Trump picks up the pace: From the Politics Desk

October 2, 2024

Politics tamfitronics

Welcome to the online version ofFrom the Politics Deskan evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, we explore how Donald Trump is ramping up his campaign activity in the final stretch of the race. Plus, senior political editor Mark Murray breaks down the fault lines in our new poll of Latino voters.

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Trump ramps up his campaign pace after GOP worried that Harris caught him flat-footed

By Katherine Doyle, Jake Traylor and Jonathan Allen

Former President Donald Trump is finally gearing up for an all-out sprint in his bid to reclaim the White House.

Trump, caught flat-footed when Democrats switched candidates this summer, has held 26 campaign events this month — most of them rallies — more than the 21 he participated in during June and July combined, according to an NBC News analysis of his schedule. The ramp-up started in August, when he held 19 events.

While it is traditional for campaigns to gather steam after Labor Day, some Republicans worried that Vice President Kamala Harris got the jump on him when she barnstormed the country in August after she took over for President Joe Biden at the top of her party’s ticket. Now, Trump is racing against Harris and the clock.

Trump held two rallies over the weekend, in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. At both, he lobbed increasingly personal attacks at Harris, baselessly questioning her mental fitness and calling her “mentally impaired.” At the rally in Pennsylvania, he called for Harris to be “impeached and prosecuted” for her policies related to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Leading the charge for more events is Trump himself, a campaign official said, saying Trump was supposed to have a slow Sunday but insisted instead, “We got to do something,” leading to the rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Trump is scheduled to make two stops in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the day of the vice presidential debate. And on Saturday, Trump plans to return to Butler, Pennsylvania, to hold an event at the venue where he was shot in an assassination attempt on July 13.

Hurricane Helene fallout: Trump took a detour from the campaign trail Monday to visit Valdosta, Georgia, one of the areas affected by Hurricane Helene.

Matt Dixon, Adam Edelman and Megan Lebowitz report that Trump falsely claimed that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp hasn’t been able to reach Biden to discuss the hurricane’s impacts on his state. Earlier in the day, Kemp, a Republican, said that he initially missed Biden’s call but that he called back and the two were able to connect Sunday evening.

While Trump said he didn’t travel to Georgia to talk politics, he criticized a photo Harris posted on social media saying she had been briefed by the FEMA administrator as “FAKE and STAGED,” and he said that the federal government and Democratic governors, including North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, are “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”

Biden and Harris have both said they intend to travel to areas affected by Helene as soon as their visits won’t affect emergency response operations.

By Mark Murray

The top overall takeaway from our NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC Latino poll is just how politically diverse and divided Latino voters are in 2024, mirroring the same fault lines we see in the broader electorate.

Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump 54%-40% among registered Latino voters nationwide, the poll shows. There’s a notable gender gap: Latina women support Harris over Trump by 26 points, 60%-34%, while Latino men are split between the two candidates at 47% each.

Broken down by religious affiliation, Harris is ahead with Catholic Latinos by 20 points (56%-36%) and non-religious Latinos by even more, (71%-24%). Meanwhile, Trump holds a 36-point advantage among evangelical Latinos (64%-28%).

There’s also the education divide. Harris is ahead among both college-educated Latino men (58%-42%) and college-educated Latina women (61%-35%), while Trump is up among men without college degrees (51%-38%).

And then there are issues like immigration, with the poll showing 52% of Latino voters saying it’s more important to prevent discrimination against immigrants and to create a pathway to citizenship, compared with 46% saying it’s more important to secure the border and stop immigrants from entering the country illegally.

“Latinos voters are incredibly diverse. It can’t be overstressed,” said Democratic pollster Aileen Cardona-Arroyo of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the poll with Republican pollster Micah Roberts and his team at Public Opinion Strategies.

“We are looking at Latino voters rather than a consolidated Latino community,” she added.

Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro put it this way Sunday on “Meet the Press:” “I sometimes wonder if there is such a thing as ‘the Latino vote.’”

That, more than anything else, explains why Democrats have lost ground among Latino voters over the past decade, according to the poll. They aren’t monolithic, and they’re reflecting the same divisions — on gender, religion and education — we’re seeing with the electorate at large.

Read more: Nnamdi Egwuonwu dives into how the Harris and Trump campaigns are targeting the increasingly fragmented Latino electorate in very different ways.

Politics tamfitronics 🗞️ Today’s top stories

⚫ Assassination attempt fallout: A majority of voters blame “extreme political rhetoric” from some politicians and media figures for contributing to the attempt to assassinate Trump in Florida this month, according to the latest NBC News poll . Meanwhile, Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old man accused of plotting to kill Trump, pleaded not guilty to all charges. Read more →
⚖️ Georgia abortion ban struck down: A Fulton County judge struck down Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, allowing the procedure to resume and making it legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. Read more →
⚖️ Georgia election rule challenged: Democrats sued the Georgia State Election Board over a newly passed rule that requires counties to count ballots cast on Election Day by hand. Read more →
📣 Talking ’bout their generation: Senior voters are likely to play an important role in the election, as a once-reliable GOP voting bloc has become more of a toss-up. Read more →
💰 Double up: Harris promised to “double” Justice Department resources to cut the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. after Trump falsely claimed she wanted to legalize the drug. Read more →
💵 Need for aid: The Wall Street Journal reports that Americans are more reliant on government aid now than ever, leaning on programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The aid is crucial in economically strained regions, many of which are in swing states. Read more →
🗳 Down-ballot battles: Here’s a rundown of the state legislative chambers where control is up for grabs this fall. Read more → Follow live coverage from the campaign trail →