Election Live Updates: In Contentious Fox News Interview, Harris Spars With Anchor
“Vice President Kamala Harris battled with Bret Baier, who repeatedly interrupted her and pressed her using former President Donald J. Trump’s talking points. Mr. Trump, earlier Wednesday, took questions in a town hall with Latino voters.
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Vice President Kamala Harris sat for a contentious interview on Fox News on Wednesday evening in which the anchor, Bret Baier, repeatedly interrupted her and pressed her using former President Donald J. Trump’s talking points.
Mr. Baier challenged Ms. Harris on the border, on her willingness to spend taxpayer dollars on gender-transition surgery for prison inmates, and on whether she could draw any differences between the Biden administration and how she would govern. “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Ms. Harris said, in one of her clearest efforts yet to put distance between herself and Mr. Biden.
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Vice President Kamala Harris may not get another debate with former President Donald J. Trump, but on Wednesday, she got one with Bret Baier.
In an interview that turned contentious almost the instant it began, Mr. Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor, repeatedly pressed the Democratic presidential nominee on illegal immigration, taxpayer support for gender-transition surgery and other areas that closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s regular attacks against her.
Vice President Kamala Harris sat for the most adversarial interview of her campaign on Wednesday, sparring with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier over the border, President Biden’s mental fitness and whether former President Donald J. Trump is a threat to American democracy.
For a Democratic presidential candidate, appearing on Fox News is about as close as going into the lion’s den as it gets. On Wednesday, the lion was Mr. Baier, who repeatedly interrupted the vice president and tried to talk over her.
A local judge on Wednesday delivered a sweeping ruling that rejected multiple new rules governing elections in Georgia, describing them as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”
Most of the rules knocked down by the court closely aligned with the priorities of right-wing activists and were approved by the Georgia State Election Board in recent months. They included mandates to count election ballots by hand, expand the monitoring of ballot drop boxes, require new identification for delivering absentee ballots and provide expanded access for poll watchers, along with new requirements and procedures that could disrupt the election certification process.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday made her most direct and expansive pitch yet to conservative and moderate voters, appearing in Pennsylvania with a phalanx of Republican elected officials who have set aside their party loyalties to try to defeat former President Donald J. Trump.
At a campaign event in Bucks County, Pa., Ms. Harris tried to strike a unifying tone even as she castigated her opponent, casting her campaign as one that embraced anyone who believed that Mr. Trump should not serve a second term.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio has been dogged by questions over whether he accepts that his running mate, former President Donald J. Trump, lost the 2020 election. But on Wednesday at a rally in Pennsylvania, he gave a crowd of supporters a clear answer: “No.”
Mr. Vance, speaking before a crowd in Williamsport, Pa., was pressed about his reluctance to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss by a reporter, who asked: “What message do you think it sends to independent voters when you do not directly answer the question, did Donald Trump lose in 2020?”
Harris’s interview with Bret Baier of Fox News has ended. It was marked by a series of interruptions but allowed Harris to take her message to an audience that might not often hear it unfiltered. The discussion centered on the issues that Republicans largely want to dominate the election: immigration, the threat from Iran and her ties to Biden.
It seems Baier has taken an aggressive tack in this interview in an attempt to shake Harris off her talking points. But his frequent interruptions remind me of Matt Lauer talking over Hillary Clinton during a televised NBC forum in September 2016.
Harris is making points that Fox News viewers don’t often hear in the channel’s normal programming, saying that Trump is unfit to serve and pointing out the number of his former administration officials who support her candidacy.
“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris said, in what is one of her clearest efforts to separate herself from the current president.
Republicans have seen Harris’s inability to articulate differences from Biden, and Baier is giving her a chance to draw some distinctions. She is taking the opportunity, saying that she is a different generation of leadership and that she will bring her own experiences to the White House.
Harris was pressed on her position on using taxpayer funds for gender-affirming surgery for transgender inmates, including those who are undocumented. Trump has run millions of dollars on ads on the subject. “I will follow the law,” she said more than once, noting that the Bureau of Prisons provided gender-affirming treatments under Trump. She accused him of “throwing stones when you live in a glass house.”
Baier is now playing Trump-Vance campaign attack ads and asking Harris to respond.
Ten minutes in, and the entire interview has been about immigration and border security, an issue seen as one of Harris’s biggest weaknesses with undecided voters.
Baier’s unrelenting focus on immigration and border security in the opening segment of this interview will most likely be criticized by Harris supporters. But these issues are also top-of-mind for many Republican voters and particularly viewers of Fox News – the channel’s programs feature hours of daily coverage on immigration issues.
Bret Baier is invoking the names of young women that Trump refers to frequently at his rallies as victims of undocumented migrants. They are frequently cited on Fox News programming, too. Baier is asking Harris to effectively answer for those episodes as a representative of the Biden administration.
Harris is giving her standard response to questions about immigration by citing Donald J. Trump’s opposition to immigration legislation.
Harris is trying to stake out some common ground by agreeing that the immigration system is “broken.” But she says the solution is legislation passed by Congress, not solely administrative action. She has expressed empathy for border agents and for those who have had family members killed by immigrants in the country illegally.
The first question in the Fox News interview of Vice President Kamala Harris is about immigration. Bret Baier asked how many undocumented immigrants have been released into the country during the Biden administration, but he interrupted her before she could answer.
Bret Baier has not come close to allowing Harris to answer a question yet, interrupting her repeatedly. “You have to let me finish, please,” she said. “I’m in the middle of responding ot the point youre raising, and I’d like to finish.”
Halfway through a town hall hosted by Univision on Wednesday, Ramiro Gonzalez stood in front of Donald J. Trump and told the former president that he had lost his support.
Mr. Gonzalez, 56, a self-described Republican, said he was alarmed when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He did not like Mr. Trump’s leadership during the coronavirus pandemic, and he was dismayed by the chorus of former Trump administration officials who no longer support him. “I want to give you the opportunity to try to win back my vote,” Mr. Gonzalez, of Tampa, Fla., said.
A colorful website created by Cards Against Humanity, the maker of an irreverent party game, to promote an unusual election-season program — promising payments for reluctant Democratic-leaning voters who made plans to vote — has been taken down. The company, which has needled Donald Trump and his allies for years, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the vanished website, apologize.lol, which was replaced by a page focused on a lawsuit Cards Against Humanity has filed against Elon Musk. Election law experts had been divided on whether the payment program was legal.
At his rally in Williamsport, Pa., a reporter asked JD Vance about election fairness and misinformation. Vance said that he was “not worried” about the integrity of the 2024 election, though his running mate, Donald Trump, has often claimed the opposite. While Republicans have given mixed messages over the importance of early voting, Vance said he was worried that people who thought there were “too many problems” in the election would just skip voting. “That’s the exact opposite attitude you should be taking,” Vance said.
Vice President Kamala Harris is speaking at a campaign event in Bucks County, Pa., where her crowd includes many Republican supporters, including registered voters and former elected officials. “In a typical election year, you all being here with me might be a bit surprising, dare I say unusual,” she said, chuckling, “but not in this election.”
As she did a few weeks ago when appearing with former Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican, Harris chose a symbolic location for this event: near the site where George Washington crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. This campaign event, unlike others, also featured the presentation of colors and the Pledge of Allegiance. Her backdrop is a farmhouse lined with American flags and a large banner that proclaims: Country Over Party.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, at 6 p.m. Eastern is, by any measure, a risk for her and a test of her ability to handle a potentially contentious interview in an unfriendly setting. This is the first time that Ms. Harris has sat for an interview on Fox, and it follows a series of interviews that the Democratic presidential candidate has given, including one to “60 Minutes.”
But she is hardly making history here.
During a rally in Williamsport, Pa., Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, laid into Kamala Harris for agreeing only to “softball” media appearances, but the crowd cheered as he mentioned that she will join Bret Baier on Fox News for an interview tonight. “She’s got probably the hardest interview she’s ever done,” Vance said about her sit-down with Baier.
The organization behind a campaign for an abortion-rights ballot measure sued the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Wednesday, saying that a threat to prosecute television stations for running a political ad was an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights.
The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a fight between the group, Floridians Protecting Freedom, and the DeSantis administration, which has leaned heavily on the power of the state to oppose Amendment 4, a ballot measure that would guarantee abortion rights in Florida.
Donald Trump’s town hall with Univision, which will air at 10 pm Eastern, just ended. He was asked a number of direct questions by Hispanic men and women on climate change, the Jan. 6 attack, his immigration policy, gun control and abortion rights. Trump often skirted direct answers. He would not say whether he believed climate change was a hoax or stake out a position on abortion rights. But when challenged by voters, he repeated his standard positions, while trying to come across as nonhostile and non-offensive to Latino voters.
New Quinnipiac swing state polls show Kamala Harris up slightly in North Carolina while Donald Trump is ahead in Georgia by a fairly wide margin. Trump still polls ahead on the economy in both states.
Donald Trump was asked by an undecided voter from Arizona whether he really believed his baseless and debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. He blamed what he had read, but didn’t back down, saying, “I was just saying what was reported, that’s been reported, and eating other things too, that they’re not supposed to be.” And he once again said he planned to visit the city, though no campaign trip has been announced.
Donald Trump is currently taking part in a town hall in Doral, Fla., hosted by Univision that will air later tonight. Jorge Velaquez, a farmer from California, told Trump that many farmworkers were undocumented immigrants and asked him who would replace them if he carried out his promised large-scale deportations. Trump vaguely insisted he’d make things better for farmers and said that “we want workers, and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally.” But he did not elaborate on how he would change the immigration system to do so, instead returning to his frequent characterizations of undocumented immigrants as violent criminals and mentally ill people.
Former President Donald J. Trump declared himself the “father of I.V.F.” in a town-hall event Tuesday focused on women’s issues, an eyebrow-raising nickname that was his latest attempt to claim an advantage on a matter that has become a political liability.
The Supreme Court justices Mr. Trump appointed enabled the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a ruling that he has praised and that opened the door to possible restrictions on in vitro fertilization.
The longest-lived president in American history has voted again.
Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on Oct. 1 and has been in hospice care since February 2023, submitted his absentee ballot on Wednesday, according to Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson.“
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