Election 2024 live updates: Harris campaigns with Liz Cheney; Trump tours hurricane damage in North Carolina

Trump said at a campaign rally tonight that his daughter Tiffany Trump, who graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2020, finished first in her class.

"She was a great student, and she went to a fantastic law school, graduated No. 1 in her class," Trump said at the event in Concord, North Carolina.

Tiffany Trump is not on a list of honors graduates for the 2020 class published on the school’s website. The Georgetown University Law Center also indicated on its website that it does not rank students.

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Harris campaign is largely “unbothered” by Trump’s recent visit to a McDonald’s, instead viewing it as a desperate gimmick that will not affect the race, according to three Harris campaign officials, a former White House official and a longtime Harris aide.

Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt on Harris’ 1983 summer job at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California, worked the fry machine at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania over the weekend in an attempt to troll Harris.

A Harris campaign official who requested anonymity to speak candidly said that Trump was being “absurd” and that his focus on McDonald’s shows he is desperate to try to create viral moments in the closing weeks of the campaign. The official said campaign aides were not worried that it would hurt Harris, saying she did work at McDonald’s and is proud of her middle-class upbringing that took her to that job.

Trump’s campaign event yesterday at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania highlighted his battle with Harris to court a coveted group of working-class voters who have the potential to decide the outcome of the presidential election in a critical swing state.

To win them over, Trump is seeking to make the election a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration’s record, while Harris hopes to make it a choice between two contrasting agendas. Harris is pushing an expansion of the child tax credit, a subsidy for first-time homebuyers, a higher minimum wage and guaranteed paid leave, while Trump is calling for extending his tax cuts and slashing regulations in order to lower energy bills.

Data shows lower-wage workers — like ones who work at fast-food restaurants — have a lower propensity to vote. In fact, it’s a nearly linear relationship: The less money you make, the less likely you are to have shown up at the polls, according to Tufts University. Both candidates are trying to persuade and juice those voters in the final weeks before the election, and the image of Trump serving fries to supporters at a McDonald’s drive-thru was an attempt by the wealthy real estate mogul to reach out to the voters who will make or break his ambitions to return to the White House.

Read the full story here.

Trump unspooled a string of personal attacks on Harris today, at one point calling her a "total stupid person."

"She's a mess. She's a cognitive mess, and nobody wants to talk about it," he said, later labeling her "the most radical, most incompetent, most unfit vice president in the history of our country."

"Something is clearly wrong with her. She can't put two sentences together," Trump said. He also said she doesn't have "compassion, the smarts or the strength" to be president.

Harris is leaning into a strategy of avoiding being seen with Biden on the campaign trail and showing video clips of Trump at her campaign events to highlight his statements in a novel way.

The dual track — of not showing Biden, who is viewed as a drag on her campaign, and of featuring Trump's statements in a new light — is part of an overall effort to appeal to undecided and independent voters who the Harris campaign’s internal polling shows are still up for grabs and can affect a razor-close election.

A former White House official who requested anonymity to discuss the Harris campaign and Democrats’ views of Biden said after having talked with a number of campaign officials that it's clear Biden is viewed as “rapidly declining” and a liability on the campaign trail.

Elon Musk’s daily $1 million lottery for registered swing-state voters who sign his super PAC’s political petition falls into a legal gray area and could violate election law, three experts told NBC News. 

The petition, created by Musk’s America PAC, is part of his larger campaign over the last week to register conservative voters in swing states.

Paying someone to vote or to register to vote is explicitly illegal under federal law. Musk’s payouts seem to skirt those laws, though. He and America PAC have said payouts or lottery entries will be given to registered voters for their petition signatures or referrals of other signers. The petition is in support of free speech and gun rights. Signing it does not require any specific party affiliation.

Read the full story here.

Harris was asked at a campaign event in Royal Oak, Michigan, how she is handling the stress of running for president in the weeks before the election.

Maria Shriver, who moderated the event, mentioned doing yoga and eating gummies to stave off stress, to which Harris responded with a laugh that she's "not eating gummies," drawing laughter from the crowd.

Harris said she often wakes up in the middle of the night, but she said she also works out "every morning."

"I try to eat well, you know. I love my family, and I make sure that I talk to the kids and my husband every day," Harris added.

Amid heightened security concerns and mounting staffing issues within the Secret Service, both presidential campaigns have curtailed the frequency and kinds of events they’re holding on the trail, four sources with the campaigns said.

Officials with Harris’s and Trump’s camps say they’ve pulled back on the so-called off-the-record stops — when presidential candidate break from larger-scale events on the trail to drop into local diners, ice cream shops or barbers — because of more burdensome security requirements. There’s an element of surprise to many of those stops, which is what can create local buzz about a candidate.

But since an assassination attempt on Trump in July, the worlds for both candidates have drastically changed.

Read the full story here.

The Justice Department today unsealed an indictment charging a Pennsylvania man with threatening to kill a representative of a state political party.

The party representative, who was unnamed, made a post online recruiting volunteers to serve as official poll watchers on Election Day and included a phone number, the Justice Department said in a news release.

A 62-year-old Philadelphia resident then texted the representative, saying he was interested in volunteering, the Justice Department said. He later sent expletive-filled threats, saying he would kill the representative if he did not get an answer, threatening to skin them alive and telling them their “days are numbered,” according to the indictment.

At a rally today in North Carolina, Trump said a number of manufacturing jobs were lost this year and that he would stop the "raping and pillaging" if elected.

"Under Kamala Harris, the United States has lost 50,000 manufacturing job this year alone," he said. "But under the Trump administration, we are going to take back what is ours. We will end the looting, ransacking, raping and pillaging of North Carolina and frankly every other state in the union.

"We will bring back our job, our factories, our wealth and our dreams," he added.

Harris has repeatedly criticized Trump for the overall loss of manufacturing jobs when he was president, most of which occurred during the pandemic. Overall, the number of manufacturing jobs in the country is higher now than it was during the Trump presidency, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Speaking to reporters in Michigan, Harris said some police officers "were killed" during the Jan. 6 riot.

Trump "incited a mob, a violent mob, that attacked the United States Capitol, wherein over 140 uniformed law enforcement officers were injured and some were killed," she told reporters ahead of a campaign event in Royal Oak.

No officers were killed during the riot. Some law enforcement officers died in the days and weeks after the attack, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died a day later after he suffered two strokes, and four officers who died by suicide.

Harris said she believes abortion rights are a "compelling issue" to voters when she was asked this afternoon whether the fall of Roe v. Wade could bolster her support among Republican female voters.

“I do believe it is a compelling issue, especially when we consider the fact that for so many of us, our daughter is going to have fewer rights than their grandmother. And America’s strength, one of the attributes of our progress, has been the expansion of rights, not the restriction of rights, and that’s what we’re seeing happen,” Harris told reporters ahead of an event with former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.

She also pointed to recent midterm and special elections, arguing that “when the issue of the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body is on the ballot, the American people vote for freedom regardless of the party with which they’re registered to vote.”

Abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states this fall, including battlegrounds Arizona and Nevada.

Vance made remarks about Green Party candidate Jill Stein at a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and slammed Harris, calling her “anti-Christian,” in an event aimed at reaching out to Catholic voters.

At the end of his remarks in Swannanoa, North Carolina, a reporter asked Trump whether North Carolinians should still support Mark Robinson for governor. Robinson received massive backlash after dozens of disturbing comments on a pornographic forum were revealed. He has denied they were his posts.

 “I’m not familiar with the race right now,” Trump said. “I haven’t seen it.”

Harris and former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., campaigned in Pennsylvania today, sitting onstage together in a conversation that had them interrupting each other to underscore their points.

Cheney, who has opposed legal abortion and praised the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, said she was reaching out to people who may oppose abortion and telling them it is OK to vote for Harris. 

“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need," Cheney said. "And so I think this, this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people come together to say what has happened to women and when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need, where, in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing to get access to women’s medical records. That’s not sustainable for us as a country, and it has to change.”

Sky Hugo, a transgender Arizonan, expressed frustration with the Republican Party and politics writ large over the money the Trump campaign is spending on attacks on transgender rights. 

“They want to erase my existence,” Hugo said of the GOP. “They want to make it illegal for me to be me in public.” 

Hugo, who only recently transitioned, said that “it has never been easy or a good thing to be presenting as gender-nonconforming in any respect” but added, "I am kind of coming to terms with who I am as a person in what is arguably the worst possible time.” 

She described her anxiety about using public restrooms, saying: “I have a lot of fear about using women’s restrooms in public because I know that there is a fear of people like myself entering those spaces. But also the existence of violence in those spaces is typically from cis het men," referring to the terms "cisgender" and "heterosexual." "And were I to go to a men’s restroom, I would be at a higher risk of experiencing that violence." 

Hugo also expressed frustration with the Democratic Party, saying it hasn't stood up for her rights adequately or presented a true leftist ideology. 

While at his campaign stop in Asheville, Trump appeared to try to push back on reports he's dealing with exhaustion, telling reporters, "I don't want a day off."

"I've been going full blast," Trump said. "I don't want a day off. We have to win."

Trump made the comments in the wake of a Politico report that he'd been declining certain interview requests because he's "exhausted," and after a Friday event in which he appeared to be nodding off. NBC News did not independently verify Politico's reporting.

The Harris campaign posted a clip of the incident on X and said, “An exhausted Trump appears to be falling asleep during his campaign event.”

Harris is focusing on swing states, with plans to visit three states today as she looks to win over disenchanted Republican voters and earn the vote of young Black men with the help of former President Barack Obama. NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez reports for "TODAY."

Speaking at a campaign event in Asheville, Trump again made the false claim that FEMA had no money to help victims in the hurricane-stricken area because it was spending funds on migrants.

As he's done for weeks, Trump appeared to conflate two completely separate funds to paint a misleading picture. FEMA has dedicated disaster relief money that cannot be used for other purposes, and it was separately tasked by Congress in 2022 to disseminate money from Customs and Border Protection to help communities that received influxes of migrants.

"They spent a lot of money on bringing illegal migrants. ... They don't have any money for the people who live here," Trump said. "They've spent it on illegal migrants."

Trump's repeated false claims and other conspiracy theories and misinformation have led to threats against FEMA workers in the area. Trump was asked if his comments were "helpful" to emergency workers trying to do their jobs. "I think you have to let people know how they're doing," Trump responded. "If they're doing a poor job, are we not supposed to say it?"

Trump's campaign recently started targeting over 700 ZIP codes in Michigan with ads on Facebook and Instagram. It's part of a broader digital effort to mobilize voters to request a mail ballot or participate in early voting opportunities, including over 800 ads launched on Google in the last 10 days.

The specific targeting on Facebook and Instagram in Michigan is unique, however. A review of the Trump campaign’s digital targeting efforts over the past few months by NBC News reveals that the campaign rarely targets ads by ZIP code on Meta’s platforms. At this point, the Trump campaign is targeting mobilization ads on Facebook and Instagram at specific ZIP codes in two states: Michigan and Maine, where Trump is competing for the electoral vote awarded in the 2nd Congressional District.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign is generally blanketing the ads across the full state but is leaving out very specific neighborhoods in larger municipalities like Flint, Traverse City, Lansing, Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.

It has also generally skipped over Wayne County, home of Detroit, which favored Biden by 38 points in 2020. But a deeper dive on the Wayne County data reveals that there are specific communities that the Trump campaign is targeting with mobilization ads. These ads are running in Dearborn Heights, Flat Rock, Garden City, Grosse Ille, New Boston and Rockwood.

Trump told NBC News today that he hasn't seen any evidence of cheating in the 2024 presidential election so far, as early voting has been underway in a number of states.

He made the comment at a stop in Swannanoa, North Carolina, when NBC News asked him and RNC Chair Michael Whatley if they've seen any specific incidents of cheating at this point, two weeks out from the election. Trump and Whatley both said they have not seen any yet, but that it’s early.

Asked if there is a concern that the results of the election in North Carolina will not be credible or legitimate because of Hurricane Helene, Trump said, "No."

"I think in a way, it’s the opposite," he continued. "I mean, we’re so impressed, and I think they have a pretty good system here." Trump went on to praise the high number of early voters in the state despite the hurricane, saying "the fact that they’d come out and vote in record numbers is pretty amazing to me."

Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has forcefully ramped up his efforts to help re-elect Trump, raising eyebrows across the political world and inviting questions about the legality of some of his tactics.

Musk hit the road last week and during the weekend to help galvanize support for the Republican nominee — a newsworthy undertaking on its own, but all the more so because of the things he has done along the way. Musk on Thursday pushed a debunked conspiracy theory about election fraud and announced he would give away $100 to every registered Pennsylvania voter who signed a petition supporting the First and Second amendments to the Constitution.

The daughter of the late Republican President Gerald Ford, Susan Ford Bales, endorsed Harris for president today.

“Vice President Harris and I likely disagree on some policy matters, but her integrity and commitment to those same principles that guided Dad have led me to conclude that Kamala Harris should be elected 47th President of the United States," said Ford Bales, a registered Republican.

Ford Bales compared this period to the time when her father became president after President Richard Nixon resigned and Ford needed to do what was right and defend the Constitution. Facing a similar dynamic today, she said, the U.S. "cannot regress back to a divisive paradigm of loathing toward one another and disdain for our Constitution."

"We witnessed on January 6 the horrors of what that looks like, and we can never allow a repeat of that tragedy," she said. "The forces that incited it must be held accountable. They can never be in a position to ever do it again."

The five men who make up the Central Park Five, and now call themselves the Exonerated Five, have filed a defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump over his remarks during the presidential debate last month.

The lawsuit focuses on the Sept. 10 debate in Pennsylvania, where Trump said that the five men — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise — pleaded guilty when they were tried in connection with the assault and rape of a woman who had been running in Central Park on April 19, 1989, and that the victim had died.

During the debate he said: “They admitted — they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty — then they pled we’re not guilty.”

At the time of the trials, each had pleaded not guilty and the victim of the attack survived.

Read the full story here.

The Supreme Court rejected disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen’s last-ditch effort to revive a civil rights claim against his former boss, Donald Trump.

The justices left in place lower court rulings that said Cohen could not pursue his allegation that then-President Trump and other officials violated his rights by putting him in solitary confinement for writing a tell-all book.

In 2020, Cohen was serving a three-year sentence on various charges relating to the work he had carried out for Trump.

He had been in home confinement because of the Covid-19 pandemic but was ordered back to prison after refusing to sign a form that would have prevented him from speaking to the press or posting on social media. After 16 days in solitary confinement, a federal judge ordered Cohen released, finding that officials had retaliated against him on free speech grounds.

Read the full story here.

The Secret Service did not properly plan and coordinate with local law enforcement ahead of Trump’s July 13 campaign rally, where he was shot at in an assassination attempt, a new report says.

The interim report by the House task force investigating the attempt on Trump’s life that day says that the first phase of the probe “clearly shows a lack of planning and coordination between the Secret Service and its law enforcement partners before the rally.”

These findings, the bipartisan panel said, were based on 23 transcribed interviews with local law enforcement, thousands of pages of documents, and testimony from the task force’s public hearing in September, the task force said in a release.

Read the full story here.

Trump said "there is a way" to eliminate federal taxes when asked by a voter in New York City last week about whether such a thing would be possible.

"You know in the old days when we were smart, when we were a smart country, in the 1890s and all, this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was," Trump said. "It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax."

Trump then hinted about his own policy plans on tariffs.

"But no, there is a way. I mean, if we, if what I’m planning comes out — it’s a great question, by the way," he said. "You’re a pretty sophisticated cat, you know?"

New fundraising reports show Harris massively outraised Trump's campaign yet again last month as the two campaigns barrel toward Election Day.

The Democratic campaign raised almost $222 million in September, according to federal campaign finance reports released yesterday, compared to the Trump campaign's almost $63 million. There was a similar trend in spending — $270 million for Harris' campaign and almost $78 million for Trump's campaign — and the Harris campaign closed the month with $187 million in the bank to the Trump campaign's $120 million.

The new numbers follow a trend we've seen since Harris jumped into the race. But remember, the best-funded candidates won the 2020 presidency but lost in 2016.

Trump is set to speak at an event in two weeks put on by Clay Clark, the co-founder of the Christian nationalist, conspiracy theory-promoting "ReAwaken America Tour," Trump's campaign confirmed.

“In many ways it will feel like the ReAwaken Tour,” Clark told NBC News. He noted that other faith leaders will address the event, as well as Michael Flynn and Ben Carson.

Flynn is the co-founder of the "ReAwaken America Tour" with Clark.

Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, was asked in an interview on Fox News this morning why it's "necessary" for Trump to continue to describe Americans who disagree with him as "enemies from within."

Vance tried to dismiss the question as just another example of Trump being candid.

"Donald Trump is unfiltered. I think this is one of the reasons why the campaign has gone well, because he's not doing a basement campaign strategy," Vance said. "He's not just running on slogans. When people ask him questions, he speaks from the heart."

During an interview with WPXI, an NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh, Trump said he supports abortion bans being "longer than six weeks" and bragged that he has "done a great job of this for the people" despite championing the Supreme Court decision that led to those six-week bans in the first place.

"I think it’s got to be longer than six weeks, personally, and as you know I’ve done a great job of this for the people," he said. "They wanted to get it back to the states, they wanted a vote of the people. All Democrats wanted it, all Republicans wanted it, everybody."

The Democratic National Committee is launching a new ad today highlighting former Ku Klux Klan leader David’s Duke recent endorsement of third-party candidate Jill Stein.

The DNC has warned that the Green Party nominee will be a “spoiler candidate” in some swing states, like she was in 2016 for Hillary Clinton.

The spot, entitled “Company They Keep,” is set to air in the battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and on cable channels nationwide, according to a DNC official who first shared the details with NBC News.

When Duke backed Stein last week, he said he was considering what was “good for white people, Europeans” and ultimately called it one of the “most important statements” he has made politically.

Stein’s campaign disavowed the endorsement and called Duke “trash.”

With two weeks left until Election Day, Trump spent the weekend in Pennsylvania, raising eyebrows with a vulgar aside about the late Arnold Palmer and using an expletive to refer to Harris. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for "TODAY."

TUCSON, Ariz. — If there’s a prototypical Kamala Harris voter, it might seem to be Charles Johnson, a 23-year-old Black college student.

Johnson is informed and politically engaged; he went to hear former President Barack Obama speak Friday at a Democratic campaign rally on the University of Arizona campus.

Yet he isn’t all that impressed with Obama, the nation’s first Black president, nor Harris, who would be the second. He says he’s leaning toward voting for Trump.

“The media says he [Trump] is horrible and he’s racist and he’s going to bring us back, but he’s only gaining support with Black voters,” Johnson said in an interview. “He’s only gaining support with Black men.”

Read the full story here.

Walz will spend today in New York, speaking at a campaign reception.

He spoke at multiple fundraisers yesterday, as well. New York is not considered a swing state.

Trump will spend his day in North Carolina, with his first stop in Asheville, a city in the western part of the state that was hit hard by Hurricane Helene. He will survey the damage firsthand and also speak to the media, according to the campaign.

Later, Trump will head to Greenville for a rally and continue on to address faith leaders event in Concord.

Trump narrowly won North Carolina in 2020, but Democrats see it as within their reach to flip this cycle.

Harris will campaign in three Midwestern swing states today, speaking in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump carried the trio of "blue wall" states in 2016, but the Biden-Harris ticket flipped all three states blue in 2020. Polling indicates that all three remain tightly competitive this cycle.