Election 2024 live updates: Trump and Harris campaign in the Rust Belt

In the final lead up to the 2024 presidential election, the issue of health care is taking the spotlight with Harris and Trump offering very different plans when it comes to the Affordable Care Act. It comes as Trump says he plans to tap Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the nation’s public health agencies. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for TODAY.

The handful of Americans who have won $1 million checks from tech billionaire Elon Musk’s super PAC have a few things in common. 

Per the giveaway’s stated rules, they are all registered voters, according to public records. They all live in presidential battleground states, according to the same records. And presumably they have all signed Musk’s petition “in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” — a requirement to win the lottery-style contest, although their signatures on the petition aren’t public. 

And an analysis of the winners shows at least one other similarity: Almost all of them are registered Republicans or appear to be Republican-leaning. 

Read the fully story here.

Marking their first campaign trail appearance together, Donald Trump Jr. in remarks to Vance defended his father’s violent comment about Liz Cheney during an appearance at a rally in eastern North Carolina.

“My father says it’s strange — if Liz Cheney wants to be in all of these wars, she should pick up arms,” Trump Jr. said. “But it seems like the people that get us in the wars never seem to be the people fighting them. The media says Donald Trump thinks that Liz Cheney should be shot. But that’s what we’re dealing with, right? They have nothing else.”

At a rally yesterday in Arizona, Trump said the former member of Congress from Wyoming would not be a “war hawk” if she were to have guns “trained on her face.” Cheney, an outspoken Republican critic of the former president, is backing Harris’ presidential bid.

The Supreme Court today handed a loss to Republicans by allowing Pennsylvania voters who sent mail-in ballots that were flagged as being potentially defective to submit a separate provisional in-person ballot.

The justices with no noted dissents rejected a Republican request to put on hold a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling from last week.

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote a brief statement saying that although it is an issue of “considerable importance” there were several reasons for the court to not get involved at this stage. His statement was joined by two other conservatives, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Read the full story here.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was asked today at an event in New York with politically vulnerable Rep. Brandon Williams, R-N.Y., whether Republicans will seek to repeal the CHIPS and Science Act if they win both the White House and control of Congress next week.

“I expect that we probably will,” Johnson said, according to video posted by journalist Luke Radel.

When Williams was asked to weigh in, he disagreed, saying that "the CHIPS Act is hugely impactful here." He vowed to “remind” Johnson “night and day” about the importance of the law.

Harris reacted with surprise when the Little Chute, Wisconsin, crowd overwhelmingly indicated it had voted early.

"So let me ask: We're four days out. Who here has already voted?"

When the crowd roared in response, she replied, "Oh wow! Oh my goodness! That's great! Thank you."

Trump doubled down on his criticism of former Rep. Liz Cheney during his rally in Warren, Michigan, saying that she "wants war" but isn't brave enough to fight in one.

"But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her, she wouldn't have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye," Trump said.

"Liz Cheney wouldn't fight," he added later. "I'll go with her. I'll go to the Middle East, I'll go wherever she wants, and we'll fight. She doesn't have the guts to fight."

Democrats have at times accused Trump of faking a disability to avoid the Vietnam War drafts. In 2016, it was reported that during the war, Trump received four service deferments for education and one for a bone spurs diagnosis.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney called on former President George W. Bush to speak out about the election.

Cheney, who has attracted attacks from Trump since she endorsed the Democratic nominee, said it was not difficult for her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to announce his support for Harris and called on Bush to follow suit.

“He has been absolutely, I would say, as concerned for maybe even longer than I have been about the danger that Donald Trump poses, and I can’t explain why George W. Bush hasn’t spoken out, but I think it’s time, and I wish that he would,” Cheney said during a live interview today on The New Yorker’s Radio Hour podcast.

A Georgia judge ordered the 3,000 late-delivered mail ballots should be accepted up to three days past Election Day after Cobb County election officials failed to send the ballots to voters on time. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Georgia, and Southern Poverty Law Center sued this morning seeking additional relief for the voters after the county acknowledged it had failed to send them in the time frame required by law.

An appeal is likely.

In Green Bay on Wednesday, Trump donned an orange vest and climbed into a garbage truck to try to highlight a gaffe President Joe Biden made just the day before.

Nearly 160 miles away in Madison, Vice President Kamala Harris stepped onstage to thousands of screaming students and vowed she would chart a new way forward.

Read the full story here.

Four secretaries of state — Arizona's Adrian Fontes, a Democrat; Michigan's Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat; New Hampshire's David Scanlan, a Republican; and Kentucky's Michael Adams, a Republican — joined NBC News' "Meet the Press NOW" to discuss threats to election workers ahead of Election Day.

"Just today, we’ve gotten reports about the potential for disturbances on Election Day throughout the northern part of our state. We’re ready, and we have partnerships with law enforcement and others to protect the people who protect democracy," Benson said.

Scanlan added that while he's not aware of any public threats to election workers in his state, "we’re not being complacent about that either."

"We’re fortunate in New Hampshire that we are a small, friendly state, and I am not aware of any threats in polling places that are being spoken about publicly, but we’re not being complacent about that either," he said.

Walz said during an interview today that he doesn't expect Trump to accept the 2024 presidential election results.

"I don’t expect he will accept it. But that’s too bad for him because we’ll win," Walz said during a SiriusXM interview set to air in full this evening, adding that there are "protections in place" to ensure that the results are respected.

Walz also responded to Trump's recent comment suggesting that former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., would not be such a “war hawk” if she had guns “trained on her face."

"Well, it’s sickening but not surprising. This is exactly what he does," Walz told host Zerlina Maxwell. "But the good news is, is that there’s an antidote to this. The firewall that is voting for Kamala Harris is how we stop this."

In the days before the election, a political group has launched ads in Washington, D.C., with an unusual target: Fox News executives.  

Set to music reminiscent of the score from the TV show “Succession,” the slickly produced ad features footage of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol along with Rupert Murdoch and other Fox News personalities.  

“Two plus two is four, the Earth is round. Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Only one of those statements is a lie — a lie that Fox News and others repeated hundreds of times,” the ad says. “A lie that led to death threats against election workers, violence on Jan. 6, and untold losses for people and companies who make our elections the cleanest to the world.”

A dark-money group registered in Wyoming named “2 +2 = 4 LLC” — meaning they do not have to make public their donors — is funding the ad that was quietly launched in the weeks leading up to the election. 

“An anonymous extreme left-wing group’s effort to fundraise off Smartmatic’s lawsuit is entirely predictable and we remain ready to defend this case surrounding highly newsworthy events when it goes to trial next year,” a spokesperson for Fox News said. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims against FOX News are highly implausible, disconnected from reality and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

"Meet the Press" moderator Kristen Welker joins "TODAY" to break down what to expect for the final weekend of the 2024 presidential campaign and the growing gender gap in the race for the White House.

Angelica Solís, 47, an L.A.-based nonprofit education executive and mom of two school-age children, was preparing for her evening set of phone calls to Arizona voters in support of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Solís said she was surprised to find her brother and other male Latinos in her family were leaning right and voting for Trump when the family had traditionally voted Democratic. “I try to share information; if there is a new news story or data about Trump’s tax plan, I share that,” said Solís, whose family is of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage. 

Solís herself reached out to the Harris campaign to volunteer. It’s her level of enthusiasm that Democratic-leaning and progressive groups have been harnessing to make Latinas electoral influencers, either in support of Harris or to mobilize voters on issues or ballot measures such as those protecting abortion rights. 

The push is especially relevant as the neck-and-neck race between Harris and Trump has revealed a pronounced gender divide: According to a national NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll, Latino men are evenly divided on voting preferences, with Harris and Trump each getting 47% support. But this is not the case with women; Harris holds a 26-point lead among Latinas.  

Much speculation has centered on whether Black male voters are peeling away from the Democratic ticket and supporting Trump.

Eric Holder, who was the first Black U.S. attorney general, was in Philadelphia today speaking to Harris supporters as they prepared to canvass neighborhoods on her behalf. Holder later told reporters he believes the Black vote has come home and will turn out in the numbers she needs to win.

“There were early on concerns about participation of Black men,” Holder said. “The polling I’ve seen recently and the early vote I’ve seen indicate that we’re pretty much where I would expect we’ll be, and I think we’ll do even better over the course of the next four days.”

During his first campaign event of the day, Vance was quick to slam Harris over today’s jobs report during his prepared remarks.

“While Kamala Harris goes out there and brags about the economy being great, we’ve got Michigan families who can’t afford the price of groceries, and importantly, over the last month, our country lost 28,000 private sector jobs — and it actually gets even worse than that. We lost 46,000 manufacturing jobs,” Vance told a crowd of several hundred supporters inside a western Michigan airplane hangar.

Despite the senator’s assertion that the Biden administration singlehandedly lost those jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report painted a more nuanced picture of the flat line in job growth. The report indicated 44,000 of the 46,000 fewer manufacturing jobs were largely due to the Boeing’s machinists strike while other industries were likely affected by back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast, adding that it was “not possible to quantity” the overall impact.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said Friday that her office is investigating whether Trump’s violent remarks about Liz Cheney broke the law.

“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes, a Democrat, said during a taping of “Sunday Square Off” on 12NEWS in Phoenix.

“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” Mayes told the NBC affiliate.

Read the full story here.

Trump will swing through four cities in battleground states on Monday for his last day of in-person campaigning before the general election.

The former president will deliver remarks at 10 a.m. in Raleigh, North Carolina, before traveling to Reading, Pennsylvania, for a rally at 2 p.m. Trump will then go to Pittsburgh for a 6 p.m. rally and at 10:30 p.m., cap off the evening in Grand Rapids, Michigan — his last campaign stop in 2016 and 2020.

At a stop in Dearborn, Michigan, Trump, standing beside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that the former independent presidential candidate would serve a role in healthcare in his administration.

"We'll be talking about a lot of things, but he's gonna have a big role in healthcare, very big," Trump said. "He knows it better than anybody, views that I happen to agree with very strongly, and I have for a long time."

Trump last night said that Kennedy Jr. could do "anything he wants" in his administration. NBC News reported yesterday that one role Kennedy Jr. could play is leading a task force on childhood chronic diseases.

Rapper Sexxy Red endorsed Harris today in a new post on X, citing reproductive rights as being among the reasons for her support.

The rapper’s endorsement marks a striking about-face after she previously indicated in media interviews that she planned to vote for Donald Trump, in part for the role he played in the distribution of stimulus checks during the pandemic.

Her merch is also inspired by Trump's campaign, as she sells hats that say "Make America Sexxy Again."

Trump is facing backlash for comments he made about former Rep. Liz Cheney where he suggested she would not be such a "war hawk" if she had firearms trained on her. NBC’s Peter Alexander reports for TODAY.

Durham County, North Carolina Election Chief Derek Bowens said today on MSNBC that polling staff have alert badges to notify emergency services if they are needed.

"They can discreetly notify emergency services if they get in a situation where they need to do that. We’ll also have regular patrols around our polling places. We’ll have activation of our emergency operations center to respond to any incidents that may occur," he said.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is traveling on Trump's plane today, per a post by Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt. This comes after Trump’s remarks last night that Kennedy Jr. can “do anything he wants” in Trump’s administration.

“He wants to look at the vaccines. He wants—everything. I think it’s great,” Trump said last night in Arizona.

Trump is traveling alongside Schmitt and Kennedy Jr. to Michigan and Wisconsin.

Exhausting as the campaign trail must be, Tim Walz, is finding ways to make it entertaining — for his audience and, presumably, himself.

Walz spoke for 20 minutes at a rally in suburban Philadelphia yesterday and worked in a few tart digs at Trump that delighted the crowd.

The Trump-Vance ticket, said Walz, knows nothing about how to create manufacturing jobs. “The only thing these guys manufacture is bull---- on a daily basis,” he said.

Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., defended an ad he launched in the stretch run of the campaign that promoted his independent bonafides, which included footage of Trump and noted areas of agreement between the two men.

Speaking after a canvassing launch in Castle Shannon yesterday, Casey said voters “are very smart” and can understand the difference between how he is campaigning and Harris’ argument against re-electing Trump.

“I know as much about how voters think in the state as anybody alive,” he told NBC News. “And they’re really smart. They know that when you run for public office, especially as an incumbent with a record, that part of your responsibility is to tell people about your record, and that means the whole record.”

The ad, titled “Bliss,” features footage of Trump while noting that Casey, who is locked in a tight race against Republican Senate nominee Dave McCormick, “sided with Trump on NAFTA and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating.”

According to Harris campaign senior officials, they “fully expect” Trump to declare victory before the votes are counted on Election Night.

“I’ll just say it won’t work. He did this before. It failed. If he does it again, it will fail," they said.

The comment marks the first time that the Harris campaign has explicitly said they expect Trump to declare victory prior to votes being counted. Asked last week by NBC'S Hallie Jackson if she was preparing for Trump to declare victory before the election was called Harris said "of course."

Trump is making stops in Michigan and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Last week, a video popped up on social media falsely claiming to show someone ripping up ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In a matter of hours, the clip went viral, pulling in hundreds of thousands of views after a now-deleted post on X. 

In a break with past practice, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials decided to quickly issue a statement the day after the video appeared, saying Russian operatives “manufactured and amplified” the material as part of a wider campaign to divide Americans and “raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election.”

The swift response underscored how intelligence and FBI officials have forged a new strategy to combat the onslaught of false information from Russia and other foreign adversaries. 

Scarred by their experience eight years ago when a Kremlin election interference campaign caught federal authorities off guard, intelligence agencies and the Justice Department are moving faster to expose and disrupt disinformation operations to try to knock foreign actors off balance, according to current and former officials.

Read the full story here.

Russia created a video falsely claiming a Haitian immigrant voted illegally in the state of Georgia with fake identification in a bid to undercut Americans’ confidence in the integrity of the country’s elections, a top U.S. cybersecurity official told MSNBC on Friday.

“The team came together to do a forensic analysis and an assessment, and we can definitively report that it is Russian produced and specifically designed to go viral, to undermine American confidence in the security and integrity of our elections,” said Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, when asked about the video.

Easterly said she expected more attempts by Russia and foreign adversaries to spread false information ahead of Election Day.

Pennsylvania's secretary of the commonwealth Al Schmidt told MSNBC today he has “absolute confidence” in the state’s election officials after he was asked about the Trump campaign’s and Republican lawsuits alleging improper election procedures.

“I’ve met with Democrats, I’ve met with Republicans, I’ve met with every election professional and civil servant involved with election administration in Pennsylvania,” Schmidt said. “I have absolute confidence that they are doing everything by the book and on the level.”

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit against elections officials in Bucks County claiming that voters seeking mail-in ballots were improperly turned away. A judge then extended the deadline to request a mail-in ballot in the county until today.

Trump and his allies have ramped up claims of purported election irregularities in the critical battleground state, amplifying videos of voters waiting in long lines in Bucks County and officials shutting down lines to allege wrongdoing.

Pennsylvania doesn’t offer in-person early voting; instead, election officials allow voters to return their mail ballots early in person at county elections offices. Officials have shut down lines in midafternoon so that the office can close as scheduled at 5 p.m., Bucks County spokesman James O’Malley said Tuesday.

Schmidt said today that “[misinformation] does harm not only confidence in our electoral system, but it also attempts to interfere with it by threatening the people, these friends and neighbors and professional civil servants who are counting your vote in our democracy and are in no way deserving of the sort of threats, violence and intimidation that they receive."

The Justice Deparment's Civil Rights Division announced today that it will field complaints from the public on Election Day related to potential violations of federal voting rights laws.

The division plans to focus on 86 jurisdictions in 27 states, including in battleground states such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Its staff is tasked with monitoring to "protect the rights of all eligible citizens to access the ballot" and ensure people aren't being disenfranchised or intimidated based on race, religion and other attributes, and that voters with disabilities have voting access as well, the division said in a news release.

A list of the jurisdictions can be found here.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced today that the voting machine passwords that were accidentally leaked on a state website have been updated.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a news release, “All of the passwords in affected counties have been changed," and she thanked Polis "for deploying extra state resources to help in this effort.”  

“Colorado has countless layers of security to ensure our elections are free and fair, and every eligible voter should know their ballot will be counted as cast," Griswold added.

The passwords were left on a spreadsheet online, Griswold said earlier this week. The disclosure did not pose a security threat to Colorado's elections and it did not impact how ballots are counted, she said. The password changes were made out of an abundance of caution, their offices said, and after Trump's campaign sent a letter to her office to demand security measures be instituted after the error.

A Pennsylvania volunteer fire department has issued an apology after a float appeared at its annual Halloween parade which had a Harris lookalike with her hands bound and chained to a golf cart carrying somebody wearing a Trump mask.

The float, which was seen cruising down Main Street in Mount Pleasant Township, Pennsylvania, Wednesday night was flanked by several people dressed as Secret Service agents and there was a fake sniper rifle on the top of the vehicle, WPXI-TV, the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh, reported.

“The worst part of it was that there was either a rope or a chain attached to the back of the vehicle, and there was a woman who was to resemble Kamala Harris in handcuffs and chained to the back of the vehicle as though they were dragging her,” Mount Pleasant Mayor Diane Bailey told WPXI-TV.

The Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, which has sponsored the parade for 70 years, issued an apology yesterday.

An election official in Clark County, Washington, said that all but a handful of the hundreds of ballots destroyed after someone set fire to a drop box early Monday in the city of Vancouver have been identified.

Officials retrieved 494 ballots from the box, and 488 had enough information on them to identify the voter and send them a replacement ballot, county auditor Greg Kimsey said today on MSNBC. The remaining six, however, were too damaged, and the office is urging voters who may have placed their ballot in that box last weekend to reach out to the office if they haven't received a replacement.

Authorities are searching for a suspect believed to be connected to a similar fire involving a ballot drop box in neighboring Portland, Oregon. The suspect is described as someone "highly knowledgeable in both metal fabrication and welding," according to Portland police.

Crime Stoppers is offering a $2,500 cash reward for information leading to an arrest.

New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a "consumer alert" this morning warning voters not to rely on artificial intelligence chatbots for information on when and where to vote.

James said her office tested AI chatbots and "found many providing false or misleading information about voting, threatening New Yorkers’ ability to exercise their right to vote."

In some instances, the chatbots gave incorrect information about the deadline to register to vote, while in other instances they gave incorrect information about which locations were open for early voting, the AG's office said.

"With early voting underway and Election Day just around the corner, I urge voters to be cautious and seek reliable information about the election only from official sources,” James said.

In a rare moment of unity surrounding election litigation, the Republican Party of Pennsylvania has signed onto a lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania.

The state Democrats sued Erie County Board of Elections on Wednesday, alleging that as many as 20,000 voters did not receive their mail ballots and that more than 300 voters had received incorrect or duplicate ballots. Today, Republicans joined the suit.

It’s an unusual bipartisan effort around election-related litigation, which has often pitted the parties against each other, and a sign of how seriously Republicans are courting mail ballots in this cycle after disparaging them in 2020.  

Erie County Clerk Karen Chillcott told NBC News yesterday that the ballot printing vendor and U.S. Postal Service were conducting an audit to uncover who was at fault for the missing ballots, noting that she and her office were incredibly disappointed that these failures had occurred.

“I think it’s great that there’s bipartisan support and there’s a voice from both major parties,” she said. “Everybody can have confidence that everything we can do, we are doing, and any ideas that either party has is being considered.”

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was almost killed in a shooting in 2011 and founded the gun violence prevention group Giffords, denounced Trump in a statement this morning after he suggested that Liz Cheney wouldn't be a war hawk if she had guns pointed at her.

“Declaring that a person should be shot and killed simply for supporting a different candidate is un-American. Any Republican who claims to respect the constitution and rule of law has a responsibility to speak out against Donald Trump’s dangerous comments immediately," Giffords said in a statement.

“I was shot and nearly killed for serving the people of Arizona," she continued. “As a survivor of political violence, I ask my fellow Arizonans and American patriots to reject Trump’s calls for violence and retribution. Let’s elect Kamala Harris and put this dark chapter behind us once and for all.” 

At an event with Tucker Carlson last night, Trump said of Cheney, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face — you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, 'Oh, gee ... let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.' But she’s a stupid person."

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff said in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last night that personal attacks on Harris make him mad, but said they can’t be provoked by it.

“As a husband, it pisses me off,” he said when asked how it feels when Trump attacks Harris’ intelligence. “But as a first gentleman, you know, someone who hopes to be the first gentleman, married to the next president of the United States, we cannot be distracted by it. So, no matter how I feel about it as her husband, I’ve got to put it to the side so we don’t get distracted, so we focus on this mission of getting her elected.”

“We’re not going to let anything get in our way,” he added.

Trump fans at a campaign rally in Nevada last night dressed up in fluorescent safety vests and trash bags in reference to comments from President Joe Biden, who earlier this week appeared to call supporters of the former president "garbage."

The White House has said Biden was referring to a racist joke made by a comedian at Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden, not supporters of the GOP nominee. Trump and his allies have nonetheless used Biden's words to attack Democrats. Two days ago, Trump rode around in a garbage truck and then spoke at a rally in Wisconsin while wearing an orange safety vest.

Donald Trump Jr., the former president's eldest son, and Megyn Kelly, a conservative media personality, tweeted photos of themselves wrapped in trash bags. "Happy Halloween Garbage People!" Kelly wrote.

Trump routinely disparages Democrats in harsh terms. In the wake of the incendiary Madison Square Garden rally, the former president's campaign has drawn harsh criticism for booking the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage."

Trump vowed to protect Hindu Americans and strengthen ties with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a message for the religious festival of Diwali.

In a post yesterday on his Truth Social account, Trump said he strongly condemned “the barbaric violence against the Hindus, Christians and other minorities who are getting attacked and looted by mobs in Bangladesh,” where there have been reports of violence against religious minority groups after the South Asian country’s India-backed leader was ousted by protests in August.

Trump said the violence would not have happened on his watch and that Biden and Harris, who is of Indian heritage, “have ignored Hindus across the world and in America.”

He also said he would “protect Hindu Americans against the anti-religion agenda of the radical left” and strengthen U.S. ties with his “good friend” Modi, a Hindu nationalist.

Indian Americans, who are now the biggest Asian-alone group in the U.S., are an increasingly powerful political constituency. Though they tend to vote Democratic, 1 in 3 Indian Americans intend to vote for Trump, according to a survey published this week by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

At Harris’s rally in Las Vegas last night, Jennifer Lopez addressed the comments made at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally earlier this week about Puerto Rico. Lopez added that Latinos make a “difference” in the election when united.

Election officials in Cobb County, Georgia, missed a deadline to send at least 3,000 mail ballots to voters, according to a new lawsuit shared first with NBC News.

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Georgia, and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed suit against election officials in Cobb County, Georgia this morning, seeking relief for more than 3,000 voters who did not get their ballots mailed to them on time.

The ballots were requested before the statutory deadline, but the lawsuit says the county acknowledged it failed to mail them all in a timely fashion.

American political activists on the left and the right are using networks of social media followers that behave like bots to rapidly spread conspiracy theories embraced by significant segments of the U.S. population, according to a new report by a disinformation research group.

The bogus claim that the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was staged and the lie that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets in Ohio were spread across social media platforms in a remarkably similar fashion. Both were spread by groups of linked accounts engaging in “coordinated, inauthentic behavior,” says the report, “The Botification of the Americans Mind,” by Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI.

While such sophisticated disinformation tactics are often associated with foreign actors such as Russia, Iran or China, the report highlights a troubling domestic trend: Americans themselves are deploying the techniques to spread malicious falsehoods designed to manipulate and polarize public opinion.

Read the full story here.

Nine Republican operatives and canvassers connected to the Elon Musk-backed America PAC told NBC News that they’re worried the high-profile grassroots operation on behalf of Trump’s presidential bid may hamper his chances in states decided by slim margins. 

America PAC has been tasked with much of the pro-Trump canvassing operation as his campaign focuses its efforts on a more limited effort targeting so-called low-propensity voters. In turn, the Musk-backed organization is going door to door in all of the major swing states to help turn out Trump supporters and have them fill out surveys about their voting intentions.

But the people who spoke to NBC News, many of whom have years of experience in GOP field operations, said the operation may not be the well-oiled machine many in the party might hope it is, especially considering how much money is behind the effort. 

In particular, they raised concerns about canvassers’ submitting an inordinate amount of suspect data. That data, some of which NBC News has reviewed, includes entries submitted far from the home or while canvassers are logged into Wi-Fi networks — telltale signs that a door was not knocked on, sources said. In addition, a video explaining how to “spoof” one’s location while submitting data drew attention in Nevada and Arizona, raising further concerns. 

Read the full story here.

HONG KONG — With the presidential race a dead heat in the last days before the election, Democrats and Republicans are seeking votes not just in every corner of the United States, but also around the world.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) estimates there are almost 3 million eligible American voters living outside the U.S., including tens of thousands of U.S. service members and their families.

Voter turnout among this group is low — less than 8% in the 2020 presidential election, according to FVAP, compared with almost 67% overall. That is largely due to confusion and difficulties regarding how to request and return ballots, with each state having different rules and deadlines that can include allowing ballots to be returned by email or fax.

Still, the votes of overseas Americans are important enough that both parties are courting them, and some Republican lawsuits have sought to block them.

Read the full story here.

The election has already been filled with eye-popping and historically unusual events. One other potential scenario looms this fall: the “contingent election” of the president and the vice president that would happen if no one can secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidential election. 

That has not happened in the modern era, but there are a few conceivable (if unlikely) paths across the Electoral College map that could lead to Trump and Harris ending the race tied at 269 electoral votes.

Some of those scenarios include Republicans’ winning all of Nebraska’s votes, an uphill battle because the state doles out a vote to the winner of each of its congressional districts and Harris is favored to win in the Omaha-area 2nd District. (That’s why Republicans briefly, and unsuccessfully, sought to change Nebraska’s rules and make it a winner-take-all state.) And it’s much less likely that a third-party candidate will win electoral votes and prevent someone else from getting a majority or that faithless electors will refuse to support a candidate, with the same end result.

In the event of a tie, Congress would decide the next president.

Read the full story here.

Four years ago, Trump used his bully pulpit to spread lies about the election, leading his supporters to act on their belief in mass voter fraud and eventually attack the U.S. Capitol.

With days to go before the 2024 election, Trump and his allies are running a similar playbook, priming his voters to believe the election may be “rigged.”

In addition to domestic disinformation campaigns, foreign government influence operations, overseas terrorist groups and domestic extremists are all simultaneously trying to exploit the election for their own gain, according to dozens of pages of law enforcement documents and months of reporting by NBC News.

“We’ve been describing the threat environment as everything, everywhere, all at once,” the New York City Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, Rebecca Weiner, said in an interview, describing the overall threat environment.

GLENDALE, Ariz. — At an on-stage event dominated by extensive rambling and derogatory attacks against his opponents, Trump — just four days out from Election Day — suggested that one of his top Republican critics would not be such a “war hawk” if she had guns pointed at her.

Trump, sitting in a chair next to right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson for what was billed as a live interview event, told an arena of thousands of supporters yesterday that President Joe Biden was a “stupid bastard” and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, was “a sleaze bag.”

He also said that he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, “do anything he wants” in his second administration related to health care policy, noting that his newfound political ally “wants to look at the vaccines.”

“He really wants to with the pesticides and the, you know, all the different things. I said, he can do it,” Trump said of the former independent presidential candidate. “He can do anything he wants. He wants to look at the vaccines. He wants — everything. I think it’s great,” Trump continued. 

But the former president, no stranger to personal attacks, reserved his most violent comments for former Rep. Liz Cheney.

In a lengthy and uncompromising riff on Cheney, Trump seemed to insinuate that the former congresswoman would be less of a “war hawk” — as Trump referred to her — if she was in a war herself with guns “trained on her face.”

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know when the guns are trained on her face — you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building,” Trump continued. 

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With Trump floating higher and more far-reaching tariffs if he’s elected to a new term, small businesses that sell everything from bikes to beer are nervous about another cost hike that they’d have to pass on to customers.

Chris Smith, the co-founder of Virginia Beer Co. in Williamsburg, Virginia, remembers when he first spotted a 5.5% surcharge on a statement from one of his suppliers, a U.S.-based seller of tap handles manufactured in China. The fee turned up in September 2019, after Trump placed 25% tariffs on steel, and hasn’t gone away since.

Smith spends anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 each year on tap handles emblazoned with the names of his beers — with about $1,000 of that covering the cost of the tariff. He sells them to distributors that get them placed in bars and restaurants that sell his draft beers, increasing the price to cover the tariff surcharges.

“The beer business specifically is a low-margin, high-volume business,” he said. “We don’t have the volumes that a major player has just by virtue of our size.”

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A state appeals court in New York yesterday suspended Kenneth Chesebro, who struck a plea deal with prosecutors pursuing the 2020 election interference case against Trump, from practicing law there.

In a ruling, the court found that Chesebro’s felony conviction in his criminal indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, over his efforts to overturn Trump’s election loss in that state “categorically meets the definition of a serious crime in this state” and warranted the decision to bar him from practicing law in New York.

His suspension was “effective immediately, and until further order” of the court, according to the ruling.

Chesebro was indicted in Fulton County in August 2023 along with Trump and 17 other co-defendants in connection with efforts to overturn the Trump’s defeat in the state to Joe Biden. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

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Trump sued CBS yesterday over an interview of Harris aired on its “60 Minutes” news program in early October that the lawsuit alleged was misleading, according to a court filing.

The complaint, filed in federal court in the Northern District of Texas, alleges the network aired two different responses from Harris responding to a question about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

The version that aired during the “60 Minutes” program on Oct. 6 did not include what the lawsuit calls a “word salad” response from Harris about the Biden administration’s influence on Israel’s conduct of the war.

“Former President Trump’s repeated claims against 60 Minutes are false,” a CBS News spokesperson said. “The lawsuit Trump has brought today against CBS is completely without merit and we will vigorously defend against it.”

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With nearly 60 million ballots already cast, everyone interested in the presidential election is trying to figure out where the race stands.

Despite so many votes having been cast, it is hard to know what it means. Many more people have yet to vote, and exactly how many there will be or how they will split are unknown. But there is one measure in the early voting data that could be more suggestive about the final results: the number of new voters who have already voted.

An NBC News Decision Desk analysis of state voter data shows that as of Oct. 30, there are signs of an influx of new female Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and new male Republican voters in Arizona, two of the most important swing states.

The early votes of new voters — voters who did not show up in 2020 — are of particular interest because they are votes that could change what happens in 2024 relative to the last presidential election. (Who voted in 2020 and doesn’t show up this time is also important, but it’s impossible to know before Election Day.)

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Harris will zero in on the swing state of Wisconsin today. Her first rally will be in Appleton and her second rally is in Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee rally will feature musical performances as part of a get-out-the-vote effort.

Walz is set to campaign in three cities in Michigan: Detroit, Flint and Traverse City.

Trump will hit the campaign trail in the Midwest today, heading first to Warren, Michigan, for a rally.

Later, he will travel to Milwaukee for another rally.

Vance is set to hold campaign events in Michigan and North Carolina today.