Election 2024 Latest: Harris concentrates on Pennsylvania while Trump stumps in the West

Former President Donald Trump will hit the campaign trail in Western states on Friday as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris fixes her attention on the battleground state of Pennsylvania in the East.

Trump will hold what's being billed as a news conference at his Los Angeles-area golf club in the morning before heading to northern California for a fundraiser, followed by a rally in Las Vegas, the largest city in swing state Nevada.

Harris, meanwhile, heads to Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre on Friday as she tries to capitalize on her momentum after Tuesday night’s debate. It’s her second day of back-to-back rallies after holding two events in North Carolina, another swing state, on Thursday.

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Here’s the latest:

Trump in his press conference repeated his claim that crime has skyrocketed under the Biden administration. FBI data has shown a downward trend in violent crime since a spike during the coronavirus pandemic.

Violent crime surged during the pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% between in 2020 over the previous year — the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records.

FBI data released in June shows that the overall violent crime rate declined 15% in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. One expert has cautioned, however, that those figures are preliminary and may overstate the actual reduction in crime.

Trump’s campaign has cited the National Crime Victimization Survey recently released by the Justice Department, which shows that the number of times people or households were victims of crime increased by about 40% from 2020 to 2023. The report notes, however, that while the rate of violent victimizations in 2023 was higher than it was in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate in 2019, when Trump was president.

That survey aims to capture both crimes reported to police and crimes that are not reported to police and is conducted annually through interviews with about 150,000 households. It doesn’t include murders or crimes against people under the age of 12.

President Joe Biden says the Haitian community is “under attack” right now and it has to stop. Biden was referring to comments made by Republican former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

The Republicans have falsely claimed immigrants are eating people’s pets and Vance on Friday suggested immigrants in the area were responsible for rising crime and rent, among other claims. In the wake of the onslaught of online insults, bomb threats were sent to multiple agencies in the city, and two elementary schools were evacuated and a middle school was closed on Friday.

Biden, speaking at a luncheon at the White House, didn’t call out anyone by name, but he said: “There’s no place in America ... It has to stop what he’s doing. It has to stop.” He said it was “simply wrong.”

Trump once again described Harris as the “border czar.” But that was never her formal title, and she was never specifically given the responsibility for security on the border.

She was tasked by Biden in March 2021 to tackle the “root causes” of migration from the Northern Triangle — the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — and pushing leaders there and in Mexico to enforce immigration laws.

Trump on Friday claimed he “completely won” the classified documents prosecution against him.

But that assessment leaves out the fact that the judge dismissed the case not because she found that Trump had done nothing but rather because she concluded that the prosecutor who brought the charges, Jack Smith, had been unlawfully appointed.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is a departure from rulings by other federal judges across the country, creating a strong possibility that it will be overturned on appeal — in which case, the prosecution would be revived and the case reinstated.

After a significant delay, former President Donald Trump's press conference at his Los Angeles-area golf club got underway on Friday just before 1:30 p.m. ET.

He began with comments from the mayor of Rancho Palos Verdes, John Cruikshank, who was talking about issues with recent landslides.

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — People began betting Thursday on which political party would win control of Congress in the November elections after a judge’s ruling allowing the wagers — the only ones to be legally approved by a U.S. jurisdiction.

New York startup company Kalshi began taking what amounts to bets on the outcome of the November congressional elections after a judge refused to block them from doing so.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb in Washington enabled the company, at least temporarily, to offer prediction contracts across the country — essentially yes-or-no bets — on which party will win control of the Senate and the House in November.

“The Kalshi community just made history, and I know we are only getting started,” said Tarek Mansour, a co-founder of the company. “Now is finally the time to allow these markets to show the world just how powerful they are at providing signal amidst the noise, and giving us more truth about what the future holds.”

▶ Read more about the endeavor

Former President Donald Trump plans to deliver remarks next Monday about cryptocurrency and the launch of the company World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform controlled by the Republican nominee’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

His speech will come 50 days before Election Day, an extraordinary use of dwindling campaign time to promote a personal business. The Republican former president has long mixed his political and business interests and marketed sneakers, photo books and Trump-branded Bibles during his 2024 campaign.

“We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said in a video posted Thursday to X, the social media site that will also host his address on the subject at 8 p.m. EDT on Monday from his Mar-a-Lago home.

▶ Read more about Trump’s stance on cryptocurrencies

Former President Donald Trump will campaign Friday in Western states as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris keeps her focus on one of the biggest battleground prizes in the East, Pennsylvania.

Trump is scheduled to hold what’s being billed as a news conference in the morning at his Los Angeles-area golf club before heading to northern California for a fundraiser, followed by a rally in Las Vegas, the largest city in swing state Nevada.

Harris, meanwhile, heads to Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre on Friday as she tries to capitalize on her momentum after Tuesday night’s debate. It’s her second day of back-to-back rallies after holding two events in North Carolina, another swing state, on Thursday.

While speaking in Charlotte, Harris took a victory lap for her debate performance in which she needled Trump and kept him on the defensive. Recounting one moment while campaigning in North Carolina, she mocked Trump for saying he had “concepts of a plan” for replacing the Affordable Care Act.

▶ Read more here.

NEW YORK — When her husband turns on the television to hear news about the upcoming presidential election, that’s often a signal for Lori Johnson Malveaux to leave the room.

It can get to be too much. Often, she’ll go to a TV in another room to watch a movie on the Hallmark Channel or BET. She craves something comforting and entertaining. And in that, she has company.

While about half of Americans say they are following political news “extremely” or “very” closely, about 6 in 10 say they need to limit how much information they consume about the government and politics to avoid feeling overloaded or fatigued, according to a new survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts.

Make no mistake: Malveaux plans to vote. She always does. “I just get to the point where I don’t want to hear the rhetoric,” she said.

▶ Read more here.

WASHINGTON — Even as she promoted her efforts to boost clean energy, Vice President Kamala Harris said in Tuesday’s debate that the Biden-Harris administration has overseen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.″

The comment by Harris, a longtime climate hawk who backed the original Green New Deal, surprised supporters and opponents alike — and conflicted with frequent boasts by Harris and President Joe Biden that they are champions in the fight to slow global warming.

After former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Biden-Harris administration reentered the global pact aimed at reducing emissions. The administration also set a target to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and moved to accelerate renewable energy projects and shift away from fossil fuels.

▶ Read more here.

Trump said Thursday in Arizona that as president he’d seek to end taxes on overtime wages. It’s his latest appeal to the working-class voters he’s counting on to return him to the White House. Trump has also pledged to end taxes on tips and Social Security wages.

The proposals would take a significant bite out of federal revenue, ballooning the deficit unless accompanied by significant spending cuts.

“It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break,” Trump said. Harris has announced her own proposal to stop taxing tips.

More on Trump’s plan to end taxation of tips here.