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Trump campaign projects confidence and looks to young male voters for an edge on Harris
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — As Donald Trump adjusts to the reality of his new race against Kamala Harris, his campaign is counting on younger male voters to give him the edge in November in a presidential contest they insist is his to lose.
Trump and his Republican campaign now face a dramatically different race than the one just three weeks ago, before President Joe Biden abandoned his bid. While they acknowledge polls have tightened with Harris as the Democratic nominee, they maintain that the fundamentals of the race have not changed, with voters deeply sour over the direction of the country, and particularly the economy.
“What has happened is we are witnessing a kind of out-of-body experience where we have suspended reality for a couple of weeks,” Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio told reporters during a briefing in West Palm Beach on Thursday of the current state of the race.
It was a message echoed by Trump during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club.
“The honeymoon period’s gonna end,” he insisted while minimizing the size of the crowds Harris has been drawing and lashing out at his new opponent. “Let me tell you: We have the enthusiasm.”
Campaign officials acknowledge that Harris had energized the Democratic base and that her team has taken the lead on fundraising. But they insist they have more than enough to do what they need to win. Trump’s campaign and its affiliates reported raising $138.7 million in July — far less than the eye-popping $310 million sum reported by Harris. Her campaign began August with more cash on hand.
With less than three months to go, senior campaign officials are focused on a group of persuadable voters that they believe is key to victory. The targets, which they say comprise about 11% of the electorate in key battleground states, skew younger and are disproportionately male and moderate. While more than half are white, they include more nonwhites, especially Asians and Hispanics, than the broader electorate.
They are especially frustrated by the economy, including their personal finances, and are pessimistic things will improve.
“It’s a very narrow band of people that we are trying to move,” Fabrizio said of the efforts. Since these voters don’t engage with traditional news outlets and have traded cable for streaming services, the campaign has been working to reach them in novel ways.
“There is a reason why we’re doing podcasts. There is a reason why we’re doing Adin Ross,” Fabrizio said, referring to the controversial internet personality who ended his interview with the former president earlier this week by giving him a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in images of Trump raising his fist after his assassination attempt.
“There is a reason why we are doing all of those things. You know what these people pay attention to? MMA, Adin Ross,” he said. “MMA” refers to mixed martial arts.
Trump campaign officials acknowledge the Democratic base is now motivated in a way it wasn’t when Biden was the nominee. Harris, they say, will likely do better than Biden would have with Black voters, especially women and older men.
But they argue Harris is doing little to appeal to swing voters. And they intend to spend the next 80-plus days painting her as a radical liberal and as the incumbent rather than a change, tying her to the most unpopular Biden administration policies.
What to know about the 2024 Election
“There’s way more information about her that they don’t know that they’re going to hear. And we’re going to make sure they’re going to get,” Fabrizio said.
By the end of the race, they believe, neither candidate will be liked, but voters will choose the candidate they feel will most improve their economic conditions.
They pointed to a line Harris has been using to refer to Trump’s presidency — “We are not going back” — as particularly ill conceived, given that some voters say things were better when Trump was in office than they are now.
Trump campaign aides said they now have staff on the ground in 18 states, ranging from critical battlegrounds to states like Virginia, where Democrats have been favored, that they hope they can put into play.
The campaign says it now has hundreds of paid staff and more than 300 Trump and GOP offices open across battleground states.
But much of their effort relies on volunteers and outside groups.
They are trying to replicate a model they used successfully during the GOP primary in Iowa this winter, where volunteer “caucus captains” were given a list of 10 neighbors they pledged to get out to the polls. The campaign has credited that model with boosting turnout on a brutally cold and icy caucus night.
The “Trump Force 47” program is focused on targeting low- and medium-propensity voters. Volunteers will be canvassing, writing postcards, phone banking and organizing their neighbors.
So far, 12,000 captains have been trained and given voter target lists, according to officials. An additional 30,000 have volunteered, with more than 2,000 expected to be trained per week between now and Election Day.
A large part of the campaign’s outreach will also rely on outside groups, which will be running paid canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts thanks to new guidance from the Federal Election Commission that allow campaigns to coordinate with outside groups in ways that were previously not allowed.
The campaign said more than 1,000 paid canvassers are on the ground in battleground states, and they’re also working to register about 1.6 million targeted voters in those competitive places.
A plane operated by the Brazilian airline VoePass crashed in the country’s Sao Paulo state on Friday, killing all 61 people on board, the company said Friday.
The aircraft involved in the fiery wreck in a residential area in the city of Vinhedo was carrying 57 passengers and four crew, according to The Associated Press. The plane departed from Cascavel, Brazil, in the state of Parana.
“The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died locally,” the airline said in a statement.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority all dispatched teams to the crash site.
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The plane crashed in the Brazilian city of Vinhedo, in the state of Sao Paulo. (Fox News)
It was not clear how many people were injured or killed. Fox News Digital has reached out to the airline.
Brazilian TV network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area on fire with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage. Additional footage showed the plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
“I thought it was going to fall in our yard,” a resident and witness who gave her name only as Ana Lucia told reporters near the crash site. “It was scary, but thank God there were no victims among the locals. It seems that the 62 people inside the plane were the real victims, though.”
This frame grab from video shows fire coming from a plane that crashed by a home in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, Friday. (Felipe Magalhaes Filho via AP)
The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed sits far from the center of the city that’s home to 77,000 residents.
At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence as he shared the news.
VoePass staff at the Guarulhos airport told the Associated Press that the company was notifying victims’ family members and supporting them at a private room in the airport. They didn’t specify how many victims.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
He said that it appeared that all passengers and crew aboard had died, without elaborating as to how that information had been obtained.
Aviation expert and former pilot Arthur Rosenberg said video of the plane appears to show the airliner stalling in midair.
“A stall is when the plane is not moving through the air fast enough, forward motion, to be able to maintain lift to stay in the air,” he told Fox News Channel’s “The Story.” “The sound tells me there was something wrong with one or both engines.”
The radar data shows a “rapid descent,” which could have been attributed to an engine failure or some other malfunction, he said.
An airliner crashed in Brazil on Friday.
“It looked like it dropped 17,000 feet in about two minutes,” Rosenberg said.
The airliner is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, though VOEPASS didn’t immediately confirm that. The aircraft is used for shorter flights.
In a statement, the plane’s manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said company specialists are “fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Japanese B-Girl Ami beats Lithuania’s Nicka in the gold medal competition as breaking makes a cameo at the Olympics.
The urban sport of breaking spun its way onto the Olympic stage for the first and possibly last time, with Japan’s B-Girl Ami winning the inaugural women’s gold.
Breaking, better known as breakdancing, made its debut amid the grand elegance of Paris’s Place de la Concorde, with 17 dancers known as B-Girls going head-to-head in a series of battles on Friday.
Ami, whose name is Ami Yuasa, beat Lithuania’s Dominika “Nicka” Banevic in the final, with China’s Liu “671” Qingyi taking bronze.
The sport blends urban dance with acrobatic moves set to the grooves of hip-hop music.
Its appearance at the Olympics could be a fleeting one, however, having already been dropped from the Los Angeles 2028 programme and no guarantees it will return in the future.
“It was disappointing it was decided that it wouldn’t be in LA, particularly before we even had a chance to show it,” said Australian B-Girl Rachel “Raygun” Gunn.
“I think that was possibly a little premature. I wonder if they’re kicking themselves now.”
Organisers ensured breaking made the most of its time in the spotlight in Paris, pumping up the volume for an excited crowd that included rapper Snoop Dogg.
“I still don’t believe that I’m here because breaking is so different,” said Italian Antilai Sandrini, known by her B-Girl name Anti.
“I never thought about breaking at the Olympics, so for me, it’s really huge.”
Afghan B-Girl makes political statement
The first contest of the day was between India Sardjoe of the Netherlands, known by her B-Girl name India, and Refugee Olympic Team competitor, Talash.
Talash, whose real name is Manizha Talash, left Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to live in Spain two years ago and danced wearing a blue cape with “Free Afghan Women” printed on it.
“There are so many people that are struggling everywhere, and this is why the world needs this,” said American B-Girl Logistx, also known as Logan Edra.
Breaking originated as part of hip-hop culture in New York in the 1970s.
What began in the block parties of the Bronx has reached the fountains and classical facades of one of Paris’s most opulent public spaces, overseen by the International Olympic Committee.
Logistx said finding a balance between breaking’s roots and Olympic competition had been “a messy process”.
“I’m just so happy with what everyone fought for on this journey because I feel like the culture pulled through,” she said.
Each battle sees B-Girls take turns to lay down their dance moves over a set number of rounds, with a panel of judges determining the winner.
The competition opened with a pool stage featuring four groups of four B-Girls, before moving onto the knockout round.
The B-Girls perform on a circular stage, accompanied by a DJ pumping out hip-hop classics and MCs hyping up the crowd.
B-Girls in the women’s event come from countries as diverse as Japan, Lithuania, Morocco and Australia.
The men’s competition takes place on Saturday.
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