President Biden’s withdrawal and Vice President Harris’s selection as the presumptive Democratic nominee has reset the 50-state race for the White House.

Former president Donald Trump had gained in national and state-level polls after a June debate in which Biden appeared confused and was at times unable to answer questions.

But in the two weeks since Biden dropped out and Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Democrats’ poll numbers — and their chances of holding the White House — have rebounded. The path to victory for Harris once again runs through seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“The Democratic base is coming home,” said Amy Walter, publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. “In states that we know that are evenly divided and have been very, very close for these last few elections, they kind of snap back to being very, very competitive and will be the focus of the 2024 campaign.”

Although Trump’s paths to victory were expanding in late June and early July, the race “is now contracting back to the original six or seven battleground states,” Walter added.

Trump and Harris are now in a virtual tie, with Trump at 46 percent support and Harris at 45.4 percent support, according to a Washington Post average of national polls. In July, Trump had 46.8 percent support while Biden had 45.2 percent support, according to The Post’s polling average.

As of Saturday, Trump still led in five of the seven battlegrounds, according to The Post’s polling average.

Trump leads Harris by five points in Georgia and Arizona, four points in North Carolina and Nevada and two points in Michigan, The Post’s averages estimate. Trump and Harris are tied in Pennsylvania, while Harris has a slight edge in Wisconsin. Harris is performing about one percentage point better in those states than Biden was before he dropped out.

Harris is doing better with Black voters, which could help bring Georgia back into play for Democrats, polling suggests. But she may not be able to replicate Biden’s appeal with White, non-college voters, which could impact her chances in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Democrats are “seeing tremendous enthusiasm for Vice President Harris and her vision in the states, whether it’s brand new supporters showing up at field offices in Nevada and Pennsylvania to knock doors or the 1,000 Georgia voters who signed up to volunteer after her rally in Atlanta,” Josh Marcus-Blank, states communications director for Harris, said in an emailed statement.

Strategists from both parties see Pennsylvania as a near must-win state for both Trump and Harris. Pennsylvania is also the state where Republicans and Democrats are investing the most in TV ad spending. Democrats are spending more than $56 million on television ads in the state between July 21 and the November election, according to the firm AdImpact. Republicans are spending $61 million.

After Pennsylvania, Democrats have spent the most on presidential television ads in Michigan, followed by Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada. For Republicans, television ad spending after Pennsylvania was highest in Georgia, followed by Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada.

“If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t be banking on anything outside of the blue wall saving me,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist, of the Harris campaign. “If you’re banking on Arizona, and Georgia and North Carolina saving you from losing the blue wall, that’s not a bet I’d want to make … The pivotal state remains Pennsylvania. If you win it, you’ve got a chance.”

Many Republicans say Harris is enjoying a honeymoon period, with the rollout of her candidacy, her upcoming vice-presidential announcement and the Democratic National Convention weeks away. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu predicted that in his state, Harris’s poll numbers will hit a “high-water mark around mid-to-late August” and said that “if she doesn’t have enough of a buffer they’re going to come back down.”

Trump “has been gaining ground and leading in battleground and blue states,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “As more voters understand how weak, failed and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris is, President Trump’s chances in these battleground states and traditionally Democrat strongholds will only get better,” she added.

Still, Democrats see Harris as more competitive than Biden in the Sun Belt states of Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

“She has appeal to some constituencies within the party that were lagging with Biden,” including younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters, said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama. “That puts into play some of those Sun Belt states that have seemed out of reach. They’re still a stretch but they’re not nearly the stretch they were.”

Axelrod added that while there’s more energy and optimism for Democrats, “everybody should be sober that given the map, it is still a difficult race.”

At Trump’s rally in Atlanta on Saturday, several Trump voters said they saw Harris as a more formidable opponent than Biden because of her age. But they expected Trump to prevail in Georgia.

Kirk Barnett said Harris is “probably” a tougher opponent. “She is coherent,” he said.

The candidates’ travel will offer clues for how they see the map going forward. Trump held a rally in Georgia this weekend, days after Harris also visited the state. Harris, meanwhile, plans to hit all seven battleground states this week, when she introduces her running mate. Harris’s running mate choice will also shed further light on her campaign strategy. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is among the potential running mates she’s vetting, along with Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.

As November approaches, analysts caution that the shape of the race remains uncertain.

In the course of a month, Biden had a debate that changed the direction of the presidential race, Trump was nearly assassinated and Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, Walter noted.

“All those things happened and it’s not like the polls flipped,” she said.

Emily Guskin and Scott Clement contributed to this report.

JD Hamel was a high school senior in an Ohio steel town when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The future senator and nominee for vice president, who uses Vance for his surname now, joined the Marines a few weeks later confident, he later recalled, that freedom and democracy would follow.

But his optimism was short lived as the war, deemed necessary by President George W. Bush after spurious intelligence indicated a dire threat to U.S. security, quickly proved a deadly quagmire instead.

“My entire life has been influenced and affected by the decisions we made a month before I enlisted,” Vance said last year in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He lamented how those who were “the most wrong” about Iraq “suffered no consequences.” The U.S. foreign policy establishment, he asserted, “has learned zero lessons from what is perhaps the most unforced and catastrophic error in the history of this country.”

Those comments are emblematic of the antiestablishment views Vance, 40, has promulgated before and since becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. And while his military service represents only a brief period of his early adulthood, he and his political opponents both have seized on his service in the early days of his addition to the ticket.

If elected, Vance would become the first to serve at such a senior level from among the generation of men and women who went to war after 9/11. He spent four years in the Marines, from ages 18 to 23, deploying once to Iraq for six months in his capacity as a public affairs specialist, a job that entailed writing news releases, taking photos and interacting with journalists. He did not face combat.

Vance’s rhetoric, however, has puzzled some who served with him, as he has shifted from a moderate Republican sharply critical of Trump just a few years ago to a hard line ally now who has echoed the former president’s falsehoods about the 2020 election and made demeaning comments about “childless cat ladies” and prominent Democrats.

Cullen Tiernan, who served with Vance, said he was not interested in assessing Vance’s statements about past elections, adding “a lot of this election chatter is looking backwards.” Asked if he intends to vote for his friend, Tiernan, who identifies as left-leaning, said he was undecided.

“I love JD, I really want to vote for him, but it’ll take me some time to get there. I want to hear what Harris has to say,” he said. “I’m going to take my time and give it a lot of deep thought.”

Some Democrats have sought to minimize Vance’s military record because he saw no combat and argued that his allegiance to Trump is an affront to the Constitution and core values of honor, courage and commitment that every U.S. Marine promises to uphold.

Vance’s former military colleagues defended him against such allegations that his service record should be left out of criticism of his politics. Shawn Haney, a retired Marine officer whom Vance has praised for her mentorship during those years, said she doesn’t agree with “much of his current politics.”

Yet Haney she is able to “separate the person from the candidate and have those unconditional feelings of pride for someone that I have served with, mentored, and considered a friend for almost 20 years.”

Vance, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.

A transformation

In his 2016 best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance wrote that he first considered joining the Marines at the suggestion of a cousin who had served. He was interested in attending college, he wrote, but had a spotty high school transcript and worried he would struggle with the debt and lack of structure that college life would bring.

In September 2003, Vance shipped off to boot camp in Parris Island, S.C., where a team of frothing drill instructors hounded him and the other recruits, barking orders and pushing them to their physical and emotional limits. He dropped 45 pounds in that time and emerged from the experience with a newfound confidence, his book says.

After graduating from entry level training, Vance went home to visit family and friends in Middletown, Ohio. He saw a “world of small expectations” and “learned helplessness,” he wrote — people who believe their choices have no effect on their lives. Marines are taught the opposite.

When Vance arrived at Cherry Point, an airfield in North Carolina, to start his first assignment, he was, like most new to the military, not a “worldly guy,” said Wil Acosta, who supervised him. Acosta recalled how more seasoned Marines in their unit felt protective of him and once imparted their counsel to ensure Vance wouldn’t get scammed by the high-interest loan car lots that ring a lot of bases.

Vance was reserved at first, said Curt Keester, who also served with him at Cherry Point. Eventually, though, Vance opened up, sharing stories about his older sister, Lindsay Ratliff, her children, and his colorful grandmother, known as “Mamaw.” He has described her as a gun-toting, foul-mouthed “hillbilly” who stepped in as his mother struggled with drug addiction. Keester said Vance spoke less about his mom in those days.

Tiernan said Vance loved reading and was a fan of the authors Ayn Rand, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In their free time, they enjoyed visiting the beach, watching football at Buffalo Wild Wings, and playing poker.

‘Affected deeply’ in Iraq

Vance deployed to Iraq from August 2005 to February 2006, and was posted at Al-Asad air base in the western part of the country. The American public had largely soured on the war as sectarian bloodshed soared and it became clear the United States could not easily disentangle itself from the conflict.

Shortly after he arrived, Vance wrote on a blog that he was “a little homesick, but mostly happy to be here and finally contribute, even if only a small part, to our country’s mission.” A spokesman confirmed the blog’s authenticity.

In the weeks before Vance’s deployment, Bush addressed the nation attempting to rally support by describing Iraq as part of a broader war against terrorism. Months later, the president acknowledged that “much of the intelligence” cited by the administration to make the case for its occupation was “wrong.”

While overseas, Vance lived in trailer-like containerized housing, rooming with Tiernan and spending hours watching DVDs sent from home or pirated and sold to them in base shops, his friends recalled.

The public affairs Marines did much of their work at desks, but they sometimes left the relative safety of their base to capture the stories of service members more directly in harm’s way. Vance’s articles from Iraq appear under the byline James D. Hamel, his legal name at the time. Among them are interviews with pilots and an account of a visit by the Marine Corps’ top general.

Vance, in his book, wrote that he was “lucky to escape any real fighting” but “affected deeply” by a day in which he encountered an Iraqi boy whom he handed an eraser, prompting the boy to become “overjoyed” at the small gift despite attending a school without running water.

While Vance wrote that he doesn’t believe in “transformative moments,” the exchange was “pretty close.” He had long resented his own family’s circumstances, he added, and changed his perspective as he observed what it was like to come of age in war-ravaged Iraq.

“I began to appreciate how lucky I was: born in the greatest country on earth, every modern convenience at my fingertips, supported by two loving hillbillies, and part of a family that, for all its quirks, loved me unconditionally,” Vance wrote.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a former Marine infantry officer who deployed to Iraq four times, has made perhaps the sharpest attack on Vance’s service record. Speaking in July on the left-leaning “Pod Save The World” podcast, Moulton said Vance “didn’t do much fighting” during the war and “doesn’t exactly uphold Marine values.”

“I consider him one of the biggest hypocrites in Congress,” Moulton said. “Someone who wrote a book completely contradicted by his candidacy. Someone who assailed Trump before he became a sycophant. This is a man who does Trump’s bidding, and I suspect that is the sole reason that he picked him, or at least the most important reason.”

Haney, the retired officer who supervised Vance, expressed frustration at attacks on his military record. His politics and comments are fair game, she said, but he volunteered to serve at a tense and dangerous time, and did so honorably, she added.

Haney said that when Vance returned to Cherry Point from Iraq, she selected him to be a representative to local media, even though his rank at the time, corporal, was junior to the officer typically assigned to the position. He was the “obvious choice,” she said, because he had shown he could learn on the fly and handle the responsibility, she recalled.

Vance, Haney said, appeared then to be a conservative and showed an interest in politics, noting that he also wanted to hear others talk about their own views.

“He probably always had a healthy dose of cynicism,” she said. “But he also had a good ability to assess, and he understood he had a limited view.”

‘He calls it like he sees it’

After his enlistment ended in 2007, Vance attended Ohio State University and then Yale Law School, where he sharpened his views of an America divided between liberal elites and more conservative masses, which he later explored in his book that vaulted him to fame.

Vance and his fellow Marines have kept in touch, shooting texts back and forth and exchanging holiday cards. A few attended his wedding in Kentucky in 2014. Three years later, Vance and several of the Cherry Point Marines gathered in North Carolina for a reunion, Keester said.

After Trump selected Vance as his running mate, Tiernan sent a congratulatory text. “Thanks dude,” he replied, Tiernan recalled.

Some of Vance’s friends see shades of his Marine Corps experience poking through in his foreign policy views, notably his aversion to how much money the United States spends abroad — particularly in Ukraine. In an April speech on the Senate floor, he said he realized after deploying to Iraq that the premise of that war was “a lie” and drew parallels to Washington’s military and financial support for Kyiv now.

“It’s the same exact talking points 20 years later,” Vance said, though the situation remains much different, with an American invasion in Iraq leading to a years-long insurgency and a Russian assault on Ukraine prompting the United States to deliver weapons and other resources without sending its own troops.

Vance has had a rocky debut as Trump’s running mate, drawing unwanted scrutiny to old, controversial comments. His critics, including some Republicans, have questioned whether Vance is the right running mate for Trump, and whether the Trump campaign spent enough time vetting him.

Vice President Harris, who has replaced President Biden atop the Democratic ticket, has assailed Vance for his shift toward Trump, claiming last month that he’d be “loyal only to Trump, not to our country.”

Vance responded during a campaign event days later in Michigan, a crucial battleground. “Well, I don’t know, Kamala,” he said. “I did serve in the United States Marine Corps and build a business. What the hell have you done other than collect a check?”

Tiernan said Vance’s observations as a young man have provided a vantage from which he can scrutinize the nation’s military and political leaders.

“He calls it like he sees it,” Tiernan said. “He can question it from a place of personal experience.”

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Vice President Harris interviewed at least three potential running mates on Sunday as the final hours before her self-imposed deadline to make her choice began ticking away.

Harris will announce her vice-presidential pick by Tuesday night, when she and the candidate will appear in Philadelphia for the first of seven rallies over the course of five days. The two will campaign in each of the seven most competitive states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Harris, who has maintained an aggressive travel schedule since becoming the likely Democratic nominee two weeks ago, spent the weekend in Washington with lawyers and her closest aides.

At the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, Harris and her aides reviewed the finalists’ backgrounds, experience and potential vulnerabilities. But the in-person interviews, Harris allies said, would be particularly important to the process as the vice president is prioritizing personal chemistry with her running mate, and says she is looking for a governing partner.

The three finalists who met with Harris on Sunday were Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. It remained unclear Sunday whether Harris herself had interviewed three other potential finalists: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.

Spokespeople for Shapiro, Walz and Kelly declined to comment on the interviews.

On Saturday, Harris holed up at her residence. Former attorney general Eric Holder, who led the vetting process, gave presentations that he and a team of lawyers at Covington & Burlington had created on the finalists.

At the same time, Harris’s team was grappling with the fallout from a British tabloid report that her husband, Doug Emhoff, had an affair during his previous marriage, long before he met Harris. Emhoff acknowledged the affair in a statement on Saturday.

“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff said in a statement released to the news media.

Presidential nominees usually take months to select a running mate, but only two weeks have passed since President Biden withdrew from the race and Harris became the likely nominee. Holder and his team finished the process this week after poring over reams of paperwork on the candidates.

Since Biden dropped out of the race, supporters and opponents of the vice-presidential contenders have tried to sway Harris and her team.

One of the most vocal campaigns has come from some liberals who oppose Shapiro in large part because of comments he made about pro-Palestinian protesters earlier this year. Shapiro, who is Jewish, compared some college protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, and encouraged the University of Pennsylvania to break up encampments of pro-Palestinian protesters.

An article Shapiro penned about 30 years ago in which he argued that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to establish their own state in the Middle East also resurfaced late last week. During a news conference on Friday, Shapiro said he wrote the article when he was a 20-year-old college student and implied that his views had changed in the years since.

Shapiro, a staunch supporter of Israel, said he has been a supporter of a two-state solution, with “Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side by side,” since far before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which prompted Israel to retaliate with its 10-month-long war in Gaza. He also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.”

Separately, some labor groups have raised concerns about Kelly because of his past opposition to legislation that they argue would make it easier for workers to form unions. But after Biden dropped out, Kelly told reporters he would support the legislation, called the PRO Act, if it reached the Senate floor.

The finalists are all White men, reflecting an assumption that voters would prefer a White male running mate for the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent leading a major-party presidential ticket. Four years ago, Biden selected Harris amid a sense by many in the Democratic Party that it was important to have a woman and a person of color on the ticket.

Even before selecting a running mate, Harris has already closed much of the polling lead Trump had opened over Biden before the president dropped out of the race. A CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday showed that Harris has a one-point edge nationally against Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.

That makes the race a statistical dead heat, but the same poll showed Biden down five points against Trump just before he exited the race. The same poll showed Harris and Trump tied in key battleground states.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.

Five secretaries of state plan to send an open letter to billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, urging him to “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI chatbot Grok, after it shared with millions of users false information suggesting that Kamala Harris was not eligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.

The letter, spearheaded by Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and signed by his counterparts Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico, urges Musk to “immediately implement changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.”

Within hours of President Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign on July 21, “false information on ballot deadlines produced by Grok was shared on multiple social media platforms,” the secretaries wrote.

The secretaries cited a post from Grok that circulated after Biden stepped out of the race: “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” the post read, naming nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.

Had the deadlines passed in those states, the vice president would not have been able to replace Biden on the ballot. But the information was false. In all nine states, the ballot deadlines have not passed and upcoming ballot deadlines allow for changes to candidates.

“This latest episode is unfortunate, but it’s also an opportunity to deliver a collective warning about the need for action on behalf of America’s voters,” Simon said in a message to The Washington Post. “We are all united by the goal of ensuring that voters get accurate information — and that they seek out trusted sources for such information.”

A message to X seeking comment from Musk, who controls X, was not immediately answered.

Musk launched Grok last year as an anti-“woke” chatbot, professing to be frustrated by what he says is the liberal bias of ChatGPT. In contrast to AI tools built by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, which are trained to carefully navigate controversial topics, Musk said he wanted Grok to be unfiltered and “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

The secretaries of state, who are the chief elections officers in their states, are objecting not to Grok’s tone but its factual inaccuracies and the sluggishness of the company’s move to correct bad information.

Secretaries of state are grappling with an onslaught of AI-driven election misinformation, including deepfakes, ahead of the 2024 election. Simon testified on the subject before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee last year.

Many of them are also still beating back the ramifications of widespread false conspiracy theories that plagued the last presidential election. The messages from Grok spurred a public conversation about whether Harris would be a legitimate candidate for president, even though she declared her candidacy well within the necessary state deadlines. Such false assertions are the kind of misinformation that helped fuel widespread beliefs in 2020 that the election was stolen from former president Donald Trump.

Another version of Grok’s false information about ballot deadlines included one telling users that ballots for the coming presidential election were already “locked and loaded.”

“So, if you’re planning to run for president in any of these states, you might want to check if you’ve already missed the boat,” the chatbot responded. “But hey, there’s always 2028, right?”

“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making — as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Simon added. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”

Grok is available only to X Premium and Premium+ subscribers, but the false information about ballot deadlines was “shared repeatedly in multiple posts — reaching millions of people,” the letter read. Grok repeated false information for more than a week until it was corrected on July 31.

Simon expressed disappointment in the way X initially responded to the error. He said that the company’s response was “the equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Dismissive and detached.”

Simon reached out to his counterparts in all nine states mentioned in the Grok messages, but only four others agreed to sign the letter. All the signatories are Democrats, except for Schmidt of Pennsylvania, a Republican who is an appointee of Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat and a top candidate to be Harris’s running mate.

The secretaries noted that this year, OpenAI partnered with the National Association of Secretaries of State to give voters correct election information, and ChatGPT has been programmed to direct users to CanIVote.org — a nonpartisan resource from professional election administrators of both major parties. Grok has entered into no such partnerships.

“We urge X to immediately adopt a policy of directing Grok users to CanIVote.org when asked about elections in the U.S.,” the letter concluded.

“This issue underlines the importance of checking with trusted sources of election information, such as your state or local election officials to get accurate information about the election process,” Toulouse Oliver said in a text message. “We do hope that X is able to address the issue with Grok reiterating this false information and hope that this can be prevented in the future.”

Benson confirmed her involvement in the letter-writing campaign. Spokespeople for the secretaries of state in Ohio and Indiana confirmed that they did not add their signatures to the letter. Representatives for those same offices in Alabama and Texas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Benson also confirmed that she had launched an investigation into a Musk-backed PAC, called the America PAC, which is supporting Trump. The investigation was first reported by CNBC.

Benson’s concern is the detailed voter information that the PAC collected from people living in Michigan and other battleground states through a section of the website that says “register to vote.”

When users in battleground states such as Michigan click on the “register to vote” tab on America PAC’s website, they can submit personal information but are not given a form to complete voter registration, CNBC reported. That contrasts with the experience of users in states that are not considered politically competitive, such as Wyoming or California. Those users can enter their email address and Zip code but are then directed to a voter registration page for their state, or back to the original sign-up section, according to CNBC.

Simon said that Musk’s AI chatbot cannot make the argument that it is simply facilitating different voices in the modern-day public square.

“This is a case where the owner of the public square (the social media company itself) is the one who introduced and spread the bad information — and then delayed correcting its own mistake after it knew that the information was false,” he said.