Harris pledges to support ‘good union jobs’ at Flint rally“I come from the middle class and I will never forget where I come from,” Harris tells the Flint crowd, pledging to support growth in cities like Flint and more “good union jobs,” including jobs “that do not require a college degree,” since a college degree is not the only measure of a worker’s skill or experience.
Harris added, as president, she will highlight which federal jobs do not require a college degree, and challenge the private sector to do the same.
Key events
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SummaryWrapping up our US politics new coverage for today, though our Middle East crisis news updates will continue. Here’s our updated key news of the day:
Kamala Harris campaigned in Michigan, focusing on her support from organized labor and pledging to support and protect “good union jobs.” In Detroit, Harris called Trump a “union buster” while praising collective bargaining for its benefits to workers. Later, in Flint, Magic Johnson appeared to endorse her and urge Black men to vote for Harris.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump held campaign events in Georgia, where he appeared with Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor, who has been the target of Trump’s ire since Kemp refused to overturn the state’s 2020 election results in Trump’s favor, and then in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to a major army base.
Polls show the presidential race is tightening in North Carolina, a swing state Trump won in 2016 and 2020, leaving some Trump supporters concerned.
Biden popped into the White House press briefing today. When asked about the November election, he said he was “confident it will be free and fair. I don’t know whether it will be peaceful,” given Trump’s rhetoric.
Biden also debunked claims from Marco Rubio that the positive jobs report was fake, saying “anything that Maga Republicans don’t like they call fake.” The September jobs report was unexpectedly strong, defying fears of an economic slowdown. The country added 254,000 jobs last month.
JD Vance spoke in Georgia this afternoon, telling undocumented immigrants “you’ve got four months, pack your bags, because you’re going home.” He also dodged a reporter’s question on whether the 2020 election was “rigged.”
Trump announced that his return to Butler, Pennsylvania, tomorrow to rally after the assassination attempt there will include the family of the man killed by the gunman, as well as a host of other rally attendees, first responders and elected officials.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman, wrote an X post that alleged some unnamed entity was controlling the weather. “Yes they can control the weather,” she said in a post. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” No word on who “they” refers to.
As Trump faces an increasingly tight race in North Carolina, Trump’s campaign appears to be focusing on turning out the state’s large military population.
Donald Trump has wrapped up his campaign town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where many of the questions from the audience came from strong Trump supporters and focused on military issues, from changing the name of the major army base in town back to “Fort Bragg,” a tribute to a Confederate general, to the issue of homeless veterans, to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, to a last question from a man who said he was a former F15 pilot in the Air Force and then the Space Force, who said he was fired from his command position during the Biden administration for criticizing the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion trainings. He asked Trump if he would support a commission or task force to guard the military from “woke generals” in the future. Trump said he would appoint the man himself to such a commission.
“Thank you for taking time tonight to speak with our troops,” the man said.
Polls show North Carolina is increasingly competitive, despite previous Trump victories“I’m freaking out about North Carolina,” one major Trump donor, who was granted anonymity to give his candid assessment of the race, told Reuters. “Georgia and Arizona are not in the bag, but heading in the right direction.”
Reuters has more about the increasingly close North Carolina race between Trump and Harris:
Trump leads Harris by 0.5 percentage point in North Carolina, according to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a polling and analysis website. The former president leads Harris by 1.1 points in Georgia and 1.2 points in Arizona. All of those figures are within the margin of error for major polls, meaning either candidate could walk away with a victory…
Some Trump allies privately say the race in North Carolina, which Trump won in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, is too close for comfort, even as they think he still has a slight leg up on Democratic rival Kamala Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
While Trump’s ad spending in the state has been relatively modest compared with most other battleground states, he has hit the campaign trail hard. His four campaign events in North Carolina, including stops in Wilmington and Mint Hill, in the last month outnumber those in any other state except for Wisconsin and Michigan, according to a Reuters tally.
As Trump once again baselessly claims that the Biden administration is failing to give adequate support to Hurricane Helene victims because many of them are Republicans, it’s worth revisiting this report from yesterday, in which two former Trump national security aides said that Trump was reluctant to give emergency funding to California after wildfires in 2018, until an aide showed him that many Trump voters live in California.
NEW: Two former Trump White House officials told me they had to show voter data to Trump to get him to release disaster funding to CA wildfire victims. He released it after learning that he had as many GOP supporters in Orange Co. as he did in Iowa. https://t.co/VU9fbGsOBl
— Scott Waldman (@scottpwaldman) October 3, 2024
“This is Katrina,” Trump says, of the government’s response Hurricane Helene, accusing the Biden administration of doing “the worst job.”
With a reported death toll of over 200 people so far, Hurricane Helene has been a catastrophic storm.
Hurricane Katrina, during the George W Bush administration, claimed 1,392 lives, Axios reported, and sparked fierce debates over the government’s emergency response, with Kanye West famously alleging that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
But Hurricane Maria, during Trump’s presidency in 2017, claimed 2,975 lives, making it the deadliest US storm of the 21st century. Axios reported.
Donald Trump is declining to sit on the armless swivel chair on the stage in Fayetteville, calling it “the most uncomfortable chair”.
“The one thing I don’t want is to fall on my ass, because that’s gong to be–that will be the only story,” Trump said. “I’m not sitting in that sucker,” he added. “I think it was a booby-trap. That was put there by Kamala.”
The crowd cheered.
In Fayetteville, Trump calls Harris “more left by far” than progressive US senator Elizabeth Warren, and “more left by far that crazy Bernie Sanders.”
“I know this will shock you, but that’s just not the case,” Bernie Sanders wrote in the Guardian this summer, in response to this Republican attack line.
At the Fayetteville town hall, an elderly veteran of the Vietnam war who sent Trump his Purple Heart, in tribute to Trump’s survival of the attempted assassination attack this summer in Butler, Pennsylvania, is on the stage asking the former president a question about how Trump will prevent homelessness among veterans, and also “kicking these illegal aliens out of the freakin’ hotels and providing them with money” while veterans remain homeless.
The question may be related to a story that circulated in rightwing media earlier this year, and which turned out to be false:
Trump takes stage in Fayetteville, home to Fort Liberty“Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?” Donald Trump asks the crowd in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the army base that was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, as part of a Department of Defense effort to rename military bases that paid tribute to Confederate soldiers.
The crowd cheered in approval.
“We did win two world wars from Fort Bragg,” Trump adds. “This is no time to be changing names.”
The Associated Press notes: “The North Carolina base was originally named in 1918 for Gen Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key civil war battles that contributed to the Confederacy’s downfall.”
Axios is reporting that venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has emailed his employees to inform them that he and his wife “will be making a significant donation to entities who support the Harris Walz campaign,” after going public with his support for Trump in July.
Horowitz reportedly wrote that “Felicia and I have known Vice President Harris for over 10 years and she has been a great friend to both of us during that time” and said that their donations would be “a result of our friendship.”
The SF Standard previously reported that Horowitz’s public embrace of Trump this summer was seen as an “astonishing about-face” that left longtime friends and acquaintances “scratching their heads,” since the Bay Area couple had previously been longtime Democratic donors, and Felicia had been outspoken about challenges for trans people in US as the parent of a trans child. (Horowitz tweeted angrily about this particular article before it came out, denouncing it as a hit piece.)