Harris continues battleground blitz in Detroit

Harris will be interviewed this afternoon by “The Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne Tha God in Detroit.

The live interview comes as Harris' campaign is ramping up its pitch to Black men in the final stretch of the 2024 race.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is suing CNN over a report alleging he made a series of inflammatory and sexually graphic comments on a pornography website’s message board.

The defamation lawsuit, filed today in Wake County Superior Court, is seeking $50 million in damages.

At a news conference announcing the suit, Robinson — the Republican nominee for North Carolina governor — described CNN’s report as a “high-tech lynching on a candidate who has been targeted from day one by folks who disagree with me politically and want to see me destroyed.”

Jesse Binnall, Robinson’s lawyer, said an investigation has shown “a number of inconsistencies” in CNN’s report. He added that CNN declined to retract the article or grant access to the data used in the reporting.

Trump’s campaign wants its candidate to talk more about policy, but on Monday night it was all about the music.

Trump was in Oaks, Pennsylvania, to host the type of town hall event his advisers hope will keep the former president on track talking both about his policy positions and those of his opponent, Harris. But the evening quickly took a bizarre turn after two rallygoers had medical issues.

Rather than continue after paramedics assisted the two people, Trump instructed his staff to just play music from a playlist he has personally curated and famously often turns on during dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” Trump said at the event where the entire point was to take audience questions. “Right?”

County election boards in Georgia are not allowed to refuse to certify election results, a state judge ruled on Tuesday.

Concerns of fraud or abuse are to be settled in court, the judge said, not by county officials acting unilaterally.

“If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced. Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said in his order.

Read the full story here.

As the final days of the campaign season dwindle, Trump said he tries not to think too much about Election Day itself and has avoided taking time off in the final push to win over voters ahead of Nov. 5.

The former president was responding to a question from the hosts of the Barstool Sports “Bussin’ With the Boys” podcast on whether he gets nerves or pregame jitters ahead of the first votes being tallied.

“In some ways, you don’t want to think of it, right?” Trump said. “I don’t want to really even think about it. I don’t. I just do. I go from day to day, I do what I have to do. I work hard — I’m a hard worker, always been. So I’ve gone like 36 days in a row with no rest.”

“It’s an all-out run,” he added. “It’s an all — you would say it’s an all-out sprint, and it is, it’s an all-out sprint. We’re sprinting to the finish line, and we’re almost there.”

A young-voter advocacy group backing Vice President Kamala Harris is launching a campaign on TikTok meant to target young voters — but not necessarily those backing Trump. 

Voters of Tomorrow released a series of videos Tuesday aimed at convincing young supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein to back Harris, working to rebrand the third-party nominee as a “scammer.”

“She’s literally worse than Elizabeth Holmes, the Fyre Fest guys and Anna Delvey combined,” 21-year-old Katy Gates said in one of the campaign’s videos. “Despite the sweet old lady look, she’s been scamming the entire country for over eight years.”

Read the full story here.

After rallying in Erie yesterday, Harris will continue her battleground state blitz this week with a series of campaign events in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia

Today: Harris will stop in Detroit to speak with Black entrepreneurs.

Tomorrow: Harris will visit Philadelphia for a campaign event.

Thursday: Harris will host an event in Milwaukee and rally in Green Bay and La Crosse.

Friday: Harris will return to Michigan to rally in Grand Rapids and make stops in Lansing and Oakland County.

Saturday: Harris will kick off early voting in Michigan with an event in Detroit and then head to Atlanta for another event.

Trump will sit for an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago.

He will then head to Cumming, Georgia, to tape a town hall with Fox News before holding a rally in Atlanta.

Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Democrats' Senate nominee in Arizona, released a new digital ad today featuring former President Barack Obama.

In a minutelong spot shared first with NBC News that will run throughout the state, Obama touts Gallego’s military experience.

“As commander in chief, I had the honor of working with so many dedicated Marines, soldiers, public servants, and veterans,” says the 44th president in the ad. “In Congress, Ruben has proven that he’ll stand up to corporate price gouging and work to lower costs for families. The guy is tough and a proven fighter.”

Walz is campaigning in Pennsylvania, attending three events in the western part of the battleground state, including in Butler County, where a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump during a campaign rally in July.

At a farm in Lawrence County, Walz is set to unveil Harris' "Plan for Rural America" and plans to attack Trump and Vance's record in other rural communities.

The plan seeks to add 10,000 health care workers in rural areas and expand access to telemedicine. The proposal also aims to lower child care costs and expand the Child Tax Credit, lower the costs of buying a home, and boost access to markets, credit and land for farmers and producers.

"I know, and Vice President Harris knows, the work our rural neighbors do is tough under the very best of conditions" Walz is expected to say, according to excerpts provided by a Harris-Walz campaign official. "And we owe them our full support to ensure that they can find opportunity right in their hometowns.”

Trump just commented on the town hall event he participated in last night in which a two attendees suffered medical events and he decided amid the emergency response to play music and listen to it rather than take questions, a situation that went on for about 40 minutes.

“I had a Town Hall in Pennsylvania last night. It was amazing! The Q and A was almost finished when people began fainting from the excitement and heat. We started playing music while we waited, and just kept it going. So different, but it ended up being a GREAT EVENING!” he posted on Truth Social.

The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is spending another $10.5 million in Michigan’s toss-up Senate race between GOP former Rep. Mike Rogers and Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, according to an SLF spokesperson.

“Michigan is competitive" the super PAC’s president, Steven Law, told NBC News in a statement. "Michiganders don’t like that Elissa Slotkin has consistently voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ green energy agenda. These voters are looking for a change from the Democrat status quo.”

The Senate Leadership Fund's latest spending was first reported by Axios.

Trump and Vance are hosting a fundraiser in New York as part of his Madison Square Garden event Oct. 27. The top give is $924,600 for the “ultra MAGA experience,” per the invite. The least expensive ticket is $5,000.

In a pair of Truth Social posts this morning, Trump appeared unwilling to release any further medical information about himself despite Harris' release of her medical records over the weekend and her calling on him to do the same.

“As to her completely desperate request for my Medical Statements, she is dying to see my Cholesterol (which is 180!), I have already provided them, many times, including quite recently, and they were flawless," he wrote.

The former president suggested that Harris has health issues, referring to her report that she's dealing with urticaria (also known has hives), allergic rhinitis and allergic conjunctivitis, which Trump calls “a very messy and dangerous situation.”

"These are deeply serious conditions that clearly impact her functioning," he wrote. All of them are common allergic reactions that aren't serious conditions.

Trump turned a town hall event in front of supporters in Oaks, Pennsylvania, into an impromptu listening party Monday night, playing a unlikely selection of tunes for more than 30 minutes after the event was paused for medical emergencies.

Trump is famed for his lengthy and unorthodox political rallies, but none have followed such an unusual format, featuring the Republican nominee swaying along and occasionally punching the air to songs including the Village People’s “YMCA,” Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Memory,” from the musical “Cats.”

The event was meant to be a Q&A focused on Trump’s policy platform, but during a pause while two people received medical attention, Trump told the crowd: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into our music. Who the hell wants to hear questions? Right?”

At 10:04 a.m. the day after the 2020 election, Trump tweeted he was “leading” in the vote count in several “Democrat run & controlled” states — until, that is, “surprise ballot dumps” took those leads away. The implication that something nefarious was happening was categorically false. But primed by months of Trump’s baseless warnings about massive voter fraud and his false claim hours earlier that he’d won the election, Michigan Republicans answered the call.

They hurried to the convention hall in downtown Detroit, then known as the TCF Center, where more than 170,000 mail ballots in America’s largest majority-Black city were being counted. Millions had voted by mail for the first time in 2020, and the new processes in Michigan seemed foreign to them.

What followed was chaos. Trump supporters furiously alleged a campaign of fraud when none existed. When officials declared that the room was over capacity and stopped letting Republican and Democratic poll observers in, Trump’s backers felt their fears were validated: They started arguing with police and election officials, banging on windows and chanting “stop the count” outside a room of poll workers tabulating military ballots.

Read the full story here.

Vem Miller, the man arrested near former Trump’s rally Saturday in Coachella, California, denied in an online video yesterday that he was trying to assassinate Trump. 

Miller, 49, of Nevada, who was arrested on state weapons charges a quarter-mile from the rally, said he is a longtime supporter of Trump. He said that he was invited to the rally by Republican officials in Nevada and that “false and defamatory statements have been released by the police in the region.”

“I’m a Trump caucus captain. I’ve collected votes for Donald Trump, and I’m also a Trump team leader,” Miller said in the video. “It is with that that I decided to come to Coachella after receiving a special invitation from members of the Nevada Republican Party.”

In a memo to supporters, shared first with NBC News, former Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell's Senate campaign in Florida argues that a late fundraising boost to her campaign could push her to victory next month.

The memo comes the same day that a new campaign ad funded jointly by Mucarsel-Powell's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is set to launch. The ad paints her opponent, GOP Sen. Rick Scott, as a "snake" who is "squeezing" Florida families.

The DSCC, the campaign arm for Senate Democrats, announced weeks ago that it would invest "millions" in the Florida and Texas Senate races, which are both considered long-shot seats for Democrats to flip.

Americans are more eager to vote early than they were before the pandemic, but a deep partisan divide on early voting remains, the latest national NBC News poll shows.

With not even a month to go before Election Day, 5% of registered voters said they had already cast their ballots (3% by mail and 2% in person), according to the new poll, which surveyed people between Oct. 4-8.

Another 47% said they plan to vote early (20% by mail and 27% in person).

Read the full story here.

When Trump visited Detroit last week, he unfurled a string of insults.

He compared the city, which is 77% Black, to a developing nation and posited that the “whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Harris wins.

If there was any question whether Trump thinks this is good or bad, he quickly clarified.

“You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” the former president said.

Trump’s comments continued a long-running and racially charged message in which he trashes large, Democratic-run cities. Such rhetoric was a staple of his unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2020, when he warned of crime and low-income housing spilling into the suburbs, indulging fears that decades earlier had prompted “white flight” migration from the inner cities.