Elections 2024 live updates: Latest news and analysis on the VP debate

Over the past four years, President Joe Biden has jetted off to survey damage and console victims after tornadoes, wildfires and tropical storms. It’s not a role that Kamala Harris has played as vice president.

But on Wednesday, they will both fan out across the Southeast to grapple with the damage from Hurricane Helene, seeking to demonstrate commitment and competence in helping devastated communities after Donald Trump’s false claims about their administration’s response. Biden is heading to North Carolina and South Carolina, while Harris is going to Georgia.

Harris’ stop will also serve as a political test in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. She’s trying to step into the role for which Biden is best known — showing the empathy that Americans expect in times of tragedy — in the closing stretch of her campaign for president.

She last visited scenes of natural disasters as a California senator, including when she went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and when she walked through charred wreckage in Paradise, California, after the Camp Fire in 2018.

Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris’ campaign manager and former state director in her Senate office, said the vice president uses her experience consoling victims as a courtroom prosecutor to connect with people after tragedies.

She said the trip to Georgia was a chance for Harris “to continue to show her leadership and her ability to get things done, versus Donald Trump and JD Vance who want to dismantle the basic services and the role that the government should play.”

In an appearance on CNN on Wednesday lunchtime, Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi said of the vice presidential debate: “You saw the difference between truth and trust, in terms of Walz, and con and slick, in terms of [Vance] … they not only want to have a federal ban on abortion, they want to close the Department of Education to educate those children.”

“First of all, injured, what does injured mean?” Trump replied. “You mean because they had a headache?”

Ariana Baio reports on the former president’s shocking remarks.

The latest polling by The Cook Political Report also looks at one of the most important and enduring political questions for Donald Trump — can he ever expand his appeal, or does he really have a hard “ceiling” of support.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump was unable to break 49 per cent of the vote in some of the most important swing states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona.

The September Cook poll gives some credence to the theory that his support is fixed. Since May, Trump’s overall share of the vote has barely budged (47-48 per cent), even as Harris has been able to improve on Biden’s share by five points (44-49 per cent).

Moreover, a fixed percentage of voters – 32-35 per cent – are “all-in” for Trump; they like him and his leadership traits, while a fixed percentage of voters – anywhere from 45-49 per cent – dislike Trump both personally and policy-wise.

However, if you combine the percentage of voters who are all-in on Trump with the 17-22 per cent who dislike him personally but approve of his policies, there is a pathway for Trump to break through his ceiling.

While the conventional wisdom suggests that the “like his policies/don’t like his style” voter is more likely to be a middle-aged conservative white male, the data finds this type of voter to be disproportionately Latino (26 per cent) and specifically a Latino man (28 per cent).

Most importantly, over half of the “policy not personality” voters are undecided on how to vote or say they are supporting a third-party candidate. In other words, if Trump were able to keep focused on a policy-based message, it would give him a significant advantage with those voters who are still up for grabs.

Donald Trump Jr clashed with Kaitlan Collins about his father previously being compared to Adolf Hitler – before the CNN journalist reminded him that JD Vance once did the very same thing.

On Tuesday night, the Ohio senator and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz faced off for their first – and likely only – debate ahead of the election, broadcast live from CBS News’s New York City studio.

James Liddell has the story.

The Kamala Harris and Tim Walz campaign has seized on JD Vance’s “damning non-answer” concerning whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election at last night’s vice presidential debate with a new ad focused on the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Donald Trump has his largest lead over Kamala Harris, 51 per cent to 42 per cent on the issue of border and immigration, according to the latest polling by The Cook Political Report. However, that is a five-point drop from his 53 per cent to 39 per cent lead over Harris in August. This drop comes even as the Trump campaign and its allies have run attack ads that put the blame for the surge of migrants at the southern border, and the crimes some of them have committed, at Harris’ feet.

The southern border is no longer as overwhelmed with the surge of migrants, and as such is no longer in the center of media coverage, which is likely helping Harris. Illegal crossings have dropped dramatically since June, when President Joe Biden’s executive action restricting asylum claims went into effect.

However, voters in border states like Arizona (+13) and Nevada (+12) continue to give Trump a significant advantage on the issue. But in states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Trump’s lead on the issue has been halved.

The Trump-Vance campaign is hopeful the vice presidential candidate’s debate performance last night will improve his “weird” image and could kick-start the campaign for the Republican ticket, according to reports.

But last night could mark a turning point.

Trump holds a five-point lead on the question of who voters trust to “deal with the economy” (50-45%). But, on the specific issue of “getting inflation under control,” Trump’s six-point lead from August has evaporated. In August, Trump led Harris on inflation and cost of living 48 per cent to 42 per cent. Today, voters are evenly divided (47 per cent) on who they trust more to handle an issue that 60 per cent of swing state voters say is the aspect of the economy that “concerns them the most.”

According to Cook there are a few explanations for this shift.

The first is that Harris’s message on the economy has broken through. Since kicking off her campaign two months ago, Harris has honed in on an “affordability” message that stresses reducing the costs of pharmaceutical drugs, cracking down on price gouging, and promoting affordable housing. She has also unveiled an 82-page economic policy plan.

Another is that Trump’s attempts to link her to “Bidenomics” and the role the Biden Administration’s economic policy played in driving up the cost of living have not been as effective as Republicans had hoped.

Voters give Trump only a three-point lead on a centerpiece of his economic agenda — tariffs and trade. Just 38 per cent of swing state voters said they thought that a 20 per cent tariff on imported goods would mean “companies would bring more manufacturing jobs back to the US”, while a plurality of voters (45 per cent) said that companies that import goods would “increase the prices consumers pay to pay for the tariff”.

Harris is likely also being helped by the fact that voters are slightly less pessimistic about the state of inflation and the economy today than they were in August. They also feel decidedly less gloomy about the economy and inflation than they felt in May, with 46 per cent saying things are getting better or staying the same in September, versus 38 per cent in May. The percentage of people who felt the economy is getting worse has dropped from 62 per cent in May to 54 per cent in September.

The gap between those who think inflation is getting better or staying the same and those who think it’s getting worse is eight points — a 17-point decrease in economic pessimism over the last four months.