source’s meaning.

Mr. Moreno, a wealthy former car dealer and political newcomer who rode the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump to victory in a heated Republican primary, put the issue of abortion at the center of Ohio’s Senate race in September. Speaking at a town hall in Warren County, he lamented that many suburban women were “single-issue voters” on abortion rights, and suggested that older women should not care about access to the procedure because they were too old to have children.

“It’s a little crazy, by the way — especially for women that are like past 50,” Mr. Moreno said to laughter. “I’m thinking to myself: I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”

As recently as in 2022, Mr. Moreno described himself as “absolute pro-life,” with “no exceptions.” In 2023, he said he would vote for a 15-week national ban. But like many Republicans in hotly contested races, he is campaigning differently now. He has said he supports “common-sense exceptions,” which his campaign told PolitiFact include for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

The Takeaway

Mr. Brown, pursuing his fourth term, is one of only two Democratic senators vying for re-election in a state that Mr. Trump won in 2020. (The other is Senator Jon Tester of Montana.) This will likely be the toughest contest of his career. Ohio, once a national bellwether, has shifted to the right, and Mr. Brown’s race is shaping up to be among the most expensive Senate campaigns this cycle.

Mr. Brown is trying to keep the focus on abortion rights, an issue that Democrats see as a winner for them at every level in November. And Mr. Brown has been making the case that Ohio’s rightward tilt belies a more moderate electorate. Last year, voters in the state defeated a ballot measure that Republicans crafted to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution. That was seen as a major victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled Legislature from severely curbing access to the procedure. Three months later, the state’s voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state’s Constitution.

By using a series of middle-aged suburban women — and one elderly one — to make the case against Mr. Moreno, Mr. Brown is making an effective appeal to voters like them, who could prove a critical bloc, to view Mr. Moreno as a condescending sexist to whom the best rebuttal is their common sense.

Using early voting data as a way to gauge who will win or lose the election, they said, is “like bringing a fishing pole to a home run derby — it’s just the wrong tool for the job.”

Still, Mr. Cooper said on X that the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina may significantly affect turnout. For example, in Buncombe County, which includes the large liberal city of Asheville, more than 33,000 ballots were cast on the first day of early voting in 2020. On Thursday, however, there were only about 8,200 cast in the county.

The state’s board of elections approved several emergency measures after about 10 early voting sites in western North Carolina had sustained substantial damage or accessibility issues. On Thursday, at a public library in Black Mountain, N.C., a purplish town in left-leaning Buncombe County where roughly 8,500 residents were still recovering from the aftermath of Helene, a line of voters stretched out the door.

More than 400 early-voting sites opened as scheduled on Thursday, including 76 sites in the 25 western counties hardest hit by Helene, according to the state’s board of elections. Only four could not open.

“I know that thousands of North Carolinians lost so much in this storm. Their lives will never be the same after this tragedy,” Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the state board of elections, said in a news conference on Thursday. “But one thing Helene did not take from western North Carolinians is the right to vote in this important election.”

The previous record for the first day of early voting was in 2020, when more than 348,000 ballots were cast. Former President Donald J. Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by 1.3 percentage points, and his campaign views the state this year as a must-win.

Early voting in North Carolina ends Nov. 2 at 3 p.m. Democrats have poured resources into the state, hoping Vice President Kamala Harris can become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina since 2008.

“The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false,’” Judge Walker, who has frequently ruled against the administration, wrote in his 17-page order. “To keep it simple for the state of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

The order followed an emergency hearing on Thursday after Floridians Protecting Freedom, the organization behind a campaign for an abortion-rights ballot measure known as Amendment 4, sued on Wednesday.

This month, the state’s health department sent several television stations a cease-and-desist letter urging them to stop airing an ad, titled “Caroline,” that is part of the “Yes on 4” campaign. It features a woman named Caroline Williams discussing how she had been diagnosed with stage four brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant.

“Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine,” Ms. Williams says in the ad.

The state called the ad “false.” At least one station stopped airing the ad after receiving the department’s letter, the suit said.

“This critical initial victory is a triumph for every Floridian who believes in democracy and the sanctity of the First Amendment,” Lauren Brenzel, the director of the “Yes on 4” campaign, said in a statement on Thursday. “The court has affirmed what we’ve known all along: The government cannot silence the truth about Florida’s extreme abortion ban.”

Mr. DeSantis has vowed to defeat Amendment 4 and has leveraged the power of the state to oppose the measure, leading to several legal challenges. The courts had declined to intervene in prior cases.

Julia Friedland, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy press secretary, said in a statement that Judge Walker had “issued another order that excites the press.”

“The ads are unequivocally false and put the lives and health of pregnant women at risk,” she said. “Florida’s heartbeat protection law always protects the life of a mother and includes exceptions for victims of rape, incest, and human trafficking.”

The campaign is seeking a preliminary injunction against the state. Judge Walker scheduled a hearing for Oct. 29.

A separate lawsuit, filed by opponents of Amendment 4 and seeking to toss the measure from the ballot, is pending in state court.