September 8, 2024, presidential campaign news | CNN Politics (2024)

Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff went for a walk in Pittsburgh on Sunday as she remains in the area preparing for Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia.

Asked by reporters if she’s ready to debate former President Donald Trump, Harris gave a thumbs-up and said, “I’m ready.”

Harris also stepped out for a break Saturday, briefly meeting voters at a local business.

The US Capitol Building is seen during sunrise on September 5 in Washington, DC.

When the House Judiciary Committee held a field hearing on Friday to highlight the impact border security issues have on local communities, Vice President Kamala Harris was underlying their line of attack.

Four months ago, when the panel held a similar field hearing in North Dakota, the vice president was not mentioned by name once.

The shift, both in branding and messaging from the “Biden Border Crisis” to the “Biden-Harris Border Crisis” underscores how House Republicans are pivoting to specifically target Harris now that she is the Democratic nominee.

As Congress embarks on a three-week sprint before its next recess, both parties return to Washington, DC, for a final messaging push dictated by the dynamics of the presidential race — while also trying to balance the critical September 30 government funding deadline.

Democrats, who dismiss the GOP attacks as a last-ditch effort, are using their spots on committees to go on offense despite being in the minority.

Earlier this month, House Oversight Committee Democrats launched an investigation into whether Trump received $10 million from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as part of his 2016 presidential campaign.

And the Democratic working group that has spearheaded messaging against Project 2025, the controversial conservative policy blueprint, has a slew of messaging events planned over the next month, multiple sources told CNN.

Read more here about the presidential election’s influence on Congress

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be in Philadelphia for the presidential debate on Tuesday as a surrogate for former President Donald Trump, a spokesperson for Kennedy tells CNN.

Kennedy will appear in the spin room — where supporters of each candidate put their “spin” on the debate in conversations with media — on behalf of Trump, according to the spokesperson.

Kennedy endorsed Trump and suspended his independent White House bid last month, urging his supporters to back the former president. Trump has said Kennedy would play a role in his administration if he is elected.

Kennedy’s alliance with Trump came after a long history of attacking the former president.

Trump’s running mate: Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance will also hit the spin room Tuesday, after attending a Philadelphia debate watch party hosted by the Trump campaign, according to a source familiar with the plans.

Earlier on Tuesday, Vance has a fundraiser in Greenville, North Carolina.

CNN’s Kit Maher contributed reporting to this post.

This post has been updated with Vance’s plans for Tuesday evening.

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 16.

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said “it’s not helpful” in closing the GOP’s gap with women voters when the party’s vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, comments on childless women.

Remember: Vance has been criticized for past comments about women and parenthood, particularly a 2021 comment saying Democratic politicians are “childless cat ladies.”

Haley also referenced a more recently resurfaced comment Vance made in 2021 about the head of a powerful teacher’s union, who he suggested “should have some of her own” children if she wants to “brainwash” kids in school.

On Trump: Haley said she disagreed greatly with former President Donald Trump’s style but was supporting him on policy — and in contrast to the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Haley said she disagrees with Trump’s child care tax credits, favoring tax cuts across the board. She also disagreed with mandating insurance companies or the federal government to pay for fertility treatments.

Haley said Trump’s team has not asked her to campaign or to advise on debate prep but said “I’m happy to be helpful,” if Trump asked.

A July sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became Vice President Kamala Harris’debut on the world stage.

Despite having met with more than 150 world leaders since becoming VP, this meeting felt different.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she said, before dismissing reporters ahead of the meeting, a moment that captured the complicated dynamics that have colored her foreign policy ambitions, and offered a preview of the type of statesmanship she would pursue as president.

Harris did not enter the job with vast experience on the world stage. Both advisers and foreign officials she’s interacted with say Harris managed to take what was essentially a supporting role and turn it into a crash course in foreign diplomacy.One former senior adviser described the vice president taking home massive briefing books and often peppering staffers with questions as she was briefed on multiple foreign policy issues.

She began, some said, rather scripted and uncertain but emerged within her first year in office as a more confident voice. In meetings, she can appear alternatively warm – searching for commonalities over food or family – and steely, as she holds a firm line on US policy.

Harris advisers argue nothing could have better prepared her to step onto the global stage, should she win the election in November, than her time as vice president.

Read more about how Harris has carved out her foreign policy path here.

A memorial is seen at Apalachee High School after the Wednesday school shooting, on September 7, in Winder, Georgia.

Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock on Sunday said school shootings are not a “fact of life,” but rather a “fact of American life,” after four people were killed at Apalachee High School on Wednesday.

The senator’s comments are in response to recent remarks made by Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who lamented school shootings being “a fact of life” and called for greater campus security.

Warnock says he’ll continue to push for passing gun control laws, something he says Americans want and has bipartisan support, but said they “can’t even have a debate about that in the Senate.”

Warnock was in Winder, Georgia, on Friday and told CNN that he spoke with the family of 14-year-old victim Christian Angulo.

Some background: Childrenages1 to 19die from gunsmorethan anything else in the US,studies show.

American kids face the highest gun violence mortality rate among peer countries by far, according to a public health declaration by the US surgeon general earlier this year.In the US,there were 36.4 deaths per million people ages 1to19;in Canada, its 6.2 per million; in Australia, it’s 1.6 per million; and in the UK, it’s 0.5 per million, according to provisional data from 2022.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

A new CNN Poll of Polls including polls conducted since the Democratic National Convention finds a tight race with no clear leader between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Harris has an average of 49% support in the new Poll of Polls, while Trump has 47% across polls conducted between August 23 and Sept. 6. The new average is largely unchanged from the previous average, which found Harris at 50% to Trump at 48%.

The Poll of Polls includes the four most recent national polls measuring the views of registered or likely voters in a 2024 presidential general election.

Takeaways from one of the polls: ANew York Times and Siena College poll of likely voters conducted from September 3 to 6 showed 48% say they support Trump to 47% for Harris, with no clear leader.

Other takeaways from the Times-Siena poll:

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks on the second day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, on August 20.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he would go higher than the 28% capital gains tax hike proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris, but broadly defended her policy position changes in an interview Sunday.

“I would go higher than that,” Sanders said of the tax hike on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Despite that disagreement, the progressive senator defended Harris’ recent shift to the center on key policies, saying he does not think she is “abandoning her ideals.”

“I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election,” Sanders said. And while he said the two do not always agree on the approach or the extent of policies, Sanders lauded Harris’ stances on making the child tax credit permanent, building affordable housing and passing the Pro Act to make it easier to join a union.

Sanders also praised former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, for endorsing Harris.

“Cheney and I agree on nothing, no issues, but what we do believe in is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations. And it’s not just Cheney. I think there is a significant number of Republicans that say, ‘Well, you know, I may not agree with the vice president on this issue or that issue, but I cannot support somebody who is a pathological liar, somebody who fomented a insurrection to overthrow the election returns,’” he said.

Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday argued voting for former President Donald Trump or writing in a name in November is a decision to “abandon the Constitution.”

Cheney said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week” that too many elected Republicans have reduced the 2024 race to a “partisan choice” — but “that’s not what we’re facing this time around.”

The onetime Republican leader, who said last week thatshe’ll votefor Vice President Kamala Harris, said she’s been “voting for 40 years. My first vote I ever cast was for Ronald Reagan in 1984. I’ve never voted for a Democrat.”

Asked whether she’d be able to endorse Harris if Harris still promoted the same policy positions as in 2019, Cheney said the vice president has “changed in a number of very important ways on issues that matter” since she first ran for president.

The former Wyoming congresswoman argued that Trump isn’t a conservative, pointing to his global tariffs proposal.

Liz Cheney’s father, former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, has also endorsed Harris due to what he describes as Trump’s “threat to our republic.”

Republican critics: Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders later told ABC that Liz Cheney is “significantly in the minority” among members of the GOP.

“You don’t get to call yourself a conservative or a Republican when you support the most radical nominee that the Democrats have ever put up,”Sanders said.

This post has been updated with comments by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders.

CNN’s Sarah Davis contributed to this post.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsem*nt of Vice President Kamala Harris and a recent alleged Russian operation to interfere with the US election arenot “going to make the difference” in the presidential race, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said Sunday.

“It is a remarkable time in politics — you have Dick Cheney endorsing a Democrat, you have a Kennedy endorsing a Republican,” Cotton said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” representing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“But in the end, endorsem*nts are not going to make the difference in this race.”

The Arkansas senator’s comments come after Cheney said on Friday that he plans to vote for Harris over Donald Trump, warning that the former president “can never be trusted with power again.”

Asked about an alleged Russian government effort toinfluence the US presidential election — detailed by the Department of Justice last week — Cotton, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he doesn’t see it making a difference.

“People should not knowingly take money from the government of Russia or Iran or China or any other adversarial nation to try to influence the election,” Cotton responded. “But using money to try to promote memes or videos on the internet is not exactly going to make a huge difference,” he later added.

Key context: Current and former US officials tell CNN that rather than relying on fake accounts and bogus online personas, Russia’s alleged efforts in 2024 have involved coopting real American influencers to try to push Russian narratives to US audiences, particularly aimed at undermining support for Ukraine.

Sen. John Fetterman speaks during the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation, and Community Development hearing in Dirksen building on April 16.

Democratic Sen. John Fetterman says his prediction that replacing President Joe Biden in the 2024 election would help former president Donald Trump did not come to fruition, but maintained in an interview Sunday that Biden still could have won.

Fetterman was one of Biden’s biggest defenders following the latter’s disastrous debate performance over the summer.

The Pennsylvania senator lauded Democratic nominee Kamala Harris but said the election will come down to the vice president successfully presenting a “stark choice” between herself and Trump.

State of the race: A newCNN Poll of Polls finds a tight contest between Trump and Harris,with no clear leader ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaks in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 6.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — a one-time presidential candidate who ran for the Democratic nomination against Kamala Harris — says the vice president will need “almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate.”

The former president and Harris will meet on the debate stage Tuesday in a showdown broadcast by ABC.

Buttigieg called debating Trump an “extremely challenging task in the face of all of the distraction, whatever outrageous things he does and says, because they will require a response, and yet you can’t allow him to change the subject.”

He described Harris as “extremely smart about getting to the core of an issue” and someone who focuses on “how is this going to affect somebody at home.”

He also took a shot atTrump’s highly scrutinized response to a question on child care policy earlier this week, saying“it wasn’t clear whether he even understood the question.”

Asked at an economic forum whether he would address rising child care costs for parents, Trump downplayed the problem and responded by touting his policy on tariffs, without clarifying how the two would be connected.

As the election approaches, there’s another focus on Democrats’ minds: keeping control of the Senate.

The party needs to hold all their seats — other than West Virginia, which is almost certain to flip to the GOP — in order to simply keep a 50-50 Senate. That means Democrats can’t afford a slip-up in a purple state like Pennsylvania, given they already have to defend seats in red states like Ohio and Montana.

But in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bob Casey is bracing for a GOP onslaught.

After a summer where he and his GOP opponent, David McCormick, have engaged in a brutal exchange of attacks in the marquee US Senate race in Pennsylvania, leaving the race in a dead heat, Republicans are preparing to drop more than $100 million across the airwaves in the final two months of the campaign.

While Casey still predicted he would pull off a November victory and contended that he didn’t “care what they spend,” he said: “I don’t have a personal super PAC funded by Wall Street billionaires. … It’s going to be a really difficult race to win.”

Read more about how Democrats are hoping to hold on to the Senate here.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a Labor Day event at Northwestern High School in Detroit, Michigan, on September 2.

Vice President Kamala Harris will return to the campaign trail in North Carolina and Pennsylvania following next week’s debate, looking to harness what she hopes will be a wave of momentum following the televised showdown.

The stops are part of a battleground state push by Harris, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and their respective spouses dubbed the New Way Forward tour.

The Harris campaign saysthe swing will include events “ineverymedia market ineverybattleground state in just four days.”

Here are some of the stops the team will make:

“With early voting about to begin and less than 60 days until Election Day, our campaign will take the vice president’s message directly to the voters wherever they are – on the airwaves, on the doors, and online,” Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said.

The campaign will also begin airing a new television ad in battlegrounds focused on Harris’ economic proposals to lower costs.

Harris has been hunkered down in Pittsburgh this weekend preparing for the debate, keeping her mostly off the campaign trail. She did make some local stops in the area on Saturday.

Then-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.campaigns in Raleigh, North Carolina, in January.

Thestart of voting in North Carolina, which was scheduled to begin Fridaywith the mailing of absentee ballots,has been delayed due to legal proceedings surrounding the removal of former independent presidential candidateRobert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from the ballot.

An appeals courtorderedthe state to remove Kennedy’s name last week, but North Carolina’s StateBoard ofElections has now appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court.

In its appeal, lawyers for the elections board said the change to the ballot at such a late stage has thrown the “elections process into chaos,” and that while it has already begun recoding ballots without RFK Jr., a quick reversal by the state’s highest court could still “avoid most of the irreparable harm.”

Why this matters: Kennedydropped out of the racelast month and endorsed formerPresident Donald Trump. Removing his name from the ballot is part of a strategy to ensure voters don’t still vote for Kennedy despite the independent’s urging to now back his unlikely ally.

North Carolina’s Democratic-controlled State Board of Elections voted along party lines last week torejectKennedy’s requestto remove his name, saying it wouldn’t be practical to reprint ballots and delay the start of voting.

Kennedy challenged the decision in court, and that’s led to the events now holding up the state’s electoral process.

Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump holds a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, on September 7.

Former President Donald Trump touched on familiar talking points as he spoke during a campaign rally at an airfield in central Wisconsin on Saturday, projecting confidence about Tuesday’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris while shouting out allies Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Here’s some of what Trump said during the rally:

Changing the 25th Amendment: Trump called for modifying the 25th Amendmentof the US Constitution and said if a vice president covers for the “incapacity of the president” they should be removed from office.

It was part of an attack on Harris, who he accuses of a “cover-up” of President Joe Biden’s fitness for office before he eventually dropped out of the race.

On the debate:Trump said the country is run by “stupid people” and that we “found that out at the debate with Joe (Biden).”

“We’re going to find it out again on Tuesday night. Is anybody going to be watching?” Trumpasked the crowd. The former president predicted that pundits would say he lost the debate, even “if I destroy her.”

Praising RFK Jr.:Trump repeatedly praised Kennedy, saying that with his help, “we’ll take on the corruption at the FDA, the CDC, World Health Organization and other institutions of public health.”

Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate who hasembraced conspiracy theoriesabout vaccines and other issues, has been positioned by the former president to helm apanel investigating chronic health problemsin a potential second Trump administration.

On Boeing and SpaceX:Trump said theBoeing Starliner crew being stuck in spaceis “embarrassing,” and that Musk, the SpaceX CEO, is “going to have to save them.”

Trump continued his public praise of the tech billionaire amid thetightening alliancebetween the two men.

“He’s very good at what he does,” Trump said of Musk. “Leon’s going to send up a rocket, he looks forward to it,” he added, apparently misstating his ally’s first name.

The praise of Musk comes days after Trump announced he would appoint Musk to head a newly created government efficiency commission if reelected.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney, left, and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Vice President Kamala Harris welcomed the endorsem*nt of former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Rep. Liz Cheney, calling the prominent Republicans’ backing a rebuke of the “attempts to kind of divide us as Americans.”

“I’m honored to have their endorsem*nt,” shetold reporters during a visit to a spice shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“They both as leaders who are well-respected are making an important statement that it’s OK and if not important to put country above party,” she added.

Harris says she’s ready for debate: Harris visited Penzeys Spices in Pittsburgh as a brief respite from debate preparations, where she greeted supporters and perused merchandise. Harris told reporters the “best part” of debate preparations was getting a chance to visit the store.

Harris suggested her main focus in next week’s debate with former President Donald Trump is to communicate with voters that it’s “time to turn the page on divisiveness.”

When asked if she’s ready to debate Trump, she replied, “Yes I am. Yes.”

During her visit to the store, Harris greeted roughly a dozen customers and took a tour, guided by one of the shop’s employees.