Election 2024 live updates: Harris campaigns with Michelle Obama; Trump stumps in the Rust Belt

In her first stop on 2024 campaign trail, former first lady Michelle Obama delivered an urgent message to men, arguing that the election could have life or death consequences for the women they love.

“I am asking y’all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously,” she said at a rally for Harris in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

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Swifties for Harris knows all too well how important the Philadelphia suburbs are — and with just over a week to go until Election Day, the group is targeting women in the city’s "collar counties" with mailers encouraging them to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.

NBC News was sent photos of the mailers from a suburban woman voter in Delaware County, Pennsylvania who is a registered Republican. The mailer peppers Swift’s lyrics throughout, encouraging voters to not “leave any blank spaces” to make sure “all the stars align for VP Harris,” saying, “we are never going back, like ever.”

It also contains a QR code where Swifties who pledge to vote can claim a limited edition friendship bracelet. The beaded bracelets have become a staple during Swift’s Eras tour.

Swifties for Harris did not immediately respond a request for comment.

Trump told rally attendees that after nine years of running, he knows win or lose this is the end of him campaigning for president.

“It’s coming to an end,” Trump said, adding, “In some ways it’s sad.”

“But we have to finish it off with a big victory,” he told the crowd.

The Constitution would restrict Trump from running again if he wins a second term in 2024, of course. But Trump also said last month that he thinks this election "will be it" for him.

Speaking at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Vance claimed that “open borders” are decreasing the quality of education for Pennsylvanian children due to children who come into the country without knowing English.

“We’ve got thousands of children in Pennsylvania schools who don’t even speak English, which of course means that a lot of Pennsylvania children are not getting the education that they need,” Vance said.

“Now I don’t begrudge any child or any family for wanting a better life in the United States of America, but number one, you’ve got to come through the legal way,” the senator added.

Trump is now taking the stage roughly an hour and 40 minutes late at his rally in State College, Pennsylvania, prompting cheers from the crowd of “Give us Trump!” and “Get him here already!”

When Trump adviser Stephen Miller took the stage, it prompted boos and groans from the crowd.

Last night in Traverse City, Michigan, Trump was so late after his three-hour Joe Rogan interview that many people left the rally before he arrived. Trump is frequently late to his rallies and often talks for 90 minutes to two hours.

During remarks in New York on security preparations ahead of Trump’s rally tomorrow at Madison Square Garden, New York City Mayor Eric Adams told reporters, “I do not believe [Trump] is a fascist.”

Adams called on everyone to “dial down the temperature” and urged New Yorkers to show “a level of respectable communication.”

With that statement, Adams bucked the trend of Democratic leaders using the term after former White House chief of staff John Kelly said Trump meets the definition of a fascist.

Tim Walz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will take to the livestream platform Twitch tomorrow, where they will face off in a game of “Madden,” the football video game.

“You ready Gov?” Ocasio-Cortez said in a post to X announcing their livestream plans.

"Can’t wait. Looking forward to playing with you, @AOC!" Walz responded.

Elon Musk’s social media app X is supercharging the spread of voter-fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence, boosting unfounded claims including two personal smears against Vice President Kamala Harris.

The dubious content is spreading in the app’s “explore” section, which says it uses Musk’s AI software, named Grok, to aggregate trending social media topics. The information does not appear to be fact-checked by humans, and in several recent examples it seemed to repeat false or unsubstantiated claims as if they were true.

The feature is named “stories for you” and has a label saying it’s in a beta test, meaning it’s an experiment not available to all users. Each “story for you” consists of a feed of posts related to a trending topic. On the desktop version of X, users can also see a paragraph-long summary of the topic written by the Grok software if they look at the history of the “story for you.”

The National Park Service on Saturday issued the permit approving Harris’ upcoming Tuesday-night speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.

The permit lists an estimated crowd of 20,000 as Harris seeks to make her closing argument to voters in prime time.

In a new Harris campaign memo shared first with NBC News, senior adviser Ian Sams writes that "it is clear that Donald Trump is on defense on the economy."

Sams pointed to a Thursday Truth Social post from Trump where he wrote that he is not proposing a national sales tax "as the Democrats say in their advertisements against me."

During an event in Michigan, Trump blasted Harris, saying that she wants war and would love a military draft.

“Your sons and daughters will end up getting drafted. ... She’d love a draft. All she wants is a war,” Trump said.

He also spoke about Beyoncé's appearance at a Harris rally in Houston on Friday, telling attendees at his Michigan event that "they have to use [famous] people to get people to come to her events."

On the first day of statewide early voting in Michigan, Harris plans to rally with former first lady Michelle Obama.

The two will attend a get-out-the-vote rally alongside Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, Sen. Gary Peters and other local Michigan leaders.

With 10 days until the general election, the Trump campaign just launched its first Snapchat digital ads of the 2024 cycle.

The ads, which are running across swing states, are focused on mobilizing voters to go vote. In one of the ads, an on-screen graphic asks, “Who needs to vote?” and the camera pans to reveal Trump pointing at the screen and giving a thumbs-up.

During the 2020 election, the Trump campaign had spent $268,000 on Snapchat ads and started consistently advertising on the platform at the end of August.

So far this year, the Democratic presidential campaign has spent $7.8 million on Snapchat ads. It’s been running ads on the platform since March.

During a speech at the Laborers’ International Union of North America Get Out the Vote kickoff event in Pittsburgh, President Joe Biden boosted Harris, telling the crowd that women “can do anything any man can do, including being president of the United States.”

Biden also blasted Trump, calling him a "loser of a man," and urged the crowd to vote, telling attendees, "don't do it for me, do it for your kids."

During a rally in Novi, Michigan, Trump doubled down on his critical comments about Detroit, saying that the city "makes us a developing nation."

His remarks came during a section of his speech about bringing manufacturing back to Michigan from China and Mexico.

"I think Detroit and some of our areas makes us a developing nation. China doesn’t have any place like that," the former president said.

Across the rural communities and industrial towns of western Michigan, semitrucks hauling thousands of pounds of food are pulling up to church parking lots and community centers where growing lines of people are waiting for a few boxes of free groceries.

One truck can carry enough food for up to 600 households, but some days even that isn’t enough to meet the demand, which has gone up by 18% over the past 12 months, said Ken Estelle, president of Feeding America West Michigan.

“We have never seen this level of need in the 43 years we have been serving this community. It is significantly higher than during Covid and has pressed us beyond our capacity,” said Estelle. “We’ve just seen this drumbeat increase every month of more people and more people.”

From rural Michigan to midsize towns in Pennsylvania and affluent suburbs in Wisconsin, food banks are reporting record levels of need that have been steadily increasing over the past several years. Despite rising wages and low unemployment rates, many households continue to struggle with escalating costs that have depleted their savings and increased credit card debt, leaving little money left over at the end of the month to put food on the table, food bank directors said.

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A South Carolina judge on Friday ruled that the voter registrations of 1,900 teens wouldn't be addressed before Election Day.

The ACLU sued after the state's Department of Motor Vehicles failed to transmit the teens' voter registrations to the elections board. The teens were 17 when they registered but would have been 18 on Election Day.

In his ruling, the judge said it was simply too close to Election Day to add people to the voter rolls.

In a statement, Allen Chaney, legal director for the ACLU of South Carolina, said, “Our government failed these young voters, and now the same government is making excuses rather than making things right. When ‘It’s too hard to fix’ becomes an acceptable reason to disenfranchise voters, we know that there’s work to do.”

In a highly anticipated interview, Donald Trump touched on a wide range of cultural and political issues Friday night in a three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan, who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

The recording went on so long that Trump arrived several hours late to his rally that night in Traverse City, Michigan. Frustrated at having to wait so long, many people left.

The Rogan interview is a continuation of Trump turning to nontraditional media outlets, including podcasts, in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Rogan also invited Vice President Kamala Harris to do an interview, but her campaign has declined. Rogan’s podcast has more than 17 million YouTube subscribers. 

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With just days left until the 2024 election, Donald Trump supporters who fell for his lies about fraud in the last election continue to face legal consequences for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, even as Trump managed to stave off his own criminal trial and again become the Republican presidential nominee.

On Friday afternoon, a young Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol faced sentencing inside a federal courthouse in Washington, just a few hundred feet from the crime scene. Caleb Berry, a now-23-year-old who stormed the Capitol along with members of the far-right Oath Keepers group, stood before the judge in a black shirt and apologized to everyone in the courtroom, and to the country.

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The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is dominating the 2024 debate, but control of both chambers of Congress is also very much up for grabs — and a series of fluid races may produce surprises on election night.

These sleeper races could determine which party wins a majority in the House or Senate, which will have a substantial impact on the next president’s agenda. They will be decided by a mix of factors, including voter turnout and whether the candidates have a unique ability to defy the broader political winds.

Here are nine races for Congress where one side should be clearly favored, but appears to have a battle on their hands.

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