Election 2024 Latest: Trump and Harris zero in on economic policy plans ahead of first debate

The two presidential nominees are using the week before their debate to sharpen their economic messages about who could do more for the middle class. Vice President Kamala Harris will discuss her policy plans on Wednesday in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while Donald Trump will address the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.

Harris will use the New Hampshire campaign stop to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses, a pro-entrepreneur plan that may soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and large corporations to pay higher taxes. Trump, meanwhile, is betting that Americans crave trillions of dollars in tax cuts — and that growth will be so fantastic that it’s not worth worrying about budget deficits.

The candidates will debate next week in what will be their first meeting ever. The nation’s premier swing state, Pennsylvania, begins in-person absentee voting the week after. By the end of the month, early voting will be underway in at least four states with a dozen more to follow by mid-October.

In just 62 days, the final votes will be cast to decide which one of them will lead the world’s most powerful nation.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the Latest:

As Trump returns to battleground Pennsylvania, his Democratic opponents argue that the former president’s plans around abortion and reproductive rights threaten health care for American women.

On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee is running a digital mobile billboard in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, around the area where the GOP nominee will participate in a Fox News town hall.

The billboard focuses on reproductive rights, with news commentators referencing Project 2025 and saying Trump and Republicans “are not going to stop until they have all but eliminated access to reproductive health care in this country.”

Project 2025 is the term for the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page handbook for the next Republican administration, which has become a chief target for Democrats’ ire in the general election. Trump has said Project 2025 is not related to his campaign.

DNC spokesperson Addy Toevs said in a statement that “banning abortion and threatening access to IVF is central to Donald Trump Project 2025 agenda for a second term.”

Trump has said that, if he wins, he wants to make IVF treatment free for women, but has not detailed how he would fund the plan or how it would work.

Last month, he said he would vote no on a Florida ballot measure that would repeal the state’s six-week abortion ban.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism helped shape his political worldview, he has written.

It has also put him in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public.

That’s changing with Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee and running mate to former President Donald Trump.

The professors and media personalities in this network are generally known as “postliberal.” Vance has used that term to describe himself as well.

▶ Here are some takeaways from the AP’s reporting.

Vice President Kamala Harris is using a New Hampshire campaign stop on Wednesday to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses, a pro-entrepreneur plan that may soften her previous calls for wealthy Americans and large corporations to pay higher taxes.

She wants to expand from $5,000 to $50,000 tax incentives for small business startup expenses, to eventually spur 25 million new small business applications over four years.

Harris is expected to stop at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, outside Portsmouth, and meet with co-founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier. Their brewery got support to open its current location through a small business credit and installed solar panels using federal programs championed by the Biden administration, according to the Harris campaign.

The New Hampshire trip is a rare deviation for a candidate who is spending most of her time in Midwest and Sun Belt states with pivotal roles in November’s election.

▶ Read more here.

By his own account, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s 2019 conversion to Catholicism provided a spiritual fulfillment he couldn’t find in his Yale education or career success.

It also amounted to a political conversion.

Catholicism provided him with a new way of looking at the addictions, family breakdowns and other social ills he described in his 2016 bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties,” he wrote in a 2020 essay.

His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that was little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

▶ Read more here.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, thwarting the former president’s latest bid to overturn his felony conviction and delay his sentencing.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that Trump had not satisfied the burden of proof required for a federal court to take control of the case from the state court where it was tried.

Hellerstein’s ruling came hours after Manhattan prosecutors raised objections to Trump's effort to delay post-trial decisions in the case while he sought to have the federal court step in.

In a letter to the judge presiding over the case in state court, the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that he had no legal obligation to hold off on post-trial decisions and wait for Hellerstein to rule.

Read more here.