GOP leaders call Harris' warnings about a Trump presidency "reckless" in light of assassination attempts

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson called Vice President Kamala Harris’ rhetoric about the dangers of a Trump presidency “reckless” in a new statement, pointing to the previous assassination attempts against the former president.

“Vice President Harris acknowledged that ‘we all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence.’ These words have proven hollow,” they said.

Johnson and McConnell said that they have been briefed on “ongoing and persistent threats” against Trump and warned that Harris must “stop escalating the threat environment.”

Analysis: Obama again feels the "fierce urgency of now"

Several political lifetimes ago, Barack Obama followed Bruce Springsteen onstage at a huge rally beneath the Cleveland skyline and declared, “A rising is coming.”

That promise, riffing off one of the rock icon’s hits, came true days later, when Obama won the 2008 presidential election.

The band was back together Thursday night, in Georgia. The former president, now 63 and still the Democratic Party’s most compelling figure, and the Boss were trying to push Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over the line in the critical swing state.

Springsteen, before strumming “Land of Hope and Dreams,” declared that Harris “is running to be the 47th president of the United States. Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant. He does not understand this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American.”

Harris reminisced before the huge crowd in Clarkston, a suburb of Atlanta, about her trip to Obama’s first presidential campaign launch in Springfield, Illinois, in 2007.

But the sense of imminent change dancing in the frigid air that February morning is missing this year in the grueling slog for every last vote, amid Democratic dread that Obama’s nemesis, Trump, is about to reclaim power.

And Obama’s return to center stage is raising the question of whether, 12 years after his last election win, he has the political muscle to take the once and possibly future president down.

Read the full analysis.

Musk keeps up pro-Trump spending spree as Harris continues to dominate money race

Elon Musk plowed nearly $44 million in October into a super PAC working to restore Donald Trump to the White House – pushing the billionaire’s total donations to the group he established to benefit the former president to nearly $119 million, new campaign finance reports show.

The last-minute burst of spending by the world’s richest man comes as Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, continues to lap the former president in fundraising, bringing in about $97 million – six times the amount collected by Trump in the first 16 days of October, according to reports the campaigns filed late Thursday night with the Federal Election Commission.

But both candidates and their aligned political operations went on a spending spree this month — burning through more than half a billion dollars combined during the first half of October as they jockey for advantage ahead of Election Day.

Read more takeaways from the filings.

Harris will speak on reproductive freedom at rally featuring Beyoncé

Vice President Kamala Harris will give a speech on reproductive freedom in Texas today, according to a senior Harris campaign official, as her team seeks to amplify the issue and spotlight what she’s described as Trump abortion bans.

In the closing days of the election, Harris is leaning into the issue of abortion rights as part of her broader argument against her Republican rival, placing the blame on former President Donald Trump for abortion bans in several states and amplifying stories of the people impacted by those restrictions. And Texas was chosen as the location for the rally, campaign officials said, because it’s the epicenter of abortion bans.

Today’s rally in Houston, will feature music superstar and Houston native Beyoncé, will spotlight Amanda and Josh Zurawski, the Texas couple who led a lawsuit against the state’s abortion bans after Amanda suffered life-threatening pregnancy complications but couldn’t have an abortion in the deep-red state.

Shanette Williams — the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman, who ProPublica reported died in 2022 from a treatable infection due to delays to her medical care stemming from Georgia’s restrictive abortion law — will also be in attendance.

Texas has one of the strictest abortion restrictions in the country, banning the procedure at six weeks — before many people know they are pregnant — with exceptions only in the case of life endangerment for the mother. The trigger law passed in 2021 took effect after the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights in June 2022.

Read the full story.

Election workers prepare for poll watchers who could disrupt vote

During a special election in Wisconsin over the summer, a group of partisan poll watchers showed up at a handful of precincts in Glendale, a suburb of Milwaukee, and created chaos by contesting every absentee ballot that was cast.

After they were reminded repeatedly about the rules against making meritless ballot challenges, the groups of poll watchers “turned disruptive,” according to Glendale Mayor Bryan Kennedy.

“They refused to stop challenging, then they were asked to leave. They didn’t, and the police were called,” Kennedy told CNN, adding that once police arrived, the observers left peacefully. “It certainly gave us pause about what we’ll see later.”

Turning what are supposed to be routine scenes of counting ballots into tense standoffs that require police intervention is exactly the sort of thing that election officials across the country are hoping to avoid when Americans go to the polls next month.

After conspiracy theories about voting spread rampantly in 2020 — as Trump and his allies tried to reverse his loss to Joe Biden — officials are preparing for a possible wave of misinformation this election season and hoping it won’t be fueled by volunteers acting as observers.

Some context: Poll watchers are a key component of election transparency, and both Democrats and Republicans have built out their ranks of volunteers and lawyers to observe polling places and vote counting centers. But while Democrats have publicly focused on get-out-the-vote efforts, Republicans have made “election integrity” a centerpiece of their campaign messaging, vowing to deploy tens of thousands of people to monitor the vote across battlegrounds.

Read more about how election workers are preparing for poll watchers here.

Catch up on the top headlines from the campaign trail yesterday

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump campaigned in battleground states yesterday as the presidential race enters its final days.

More than 30 million Americans have already cast their ballots with less than two weeks left until Election Day.

Here’s a recap of what happened on Thursday:

Donald Trump:

Trump’s legal team asked again for a federal court to dismiss the January 6, 2021, election subversion case, saying that the office of special counsel Jack Smith is unconstitutional, in a court filing 12 days before the presidential election.

In a radio interview Thursday, Trump also said he would “fire” special counsel Jack Smith, who has brought charges against the former president, “within two seconds” if reelected.

Trump participated in a campaign rally in Tempe, Arizona, where he said the US is “like a garbage can for the world” as he railed against illegal immigration. Ahead of the rally, he responded to Harris’ comments calling him a fascist, saying “everyone knows that’s not true.”

Kamala Harris:

Harris and former President Barack Obama participated in their first joint campaign appearance Thursday night in Atlanta. In battleground Georgia, the latest stop in a late-campaign sprint by Obama, the pair issued parallel warnings about the dangers facing the country if Trump is elected again to lead it.

The Democratic nominee on Thursday touted the endorsements of two former Republican elected officials for her candidacy — Waukesha, Wisconsin, Mayor Shawn Reilly and former Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan. They join more than 30 former GOP members of Congress who have publicly rebuked Trump ahead of Election Day.

Other key headlines:

House Republicans on the committee with broad jurisdiction over national elections have hired at least two former Donald Trump campaign officials involved in the 2020 fake electors scheme as the GOP-led panel gears up to take center stage in an unknown post-election landscape when Congress returns in November.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday that Trump is now “more unhinged, more unstable” and more dangerous than when she faced him in the 2016 presidential election. “I think you see that all the time in both his rallies and his kind of word-salad-after-word-salad speeches,” she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source.”

Here's what the 2024 candidates have on their schedules today

With just 11 days to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris will appear alongside Beyoncé at a rally in Houston, while former President Donald Trump will hold campaign events in Texas and Michigan on Friday.

Here’s the schedule of the 2024 candidates today:

The Willie Moore Jr. Radio Show will air a pre-taped interview with Harris at 4 p.m. ET, and she will tape an interview with Brené Brown later. Harris will deliver remarks at a campaign event in Houston, Texas at 9:30 p.m. ET, where she is expected to give remarks on abortion. Beyoncé and Willie Nelson are expected to appear with Harris.

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will make a stop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ,at 11 a.m. ET before delivering remarks at a campaign reception on behalf of the Harris Victory Fund. He will then make a campaign stop in Allentown, Pennsylvania, at 3 p.m. ET before delivering remarks at a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at 6 p.m. ET.

Trump will deliver remarks to the press in Austin, Texas, at 1:30 p.m. ET focused on immigration. GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is expected to join Trump at the event. Afterwards, the former president is expected to record an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Later, Trump will deliver remarks at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, focused on the auto industry at 7:30 p.m. ET.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will deliver remarks at a campaign event in Raeford, North Carolina, at 2:30 p.m. ET, focused on inflation and high prices. He will later hold a town hall in Monroe, North Carolina, at 6:30 p.m. ET.

Harris and Trump are in a dead heat in New York Times national poll

The presidential election is a tossup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in the latest national poll from the New York Times and Siena College.

In a head-to-head matchup, the two are tied at 48% each among likely voters, and when third-party and independent candidates are included in the mix, the race stands at 47% Trump to 46% Harris with no clear leader. An early October poll from the Times and Siena also found no clear leader in the race, with the two-way matchup in that poll standing at 49% Harris to 46% Trump.

The close finding mirrors other recent national polling on the race. In polls that meet CNN’s standards, no candidate has had a lead outside the margin of sampling error in a single poll since early October. And an updated CNN Poll of Polls incorporating the findings from the Times/Siena poll shows a tight, two-point race, with 49% supporting Harris to 47% for Trump.

The Times/Siena poll finds several key dynamics of the race unchanged compared with prior polling: Favorability ratings remain steady for both candidates, Trump continues to hold advantages as more trusted to handle both the economy (52% to 45%) and immigration (54% to 43%), while Harris has a broad advantage on abortion (54% to 43%) and handling democracy (51% to 45%).

These are the states where employers must give you time off to vote

There is currently no federal law requiring organizations to give their employees time off to vote during working hours.

But 28 states and the District of Columbia do have such laws. And a 29th state, North Dakota, has a law simply encouraging, but not requiring, employers to provide time off.

The states requiring voting leave be granted are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

The rules and allowances differ by state, according to law firm Fisher Phillips, which compiled a state-by-state guide for employers.

You can also look up specific state statutes at Justia, an online legal resource.

Read more about voting during the workday.

Meet the Pennsylvania nuns wrongly accused of voter fraud

For a Republican canvasser going door-to-door to get out the vote in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the address on East Lake Road in Erie must have seemed like Heaven-sent evidence of the sort of widespread voter fraud many in his party have been complaining about since Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020.

There were 53 voters registered at the address, the site of a Catholic church, but not a single one actually living there, Cliff Maloney, a conservative operative and founder of The Pennsylvania Chase, claimed on X in a post that quickly went viral.

But there were voters at that address — dozens of them actually. Fifty-five hard-to-miss nuns of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie.

A so-called ballot chaser, who goes door-to-door encouraging voters to return their mail-in ballots, had somehow missed the packed parking lot and the bustling reception area where nuns shuffled between their simple living quarters and the impressive stained-glass windows in the chapel.

Maloney heads a group that encourages Republicans to vote by mail and is part of a larger, often coordinated network of conservatives who cast doubts on the security of the election, suggesting widespread fraud in mail ballots, sharing uncorroborated stories of machines changing votes and urging voters to be alert and document suspected wrongdoing.

Evidence for their concerns, however, remains as thin as it was in the 2020 election and local officials are actively trying to combat the flurry of false and misleading claims like Maloney’s that spread like wildfire on social media.

The monastery has been in Erie since the 1850s and moved into their current building in 1969, in part financed by sisters who formed a real-life musical “Sister Act” group to raise funds. Most of the residents have lived there for decades and are deeply engaged with the community.

“We’ve been in Erie since 1856 doing good work. These sisters don’t deserve to be put down by some misinformation that we’re a sham, that we’re a fraud,” said the prioress, Sister Stephanie Schmidt.

Read the full story.