The two presidential candidates are using the week before their debates to sharpen their economic messages about who can do more for the middle class. Vice President Kamala Harris will discuss her policy plans in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Wednesday, while Donald Trump will address the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.
Harris will use the New Hampshire campaign stop to propose an expansion of tax breaks for small businesses, a pro-business plan that could soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and big corporations to pay higher taxes. Trump, meanwhile, is betting that Americans are hungry for trillions of dollars in tax cuts — and that growth will be so fantastic that worrying about budget deficits won’t be worth it.
The candidates will debate next week in what will be their first ever meeting. The nation’s key swing state, Pennsylvania, will begin in-person proxy voting the following week. Early voting will open in at least four states by the end of the month, with another dozen states set to follow in mid-October.
In just 62 days, the final votes will be cast to determine which of them will lead the most powerful nation in the world.
Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here’s the latest news:
DNC runs digital billboard focused on reproductive rights and Trump in Pennsylvania capital
As Trump returns to the battleground in Pennsylvania, his Democratic opponents argue that the former president’s plans on abortion and reproductive rights threaten health care for American women.
On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee will install a digital mobile billboard in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, near the area where the GOP candidate will participate in a Fox News rally.
The billboard focuses on reproductive rights, with news commentators referencing Project 2025 and saying that Trump and the Republicans “will not stop until they have virtually eliminated access to reproductive health care in this country.”
Project 2025 is the term for the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page handbook for the next Republican administration, which has become a major target for Democrats’ ire in the general election. Trump has said that Project 2025 has nothing to do with his campaign.
DNC spokesperson Addy Toevs said in a statement that “banning abortion and threatening access to IVF are central to Donald Trump Project 2025’s agenda for a second term.”
Trump has said that if he wins, he wants to make IVF treatments free for women, but he has not detailed how he plans to fund the plan or how it would work.
Last month, he said he would vote “no” on a Florida proposal to lift the state’s six-week ban on abortion.
Key points from the AP report on JD Vance and the Catholic ‘post-liberals’ in his sphere of influence
Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019 shaped his political worldview, he writes.
It also brought him into close contact with a Catholic intellectual movement that some critics saw as reactionary or authoritarian and that is little known to the American public.
That’s changing now that Vance is emerging nationally as the Republican vice presidential nominee and running mate to former President Donald Trump.
The professors and media personalities in this network are generally known as “postliberal,” a term Vance has used to describe himself.
▶ Here are some conclusions from AP’s reporting.
Harris visits New Hampshire, far from the larger swing states, to tout her small business tax plan
Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning in New Hampshire on Wednesday to tout a proposal to expand tax breaks for small businesses, a plan that would benefit entrepreneurs and soften her past calls to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and large corporations.
She wants to increase tax credits for small business startup costs from $5,000 to $50,000, ultimately generating 25 million new small business applications over four years.
Harris is expected to stop at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, outside Portsmouth, to meet co-founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier. According to Harris’ campaign, their brewery received support to open its current location through a small business loan and had solar panels installed using federal programs supported by the Biden administration.
The trip to New Hampshire is a rare departure for a candidate who spends most of her time in the Midwest and Sun Belt states, where she plays a crucial role in the November election.
▶ Read more here.
JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. And so did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers
By his own account, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019 provided a spiritual fulfillment he couldn’t find in his Yale education or his successful career.
It was also a political conversion.
Catholicism offered him a new way of looking at the addictions, family breakdown and other societal ills he described in his 2016 bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I felt a desperate need for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties,” he wrote in a 2020 essay.
Through his conversion, Vance also came into close contact with a Catholic intellectual movement that some critics saw as reactionary or authoritarian. This movement was little known to the American public until Vance emerged nationally as the Republican vice-presidential candidate.
▶ Read more here.
Federal judge denies Donald Trump’s request to intervene after hush-money conviction
A federal judge on Tuesday denied Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush-money trial, thwarting the former president’s latest attempt to overturn his felony conviction and delay his sentence.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that Trump had not met the burden of proof required to have a federal court take over the case from the state court where it was being heard.
Hellerstein’s ruling came hours after prosecutors in Manhattan objected to Trump’s attempt to delay post-trial decisions while he sought to have the federal court intervene.
In a letter to the judge hearing the case in state court, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argued that he was not legally required to delay making decisions after the trial and to wait for Hellerstein to rule.
Read more here.
