With just over two weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election and the race in a dead heat, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here’s the latest:
Voters remain largely divided over whether they prefer Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris to handle key economic issues, although Harris earns slightly better marks on elements such as taxes for the middle class, according to a new poll.
A majority of registered voters in the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research describe the economy as poor. About 7 in 10 say the nation is going in the wrong direction.
But the findings reaffirm that Trump has lost what had been an advantage on the economy, which many voters say is the most important issue this election season above abortion, immigration, crime and foreign affairs.
“Do I trust Trump on the economy? No. I trust that he’ll give tax cuts to his buddies like Elon Musk,” said poll respondent Janice Tosto, a 59-year-old Philadelphia woman and self-described independent.
An AP-NORC poll conducted in September found neither Harris nor Trump had a clear advantage on handling “the economy and jobs.” But this poll asked more specific questions about whether voters trusted Trump or Harris to do a better job handling the cost of housing, jobs and unemployment, taxes on the middle class, the cost of groceries and gas, and tariffs.
▶ Read more about the poll.
Donald Trump went to a barbershop in the Bronx section of New York for a segment with commentator Lawrence Jones that aired Monday on “Fox & Friends.”
He took questions from clients at the business about immigration, energy and taxes. The barbers wore a black shirt with the phrase “Make Barbers Great Again.”
One of the clients asked Trump if, once he generated enough revenue with some of his proposals, it would be possible to eliminate federal taxes.
“There is a way. There is a way,” Trump said, adding that in the 1890s, people did not have to pay income taxes.
The business owner, who leases the building, told him his main challenge was paying for his energy bill, which had shot up from $2,100 to $15,000 in the last seven months.
Trump asked how much average hair cuts cost and how much they had gone up. He was told they had gone up from a range between $12 and $15 to between $30 and $40.
Toward the end of the visit, Trump told the men “you guys are the same as me. It’s the same stuff. We were born the same way.”
For Rona Kaufman, the signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump.
It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she observed during a question-and-answer at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It’s in her own family.
“The family that is my generation and older generations, I don’t think anybody is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican, ever,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. “My sister has a Trump sign outside her house, and that is a huge shift.”
How big a shift? Surveys continue to find that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she’s an exception.
Still, any shift could have enormous implications in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election is like no other in memory, coming amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year.
▶ Read more about Jewish voters in this election.
