Trump and Harris Hit the Campaign Trail as Race Remains Tight: Election Live Updates
Posted on 09/19/2024
The campaign trail will run through Washington, D.C., on Thursday, with Mr. Trump and both vice-presidential nominees taking part in events there. Ms. Harris will head to Michigan to headline a “Unite for America” livestream with Oprah Winfrey in Detroit, just two days after Mr. Trump held a town hall in Flint.
Mr. Trump will make his pitch to Jewish voters at a campaign event on “fighting antisemitism” hosted with Miriam Adelson, a conservative megadonor, and then at a conference hosted by the Israeli-American Council, a pro-Israel group.
The two candidates’ running mates, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, will speak with the Business Roundtable, a group that includes leaders of some of America’s largest companies. Both campaigns are seeking the confidence of the business elite — while also courting working-class voters and labor groups — and this event is a chance for them to win support from powerful executives.
There are 47 days until Election Day. Here’s what else to know:
Trump in New York: Mr. Trump returned to his home state on Wednesday, holding a rally on Long Island. His rally at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., is unlikely to move the needle in a state Democrats consistently win, but his visit could help Republican incumbents in several competitive House races.
No Teamsters endorsement: The International Brotherhood of Teamsters will not endorse a candidate for president. The 1.3 million-member union, which backed President Biden in 2020, has been deeply divided by the openness of its president, Sean O’Brien, to Mr. Trump, who granted him a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican convention in July.
Harris on abortion: Ms. Harris is set to give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, and blame Mr. Trump directly for the dire medical situations faced by women seeking the procedure in states where it is banned or heavily restricted.
Republicans back Harris: More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Ms. Harris on Wednesday, saying Mr. Trump is “unfit to serve again as president.” They wrote that he had demonstrated “dangerous qualities,” including an “unusual affinity” for dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” the organization said in a statement provided to The New York Times.
Ms. Harris is scheduled to appear at a campaign event on Thursday with Oprah Winfrey in a Detroit suburb, her third trip to Michigan since entering the presidential race. The crucial battleground state has one of the country’s largest populations of Arab American voters, and many of them were among the more than 100,000 people to cast “uncommitted” votes against Mr. Biden in Michigan’s primary election in February. Hundreds of thousands more Americans cast similar protest votes in states across the country.
In its statement, the Uncommitted National Movement urged its members to vote against former President Donald J. Trump, who it said had “bragged about accelerating the genocide against Palestinians and promised to intensify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S.” The group also urged members not to vote for a third-party candidate, saying that could help Mr. Trump win.
The endorsement decision was not a surprise: Tensions between the group and Ms. Harris’s campaign have spilled into public view. Last month, when two Uncommitted leaders briefly spoke with her and asked for a meeting to discuss the group’s demands for an arms embargo, her campaign downplayed the interaction, and her national security adviser made it clear that Ms. Harris did not support an arms embargo.
Organizers of the Democratic National Convention last month denied the group’s request for a speaker of Palestinian descent at the event, which featured the parents of a dual Israeli American citizen who was taken hostage by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack. (The citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was among six hostages whose bodies were found in a tunnel in Gaza on Aug. 31.) Uncommitted supporters held a sit-in protest outside the convention instead.
The endorsement decision does, however, signal frustration among some Democratic voters who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and who had been cautiously optimistic that a Harris presidency could meaningfully change the United States’ approach toward Israel. The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and continues to cause a humanitarian calamity.
In its announcement, the Uncommitted group pointed to Ms. Harris’s recent support from prominent Republicans, accusing her campaign of “courting Dick Cheney while sidelining disillusioned antiwar voices, pushing them to consider third-party options or to sit this important election out.”
“We are proud to have grown our movement, even as our government continues to send bombs that destroy families,” the statement said. “Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”
Among top officials in the Biden administration, Ms. Harris has been the most sympathetic about the plight of Palestinians, and among the most forceful in criticizing Israel’s conduct in the war. But she has been reluctant to signal that she would back up those sentiments with a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy if she wins the presidency.
In an interview this week with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, Ms. Harris was pressed repeatedly for specifics on how she would handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She largely reiterated the Biden administration’s positions.
On the issue of weapons, Ms. Harris said she supported Mr. Biden’s decision this year to pause shipments of 2,000-pound bombs, which he acknowledged had been used to kill civilians. But when the vice president was pushed for her own position on the war, she pointed repeatedly to a deal the Biden administration has struggled to broker between Israel and Hamas to institute a cease-fire in exchange for hostages held in Gaza.
“We need to get this deal done, and we need to get it done immediately,” she said. “And that is my position, and that is my policy. We need to get this deal done.”
He continued to falsely maintain that Springfield, Ohio, had been over overrun by illegal immigrants, even though the Haitian community he was referring to has temporary legal status. Then, he announced he would visit both that city and Aurora, Colo., another focal point of his exaggerated claims about migrants.
“I’m going to go there in the next two weeks. I’m going to Springfield, and I’m going to Aurora,” Mr. Trump said. “You may never see me again, but that’s OK. Got to do what I got to do.”
As he discussed Springfield, members of the crowd began chanting, “Save the cats,” a reference to a debunked claim spread by Mr. Trump that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating pets. (Springfield’s Republican mayor said this week that a visit from Mr. Trump would burden the city’s strained resources.)
Mr. Trump’s rally on Long Island was his second campaign event since the apparent assassination attempt against him on Sunday in West Palm Beach, Fla. Though he spoke with typical vigor about the incident, he later appeared jumpy at one point, as someone apparently approached the stage.
“I thought this was a wiseguy coming up,” Mr. Trump said, suddenly breaking midthought from his comments on taxes. Acknowledging his nerves, he later added, “You know, I’ve got a little bit of a yip problem here, right? That was amazing. I was ready to start duking it out.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a rally in New York with just under seven weeks left in the race provoked raised eyebrows from political observers. New York, a Democratic stronghold, is not one of the battleground states seen as critical to his path to victory, and his campaign has not been expending resources here.
But Long Island is critical to Republicans’ hopes of holding the House. And the region is a kind of proving ground for Mr. Trump’s attacks on Democrats over policies that he insists have fueled crime and inflation.
At his rallies nationwide Mr. Trump often uses an apocalyptic picture of New York as an abstract emblem of a liberal agenda that he says has caused lawlessness and decay. Even so, his comments resonated with thousands of energized supporters for whom the city is their backyard.
Still, Mr. Trump, who faces tight polls with Vice President Kamala Harris in several critical battleground states, insisted that his rally was meant to help him win the state. He marveled at his charged audience, at one point comparing himself to Elvis Presley (“maybe greater even than Elvis, because Elvis had a guitar”), who played the arena several times.
Mr. Trump appealed directly to his New York supporters, promising to renovate the city’s subway, to turn ground zero into a federally managed national monument and to restore a state and local tax break that he did not acknowledge he had limited during his presidency.
Mr. Trump also repeated his debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. As he railed against a “radical Democrat regime,” he insisted that he was not “driven by partisan ideology.” And as he tried to make the case that he could flip New York, he continued to stoke fear around immigration.
“We’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats’ immigration policies. “And we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.”
Mr. Trump at one point misleadingly claimed that he had secured the endorsement of “rank-and-file” members of the Teamsters union, a reference to its releasing internal polling that showed a majority of members favored him over Ms. Harris.
But the union announced on Wednesday that it would not endorse either candidate, and the local Long Island Teamsters endorsed Ms. Harris; it was among a number of other locals across the country, including in battleground states, to do so.
Mr. Trump also responded to federal law enforcement agencies saying that Iranian hackers trying to influence the 2024 election had sent excerpts from stolen Trump campaign documents to people associated with the Biden campaign.
The law enforcement agencies said that the recipients did not respond. But Mr. Trump — who during his 2016 campaign seized on emails obtained by Russian hackers and published by WikiLeaks — complained about “foreign election interference” and claimed that “Biden is working with Iran.”
“Iranian malicious cyberactors” sent unsolicited emails that contained “an excerpt taken from stolen, nonpublic material from former President Trump’s campaign,” officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency wrote in a joint statement.
The intended recipients, who were not identified in the statement, did not appear to have replied. Even as federal officials have suggested that the hackers also targeted the Biden and Harris campaigns, they believe that the emails including the stolen Trump material were sent to be disseminated to his political enemies.
“This is further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign.
A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, Morgan Finkelstein, noted that a few people were “targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” though she added that she was not aware that any material had been sent to campaign accounts.
“We have cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation,” she added.
The Justice Department’s national security division has been investigating the Stone attack and could charge some of those responsible as early as this week, according to several officials familiar with the situation.
In a speech last week, the senior Justice Department official responsible for investigating overseas election interference and the head of the department’s national security division, Matthew G. Olsen, accused Russia of seeking to undermine Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to bolster Mr. Trump’s re-election chances.
He also cited Iran’s recent hacking of the Trump campaign as evidence that some adversaries were also seeking to damage Mr. Trump’s chances of victory.
In August, the Justice Department indicted a Pakistani citizen with ties to Iran for plotting assassination attempts against top political figures, including the former president.
The rejection came after Mr. Robinson — who has a history of incendiary remarks — issued a debate challenge to Mr. Stein in a video on Tuesday, saying, “Come on down, let’s do this mano-a-mano.”
If the two do not debate, it will break a pattern for gubernatorial candidates in place since 1972, according to Christopher A. Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
That Mr. Robinson is seeking a debate suggests that he is looking for a way to make gains in the race. In recent weeks, he has been trailing Mr. Stein in the polls by as much as 14 points. At the same time, Mr. Stein’s refusal suggests that he feels comfortable in his lead and does not want to take risks that might narrow it.
“I think politicians are realizing that they have more to lose than to gain from a debate,” Dr. Cooper said. “There’s almost no examples of the debate guaranteeing somebody victory, but they have guaranteed people losses.”
Still, he emphasized that debates were an important way to keep races transparent.
Mike Lonergan, a spokesman for the Robinson campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Stein’s refusal to participate in a debate “proves that his empty talking points about democracy are nothing more than cheap cynicism from a dishonest and self-serving career politician.”
At a campaign event in Pittsboro, N.C., on Wednesday afternoon that also featured Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Mr. Stein told reporters that he did not want to debate Mr. Robinson because he did not “want to be part of normalizing him and giving him a platform.”
“The voters of North Carolina have all kinds of opportunities to interact with me,” Mr. Stein added. “I’ve done over 60 town halls and meetings across the state. I talk to the press all wherever I go.”
For months, Mr. Stein’s campaign has flooded the airwaves with TV ads that highlight Mr. Robinson’s anti-abortion stance and portray him as an extreme MAGA-aligned Republican. In late August, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report noted that Mr. Stein had outspent Mr. Robinson on television ads by about $11 million.
Mr. Robinson has spent much of the last few weeks crisscrossing the state in campaign events, casting Mr. Stein as an out-of-touch liberal who is weak on crime and immigration. Mr. Stein has similarly traversed the state, reminding voters about the opioid crisis settlements he won as attorney general and arguing that Mr. Robinson’s vitriolic views would be bad for business growth in the state.
North Carolina is a purple state with a history of extremely close results in national elections.
This latest scrap originated after Mr. Clooney wrote a guest essay for The New York Times in July imploring President Biden to drop out of the race. Mr. Clooney had just hosted a fund-raiser for the president and observed him up close. So he had a certain credibility, and his article made an impact.
Mr. Trump appeared instantly intrigued by this act of treachery. It seemed irresistible to him — a member of the Hollywood elite of the highest order, turning against his fellow Democrat. Mr. Trump jumped right into the mix with a long post on Truth Social that began this way: “So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act. He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?”
The post raised certain questions. Chief among them: Had Mr. Trump not seen “Ocean’s Eleven”? What about “From Dusk Till Dawn,” or “Three Kings,” or “Out of Sight,” or “Burn After Reading,” or “Syriana”?
He concluded that, “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!!”
On Mr. Kimmel’s program Tuesday night, Mr. Clooney swiped back: “I will if he does. That’s a trade-off I’d do.”
Ordinarily none of this would matter — and who is to say it really does? — but for the fact that Mr. Trump, formerly the star of “The Apprentice,” clearly craves the approval of fellow stars. He has given voice to a theory that famous people in Beverly Hills are secretly voting for him but won’t acknowledge it.
So when celebrities turn against him, he often can’t help but engage. On Sunday, Mr. Trump responded to Taylor Swift’s recent endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in a post on Truth Social that read, simply, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Mr. Trump will make his pitch to Jewish voters at a campaign event on “fighting antisemitism” hosted with Miriam Adelson, a conservative megadonor, and then at a conference hosted by the Israeli-American Council, a pro-Israel group.
The two candidates’ running mates, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator JD Vance of Ohio, will speak with the Business Roundtable, a group that includes leaders of some of America’s largest companies. Both campaigns are seeking the confidence of the business elite — while also courting working-class voters and labor groups — and this event is a chance for them to win support from powerful executives.
There are 47 days until Election Day. Here’s what else to know:
Trump in New York: Mr. Trump returned to his home state on Wednesday, holding a rally on Long Island. His rally at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., is unlikely to move the needle in a state Democrats consistently win, but his visit could help Republican incumbents in several competitive House races.
No Teamsters endorsement: The International Brotherhood of Teamsters will not endorse a candidate for president. The 1.3 million-member union, which backed President Biden in 2020, has been deeply divided by the openness of its president, Sean O’Brien, to Mr. Trump, who granted him a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican convention in July.
Harris on abortion: Ms. Harris is set to give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, and blame Mr. Trump directly for the dire medical situations faced by women seeking the procedure in states where it is banned or heavily restricted.
Republicans back Harris: More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Ms. Harris on Wednesday, saying Mr. Trump is “unfit to serve again as president.” They wrote that he had demonstrated “dangerous qualities,” including an “unusual affinity” for dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” the organization said in a statement provided to The New York Times.
Ms. Harris is scheduled to appear at a campaign event on Thursday with Oprah Winfrey in a Detroit suburb, her third trip to Michigan since entering the presidential race. The crucial battleground state has one of the country’s largest populations of Arab American voters, and many of them were among the more than 100,000 people to cast “uncommitted” votes against Mr. Biden in Michigan’s primary election in February. Hundreds of thousands more Americans cast similar protest votes in states across the country.
In its statement, the Uncommitted National Movement urged its members to vote against former President Donald J. Trump, who it said had “bragged about accelerating the genocide against Palestinians and promised to intensify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S.” The group also urged members not to vote for a third-party candidate, saying that could help Mr. Trump win.
The endorsement decision was not a surprise: Tensions between the group and Ms. Harris’s campaign have spilled into public view. Last month, when two Uncommitted leaders briefly spoke with her and asked for a meeting to discuss the group’s demands for an arms embargo, her campaign downplayed the interaction, and her national security adviser made it clear that Ms. Harris did not support an arms embargo.
Organizers of the Democratic National Convention last month denied the group’s request for a speaker of Palestinian descent at the event, which featured the parents of a dual Israeli American citizen who was taken hostage by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack. (The citizen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was among six hostages whose bodies were found in a tunnel in Gaza on Aug. 31.) Uncommitted supporters held a sit-in protest outside the convention instead.
The endorsement decision does, however, signal frustration among some Democratic voters who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and who had been cautiously optimistic that a Harris presidency could meaningfully change the United States’ approach toward Israel. The war has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, and continues to cause a humanitarian calamity.
In its announcement, the Uncommitted group pointed to Ms. Harris’s recent support from prominent Republicans, accusing her campaign of “courting Dick Cheney while sidelining disillusioned antiwar voices, pushing them to consider third-party options or to sit this important election out.”
“We are proud to have grown our movement, even as our government continues to send bombs that destroy families,” the statement said. “Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.”
Among top officials in the Biden administration, Ms. Harris has been the most sympathetic about the plight of Palestinians, and among the most forceful in criticizing Israel’s conduct in the war. But she has been reluctant to signal that she would back up those sentiments with a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy if she wins the presidency.
In an interview this week with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, Ms. Harris was pressed repeatedly for specifics on how she would handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She largely reiterated the Biden administration’s positions.
On the issue of weapons, Ms. Harris said she supported Mr. Biden’s decision this year to pause shipments of 2,000-pound bombs, which he acknowledged had been used to kill civilians. But when the vice president was pushed for her own position on the war, she pointed repeatedly to a deal the Biden administration has struggled to broker between Israel and Hamas to institute a cease-fire in exchange for hostages held in Gaza.
“We need to get this deal done, and we need to get it done immediately,” she said. “And that is my position, and that is my policy. We need to get this deal done.”
He continued to falsely maintain that Springfield, Ohio, had been over overrun by illegal immigrants, even though the Haitian community he was referring to has temporary legal status. Then, he announced he would visit both that city and Aurora, Colo., another focal point of his exaggerated claims about migrants.
“I’m going to go there in the next two weeks. I’m going to Springfield, and I’m going to Aurora,” Mr. Trump said. “You may never see me again, but that’s OK. Got to do what I got to do.”
As he discussed Springfield, members of the crowd began chanting, “Save the cats,” a reference to a debunked claim spread by Mr. Trump that Haitian migrants were abducting and eating pets. (Springfield’s Republican mayor said this week that a visit from Mr. Trump would burden the city’s strained resources.)
Mr. Trump’s rally on Long Island was his second campaign event since the apparent assassination attempt against him on Sunday in West Palm Beach, Fla. Though he spoke with typical vigor about the incident, he later appeared jumpy at one point, as someone apparently approached the stage.
“I thought this was a wiseguy coming up,” Mr. Trump said, suddenly breaking midthought from his comments on taxes. Acknowledging his nerves, he later added, “You know, I’ve got a little bit of a yip problem here, right? That was amazing. I was ready to start duking it out.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to hold a rally in New York with just under seven weeks left in the race provoked raised eyebrows from political observers. New York, a Democratic stronghold, is not one of the battleground states seen as critical to his path to victory, and his campaign has not been expending resources here.
But Long Island is critical to Republicans’ hopes of holding the House. And the region is a kind of proving ground for Mr. Trump’s attacks on Democrats over policies that he insists have fueled crime and inflation.
At his rallies nationwide Mr. Trump often uses an apocalyptic picture of New York as an abstract emblem of a liberal agenda that he says has caused lawlessness and decay. Even so, his comments resonated with thousands of energized supporters for whom the city is their backyard.
Still, Mr. Trump, who faces tight polls with Vice President Kamala Harris in several critical battleground states, insisted that his rally was meant to help him win the state. He marveled at his charged audience, at one point comparing himself to Elvis Presley (“maybe greater even than Elvis, because Elvis had a guitar”), who played the arena several times.
Mr. Trump appealed directly to his New York supporters, promising to renovate the city’s subway, to turn ground zero into a federally managed national monument and to restore a state and local tax break that he did not acknowledge he had limited during his presidency.
Mr. Trump also repeated his debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. As he railed against a “radical Democrat regime,” he insisted that he was not “driven by partisan ideology.” And as he tried to make the case that he could flip New York, he continued to stoke fear around immigration.
“We’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats’ immigration policies. “And we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.”
Mr. Trump at one point misleadingly claimed that he had secured the endorsement of “rank-and-file” members of the Teamsters union, a reference to its releasing internal polling that showed a majority of members favored him over Ms. Harris.
But the union announced on Wednesday that it would not endorse either candidate, and the local Long Island Teamsters endorsed Ms. Harris; it was among a number of other locals across the country, including in battleground states, to do so.
Mr. Trump also responded to federal law enforcement agencies saying that Iranian hackers trying to influence the 2024 election had sent excerpts from stolen Trump campaign documents to people associated with the Biden campaign.
The law enforcement agencies said that the recipients did not respond. But Mr. Trump — who during his 2016 campaign seized on emails obtained by Russian hackers and published by WikiLeaks — complained about “foreign election interference” and claimed that “Biden is working with Iran.”
“Iranian malicious cyberactors” sent unsolicited emails that contained “an excerpt taken from stolen, nonpublic material from former President Trump’s campaign,” officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency wrote in a joint statement.
The intended recipients, who were not identified in the statement, did not appear to have replied. Even as federal officials have suggested that the hackers also targeted the Biden and Harris campaigns, they believe that the emails including the stolen Trump material were sent to be disseminated to his political enemies.
“This is further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden because they know President Trump will restore his tough sanctions and stand against their reign of terror,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign.
A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, Morgan Finkelstein, noted that a few people were “targeted on their personal emails with what looked like a spam or phishing attempt,” though she added that she was not aware that any material had been sent to campaign accounts.
“We have cooperated with the appropriate law enforcement authorities since we were made aware that individuals associated with the then-Biden campaign were among the intended victims of this foreign influence operation,” she added.
The Justice Department’s national security division has been investigating the Stone attack and could charge some of those responsible as early as this week, according to several officials familiar with the situation.
In a speech last week, the senior Justice Department official responsible for investigating overseas election interference and the head of the department’s national security division, Matthew G. Olsen, accused Russia of seeking to undermine Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to bolster Mr. Trump’s re-election chances.
He also cited Iran’s recent hacking of the Trump campaign as evidence that some adversaries were also seeking to damage Mr. Trump’s chances of victory.
In August, the Justice Department indicted a Pakistani citizen with ties to Iran for plotting assassination attempts against top political figures, including the former president.
The rejection came after Mr. Robinson — who has a history of incendiary remarks — issued a debate challenge to Mr. Stein in a video on Tuesday, saying, “Come on down, let’s do this mano-a-mano.”
If the two do not debate, it will break a pattern for gubernatorial candidates in place since 1972, according to Christopher A. Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University.
That Mr. Robinson is seeking a debate suggests that he is looking for a way to make gains in the race. In recent weeks, he has been trailing Mr. Stein in the polls by as much as 14 points. At the same time, Mr. Stein’s refusal suggests that he feels comfortable in his lead and does not want to take risks that might narrow it.
“I think politicians are realizing that they have more to lose than to gain from a debate,” Dr. Cooper said. “There’s almost no examples of the debate guaranteeing somebody victory, but they have guaranteed people losses.”
Still, he emphasized that debates were an important way to keep races transparent.
Mike Lonergan, a spokesman for the Robinson campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Stein’s refusal to participate in a debate “proves that his empty talking points about democracy are nothing more than cheap cynicism from a dishonest and self-serving career politician.”
At a campaign event in Pittsboro, N.C., on Wednesday afternoon that also featured Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Mr. Stein told reporters that he did not want to debate Mr. Robinson because he did not “want to be part of normalizing him and giving him a platform.”
“The voters of North Carolina have all kinds of opportunities to interact with me,” Mr. Stein added. “I’ve done over 60 town halls and meetings across the state. I talk to the press all wherever I go.”
For months, Mr. Stein’s campaign has flooded the airwaves with TV ads that highlight Mr. Robinson’s anti-abortion stance and portray him as an extreme MAGA-aligned Republican. In late August, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report noted that Mr. Stein had outspent Mr. Robinson on television ads by about $11 million.
Mr. Robinson has spent much of the last few weeks crisscrossing the state in campaign events, casting Mr. Stein as an out-of-touch liberal who is weak on crime and immigration. Mr. Stein has similarly traversed the state, reminding voters about the opioid crisis settlements he won as attorney general and arguing that Mr. Robinson’s vitriolic views would be bad for business growth in the state.
North Carolina is a purple state with a history of extremely close results in national elections.
This latest scrap originated after Mr. Clooney wrote a guest essay for The New York Times in July imploring President Biden to drop out of the race. Mr. Clooney had just hosted a fund-raiser for the president and observed him up close. So he had a certain credibility, and his article made an impact.
Mr. Trump appeared instantly intrigued by this act of treachery. It seemed irresistible to him — a member of the Hollywood elite of the highest order, turning against his fellow Democrat. Mr. Trump jumped right into the mix with a long post on Truth Social that began this way: “So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act. He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?”
The post raised certain questions. Chief among them: Had Mr. Trump not seen “Ocean’s Eleven”? What about “From Dusk Till Dawn,” or “Three Kings,” or “Out of Sight,” or “Burn After Reading,” or “Syriana”?
He concluded that, “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!!”
On Mr. Kimmel’s program Tuesday night, Mr. Clooney swiped back: “I will if he does. That’s a trade-off I’d do.”
Ordinarily none of this would matter — and who is to say it really does? — but for the fact that Mr. Trump, formerly the star of “The Apprentice,” clearly craves the approval of fellow stars. He has given voice to a theory that famous people in Beverly Hills are secretly voting for him but won’t acknowledge it.
So when celebrities turn against him, he often can’t help but engage. On Sunday, Mr. Trump responded to Taylor Swift’s recent endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in a post on Truth Social that read, simply, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
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