Harris to campaign with Obama, Springsteen; Trump heads to the West

With less than two weeks until Election Day, the tone of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is shifting to focus on criticisms of former President Donald Trump. CBS News campaign reporter Nidia Cavazos has more.

Early voting kicked off Thursday in Maryland, with 97 voting centers open throughout the state. Early voting will run through Oct. 31.

In 2020, when the last presidential election was decided, more than 981,000 Marylanders voted early for the presidential candidates. More than 3,037,000 total Maryland votes were counted.

For more information on how to vote early in Maryland, visit CBS News Baltimore. 

In a televised debate on Wednesday night, New York congressional candidates Mike Lawler and Mondaire Jones sparred over the presidential election, the war in Gaza and a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. 

Lawler — a Republican and the incumbent representative of New York’s 17th District in the House — faces a closely-watched competition against Jones, his Democratic challenger. The race that could determine which political party controls that chamber of Congress.

Jones accused Lawler of being a “mini-fascist” for supporting former President Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection, while Lawler accused Jones of being a socialist. 

They disagreed about a peace settlement in the Middle East and local issues affecting their region, like the MTA’s congestion pricing plan and whether abortion rights should be codified through a measure called the Equal Rights Act. Jones said Lawler “is rabidly anti-choice.” Lawler said Jones is “the only one who has disdain for women.”

Watch CBS New York’s Marcia Kramer’s analysis on the debate here or in the player above. 

If you’re a man in the Philadelphia area who’s inclined to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris but still not entirely sold on the idea, her team hopes you’ll listen to Duke, a Southwest Philadelphia resident and star of “She Can Do It,” a 30-second ad that begins airing on broadcast and cable television stations in the Philadelphia area on Thursday.

Sitting on a stoop, Duke tells someone off camera, “When I look at Kamala, I look at my aunt. I mean, we’ve got this Black lady, strong, who stands on business, who means what she says, is relatable. I see the empathy, that’s just, like, in their heart, the nature of a female.”

As footage of Harris flashes on screen, he adds: “She shows a lot of empathy when she speaks. Her actions — Kamala’s strong, she’s powerful. She stern, she means everything that she says. This November, I’m standing with Kamala.”

The ad is set to air during local broadcasts of Philadelphia 76ers NBA basketball games, and during local cable ad breaks during TNT coverage of NBA games and its popular “Inside the NBA” pregame show, as well as on networks popular with Black viewers, including BET, OWN, and VH1. The ad is part of an ongoing $370 million national ad campaign that stretches from Labor Day to Election Day.

Read more here. 

As Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies continue to attack a ballot proposal aimed at enshrining abortion rights in the state Constitution, his administration pushed back in a legal battle about the state’s efforts to block a television ad supporting the measure.

Attorneys for the administration on Tuesday filed a document accusing the Floridians Protecting Freedom political committee, which is sponsoring what appears as Amendment 4 on the November ballot, of “intentionally spreading false factual information” about a state law restricting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

Floridians Protecting Freedom filed the federal lawsuit after the state Department of Health sent threatening letters to television stations running the commercial, which the department said posed a public “health nuisance.

Read more from CBS Miami here. 

In the final stretch before the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on a three-state tour across battleground states to court swing voters — with a particular focus on those who backed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary earlier this year. 

Harris’ pitch was remarkably similar to the foreign policy warning about Trump that Haley delivered when she was a presidential candidate.

“If Donald Trump were president, Vladimir Putin will be sitting in Kyiv — and understand what that would mean for America and our standing around the world,” Harris told Oakland County voters in Michigan on Monday. Claiming Trump would surrender Ukraine to Russia, Harris added, “that is signaling to the President of Russia he can get away with what he has done. Look at the map. Poland would be next.”  

Read more here. 

— Nidia Cavazos and Caitlin Huey-Burns

The number of registered Hispanic voters has doubled in the U.S. in recent years, and Latinos are the largest and fastest growing minority groups in the country while also being among the most diverse, meaning how Harris and Trump fare in the presidential election could come down to this electorate.

“CBS Mornings Plus” co-hosts Adriana Diaz and Tony Dokoupil looked at a poll Thursday conducted earlier this month by The New York Times and Siena College, which estimated a majority of the Hispanic electorate will support Harris for president, while 37% will support Trump. Hispanic voters, according to those figures, will skew toward the Democratic nominee overall, albeit by a smaller estimated margin than in 2020 or 2016. 

And, as Diaz pointed out, polling data from August indicates most Mexican and Puerto Rican Americans support Harris while most Cuban Americans support Trump. CBS News political analyst and Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez said this election will be the first in 40 years where Republicans are “competitive” with Democrats in pursuit of the Latino vote. 

“What I’d be watching is, is Donald Trump going to reach over that 40%?” Sanchez said of the steps each campaign can take to target Hispanic voters who can still be swayed. “On the Harris side, it’s turning out those urban areas, particularly Latinas. That’s the growth and the steadfast nature of the Democratic Party.”

Watch the full segment here or in the player above. 

Trump called his ability to divide people a “gift” when conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump “why do you destabilize people this way?” during an appearance on his show.

“Well, it’s a gift,” Trump said. “It’s something maybe less than a gift, but it’s one way or the other, because I have a tendency to win. It’s a nice thing that bothers people. Sometimes I play a little bit rough, but they play rough. They are rough and vicious people. They are vicious people. They are dirty people.”

Trump insisted Democrats hate him because he wins, but when Hewitt pushed that Ronald Reagan had big wins and wasn’t so hated, Trump said it was a “personality type” because Reagan was a “softer person.”

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Thursday morning, Trump said he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “in two seconds” if elected.

When Hewitt asked if Trump would pardon himself or fire Smith, who has overseen the investigation into whether Trump subverted the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election.

“it’s so easy,” Trump answered. “It’s so easy. Jack, he’s a crooked person. We had a brave, brilliant judge in Florida. She’s a brilliant judge, by the way, I don’t know. I never spoke to her. Never spoke.”

Half of the eight battleground states in this year’s U.S. presidential election use the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a rate that hasn’t changed since 2009 despite a 47% surge in the cost of living since then. In essence, that means minimum-wage workers in those states have seen much of their purchasing power vaporized by inflation over the past 15 years. 

Donald Trump’s October 20 visit to a McDonald’s location in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, where the former president served food to pre-selected supporters, has renewed public attention on how much low-income workers earn. Asked by CBS News reporter Olivia Rinaldi if he thought the minimum wage should be raised after spending time behind the counter at the fast-food restaurant, Trump sidestepped the question. 

“Well, I think this. I think these people work hard. They’re great,” he said. “And I just saw something a process. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing to see. These are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs, and it’s good and great people working here too.”

Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the former president’s views on the minimum wage. 

Read more here. 

Vice President Kamala Harris is set to hold a campaign event Thursday in Georgia, which former President Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen will also attend. 

Springsteen’s involvement marks the first of several concerts taking place along Harris’ campaign trail, which are part of a series her campaign has called “When We Vote We Win.” The series will touch all seven battleground states, starting in Atlanta and moving next to Philadelphia on Monday.  Obama and Springsteen are both set to appear at Monday’s event, too, a senior campaign official told CBS New Philadelphia.

Former Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump before retiring in 2022,  told The Detroit News on Thursday that he’s backing Harris in the 2024 presidential election. 

 Upton, who represented Michigan for more than three decades in the House and worked alongside Walz, said Trump is “totally unhinged.”

“We don’t need this chaos,” he told The Detroit News. “We need to move forward, and that’s why I’m where I am.”

Upton also told The New York Times that he cast his ballot for Harris, noting that it marked the first time he has supported a Democrat for president. 

Vice President Kamala Harris shared where she stands on key political issues at her CNN town hall on Wednesday night, with her positions on immigration and the United States’ approach to conflict in the Middle East being some of the event’s most notable takeaways. Harris also assured her administration would take a different approach to policies than the current one under President Biden, although she did not offer many specifics. 

Moderator Anderson Cooper pressed Harris on her views about immigration, an issue that has recurred in Republican attacks on her presidential campaign. Harris criticized the border wall proposed by former President Donald Trump during his time in office but did not respond directly when asked if she supports continuing that project now.

“I want to strengthen our border,” she said, pledging to push through a bipartisan bill focused on border security, which calls for $650 million initially earmarked under Trump.

Harris also commented on war in the Middle East, after an undecided voter asked how she plans to protect Palestinian civilians. The Democratic nominee called the death toll “unconscionable” and said she believes there is an opportunity to end Israel’s war with Hamas now that Yahya Sinwar has been killed.

As for how her policies would deviate from President Biden’s, Harris said she embodies “a new generation of leadership” in this country.

“My administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” she said. “I will bring to this role my own ideas and my own experience.”