Harris and Trump deadlocked in polls, new report suggests A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked. According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump. One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.” In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way. This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time. DOJ warns states about voting laws, amid efforts to purge voters from rolls Amid efforts to purge voters in Republican-led states, the Department of Justice released a fact-sheet on Monday reminding states of the restrictions on removing voters ahead of the voter rolls on the eve of a federal election. The document essentially serves as a warning to states that systematically removing voters within 90 days of a federal election is illegal under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Any effort to remove voters, according to the law, must also be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory.” The document is notable because it comes as Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, and Ohio have all touted efforts to remove people from the voter rolls in recent months. Many of those efforts have been misleading and have targeted people suspected of being non-citizens and have raised scrutiny from civil rights groups who are concerned the efforts may be unlawfully targeting naturalized citizens. “Examples of list maintenance activities that may violate the NVRA include comparing voter files to outdated or inaccurate records or databases, taking action that erroneously affects a particular class of voters (such as newly naturalized citizens), or matching records based solely on first name, last name, and date of birth,” the fact sheet says. There have also been reports of activists in Georgia and Florida using unreliable software to challenge the voting eligibility of people it believes may have moved. The DOJ guidance issued on Monday reminds states that those efforts are also illegal within 90 days of a federal election. The 90-day blackout period, the document says, “also applies to list maintenance programs based on third-party challenges derived from any large, computerized datamatching process.” Kristen Clarke, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, released a video urging voters to contact DoJ if they believe they have been wrongfully removed from the rolls. “As we approach Election Day, it is important that states adhere to all aspects of federal law that safeguard the rights of eligible voters to remain on the active voter lists and to vote free from discrimination and intimidation,” she said in a statement. ‘I had never actually heard her more upset:’ Kamala Harris as Roe v Wade fell Speaking at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, a key swing state, Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband, talked about the intense impact of the conservative Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade on all the women in his life, including Harris. He said he heard the news directly from Harris herself. “I had never actually heard her more upset. And she called to say, ‘Dougie, they actually did it, they actually did it.’” Emhoff said Harris had personally grilled Trump’s rightwing supreme court nominees, who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent when it came to abortion. Emhoff’s remarks come as Democrats focus on abortion rights, which is seen as Harris’ strongest issue. Harris’ gun violence platform: crime is down, ban assault weapons, fund the police Advocacy groups are continuing to weigh in on the outline of Kamala Harris’s policy priorities, posted on her website today. It’s no surprise that Giffords, a leading gun violence prevention group headed by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, praised Harris’s policy outline on gun violence prevention, which comes in the wake of two new high-profile mass shootings in Georgia and in Kentucky. Harris, a former prosecutor who secured the first-ever political endorsement from March for Our Lives, the youth gun violence prevention group formed in response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has a long track record on responding to daily community gun violence, and she served as the head of the Biden administration’s newly created Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an office advocates had pushed for. The gun control measures Harris endorses are standard for Democratic politicians: she supports legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and supporting red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Harris’ policy overview touts her record as a prosecutor “getting illegal guns and violent criminals off California streets,” but it also highlights the Biden administration’s big investment in community-based gun violence prevention efforts, which advocates called a significant improvement from the Obama administration. Harris’ platform notes that, after a big increase in gun violence in 2020, during the early pandemic, there appears to have been a historic drop in murders in 2023. (How much decisions at the White House level had to do with either the rise or the fall in murders is deeply unclear, but the decrease in violence that Harris is pointing to is real.) She also makes very clear that she does not support defunding the police, but instead “continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers and people to support them.” Oprah will host a livestream rally for Kamala Harris on 19 September This is Lois Beckett, picking up our US politics coverage from Los Angeles. Oprah Winfrey will host a digital rally for Kamala Harris next week, multiple news outlets reported. The event will bring together different affinity groups that have mobilized for the Harris campaign, Variety reported. United We Dream Action, the political and electoral arm of United We Dream, the largest immigrant rights group led by young activists in the US, has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, they announced on Monday. Bruna Sollod, the group’s senior political director, said in a statement: We choose to block the pain and violence Trump will carry out against our people. We choose Harris as our next organizing target and are ready to hold her accountable these next four years to meet the demands of our generation. Michigan supreme court rules RFK Jr"s name must appear on ballot The Michigan supreme court has ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name will appear on Michigan’s ballot this fall, the Detroit Free Press is reporting. Despite suspending his presidential campaign last month and endorsing the former president Donald Trump, the Michigan supreme court ruled on Monday that Kennedy’s name would remain on the state’s ballot. This comes just days after an appellate court in Michigan ruled that Kennedy’s name must be stricken from ballots. The Michigan secretary of state’s office said last week that it would appeal to the state supreme court. The new ruling from the state’s high court on Monday overturns the lower court’s decision, the Detroit Free Press reported. Ever since he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy has been fighting to remove his name from ballots in swing states. Harris and Trump deadlocked in polls, new report suggests A new report published by Pew Research Center on Monday, shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump deadlocked. According to the Pew report, 49% of registered voters surveyed said that if the election were held today, they would vote for Harris and an identical share said they would vote for Trump. One takeaway from the new poll is that Pew states: “Trump’s advantage on ‘mental sharpness’ has disappeared.” In the survey, 61% of voters said the phrase “mentally sharp” described Harris “very or fairly well”, compared with 52% who described Trump this way. This is a decrease from an earlier Pew survey published in July, where 58% of voters said that they viewed Trump as “mentally sharp” compared with 24% who said that about president Joe Biden at the time. On Monday, president Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the several individuals to serve as “key leaders in his administration” in a news release. The nominees include Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Dan Sullivan to be Representatives of the US to the 79th session of the General Assembly of the UN, among others. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, also told reporters on Monday that Joe Biden would be watching the Tuesday debate between the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the former president Donald Trump. “The president is going to watch the debate, he’s looking forward to watching the debate” Jean-Pierre said. “The president is incredibly proud of the vice-president,” she added. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters on Monday that president Joe Biden agreed with Kamala Harris’s leadership and policy decisions. During the White House press briefing on Monday, Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter why Vice-President Harris was “spending so much time trying to define Trump and link him to Project 2025, rather than define herself?” Jean-Pierre responded and directed the question to the Harris campaign, but said that the contrast between Trump and Harris could not be “more clear” and said that Biden “agrees with her leadership, her policy decisions.” This comes as the Harris campaign released a list of her policy proposals on Sunday evening. Nikki Haley says Trump and Vance must change how they talk about women In an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, said that former president Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, need to change the way they speak about women, when asked why she thinks Kamala Harris has a 14-point lead among women. “Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women,” Haley, who has previously said she would be voting for Trump in November, said on Monday. “You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far just by accident … she’s a prosecutor.” She continued: You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too. The bottom line is, we win on policies, stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign posted a list of her policy positions on its website this weekend, after critics have called her vague and thin on policy since the Democratic nominee launched her run for the White House in July. The list of policies on the Harris campaign website are organized into four main sections focused on the economy, “fundamental freedoms”, safety and crime, and national security. Among the proposals, Harris has said she would implement tax cuts for the middle class, reduce healthcare costs, increase the minimum wage, bring back the bipartisan border security bill and more. Interim summary Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump is “probably going to speak a lot of untruths” during their debate tomorrow night. “There’s no floor for him in terms of how low he will go,” Harris said in an interview with Rickey Smiley that aired on Monday. Ten retired top military officials announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris in a letter warning that Donald Trump is “a danger to our national security and democracy”. The letter by National Security Leaders for America also sought to defend Harris against Republican attacks over the Biden administration’s chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. A 250-page Republican-led congressional report on Monday attempted to implicate Kamala Harris in the chaotic 2021 pullout of western forces from Afghanistan. Democrats accused Republicans of inflating Harris’s part in the incident simply because she had replaced Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee. Donald Trump threatened in a Truth Social post over the weekend that he would jail those “involved in unscrupulous behavior” during this year’s election. He indicated that lawyers, political operatives, donors, voters and election officials could all be targeted with prosecution. Donald Trump confirmed he will vote in support of a ballot measure in Florida that would legalize recreational marijuana. Trump’s support contrasts with Florida’s governor and fellow Republican, Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal opponent of the ballot measure. Kamala Harris’s campaign will air a new TV ad featuring former officials in Donald’s Trump administration warning about the threat he poses to the country, in what looks like an attempt to goad the former president ahead of tomorrow’s debate. The Harris campaign also released three new TV ads targeting Donald Trump on abortion ahead of Tuesday’s debate that includes comments from the Republican nominee claiming credit for helping overturn Roe v Wade. The leaders of two major left-leaning women’s organizations said the issue of reproductive rights would offer the “starkest possible contrast” between Harris and Trump at Tuesday night’s debate. Republican officials are raising the alarm that Trump campaign has invested far fewer resources for its voter turnout operation in battleground states than previous presidential election races. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, postponed a rally he was scheduled to speak on Monday evening in Reno, Nevada due to wildfires in the region, his campaign said. Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Kamala Harris in November’s election. Six key moments that could offer insight into Harris"s debate strategy against Trump Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate. The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June. The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states. For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.