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Trump and Harris make final appeals as US election goes down to the wire

Published

2 years ago

November 3, 2024

Trump and Harris make final appeals as US election goes down to the wire

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump made their final appeals to undecided voters and sought to rally their supporters in swing states as polls showed the election going down to the wire in the final 48 hours.

Their presidential campaigns are battling for any edge following a bitter White House contest in which the candidates are running neck-and-neck in the key states that will decide the election.

After making a late-night appearance on the Saturday Night Live comedy show in New York, Harris was in Michigan at a Black church on Sunday, to be followed by appearances at a restaurant and a barber shop, and a large rally. Trump started the day in Pennsylvania — and was due to appear in North Carolina, and Georgia later on Sunday.

Over the weekend, the vice-president’s campaign was buoyed by a respected poll in the staunchly conservative state of Iowa, which showed the Democratic vice-president leading Trump by three percentage points in a state that the Republican former president won by nine points in 2020.

According to the poll by the Des Moines Register, her surge was propelled by growing support among women — and older white women in particular, which if replicated across the Midwest could be decisive for Harris.

However, other surveys published on Sunday showed the race to be essentially deadlocked. The closely followed New York Times/Siena poll showed Harris leading in Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia and Wisconsin, which would be just enough for her to prevail, but tied in Pennsylvania and Michigan, while trailing in Arizona. The FT’s poll tracker shows Harris holding a 1.3 percentage point lead nationally.

“It’s a choice between whether we will have four more years of incompetence and failure, which is what we have right now, or whether we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country,” Trump told the crowd at his first stop near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “It’s now or never, this is the moment,” he said.

Trump has been counting on voter disapproval of Harris on the economy and immigration to sway the American electorate into backing him for a second term in the White House.

But Trump has struggled to focus on policy in the final week of campaigning, falling back on personal attacks, violent rhetoric and offensive language that Democrats believe will backfire on his campaign.

He has already cast doubt on the integrity of this year’s election, baselessly accusing Democrats of fraud, as he did in 2020.

“They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing,” Trump said on Sunday.

As he spoke of his own security arrangements, he added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind that.”

During her first event in Detroit on Sunday, Harris told parishioners that “we have two days until we decide the fate of our nation.” She added that she had seen “faith in action in remarkable ways” from voters during the campaign.

“Let us turn the page and write the next chapter of our history,” she said.

Harris and her allies are seeing evidence of strong support among women due to her support for abortion rights, and their rejection of Trump’s character.

“I believe that this will be a tight race. That’s the nature of our country in this moment. But the momentum is with her,” Raphael Warnock, the Georgia Democratic senator, said on NBC on Sunday.

Trump’s campaign has made a big bet that he can reel in more Black and Latino male voters who do not vote as reliably as other segments of the population, and that widespread American dissatisfaction with the direction of the country will get them to victory.

“We’re not taking anything for granted, but the issues are on our side. People want a secure border. They want a strong economy. They want peace through strength and a stronger national security around the world,” said Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican congresswoman, on Fox News. “On every top issue, Republicans are winning. President Trump is winning,” she said.

On Monday, Harris is expected to campaign solely in Pennsylvania, which is the biggest prize of all the swing states, and one that Trump won in 2016 but Democrats won back in 2020.

Trump will also appear in Pennsylvania, before holding a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to close out his campaign.

News

Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Published

8 hours ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.

She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.

Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.

But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”

“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”

As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.

She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.

The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.

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Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

Published

10 hours ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

The U.S. Supreme Court

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.

The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.

Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”

Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.

The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.

And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.

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Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

Published

20 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Press Room

Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.

The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”

“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.

Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.

The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”

Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.

Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.

“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.

Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.

“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.