President Trump says he’ll visit North Carolina for his party’s convention after all. In Maine, Senator Susan Collins trails Sara Gideon in a new poll. Here’s the latest.
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Joe Biden says he’ll “have a choice” for his running mate “in the first week of August.” Watch live video of his news conference below.
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In a speech, Biden lays out his plan to fight systemic racism.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday unveiled the capstone to his sweeping economic recovery plan with a speech that outlined his vision to advance racial equity in the American economy.
Nodding to the fact that he was giving remarks soon after the death of the civil rights icon John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia, Mr. Biden warned that Mr. Trump is “horrifyingly and not surprisingly, intentionally stoking the flames of division and racism in this country.”
The afternoon speech, delivered Wilmington, Del., offered Mr. Biden a chance to detail a clear message on racial justice, and to cut another sharp contrast with his opponent, who has repeatedly taken incendiary actions on that issue at a moment of national crisis over racism and police violence.
“Every instinct Trump has is to add fuel to the fire,” the former vice president said. “It’s the last thing, the last thing we need. We need leadership that will calm the waters and lower the temperature.”
Speaking before four American flags in a community center gym, Mr. Biden framed fighting systemic racism as integral to a range of his economic proposals, from housing to infrastructure to supporting small businesses, a goal that he said goes well beyond the aim of defeating the president whose leadership, he said, has made everything worse.
“It’s about rising to this moment of crisis,” he said. “Understanding people’s struggles. And building a future worthy of their courage and their ambition to overcome.”
In recent months, Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has increasingly called for ambitious measures to address the nation’s public health and economic challenges, and the growing outcry over racial injustice. His proposals go far beyond the instincts toward relatively incremental change that guided him in the primary, at least compared to many of his Democratic opponents.
Ahead of the speech, the Biden campaign released a policy plan on racial equity. It includes proposals for increasing access to venture capital and low-interest loans for small business owners of color and, on criminal justice, funding to improve how states seal criminal records for certain nonviolent offenders.
A number of the policies highlighted in his speech had already been announced as part of other initiatives, like a tax credit of up to $15,000 for first-time home buyers, or a goal that disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of the benefits of spending on clean energy. The Tuesday event is part of a broader effort that aims to emphasize the idea that racial justice is core to Mr. Biden’s overall policy vision.
After canceling Jacksonville convention plans, Trump says he will in fact travel to North Carolina for the R.N.C.
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President Trump will visit Charlotte, N.C., to accept his nomination after all.
Mr. Trump said on Monday that he planned to visit the original host city of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, the start of the week that he once hoped would include large, celebratory events. He plans to pay a visit to the 336 delegates who will convene there for a day of convention business and the official roll call where the president is renominated.
Mr. Trump and his team have still not decided where he will give his official renomination speech on Thursday night, and the president’s Monday pop-by in Charlotte is expected to be a low-key affair where he won’t deliver extended remarks of his own. Mr. Trump planned to meet with his senior campaign advisers on Tuesday at the White House to discuss possible venues for his own big convention night speech, according to two people familiar with the plans.
Those plans have been in flux since last week, when Mr. Trump announced he was canceling the convention in Jacksonville, Fla., because of uncertainty created by the surging pandemic.
On Tuesday, Mayor Lenny Curry of Jacksonville held his first news conference since last week’s decision to call off the festivities, telling reporters that he believed it was the right call, even as Florida’s coronavirus numbers appear to be leveling off.
“The plateau could be a long ride,” Mr. Curry said.
Charlotte is the city where Mr. Trump decided he did not want to hold his convention, because of a disagreement with the Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, over social distancing rules.
“I’ll be in North Carolina, and that’s a very big deal because we have a lot of the delegates there and that’ll be a nomination process,” Trump told WRAL, a Raleigh, N.C., television station, while visiting Morrisville, N.C., on Monday. He traveled to the state to talk about the progress being made on a vaccine for the coronavirus. “That’s essentially where the nomination, where it’s formalized. And I’m really honored to do it in North Carolina.”
Mr. Trump also mentioned that he won the state in 2016, that he had a granddaughter named “Carolina,” referring Eric Trump’s daughter, and that his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was a North Carolina native.
Barr doubles down on unsupported claim that mail-in voting ‘substantially increases the risk of fraud.’
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Attorney General William P. Barr is testifying on Capitol Hill on Tuesday for the first time in more than a year, defending the federal response to nationwide protests before the House Judiciary Committee.
Mr. Barr has also sowed doubts about the use of mail-in ballots in the November election, echoing the dozens of baseless claims Mr. Trump has made on the same topic. At the hearing, he continued that unfounded line of criticism.
“If you have wholesale mail-in voting, it substantially increases the risk of fraud,” Mr. Barr said in a response to questions from Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a Democrat and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who is a co-chairman of the Biden campaign.
The president has repeatedly claimed that mail-in ballots lead to fraud, a statement that has no basis in the experience of the states that give voters the option of voting by mail.
Mr. Barr said that while he has voted by mail before, his concerns about fraud had more to do with the widespread use of mail-in ballots.
“I’m not talking about accommodations to people who have to be out of the state or have some particular need not to, or inability to go and vote,” he said. “What I’m talking about is the wholesale conversion of elections to mail-in voting.”
Mr. Richmond noted that African-Americans are being harmed by the coronavirus at higher rates. “Not that it would be the first time that African-Americans would risk their lives to vote in this country to preserve its democracy,” he said.
Mr. Barr also defended the Trump administration’s use of federal agents to respond to demonstrations against racism and police brutality, forcefully asserting that they were fighting violent crime.
City officials have accused federal agents of using heavy-handed tactics and have said their presence reinvigorated tensions that had been subsiding.
Democratic lawmakers on the committee also asked Mr. Barr about his approach to the Mueller investigation, his recommendation of a shorter prison sentence for Roger J. Stone Jr. and other issues.
Susan Collins, a vulnerable Republican senator, trails Democrat Sara Gideon in a new Maine poll.
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Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the lone New England Republican and a top target for Democrats seeking to capture the Senate majority, is trailing her Democratic opponent, Sara Gideon, by five percentage points, according to a new poll of likely voters in the state.
“The overwhelming takeaway is that voters are angry,” said Daniel M. Shea, a government professor at Colby College, which conducted the poll. Voters think Ms. Collins “is too close to Donald Trump and that she has forgotten about Maine,” he added.
Ms. Gideon, the speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives, who has raised an enormous war chest, had the support of 44 percent of likely voters in the poll, and Ms. Collins had 39 percent. The poll’s margin of sampling error was about four percentage points.
Ms. Collins, whose cultivated reputation as a moderate has suffered during the Trump administration, faces particular challenges with younger voters and women, the poll found. She had an approval rating of just 24 percent among voters under the age of 35 and 39 percent among women.
Ms. Collins’s decision to support Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and to vote against Mr. Trump’s impeachment has led many voters to question her willingness to break with the Republican Party.
But Mr. Shea cautioned that the results of the poll were by no means a guarantee that Ms. Collins, who is facing the toughest election of her political career, will be defeated, calling the race “a nail-biter.”
“There’s a long way to go, and the senator is a strong campaigner and she has done a lot for the state,” he said. “So this is going to be a tight race to the end.”
Trump’s supposed shift on the virus didn’t last long.
Last week, Mr. Trump raised Republican hopes for a major course correction on the coronavirus when he canceled the G.O.P. convention in Jacksonville, Fla., and urged Americans more clearly than in the past to wear masks in public. No matter how many times Mr. Trump proves himself incapable of changing political stripes, the notion that he might seems to persist.
Not so amazingly, his sober posture did not last.
On Monday, Mr. Trump began the week with an emphatic reassertion of his core instincts, heralding a speedy economic comeback underway (a description not rooted in reality), insisting his polling shows him well ahead of Mr. Biden in swing-state battlegrounds (it does not), and again pressuring governors to speed up a return to normal business in their states. It was a performance that underscored once more that when it comes to the defining issue of the election, Mr. Trump is mostly choosing to inhabit an alternate reality in which recovery is right around the corner.
“I really do believe a lot of the governors should be opening up states that they’re not opening,” Mr. Trump told reporters. Late Monday, tweeting that “markets would crash and cities would burn” if Mr. Biden were elected, he said that “we will beat the Virus, soon, and go on to the Golden Age.” He also retweeted a series of misleading claims about the coronavirus, including a Breitbart video that contained misinformation about the pandemic and has since been removed by social platforms.
(The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. posted the same video on Twitter and was logged off his account for 12 hours in response for violating the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy, according to a company spokesman, who said the pause was not a suspension. Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for the younger Mr. Trump, responded by saying, “Big Tech is the biggest threat to free expression in America today.”)
By declining to grapple with the real conditions of the virus and the economy, President Trump is not only cleaving himself apart from most voters and their anxieties and needs — a serious enough problem in an election year. He is also effectively ceding the debate over managing and rebuilding from the pandemic to Mr. Biden, who has been gradually rolling out a series of public health and economic aid plans more or less unchallenged by the president.
Watchdog group accuses Trump campaign of hiding almost $170 million in spending.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has routed nearly $170 million in spending through various firms headed or created by its former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and other campaign officials, and a campaign watchdog said in a formal complaint on Tuesday that the payments were a “laundering” effort to hide the ultimate destination of the funds.
The accusation, made by the Campaign Legal Center to the Federal Election Commission, said that by using the Parscale-linked firm American Made Media Consultants, the Trump campaign has kept hidden the names of some vendors and advisers being paid by the campaign, including the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr.
“This scheme flies in the face of transparency requirements mandated by federal law, and it leaves voters and donors in the dark about where the campaign’s funds are actually going,” said Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center and a former F.E.C. chairman. “This secrecy could also disguise other campaign finance violations, but we don’t know, because the campaign isn’t disclosing these routed payments.”
The complaint cites several companies that do business with the Trump campaign and its shared committees with the Republican National Committee, which do not appear on F.E.C. disclosures.
For instance, Federal Communications Commission records show that the media-buying firm Harris Sikes Media has executed some of Mr. Trump’s ad purchases, but the campaign has reported no payments to that firm in 2019 and 2020, the complaint says.
F.E.C. complaints typically take years to resolve but could set important precedents for disclosure in the future.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said that A.M.M.C. “builds efficiencies and saves the campaign money by providing these in-house services that otherwise would be done by outside vendors.” He said that the firm “does not earn any commissions or fees” and that the campaign “complies with all campaign finance laws and FEC regulations.”
Vice News was first to report on the complaint.
A major Latino advocacy group will throw its support behind Biden.
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Mr. Biden will pick up an endorsement on Wednesday from UnidosUS, the largest Latino nonprofit advocacy organization in the country, and address the group during its annual conference.
It is the second time the political arm of the national organization has backed a presidential candidate, after endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, and another indication of how focused national Latino groups are on defeating Mr. Trump. Several other national Latino organizations that have typically stayed out of partisan politics are considering officially backing Mr. Biden this year.
“Joe Biden will work for us, not against us,” Janet Murguía, the president of UnidosUS Action Fund, said in a statement. “He will work tirelessly to unite us and to heal our nation. And he will do this because he shares our values of faith, family, hard work, and a belief in the promise of America not just for some, but for all of us.”
The endorsement comes as some Democrats have worried about enthusiasm among Latino voters for Mr. Biden’s candidacy, and that the Biden campaign is not doing enough to reach out to Latinos, who are projected to be the largest nonwhite voting bloc this year. While polls have consistently shown that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Hispanic voters, he has held on to the support of roughly 25 percent of them.
Julie Chávez Rodriguez, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign, said that Latinos were a “huge part of the pathway to victory” in battleground states including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Texas. “In places like Michigan where Hilary lost by these very narrow margins, Latinos can make up that difference,” she said.
Unidos will work with local organizations in Florida, Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania to increase voter turnout and register new voters, officials said.
The biggest spender in a contentious Republican primary? A Democratic group.
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With a close Republican Senate primary election in Kansas one week away, the top spender isn’t either of the two leading contenders; it is a Democratic-allied super PAC trying to push voters toward the more polarizing candidate, Kris Kobach.
The group, Sunflower State, is spending $2.4 million to boost Mr. Kobach on TV and radio in the final days of the primary cycle, far more than the approximately $1 million being spent in support of his chief rival, Representative Roger Marshall, according to Advertising Analytics.
Mr. Kobach, a former Kansas Secretary of State known for hard-line positions on immigration, lost the race for governor in 2018. Republican leaders in Washington, who back Mr. Marshall, are worried that nominating Mr. Kobach would put the open seat in play. Kansas hasn’t sent a Democratic senator to Washington in 88 years.
A super PAC tied to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, is running ads supporting Mr. Marshall. A second outside group tied to Mr. McConnell, Plains PAC, is more aggressive, warning Republicans not to choose Mr. Kobach because he lost the governor’s race to Laura Kelly, a Democrat, and has ties to white nationalists.
The winner of the 11-person Republican primary will most likely face State Senator Barbara Bollier, a Democrat who has raised an impressive sum of money.
Meddling by one party in another party’s primary is nothing new. The treasurer of Sunflower State, which was created this month, has worked for a former Kansas Democratic governor. An email sent to the address it provided on a recent filing was not returned. A spokeswoman for the Senate Majority PAC, which supports Democrats across the country, declined to comment when asked if it was funding Sunflower State.
One person who is still publicly on the sidelines and likely to remain there: Mr. Trump. In 2018 he campaigned for Mr. Kobach. But to endorse him now would infuriate Mr. McConnell. So Mr. Trump is reportedly working behind the scenes for Mr. Marshall, but to openly offer his blessing would anger the most conservative voters in the president’s base.
An Indian-American political group sees the election as a ‘pivotal moment.’
At this time in 2016, Representative Ami Bera of California was the only Indian-American in Congress. That November, four more were elected to join him.
Now, one of those four — Senator Kamala Harris of California — is a leading contender to be former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is running an ad in Hindi, and an advocacy group for Indian-American candidates is announcing that it will spend $10 million in this year’s elections.
That group, IMPACT, will announce its plans on Tuesday along with a new executive director, the public interest lawyer Neil Makhija, who called 2020 a “pivotal moment” for Indian-Americans.
Indian-Americans are the second largest immigrant group in the United States, after Mexicans, but they account for only five members of Congress: Ms. Harris, Mr. Bera and Representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Ro Khanna of California and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, all Democrats. IMPACT’s investment is an effort to increase that number, and also to elect Indian-American candidates to offices as far down-ballot as local school boards.
Mr. Makhija said in an interview Tuesday that the group’s efforts would be focused on recruiting, training and supporting candidates, and that it would work “shoulder to shoulder” with members of other underrepresented communities, like Black, Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. voters.
According to the research firm CRW Strategy, more than three-quarters of Indian-American voters supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Mr. Makhija said they were also likely to support Mr. Biden.
“Our values are broadly reflected, currently, in what the Democratic Party is espousing in terms of access to health care and education, addressing global climate change in an equitable fashion, and having an inclusive immigration system where we live up to the ideals on the Statue of Liberty that our parents and grandparents all looked to,” he said.
IMPACT is not explicitly aligned with Democrats, Mr. Makhija added, but “our values certainly lean that way, and the Indian-American electorate is certainly voting that way.”
Biden offers big donors packages for a convention most of them won’t be attending.
The Democratic National Convention next month in Milwaukee will be mostly virtual, and for the extremely small number of people who attend — about 300 — it will require daily tests for the coronavirus.
But that isn’t stopping Mr. Biden’s campaign from asking donors to contribute big bucks.
In a private briefing last week for some of the Biden campaign’s top bundlers of campaign contributions, donors were pitched on the various offerings for top contributors to the convention.
The Biden campaign laid out three tiers: “Senatorial” for those who gave at least $50,000 or raised $100,000 from others; “Vice Presidential” for those who contributed $100,000 or raised $250,000; and “Presidential” for $250,000 givers and $500,000 raisers.
Each tier comes with its own set of goodies and exclusive access, with all levels receiving “afternoon briefings” and other “daytime content,” as well as access to a “post-gavel celebration.” But it will take a quarter-million dollars or more for a “premium convention welcome kit” as well as the “taste of the trail” package, though it is not clear exactly what those contain.
The Republicans had been furiously raising money to host a convention celebration in Jacksonville, Fla., until last week, when Mr. Trump reversed course after growing concerns about safety and the coronavirus. The party had asked couples to give up to nearly $1.2 million, though that package was intended for a in-person convention that has since been scrapped.
Reporting was contributed by Davey Alba, Maggie Astor, Alexander Burns, Emily Cochrane, Nicholas Fandos, Jacey Fortin, Trip Gabriel, Katie Glueck, Shane Goldmacher, Annie Karni, Thomas Kaplan, Patricia Mazzei, Katie Rogers, Rick Rojas, Charlie Savage, Lynn Vavreck, Christopher Warshaw and Michael Wines.
