Here’s the latest on the presidential race.
With just two days before former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris meet for their first in-person clash — a debate on ABC News on Tuesday — both candidates are off the campaign trail on Sunday.
Ms. Harris has been hunkered down in a hotel in Pittsburgh preparing for the debate, while Mr. Trump, who has said that he does not need to prepare, has been engaging in what his team calls “policy time.”
As the debate looms, a new poll released on Sunday showed Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris entering the campaign’s homestretch in a tight race. Mr. Trump is retaining his support and Ms. Harris faces a sizable share of voters who still say they need to know more about her, according to a national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College.
On Sunday, Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, will make a campaign stop in Norristown, Pa., while Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, will head to a fund-raiser in Los Angeles.
Also on Sunday, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a onetime top Republican in Congress who became a staunch Trump critic, will sit for an interview on ABC News’s “This Week.” She and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, became some of the most high-profile Republicans to support Ms. Harris’s candidacy when they announced last week that they would vote for her in November.
Early on Sunday, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced plans for a post-debate tour of battleground states, with the vice president and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, to visit North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Here’s what else to know:
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An offer to assist: Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, whom Mr. Trump defeated in the Republican primary, told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” in an interview that will air in full on Sunday, that she is ready to campaign for the former president if he chooses to mobilize her. Some of Ms. Haley’s supporters are moderate Republicans who have considered supporting Ms. Harris.
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A threat from Trump: In the latest escalation in Mr. Trump’s language concerning the election, the former president threatened in a social media post on Saturday to prosecute lawyers, political donors, election officials and others if he were elected and people were found to have engaged in “unscrupulous behavior” in connection with voting. On Friday, Mr. Trump urged the board of the nation’s largest police union to “watch for voter fraud,” an appeal that, if followed through on, could run afoul of state laws and raise accusations of voter intimidation.
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New Harris ad on abortion: Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign released a TV advertisement on Saturday reminding voters that Mr. Trump had taken credit for helping overturn Roe v. Wade, targeting the growing share of voters who say that abortion is their top issue.
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Trump calls for an overhaul: Mr. Trump vowed to reshape the federal bureaucracy in his speech in Wisconsin on Saturday, pledging to ultimately eliminate the Department of Education, redirect the efforts of the Justice Department, and fire civil servants charged with carrying out Biden administration policies that he disagreed with.
Her campaign’s efforts to cast Ms. Harris as a change-maker seem not to have been as effective as some Democrats hoped. Fifty-five percent of people say she would represent “more of the same,” while 53 percent said Trump would be a “major change.”
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said on CNN this morning that he was unconcerned about the news that Russia paid an American media company millions of dollars to push Russian propaganda through conservative social media commentators.
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“People should not knowingly take money from the government of Russia, Iran or China, or any other adversarial nation, to try to influence the election,” he said. “But I also think it’s fair to say that a few memes or videos in the vast sea of political commentary is not going to make much of a difference.”
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Asked for a response, a Harris campaign official, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal reaction to the poll, said that they have long anticipated a margin-of-error race. That person also pointed to the policy initiatives that Harris has rolled out recently, specifically a capital gains tax at a far lower rate than the president had initially proposed. Of course, Harris has the challenge of talking about those policies on Tuesday with Trump standing just feet away, trying to undercut them.
Voters especially want to hear more about policies from Harris, with 66 percent volunteering they want to hear more about her plans or policies. The same figure for Trump was 45 percent.
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Harris’s strategy has been to stay fairly minimalist as Trump, for several weeks, seemed to flail as he tried to define her. But the poll, as Nate Cohn suggests, demonstrates the risks of that approach. Among other things, it elevates every milestone event — interviews, the debate — to have greater significance.
The tightness of the race underscores how crucial a moment the coming debate will be. It is likely to be the biggest audience of the campaign and only certain opportunity for the candidates to change the dynamic of what our polls show is a tight race.
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The overwhelming share of TV ads in this race since Harris entered have been about her — and this poll explains why. Already, 90 percent of the electorate says they know pretty much what they need to know about Trump. But the share for Harris is much lower, 71 percent, making her very much the subject of the race.
Harris has publicly been clear that she considers herself the underdog in the race even as her campaign rakes in cash. And many of her allies have argued that Trump’s base of support has a ceiling, while she only has room to grow. But the fact that his support has not dwindled and she is not breaking away amounts to a sobering update for Harris supporters who have spent weeks all but ecstatic about the odds.
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The new NYT/Siena poll is directionally consistent with the private polling of the Trump campaign. Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has stressed to the former president that the race is far more stable than public polls suggest. Fabrizio’s polling has shown that Harris stopped gaining ground on Trump after recapturing traditional Democratic constituencies that had soured on Biden.
Our latest poll shows a race that is a statistical toss-up, but with some warning flares for Harris heading into the crucial debate on Tuesday. This statistic, highlighted by our Nate Cohn in a piece, stands out: “28 percent of voters said they needed to learn more, compared with only 9 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.”
What’s also striking in the poll is that more voters see Trump as representing “change” compared to Harris, which had been the case while President Biden was in the race. That all underscores why the debate is so crucial as a chance for Harris to define herself.
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who ran for president against Kamala Harris in 2019, said on CNN that he thought the main challenge for the vice president in the debate would be keeping the focus on policy instead of on Donald Trump. “I think the main task will be to make sure Americans understand the difference in visions and are reminded that they already agree with her on the issues that matter most to them,” he said.
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“It will take almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate,” Buttigieg added. “It’s no ordinary proposition. Not because Donald Trump is a master of explaining policy ideas and how they’re going to make people better off — it’s because he’s a master of taking any form or format that is on television and turning it into a show that is all about him.”
Buttigieg was also asked about an upcoming report from the Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has been a political liability for the Biden-Harris administration. “If they’ve had three years to assess what happened, why are they delivering a report after Labor Day in a presidential election year?” he said. “I think it really feeds into a sense that this is something they’re using as a political football.”
Trump threatens lawyers, donors and others with prosecution after election.
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Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday threatened a wide range of people, including lawyers, political donors and operatives, with prosecution if he wins the November election and people have been found to have “cheated” or engaged in “unscrupulous behavior” in connection with the voting.
The statement, which Mr. Trump made on his social media site, Truth Social, was the latest escalation in the former president’s language concerning election fraud as early voting is set to begin in the coming weeks in some states.
Mr. Trump has increasingly spoken publicly about the 2020 election, repeating his false claims that widespread fraud had affected the outcome and insisting that he is guarding against it in 2024.
On Saturday, however, he threatened to use the power of the government against people if he is sworn in as president for a second term in January.
“CEASE & DESIST,” Mr. Trump wrote in his post. “I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Mr. Trump’s post continued: “It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.
“We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
He later posted the message to X, the website formerly known as Twitter, where he has a significantly larger following than he does on Truth Social.
In response to Mr. Trump’s post, Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer who recently joined Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team, wrote on X: “We won’t let Donald Trump intimidate us. We won’t let him suppress the vote. We won’t let him subvert the election. We won’t let him cheat. We will fight and we will WIN.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for prosecutions against people who he believes have wronged him.
After he was indicted by the federal government for the first time in 2023, Mr. Trump vowed to have a “real special prosecutor” who would go after President Biden and his family if he won the presidency in 2024.
On Friday, speaking to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower, in Manhattan, Mr. Trump said the criticisms of judges by Democrats “should be illegal” and that the Justice Department should look into “the legality of these people” attacking jurists like Aileen Cannon, the federal judge he appointed who recently dismissed an indictment against him. That indictment accused Mr. Trump of wrongly retaining classified information after he left office and obstructing the investigation into it.
Also on Friday, while he accepted an endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police, Mr. Trump urged police officers to “watch for the voter fraud.” If the police were to follow through on that appeal, their actions could conflict with multiple state laws and prompt accusations of voter intimidation.
“Believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge, they’re afraid of you people,” Mr. Trump said.
Trump calls for eliminating the Education Department and working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, on health issues.
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Former President Donald J. Trump vowed to vastly reshape the federal bureaucracy on Saturday in a wide-ranging, often unfocused speech at a rally in Wisconsin.
He pledged to ultimately eliminate the Department of Education, redirect the efforts of the Justice Department and fire civil servants charged with carrying out Biden administration policies that he disagreed with.
And he told his supporters that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading vaccine skeptic who recently endorsed him, would be “very much involved” in a panel on “chronic health problems and childhood diseases.” Mr. Kennedy rose to prominence as a vaccine skeptic who promoted a disproved link between vaccines and autism.
At one point Mr. Trump got in a dig at Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he has frequently accused without evidence of covering up signs that Mr. Biden was not fit to be president, by saying that he would support modifying the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to make it an impeachable offense for a vice president to cover up the incapacity of the president. It was a long-shot proposal at best, which would entail a difficult process that he does not control.
Mr. Trump — who spent four years overseeing the federal bureaucracy — stood at an airport in front of hundreds of people holding “Drain the Swamp” signs distributed by his campaign and promised to “cut the fat out of our government for the first time meaningfully in 60 years,” a period that includes his presidency.
Many of the proposals in Mr. Trump’s speech align with plans reported by The New York Times to conduct a broad expansion of presidential power over government, and to effectively concentrate more authority within the White House, if he wins in November.
And many of his pledges dovetailed with the stated goals and proposals of Project 2025, an effort by a group of conservative organizations to develop policies for the next Republican president. Mr. Trump has disavowed Project 2025 as Democrats have seized on some of its more radical proposals, even as he has said that he agrees with some of its efforts.
Throughout his third presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has signaled a willingness to end the post-Watergate norm that the Justice Department operates independently from White House political control.
On Saturday, he said he would “completely overhaul” the department to shift it away from what he called politically motivated prosecutions, a term he has used to encompass the cases of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to stop President Biden from taking office.
Mr. Trump again repeated his vow to pardon those people, saying that his administration would “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized” and that he would “sign their pardons.”
Mr. Trump also suggested that he would root out federal bureaucrats who were not ideologically aligned with him, including some career civil servants who are charged with carrying out policies ordered by the current administration.
The Harris campaign said in a statement that Mr. Trump was “obsessed with payback.”
“If he wins this November, Donald won’t lift a finger to help the American people,” Sarafina Chitika, a Harris campaign spokeswoman, said in the statement. “Aided by his Project 2025 allies and a Supreme Court that has given him near total immunity, he will use his unchecked power to prosecute his enemies and pardon insurrectionists who violently attacked our Capitol on Jan. 6.”
During the rally, Mr. Trump repeated his recent promise to create a so-called government efficiency commission that has been pushed for by the billionaire Elon Musk, mistakenly calling him “Leon” at one point.
He vowed to fire “warmongers,” to conduct a “cleanup of the military industrial complex” and to “fire every federal bureaucrat” who he said had infringed on free speech. And he said he would eliminate “so-called equity policies,” a favored culture war target of Republicans.
And Mr. Trump, who at the end of his presidency railed against the federal public health apparatus, suggested that he would rethink it by getting rid of what he vaguely described as corruption at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
Mr. Trump’s rally, held outdoors at the Central Wisconsin Airport in Mosinee, Wis., was his last scheduled campaign event before Tuesday’s debate with Ms. Harris. Though the focus was intended to be his renewed calls to “drain the swamp,” Mr. Trump, in his usual fashion, jumped all over the map.
As he was outlining his nine proposals to, as he put it, “break the grip” of President Biden and Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump detoured to question the size of the crowds at Ms. Harris’s rallies and to criticize an effort announced this week to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the election.
Mocking the effort, Mr. Trump jeered Democrats for being overly concerned with Russia. “I don’t know what it is with poor Russia,” he said.
Though American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors Mr. Trump, the former president made light of President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparently sarcastic statement recently that he supported Ms. Harris. “He endorsed Kamala,” Mr. Trump said. “I was very offended by that. I wonder why he endorsed Kamala. No, he’s a chess player.”
Later, as he criticized the Biden-Harris administration’s stance on the economy, Mr. Trump misled on statistics. Though the official unemployment rate last month edged down to 4.2 percent, Mr. Trump seized on an alternative measure to lament that the “real” rate was 7.9 percent. And he once again falsely claimed that all the job growth under the Biden administration had gone to “illegal migrants.”
Mr. Trump also spent considerable time discussing immigration, part of what he acknowledged was an effort to revive a strategy from his successful 2016 campaign. He pointed to high-profile crimes that the authorities have said were committed by undocumented immigrants, claiming they offered evidence of a surge of violent “migrant crime” that available data does not support.
Mr. Trump once again spoke at considerable length about a story that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colo., though the local police have disputed the claim. But as he spoke, his campaign displayed menacing images of supposed gang members with captions like “your apartment building under Harris” meant to stoke fear.
Then, even as he was addressing a crowd in Wisconsin — a battleground state that proved critical in his 2016 victory and in his 2020 loss — he repeatedly singled out states political analysts have said are likely out of Republicans’ reach in November.
“If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants, and the governor will be sent fleeing,” Mr. Trump said. He urged its residents to do a “protest vote,” and then added: “Illinois is really the same thing. And Maine, another one.”
As he sought to portray his opponents as overly liberal, Mr. Trump seized on a culture war issue that has fired up conservatives, falsely claiming that transgender children were getting surgeries at schools.
“Can you imagine, you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’” he said. “And your son comes back with a brutal operation.”
And in a continued attempt to redirect political fallout from his role in appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, Mr. Trump claimed that six states led by Democrats allowed the executions of babies after birth. Mr. Trump routinely tells versions of this falsehood; infanticide is illegal in all 50 states.
Mr. Trump also repeated his false and debunked claims of election fraud in 2020, and again made unsubstantiated accusations that the four criminal cases against him were political persecution by the Biden administration.
He once again compared undocumented immigrants to Hannibal Lecter and went on an extended defense against Democrats who have been calling him and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “weird.”
“I happen to be very solid,” Mr. Trump said. “I have other problems, perhaps, but I’m a very solid person.”
Simon J. Levien contributed reporting from New York.
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Harris campaign releases ad showing Trump taking credit for helping overturn Roe v. Wade.
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Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign released a TV advertisement on Saturday reminding voters that former President Donald J. Trump has taken credit for helping overturn Roe v. Wade, and targeting the growing share of voters who say that abortion is their top issue.
The new 30-second ad will appear on broadcast and cable networks in seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — and in Nebraska’s competitive Second Congressional District, the campaign said. It is part of a broader $370 million advertising blitz by the Harris campaign, which said it had not determined how much it would spend to broadcast the abortion spot.
What the ad says
Over ominous music, the ad opens with a clip of Mr. Trump saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who seek abortions. It then shows him saying this year that for “years, they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.”
The narrator then says that Mr. Trump “wants to go further, with plans to restrict birth control, ban abortion nationwide, even monitor women’s pregnancies.”
More context
Mr. Trump’s 2016 statement about “punishment,” made in a forum with Chris Matthews of MSNBC, was almost immediately seen as a gaffe from a candidate new to politics, and Mr. Trump reversed himself within hours.
But he has repeatedly expressed pride in appointing three Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and leading to bans or restrictions in 22 states.
Some of the claims about Mr. Trump’s future plans are drawn from Project 2025, a set of conservative policies drawn by up some of the former president’s allies; Mr. Trump has distanced himself from the blueprint. Mr. Trump has by turns said that he likes the idea of a 15-week federal ban and that he would not sign a national abortion ban. He has also said that he does not support restricting birth control, but has suggested that he might support allowing states to do so.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that the vice president was “lying about President Trump’s position on abortion,” adding, “President Trump has been unequivocally clear: He does not support a federal ban on abortion.”
What the ad is trying to do
The ad is aimed at exploiting voters’ unease with the Republican Party’s position on abortion, centering the issue as polling shows that voters in swing states increasingly say abortion is key to their choice in the fall.
For women younger than 45, abortion has eclipsed the economy as the top issue, according to New York Times/Siena College polling. In an August survey of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, significantly more voters said they trusted Ms. Harris on abortion: She led Mr. Trump on that issue by 24 percentage points in those states.
The former president is said to have privately told his advisers that abortion could sink his party in the election.
Mr. Trump has sent mixed signals about abortion this year. He seemed to suggest last week that he might support a Florida ballot measure to expand abortion rights, only to say one day later that he would vote against it.
The abortion ad arrived four days before the debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump on ABC News on Tuesday night, when the topic is likely to come up.