Election 2024 live updates: Trump campaigns on the East Coast; Harris visits Michigan

For the first time at one of her rallies, Harris did not mention Trump by name.

She instead touched on forward-looking themes in her remarks, telling the East Lansing crowd, "Today, I see the promise of America in everyone who is here."

A senior Harris campaign official told NBC News it was the first rally since Harris became the Democratic presidential candidate at which she did not mention Trump by name, saying the strategy is “closing fully positive.”

The Harris campaign has attempted to argue she represents the "politics of joy" and draw a contrast with what it argues is Trump's darker vision for the country.

Harris began her rally in East Lansing, Michigan, by giving a shoutout to Arab American community leaders and addressing the Israel-Hamas war and its toll in Gaza, where over 40,000 Palestinians have died since the war began, and Lebanon.

"We are joined today by leaders of the Arab American community, which has deep and proud roots here in Michigan," Harris said. "And I want to say this year has been difficult given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon. It is devastating."

She said that if she is elected, she would do "everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination."

Michigan has a large Arab American population.

Vance, joined by a notable list of Republican leaders, told supporters that the Republican ticket respects and will represent those who disagree with it as Trump continues to invoke violence and vulgarities against people he perceives as opponents. 

“But you know, if they vote the wrong way, they vote the wrong way, they’re still our fellow citizens. We’re still going to love them, and we’re still going to serve them as best we can do,” Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, told several hundred supporters in a south Philadelphia warehouse. 

Vance then knocked Harris for “attacking her fellow citizens.”

A political video reminded women that they can vote for Harris without telling their husbands, enraging prominent conservatives and reigniting a fiery discourse that highlights the central role of gender in this year’s election.

The video, which began circulating last week, opens with a woman about to enter the polling booth after her husband, looking nervously back at him before she makes her choice. She locks eyes with another woman as they fill out their ballots for Harris.

“In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” actor Julia Roberts narrates, alluding to an ongoing partisan battle over reproductive rights, “you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.”

The women then leave the polling booth to meet their husbands, who presumably cast their votes for Trump.

Read the full story here.

Former Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as former Senate candidate Herschel Walker, are all speaking in Macon. All three lost Senate races in Georgia thanks at least in part to Trump.

A supporter at Trump’s Kinston, North Carolina, rally appeared to yell out, “Pardon the January 6ers!”

“Yeah. … It’s true,” Trump said in response.

Trump has repeatedly indicated his intention to pardon Jan. 6 rioters if he's elected. More than 1,488 defendants had been charged in connection with the riot as of Aug. 6, according to the Justice Department.

The Harris campaign launched more than 57,000 volunteer shifts yesterday, reaching out to voters through door-knocking and phone calls, a senior campaign official told reporters on a call.

Campaigners knocked on more than 1.85 million doors across battleground states, the official said. That included knocking on more than 807,000 doors in Pennsylvania, about 256,000 doors in Michigan and 215,000 doors in Wisconsin. Harris allies have knocked on more than 16 million doors to date, according to the official.

When a reporter asked the official for a reaction to the Des Moines Register poll that showed a close race in Iowa, the official emphasized that the campaign sees the race as "very close." The official also said the campaign has seen undecided voters break in its favor in the closing weeks of the race.

"What we are seeing across the board is energy and momentum. We are seeing that we're closing strong," the official said. "I would not read into it any more than that, and we're certainly just completely laser-focused on our strategy."

At a rally in Kinston, North Carolina, Trump gave a shoutout to Dave McCormick, a Republican running for the Senate in Pennsylvania.

“We have great Republicans running, and you have one of the best ones of all right here, David McCormick, you know that. Where’s David, is he around?” Trump said as he looked for McCormick in the crowd.

McCormick, who is running against Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., rallied with Trump in Pennsylvania earlier today.

Obama slammed Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“If you ask Donald Trump what he’s going do to make health care more affordable, he’s got one answer, and it’s end, repeal the Affordable Care Act,” Obama said. “And he’s not by himself. The other day the speaker of the House, the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said, ‘There would be no Obamacare if Trump wins.’”

Obama said they had been unsuccessful in their efforts because the act works.

A senior Harris campaign official blasted Trump's comments at a rally earlier today, when he talked about shooting through journalists.

"He really is closing his campaign with total darkness and anger," the official said, adding that for Trump, the election is about his own grievances.

The official contrasted Trump's closing message with Harris', saying she is "focused on this optimistic, hopeful future and vision she has for the country."

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris' husband, blasted Trump for his comments at a rally this morning that he "shouldn't have left" the White House in 2021 after Biden won.

"I couldn’t believe it," Emhoff said about Trump's comments.

"Trump and his team are already making unfounded claims of cheating in this election, after the 'big lie,' when they forced all these states under the guise of election integrity to 'strengthen' or make it harder to vote," Emhoff said at a campaign event in Georgia. "Now, they’re still complaining, and we know exactly why they’re pulling these stunts. They’re worried because you’re voting in record numbers."

Miami-Dade County, Florida, has broken its all-time early voting record, Deputy Elections Supervisor Roberto A. Rodríguez said.

In 2020, when the coronavirus was a factor in voting trends, early voting in Miami-Dade totaled 513,646 people. As of 4 p.m. today, early voting in the county was at 580,756 with still hours to go, Rodríguez said.

Overall, over 7.8 million early votes have been cast across Florida by mail or in person. So far, registered Democrats lead vote-by-mail, while early voting in person has been dominated by registered Republicans by nearly 50%. The partisan split is 2,455,483 Republicans and 1,397,420 Democrats for early statewide voting.

Actor Robert De Niro stopped in battleground Pennsylvania today, campaigning on behalf of Harris at a Philadelphia Eagles tailgate.

A spokesperson for the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the Harris campaign organized De Niro’s attendance, but several unions that were set to canvass in the area today described the appearance as "a surprise" on X.

Other users on the platform posted photos and videos of De Niro at the tailgate, describing his remarks as "defending women's rights" and speaking out against Trump.

Obama made a direct appeal to Black and Latino Trump voters in Milwaukee, telling them Trump is not a candidate who would look out for them.

“If you are Black or Latino and you feel like too often your community is overlooked by politicians except during election time, I get how you feel. But why would you think the answer is to vote for someone who has a long history of demeaning and disregarding your community?” Obama said.

He cited Trump’s derogatory claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico’s being an island of garbage.

“Do you think that’s someone who’s gonna look out for you?” Obama said.

Trump leaned heavily into claims of election fraud today and appeared to call for violence against the members of the media at his rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, continuing an almost decadelong streak of attacking the media.

Speaking about the bulletproof glass positioned in front of his lectern, Trump said that for a bullet to hit him in an attempted assassination, a shooter would have to “shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.”

“I have a piece of glass over here, and I don’t have a piece of glass there, and I have this piece of glass here,” Trump said, pointing out the glass around his lectern, which has become common since he survived two assassination attempts this year, one of them at a similar outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“All we have really over here is the fake news,” Trump added. “And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much.”

Read the full story here.

Trump will end the day with a rally in Macon, Georgia — he's running late and speaking right now in North Carolina.

Already onsite at the Georgia event is Herschel Walker, who told NBC News he will speak at the rally.

Walker made a failed run for the Senate in 2022, losing to Democrat Raphael Warnock. Walker's campaign was plagued by controversy, and Republicans bemoaned it as part of the reason the party failed to capture the Senate in the midterms despite early predictions it would.

In a statement, Democratic National Committee spokesperson Alex Floyd criticized Trump's comments at a rally this morning where the former president spoke about shooting at the press, writing, “Donald Trump is closing out his campaign by telling the American people exactly what he has planned in a second term: threats of violence against the media, attacks on our democracy, and claiming he ‘shouldn’t have left’ the White House after he lost by over seven million votes in 2020."

Floyd characterized Trump's speech as "unhinged ramblings and dangerous rhetoric" and called the former president "unfit to lead."

Obama told undecided voters in Milwaukee that Trump's economic policies will favor billionaires and big corporations, and that if people remember the economy being good when Trump first came into office, that’s because Obama left him a good economy.

"Now, some people might hear that and then say to themselves, 'Well I remember the economy being pretty good when he first came into office.' It was — because it was my economy," Obama said.

"I had spent eight years cleaning up the mess that Republicans left me," he added.

He added that people shouldn't be fooled by low gas prices during the Trump presidency, highlighting that gas prices hit an all-time low when people were not driving, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a phone interview with ABC News on Sunday, Trump declared that he had "a substantial lead" in polling and predicted the winner of the election would be declared on election night. Trump also said there's a possibility he could lose.

Asked if there was a chance he could lose, Trump told ABC's Jonathan Karl, “Yeah, I guess, you know, I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right?”

“But I think I have a pretty substantial lead, but, you could say, yeah, yeah, you could lose. Bad things could happen. You know, things happen, but it’s going to be interesting," he added.

Harris made some retail campaign stops in Michigan today, including talking with voters at a Black-owned barbershop in Pontiac. It's the second barbershop she's visited in the closing days of the campaign, as she tries to raise her standing with Black men.

She gave brief remarks as she left.

“This is a fight that is not against something as it is for something," Harris said.

The final national NBC News poll of the 2024 presidential campaign finds a neck and neck contest defined by clashing forces that have aided both Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump in their pursuit of the White House.

Taken together, the poll shows Harris getting support from 49% of registered voters in a head-to-head matchup, while Trump gets an identical 49%. Just 2% of voters say they’re unsure about the choice.

Boosting Harris: rising Democratic enthusiasm, a 20-point lead over Trump on the issue of abortion, and an advantage for Harris on which candidate better looks out for the middle class.

Helping Trump: two-thirds of voters who believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, a favorable assessment of Trump’s presidency — especially compared with President Joe Biden’s current performance — and Trump’s double-digit advantage on the economy and the cost of living.

Read the full story here.

During a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump spread falsehoods about mail-in ballots in Lancaster filled out with "the exact same penmanship."

"In Lancaster, they found 2,600 ballots, all done and by the same hand. In other words, the same exact penmanship, the same hand, the same everything," Trump told the crowd.

"It was all done by the same pen, the exact same pen. And then they go and they say, 'Well, this is a conspiracy theorist.' It’s a terrible thing that’s happened to our country," he added.

It appears that Trump was referring to a case in Lancaster County where officials discovered 2,500 voter registration forms, not ballots, that appeared to be fraudulent.

A spokesperson for Lancaster County did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During an interview on MSNBC's "Inside with Jen Psaki," former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Trump's comments that he "wouldn't mind" if someone shot through the media at one of his rallies were "further indication of his cognitive degeneration."

"I think that what the ex-president just said is further indication of his cognitive degeneration," Pelosi, 84, told Psaki.

"He can’t last as president for four years with his brain deteriorating at the rate that it is, and it's clearly evident," Pelosi added.

At a rally in Pennsylvania today, Trump said he should not have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden was sworn in.

"The day that I left, I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well," the former president told supporters.

Harris, speaking to reporters after attending a church service in Detroit, said she completed her ballot and mailed it back to California, where she is registered to vote.

That means Harris will forgo traveling back to her home state and the classic image of the candidate entering the voting booth.

And it didn't mean that she was willing to say how she voted on a ballot measure in California that has become controversial. Proposition 36 would toughen penalties on some nonviolent crimes, reversing a proposition passed a decade ago that was meant to reform the justice system and help reduce mass incarceration.

"I am not going to talk about the vote on that," Harris said when asked how she voted on Proposition 36. "Because, honestly, it's the Sunday before the election, and I don't intend to create an endorsement one way or another around it."

While railing against the election system and calling for voting to occur on just one day, Trump called Harris and Democrats "corrupt."

"It’s all corrupt. She’s corrupt. She’s a corrupt person. I’m running against a totally corrupt person," he told attendees at a Pennsylvania rally this morning. "And I’m really not running against her. I’m running against a corrupt machine called the Democrat Party."

Later, Trump said it was unfair that Harris was chosen as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, saying it was "ripped away" from President Joe Biden, calling him a "poor, stupid guy."

At one of his final rallies of the campaign, Trump in Lancaster is railing against early voting, saying voting should be “one day” and calling for the use of “paper ballots” only.

You “oughta go to paper ballots and voter ID, you oughta have the election over at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” Trump told attendees.

Earlier in the program, a lot of hands in the crowd shot up when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders asked the crowd if they'd already voted by mail.

"It’s a damn shame, and I’m the only one that talks about it," Trump added about his call for Election Day voting only. "Everyone’s afraid to damn talk about it, and then they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist."

During an interview Sunday with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., dialed down fears that Black male voters may turn out in higher numbers for Trump than ever before.

"I was in Michigan a couple weeks ago, in a Black fraternity house, my own fraternity. I’ve spent time in barbershops. I’ve been encountering folks, obviously in my church, and other churches. And there is momentum for Kamala Harris, and the more voters hear about her, including Black men, the more they they like her," Warnock said.

"Let me tell you something. Black men are not going to show up in droves and waves voting for Donald Trump," he added. "They’re not, and it’s because they know who he is." The Georgia senator pointed to Trump's actions in the late 1980s against a group of Black and Latino men nicknamed the "Central Park Five" who were accused of raping a jogger and were later exonerated.

As voters head to the polls for Tuesday’s elections, they will also be electing a new Congress. And whichever party wins control of the House and Senate will get to decide how to handle a slew of consequential policy matters.

Whether it’s expiring tax cuts and health care subsidies, another round of government funding or must-pass measures like a debt limit extension and a new farm bill, Congress will have its hands full.

Read the full story here.

Standing inside a sparsely filled federal courtroom in Washington yesterday afternoon, another Trump supporter who committed crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, because he believed the then-president’s election lies was sentenced to prison for participating in what his sentencing judge described as “a direct attack on the nation’s democracy.”

Wearing a blue suit as he shook, sniffled and fought back tears, 38-year-old Troy Weeks talked extensively about his rough childhood, bragged that he refused to take part in a walkout when he was in high school, quoted scripture and apologized to one of the few people in the courtroom gallery: former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, a military veteran who was repeatedly assaulted while protecting the Capitol nearly four years ago.

Read the full story here.