Election 2024: Harris campaigns with Usher; Trump speaks in Pennsylvania

Obama had a message for men during his campaign event for Harris in Las Vegas tonight, which comes as polling indicates a large gender gap in voter support for Harris and Trump.

"I've noticed this, especially among some men who seem to think Trump's behavior of bullying people or putting them down is somehow a macho sign of strength," Obama said.

"That's not what real strength is," he said, before crescendoing into a list of examples of what he views as "real strength" as the audience cheered.

Obama has been dispatched by the Harris campaign as part of its efforts to woo male voters, with his message about "real strength" becoming a recurring theme of his remarks.

Rep. Dina Titus spoke in Las Vegas ahead of Obama's speech, arguing that Trump's election would be detrimental to the country — but also worked in a jab about his dance moves.

"Besides all that, he's a terrible dancer," she said after rattling off areas of policy disagreement with the former president. "The man has no soul and no rhythm."

Walz similarly took a jab at Trump for turning a town hall into a music session where Trump stayed onstage for about 40 minutes and swayed and danced, prompting Democrats to question his mental acuity.

"You do not want me dancing for 20 minutes, like this, dude. Somebody on his staff should explain the YMCA song to him, too," Walz said today at a rally.

With just over two weeks to go until election day, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump held dueling rallies in battleground Michigan on Friday. NBC’s Dasha Burns reports for TODAY.

After Trump referenced people being impressed with famous golfer Arnold Palmer showering, the Harris campaign hit the former president's speech as "literal junk."

“Trump’s Pennsylvania Closing Argument Is Literal Junk,” the Harris campaign said in the headline of its press release.

The campaign added, “Donald Trump focused on the issue most important to voters in this election: a deceased golfer’s … anatomy.”

During an interview with “Breitbart News Special Report” on SiriusXM, Trump addressed accusations from the Harris campaign that he is exhausted from being on the campaign trail after canceling interviews and events over the past few days.

Trump said he hasn’t had a day off in 52 days and confirmed he will be attending the Pittsburgh Steelers-New York Jets football game in addition to visiting a McDonald's tomorrow in Pennsylvania where he'll work the fry cooker, according to his campaign. Trump has said that Harris is lying about having worked at a McDonald’s in the past.

Asked about Democratic accusations that Trump has and will continue to weaponize the government, Trump said, “First they say, 'You’re exhausted.' Then they say I’m going to weaponize government. I guess I can’t be too exhausted, can I?”

The Harris campaign has attempted to paint Trump as too tired to campaign on the heels of a Politico report saying that a Trump adviser asserted the former president declined certain interviews because he was “exhausted.” NBC News has not independently verified the report.

Walz criticized Trump as "exhausted" and "rambling," adding that Vance is "waiting in the wings."

"He's not up to it," Walz said about Trump.

"There’s something called the 25th Amendment, and you can be damn sure JD Vance has read the 25th Amendment," Walz added.

Harris revealed recently that she’s a Formula 1 fan and that her favorite driver is “Lewis Hamilton, of course.”

Asked today by NBC News whether Harris is his favorite of the two presidential candidates, the seven-time world champion said, “Yes.”

He declined to elaborate, saying only, “But she is, of course.”

The British driver, who races for the Mercedes team and hasn’t been shy in speaking out about a range of global causes, made the remarks during the U.S. Grand Prix weekend here in Austin.

Former President Donald Trump called rival Kamala Harris a “s--- vice president” during a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Saturday evening, punctuating his broader argument that she is too liberal in a more aggressive fashion and with fresh vulgarity.

“Bernie is radical left, and this one, Kamala, is further left,” Trump told the crowd at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport. “And then, so you have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough, that you just can’t take it anymore. We can’t stand you. You’re a s--- vice president.”

Read the full story here.

During her rally in Atlanta, Harris highlighted the case of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who ProPublica reported traveled to North Carolina and later died when she wasn’t able to get care for a rare complication from the abortion pill.

Members of Thurman's family attended the rally today, Harris said.

The vice president also led the crowd in chanting Thurman's full name, Amber Nicole Thurman, saying that she "promised Amber's mother that we will always remember her story and speak her name."

During her rally in Atlanta, Harris again argued that Trump was exhausted on the campaign trail, an argument she pushed frequently yesterday following a Politico report.

She also mocked Trump as rambling and unable to finish thoughts. The former president has referred to his speaking style as "the weave." Harris called it "nonsense."

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban pitched Harris’ economic opportunity agenda to a town hall of small-business owners in Phoenix this afternoon, arguing Harris’ economic policies would help build their businesses while Trump’s would hurt them.

“I’m here to tell you how you can make more money under Kamala Harris than you would under Donald Trump,” Cuban said.

Cuban focused on the high universal tariffs Trump has proposed on all U.S. imports and his proposal for tariffs of 60% or more on all Chinese imports, saying the high tariffs would cause the small-business owners’ domestic operating costs to skyrocket, making it harder to get their ventures off the ground.

Grammy-winning singer Usher campaigned for Harris in Atlanta before she took the stage.

Part of the way through his remarks, someone in the crowd yelled, "We love you, Usher!"

"I love you more," he responded. "But I love Kamala Harris even more. I want her to be our next president of the United States."

Trump opened up his rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with a lengthy monologue about the late golfer Arnold Palmer, during which he seemed to imply that men who saw him in the showers were impressed by his genitalia.

The former president was speaking at a regional airport named for Palmer, a championship-winning golfer from Latrobe who won seven major titles between 1958 and 1964.

“This man was strong and tough,” Trump said. “And I refuse to say it but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God. That’s unbelievable. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it. I had to say it. We have women that are highly sophisticated here. But they used to look at Arnold, they said, ‘man.’”

The Harris campaign quickly highlighted the remarks. “Has someone done a wellness check on @realDonaldTrump,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika posted on X.

Trump will attend the Steelers-Jets game in Pittsburgh tomorrow night, according to a senior Trump campaign official and a person familiar with the former president's plans.

Trump will watch the game from a suite alongside members of the energy industry, elected officials and former NFL players Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell, who are also attending Trump's rally today, according to the campaign official. The former president will also have an interview with WPXI, a local Pittsburgh news station.

Former President Barack Obama will head to Charlotte, North Carolina, next Friday for a campaign event, according to a Harris campaign official.

North Carolina hasn't swung blue in a presidential race since 2008, when Obama was elected to his first term. During his campaign stop, he will encourage voters to cast ballots early or return their mail-in ballots, the official said.

Obama is making stops in a slew of swing states in the final stretch of the campaign, including his first joint appearance with Harris in Georgia next Thursday. He campaigned in Arizona yesterday and is stopping in Nevada today. Next week, he's expected to also hit Michigan and Wisconsin.

Former NFL players Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell will attend Trump's rally today in Pennsylvania. Brown is set to speak during the event too, according to the campaign.

Brown has previously been arrested for allegedly not paying for child support. He has also faced an arrest warrant over domestic battery allegations, which were later dropped.

A former trainer sued Brown in 2019 for alleged sexual assault. Brown denied the allegations and eventually reached a settlement with his accuser.

At a rally in Detroit, Harris encouraged attendees to vote early, alluding to the fact that voters in North Carolina and Georgia set new records earlier this week for the number of voters who turned out early.

"Now, who is the capital of producing records?" Harris asked the crowd, laughing.

"We are going to break some records here in Detroit today. We are going to do this because we know what is at stake, and we know the power of the people," she added.

In digital ads on Snapchat and Instagram, the Harris campaign is using dating-game-style videos to persuade young people to make a plan to vote.

In one ad running in Arizona near several university campuses, women hold balloons while they interview a man about his job, his salary, his height and whether he works out. Then one woman asks, "Do you have a plan to vote?"

The Harris campaign today said that the vice president's husband, Doug Emhoff, will head to North Carolina on Tuesday to kick off a canvass launch, participate in hurricane relief efforts and deliver remarks at a get-out-the-vote event.

Ahead of a campaign event in Detroit, Harris told reporters that she's dedicated more time on the campaign trail responding to Trump because he's "becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged, and it requires that response."

"I think the American people are seeing it ... and I think the American people deserve better than someone who actually seems to be unstable," the vice president added.

NBC News has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.

During a press gaggle in Detroit, Harris said she was encouraged by the record levels of turnout in North Carolina and Georgia during early voting.

“In fact, today in Michigan, I’m going to challenge the folks here to do the same," Harris said.

Asked whether she was worried about Republicans leaning into early voting this year, Harris dismissed the fear, telling reporters, "I don’t yet have enough data to tell you who’s voting for who and or how they’re leaning, but I think it’s great that people are turning out and voting and being active. It’s what we should all want, right, in our democracy, that people understand it’s their civic duty, but also that they can make a difference.”

The former president will be back in the Keystone State on Saturday, where he is scheduled to appear in Latrobe, just outside of Pittsburgh, for a campaign rally this evening.

The vice president will start her campaign schedule today in Detroit, where she is slated to appear at an early-afternoon event alongside Grammy-winning singer Lizzo, who is from the city.

The celebrity cameos don't end there, though. After the Detroit event, Harris is scheduled to fly to Atlanta for a campaign rally with rapper and singer Usher.

Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly zeroing in on a group of voters her campaign believes could make a critical difference in several key battleground states: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who can’t get themselves to support former President Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Harris held an event with many of her leading Republican surrogates in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — a crucial swing area of the key battleground state. In rural western Pennsylvania one day prior, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held an event at the farm of a former Trump voter.

Those events followed a much-hyped rally in Wisconsin where Harris appeared alongside former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., during which Harris touted support from her and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who left office with notably low approval ratings. On Saturday, the Harris campaign announced a battleground state tour of panels with the younger Cheney.

The Harris campaign — which believes these voters are being undercounted in polling — had them front of mind when scheduling an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, just before her event with Republican supporters.

Read the full story here.

Mesa Mayor John Giles, a Republican who supports Kamala Harris for president, is vexed by the disconnect between Arizona’s presidential race and what’s happening down the ballot.

Polls show Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, the quintessential Donald Trump acolyte, losing a significant slice of the former president’s voters to her Democratic rival, Rep. Ruben Gallego.

Read the full story here.

James Carville was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan recently when he kept being stopped by anxious New Yorkers begging the famed Cajun political sage for some kind of guidance about how the November election would turn out.

He had nothing for them.

“They firmly believed that I had some kind of secret knowledge,” said the veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to tell someone who thinks you’re omnipotent that you’re really not.”

Read the full story here.