Trump stumps in Rust Belt; Harris is campaigning with Michelle Obama

During a rally in Novi, Michigan, Trump doubled down on his critical comments about Detroit, saying the city “makes us a developing country.”

His remarks came during a portion of his speech about bringing manufacturing back to Michigan from China and Mexico.

“I think Detroit and some of our areas make us an up-and-coming country. There is no such place in China,” said the former president.

In the rural communities and industrial towns of western Michigan, semi-trucks carrying thousands of pounds of food pull up to church parking lots and community centers, where lines of people wait for a few boxes of free food.

One truck can carry enough food for 600 households, but sometimes even that isn’t enough to meet demand, which has grown 18 percent in the past 12 months, said Ken Estelle, president of Feeding America West Michigan.

“We have never seen this level of need in the 43 years we have been serving this community. This is significantly higher than during Covid and it is putting pressure on us beyond our capacity,” Estelle said. “We’ve just seen this drumbeat grow with more and more people every month.”

From rural Michigan to mid-sized cities in Pennsylvania and affluent suburbs in Wisconsin, food banks are reporting record levels of need that have steadily increased over the past few years. Despite rising wages and low unemployment, many households continue to struggle with rising costs that exhausted their savings and increased According to food bank directors, there is not much money left at the end of the month to put food on the table.

Read the full story here.

On Friday, a South Carolina judge ruled that the voter registration of 1,900 teenagers would not be considered until Election Day.

The ACLU sued after the state Department of Motor Vehicles failed to turn over teen voter registration to the Board of Elections. The teenagers were 17 when they registered, but were due to turn 18 on election day.

In his ruling, the judge noted that election day was too close to include people on the voter rolls.

In a statement, Allen Chaney, legal director of the ACLU of South Carolina, said, “Our government failed these young voters, and now that same government is making excuses instead of fixing the situation. When ‘it’s too hard to fix’ becomes an acceptable reason to disenfranchise voters, we know we have work to do.”

In a much-anticipated interview, Donald Trump touched on a wide range of cultural and political issues Friday night during a three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan, host of one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

The recording lasted so long that Trump was several hours late for his rally that evening in Traverse City, Michigan. Disappointed that I waited so long many people left.

Rogan’s interview is a continuation of Trump’s appeal to non-traditional media, including podcasts, in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Rogan also invited Vice President Kamala Harris for an interview, but her campaign declined. Rogan’s podcast has over 17 million subscribers on YouTube.

Read the full story here.

The 2024 election is just days away, Donald Trump supporters who have come to love him lies about fraud in the last election continues to bear legal consequences the storming of the Capitol on January 6even as Trump succeeded divert their own criminal proceedings and again became a candidate for the presidency from the Republican Party.

The young Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol faced sentencing Friday afternoon at a federal courthouse in Washington, just a few hundred feet from the crime scene. Caleb Berry, 23, who stormed the Capitol with members of the far-right group Oath Keepers, stood before a judge wearing a black shirt and apologized to everyone in the courtroom and to the country.

Read the full story here.

The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is dominating the 2024 debates, but control of both houses of Congress is also very possible — and a series of tight races could be a surprise on election night.

These races could determine which party wins a majority in the House or Senate, which will have a significant impact on the next president’s agenda. They will be determined by a combination of factors, including voter turnout and whether the candidates have a unique ability to weather the broader political winds.

Here are nine congressional races where one party should have a clear advantage but appears to be in the running.

Read the full story here.