The Latest: Harris and Trump campaigns pivot to turnout as early voting begins

With just 21 days to go before the final votes are cast in the 2024 presidential season, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are scrambling to win over and turn out Black voters, women and other key constituencies in what looks to be a razor-tight election.

Harris appeared at a town hall-style event in Detroit hosted Tuesday by the morning radio program “The Breakfast Club,” featuring Charlamagne Tha God. Trump, meanwhile, joined an all-female audience at a Fox News Channel town hall, to be aired Wednesday on host Harris Faulkner's show.

Harris warned that Trump would “institutionalize” harsh policing tactics that disproportionately affect Black men, while Trump said Harris’ immigration policies has been “devastating” Black and Latino communities.

Here’s the latest:

Trump emphasizes hypermasculinity as Obama says men who sit out don’t show strength

Attention, American men: Donald Trump and his allies want you to believe your vote says big things about your masculinity. The Republican nominee is amping up his hypermasculine tone and support of traditional gender roles, a reflection of the surgical campaign-within-a-campaign for the votes of men in a showdown with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

But where Harris is deploying “dudes” who use bro-ey language and occasional scolding to boost her support particularly among Black and Hispanic males, Trump’s camp is meeting men in alpha-male terms, often with crude and demeaning language.

“If you are a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said on his podcast.

As the razor’s edge contest elevates the importance of small caches of voters who are apathetic or on the fence in battleground states, both camps are reaching beyond their ideological bases.

“You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is?” former President Barack Obama scolded Black men last week in Pennsylvania, the largest battleground state. “That’s not acceptable.”

Republicans challenge more than 63,000 voters in Georgia, but few removed, AP finds

An Associated Press survey finds that more than 63,000 Georgia voters have had their qualifications challenged since July 1. That’s a big surge from 2023 and the first half of 2024, when the AP found that about 18,000 voters were challenged. But only about 1% of those challenged in recent months have been removed from the voting rolls or placed into challenged status, mostly in one county.

The challenges are part of a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to enlist Republican activists to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls.

The Georgia push is part of a national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls. The effort to remove voters has drawn scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department, which in September issued a seven-page guidance memo that aims to limit challenges and block parts of the new Georgia law by citing 1993’s National Voter Registration Act.

Trump's idea that high tariffs are an economic cure-all is deeply flawed, economists say

Donald Trump told the Economic Club of Chicago that "the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff.’”

He's defended his plan to impose high tariffs on imported goods as an economic cure-all, despite warnings from economists that businesses will have to pass the costs to American consumers, raising prices and deepening inflation.

“Inflation will vanish completely" if he's able to return to the White House, Trump insisted.

Most mainstream economists say Trump’s policy proposals would make inflation worse. Deporting millions of migrant workers and demanding a voice in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies also would send prices surging, they say.

Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a letter in June expressing fear that Trump’s proposals would “reignite’’ inflation, which has plummeted since peaking at 9.1% in 2022 and is nearly back to the Fed’s 2% target.

Last month, the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted that Trump’s policies — the deportations, import taxes and efforts to erode the Fed’s independence — would drive consumer prices sharply higher two years into his second term. Peterson’s analysis concluded that inflation, which would otherwise register 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6% and 9.3% if Trump’s economic proposals were adopted.

Georgia judge blocks new rule requiring hand-counting of ballots

A judge has blocked a new rule requiring Georgia Election Day ballots to be counted by hand after the close of voting. The same judge ruled a day earlier that county election officials cannot refuse to certify election results by the deadline set in law.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney late Tuesday blocked enforcement of the hand count rule while he considers the merits of a challenge by Democrats and liberal voting rights groups who raised concerns that Donald Trump’s allies could refuse to certify the results if the former president loses to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

They have also argued that new rules enacted by the Trump-endorsed majority on the State Election Board could be used to stop or delay certification and to undermine public confidence in the results.