Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is relying on a cluster of loosely coordinated outside groups to run turnout operations traditionally performed by the campaign itself, an approach that takes advantage of new leniencies in campaign finance rules but comes with the risk of untested outfits duplicating efforts or working at cross purposes.

With fewer than 100 days left before the election, local GOP officials in battleground states have raised alarms about the scant presence of Trump campaign field staff. For the large armies of paid and volunteer door-knockers and canvassers that typically drive turnout in presidential elections, the campaign is largely relying on outside groups such as America First Works, America PAC and Turning Point Action.

The Trump campaign’s shrunken in-house operation resulted from its takeover of the Republican National Committee in March, when Trump secured the nomination. The RNC had been planning an extensive field program, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those now-discarded plans included 88 staff members and 12 offices, and goals to knock on 3 million doors and make 2.4 million phone calls, in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, the RNC’s plan called for 62 staffers and seven offices, aiming for 558,000 voter contacts.

Past experiments with outsourcing field operations, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s heavy reliance on a super PAC in the Republican presidential primary race, have wound up as expensive boondoggles. With the legal barriers now removed, the current effort will test how much the rules — as opposed to structural or personal dynamics — contributed to the challenges. It will also test how a novel approach stacks up against the Democratic ground effort, which is using more traditional methods.

In what everyone expects to be a close election, the unglamorous mechanics of mobilizing a sliver of additional voters can make all the difference. In 2020, a change of about 43,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have been enough to tip the electoral college.

In March, the Federal Election Commission issued new guidance that opened the door for campaigns and outside groups to collaborate on turnout efforts. In the past, campaigns and official party committees, which are subject to contribution limits, generally observed a firewall that blocked information-sharing with super PACs and nonprofits that accept unlimited contributions.

Now, campaigns and outside groups are free to share messaging and exchange data. That new opportunity has allowed the Trump campaign to supplement a bare-bones in-house field program with allied programs fueled by megadonors.

“These folks have been pre-dividing themselves based on their own focuses,” said a Trump campaign official who wasn’t authorized to talk publicly and so spoke on the condition of anonymity. “My goal isn’t to rearrange them, it’s to maximize.”

Before the Trump campaign’s RNC takeover, the committee had detailed plans in certain states — internal documents include hundreds of pages in total about how an extensive get-out-the-vote effort could win a close election by a small margin.

The documents show a Trump operation that was once prepared to spend extensively across the country, targeting particular communities and attempting to reach more than 1 million voters. In many of the states, the plans included certain towns, small subsections of the population or demographics where the campaign had underperformed in the past.

“While the Trump Victory Team on the ground did an excellent job getting out the vote in 2020 on Election Day, we did not turn out enough of low propensity voters to compete with the Democrats in early voting or persuade enough voters to hit the number of votes we needed to win,” the Pennsylvania plan said. “We need to learn from the lessons of 2020,” it added.

“They were totally discarded,” said a person familiar with the plans, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private matters.

The campaign’s own field operations are using the same formula that carried Trump to victory in the Iowa caucuses, relying on dedicated volunteers serving as neighborhood captains. Under the banner of “Trump Force 47,” the campaign is collecting volunteers in key places and assigning them lists of 10 neighbors to personally mobilize.

Volunteers who meet their goal of recruiting 10 voters receive larger lists of targets, focusing on infrequent voters and people who aren’t reached by conventional methods such as ads, mail and phone banks. The campaign is encouraging Trump supporters to vote early by mail or in person, so it can check them off the list and focus on others — despite the candidate’s consistent vilification of mail ballots.

The Trump campaign declined to disclose how many volunteers it has recruited. “The Trump Force 47 program prioritizes many volunteers doing a few high-impact tasks each instead of old models which devolved to few volunteers trying to do many low-impact tasks each,” said political director James Blair.

By contrast, the Harris campaign and allied outside groups said they are not changing their approach in response to the FEC decision. The campaign said it has 1,300 staff members (including party payrolls) and 250 offices in battleground states organizing events, trainings, door-knocking, phone calls and online peer messaging. It recruited 170,000 new volunteers who signed up since President Biden withdrew in late July and held 2,300 events in swing states last weekend to mark 100 days to the election.

“Our campaign will make millions of voter contacts after having millions of conversations with voters in battleground states with thousands of staff, tens of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of events,” said the Harris campaign’s battleground state director, Dan Kanninen. “The Trump campaign is talking about a handful of organizers and volunteers doing events ad hoc, in a way that makes it look like there’s organizing going on when there isn’t any.”

‘Rolling up to the house that’s on fire’

More than 50 conservative groups met in Washington in April to coordinate efforts, including avoiding redundancy in voter outreach. The coalition continues to meet on a weekly basis.

“Everyone sees the marketplace here,” said a prominent Republican involved in one of the efforts. “Everyone sees the campaign isn’t doing it, and there is a huge opportunity.”

America First Works, a nonprofit affiliated with the America First Policy Institute that employs many Trump administration alumni, convened the summit, and is itself focusing this year on door-to-door canvassing with paid door knockers and volunteers in 19 bellwether counties such as Bucks County, Pa., Maricopa County, Ariz., and other suburban counties with populations of 400,000 or more. The group said it has fanned people out to knock on 500,000 doors since June.

One of the most ambitious upstart efforts comes from Turning Point Action, the five-year-old political organization founded by right-wing activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s group had long clashed with GOP leadership but is now closely aligned with the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, symbolized by a prime-time speaking slot for Kirk at the Republican National Convention in July.

Turning Point Action, which has also amplified Trump’s false claims of election fraud, ran Trump’s college coalition in 2020 and organized “Super Saturday” canvassing outings in 2022. Through that work, the group’s leaders concluded that the GOP’s existing technology wasn’t up to the task and that no one in the party was doing sustained, year-round community-based organizing, according to Tyler Bowyer, the program’s chief operating officer and an RNC member from Arizona.

Bowyer and Kirk set out to raise about $100 million and hire hundreds of local full-time organizers in the critical battleground states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, aiming to build a permanent campaign infrastructure on par with what Democratic-aligned groups have developed in recent decades. Bowyer said the group studied social science research and public documents from Democratic-aligned groups to assess successful techniques that they could replicate.

“I truly don’t believe that most on our side know what we’re up against,” Bowyer said. “It’s like we’re rolling up to the house that’s on fire,” he said. “Are we going to save the Republican Party? Are we going to save the candidate? Are we just going to sit by and just let the house burn down?”

At a Turning Point Action office in Waukesha, Wis., in June, about three dozen newly hired full-time community organizers got together with poster boards and scented markers to brainstorm techniques to meet their targeted neighbors. They were each assigned a few hundred registered Republicans who didn’t vote in recent presidential elections, aiming to turn them out for Trump.

Bowyer instructed the organizers not to come on too strong by showing up with MAGA hats and fliers. Instead, they should research their marks and start reaching out through Facebook groups, community events, or neighborly gestures such as recommending plumbers or harp teachers. They could even arrange seemingly chance encounters on coffee runs or dog walks.

“Some of these things sound like stalking,” one staffer whispered.

“Professional stalkers,” his colleague joked back.

As one slide from the training implored: “BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL.”

Turning Point Action’s leaders have cited research from some political scientists, who said in interviews that the program seems consistent with methods that experiments have shown to be effective. But the effectiveness of the strategy depends on how motivated and reliable the organizers are, as well as whether they are targeting the right voters, according to Donald P. Green, a Columbia professor and co-author of “Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout.”

A constellation of groups

Other conservative groups are also engaged in ground efforts. The Faith and Freedom Coalition will focus on evangelical voters and expects to spend $62 million to send 10,000 staffers and volunteers to knock on 10 million doors in presidential and Senate battleground states and 42 House districts, according to the Christian conservative group’s chairman, Ralph Reed.

The Trump campaign official said more outside groups would emerge to participate in various facets of Trump’s ground game. One new super PAC that has already spent more than $15.8 million is America PAC, funded by billionaire X owner Elon Musk, the tech-investor Winklevoss twins and others. Musk denied a Wall Street Journal report that he would be providing $45 million a month, but people familiar with the matter said he is both raising money for the initiative and expected to contribute himself.

The outfit is focused on the seven core battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. The program is being run by former Republican Governors Association director David Rexrode, as well as Generra Peck and Phil Cox, alumni of DeSantis’s presidential primary bid, according to a person with direct knowledge.

The Musk-backed program is in flux, a person familiar with the operation said, after it cut ties with a firm that had been hired to handle much of the operation. It is unclear what the group will do next.

One person familiar with Trump’s operation joked that it was funny that his campaign was now partially relying on some of the operatives it fiercely mocked when they worked for DeSantis.

In Pennsylvania, a former teacher and onetime Ron Paul supporter is assembling a door-knocking program called Pennsylvania Chase with the sole purpose of getting Trump supporters to request mail ballots and return them. Cliff Maloney said his plan is inspired by the fact that in 2020, roughly 140,000 Republicans requested mail ballots and never turned them in, and Biden won the state by about 80,000 votes. (It was not clear how many of those Republicans voted in person.)

“No one went to their door and said: ‘Hey Bob, you got that little ballot sitting there? Let’s get that thing in!’” Maloney told activists at a Turning Point Action conference in Detroit. Maloney wants to change that with plans to set up as many as 10 regions around the state with 120 paid workers based in group housing from Sept. 1 through Election Day with the goal of knocking on 500,000 doors.

BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. — More than a week after Kamala Harris’s debut as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, the buzz around her candidacy is still fresh here in the collar counties surrounding Philadelphia. Though many voters acknowledged they know little about her or her ideas, they used words like “exciting” and “energizing” to describe the political moment.

But the politician everyone really wanted to talk about was Sen. JD Vance, with his selection as former president Donald Trump’s running mate sparking a new chapter in the long-running conversation about Trump’s views of women.

Vance’s comments from 2021 suggesting that Americans without children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future went viral days ago. But unfortunately for Trump, the maelstrom surrounding his running mate is still stirring in this perennial battleground. In interviews with more than two dozen voters, it was clear that Vance’s views have renewed unease about Trump’s judgment, his past statements about women and his record on abortion. Almost universally, voters also said they were bracing for Trump to unleash personal attacks on Harris.

“Now that you’ve got Kamala in there, you’ve got a whole different ballgame,” said Mike Dumin, a 68-year-old independent from Lansdale. “He is going to attack her in ways that are going to be distasteful to most normal people except his base. He can’t help himself. He cannot stand the fact that it’s a woman, especially a woman who is a minority who could beat him.”

Dumin said that Vance’s past comments suggest that the senator from Ohio “wants obedient servants at home just having babies” and that his public interactions with his wife, Usha, an accomplished lawyer who spoke at the recent Republican National Convention but has kept a low profile, should tell Americans everything they need to know: “That’s what he pushes. That’s who he is. And this is coming from a man,” Dumin said.

“High heels and lipstick,” interjected his wife, Susan Dumin, a 68-year-old retired florist. When Trump and Vance’s positions on abortion enter the conversation, she said, “Women are terrified. We are 50 percent, and we are letting the other half decide our health care.”

In a strange stroke of political timing, America’s reintroduction to Harris, now at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, has coincided with the vetting of Vance. That has meant voters are revisiting the possibility of the first female president at the same time that Vance is drawing scrutiny of his views on traditional marriage, the role of women in the home and his opposition to abortion, including in the case of rape and incest.

Cognizant of the negative reception that some of Vance’s views have earned, Trump has defended his running mate even as members of his party second-guess his decision. In a recent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump said Vance “loves family” and went on to defend Americans who don’t have children: “I know so many people. They never met the right person,” Trump said. “They’re every bit as good as anybody else that has the most beautiful family.”

When asked whether Vance would be ready to be president on day one during a Wednesday interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, Trump noted that vice-presidential picks historically have had very little bearing on the outcome of presidential races.

By including Harris — who has two stepchildren — in his 2021 description of ascendant Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable,” Vance seems to have triggered anger not only among voters who support her, but also among swing voters, who suddenly feel inspired to defend her.

“Talking about why Kamala doesn’t have any kids — that was very disrespectful,” said Noris Lugo, a 53-year-old teacher from Montgomery Township, who noted that Vance would have no idea whether a woman has been unable to bear children or has made a choice not to. Before the sudden upheaval caused by President Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Lugo was leaning toward voting for Trump because she believes he is good for the economy.

Now, Lugo said, she is more heavily weighing how the former president “treats people” and is concerned that Vance and Trump “have the same behavior and thinking.” Disrespect for women — “that’s the one thing I don’t tolerate,” she said.

Stephanie Crossier, a 32-year-old teacher from Doylestown, leans Republican and believes Democrats have gone too far to the left on abortion. But she has positive impressions of Harris thus far and said she is struggling as she evaluates whether someone with Trump’s ethics should serve as commander in chief.

“Trump has things on his record that shouldn’t be there for a president. The legal run-ins,” Crossier said, alluding to his recent conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a hush money trial, as well as his other pending criminal trials.

Rosemary O’Connor, a 73-year-old former Amtrak employee from Bedminster, said she was relieved that the scrutiny of Vance has “revitalized” the conversation around Trump.

“People got immune to Trump; they just shrug him off,” said O’Connor, who changed her registration from Republican to Democrat after Trump was elected because she no longer felt the party reflected her values. With Vance, she said, “we’re getting a new take on their views.”

Vance argues that the media has twisted his past statements. Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, insisted that the former president is “thrilled with the choice he made.”

“Kamala Harris is weak, failed, and dangerously liberal, and no amount of gaslighting from her or her campaign will erase her despicable record,” Cheung said in a statement.

But Trump has been complicating the GOP’s effort to steer the conversation about Harris in a more substantive direction — to scrutiny of her record on immigration and policing, for example. During the NABJ interview, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity — asking whether she was Indian or Black before stating that she just recently “became a Black person.” Harris dismissed his false claims about her race as “the same old show,” which she described as “divisiveness” and “disrespect.”

Still, impressions of Harris among swing voters here remain fluid. Voters often struggled to recall specific aspects of her record or her biography, creating an opportunity for both sides as they try to define her with millions of dollars of television ads. Trump and Harris are tied in Pennsylvania, according to The Washington Post’s polling average. Harris led Trump by seven points among suburban voters in a head-to-head matchup in a Fox News poll last week. That is much narrower advantage than the double-digit lead that Biden held with suburban voters in the Fox poll in October 2020. Ultimately Biden won the state by only one point.

Rachel Siegel, a 32-year-old aesthetician from Fountainville, said she didn’t vote in 2020 because she was undecided between Biden and Trump. But she has found Harris’s demeanor off-putting and described the economy during the past four years as “absolute garbage.”

Both Siegel and her mother, Sonia McAfee, 63, questioned whether Harris is strong enough for the role of president. McAfee said Trump “scares” her when it comes to international affairs, but she is leaning toward voting for him because she doesn’t think Harris “is what we need right now.” The main criticism McAfee has heard about Harris is that she was not effective in curbing illegal immigration in her role as vice president. (Although Republicans have described Harris as the “border czar,” she was tasked with a narrower role addressing the root causes of migration out of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras).

“You feel like you have to look up everything in both parties, because everybody calls each other liars and ultimately you don’t know the truth,” said McAfee, a retired accountant. “VPs sort of end up in the background, so I don’t really know what she’s capable of.”

McAfee said Vance has seemed “knowledgeable” but “ought to watch how he says things.” Both women have been disappointed that much of the discussion around Harris’s ascent has centered on race and gender.

“I don’t like that people throw out the race card — that she’d be the first Black woman [as president] — I don’t care,” McAfee said. “You’ve got to prove to me that you can do the job.”

Scott Clement contributed to this report.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Vice President Harris dominated the news last week as she became the likely Democratic nominee, a first for a woman of color. But that potentially historic milestone barely registered for Jasmine Hudson, who was sitting in grief over another Black woman in the news: her second cousin, Sonya Massey.

On July 22, the same day Harris locked up endorsements for the nomination, Illinois State Police released body-camera video showing the fatal July 6 shooting of Massey, a 36-year-old mother of two, by a sheriff’s deputy who responded to Massey’s 911 call about a potential prowler at her south Springfield home.

Hudson, who is also Black, had struggled to eat or sleep as her family sought answers about why and how Massey was killed. The footage only made the pain worse. The woman she saw in the video was the same person she’d known her entire life — a slight, petite woman who was soft-spoken and spiritual, “someone who wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said. And now, her cousin was a hashtag, joining other Black women like Breonna Taylor whose lives were cut short in fatal police encounters.

“My family is not doing good at all,” said Hudson, 33, struggling to speak through tears. “We are in shambles. We are in shock. We are distraught. … Why did this happen to her? It doesn’t make any sense.”

To Hudson, it all seemed so far away from the world where Harris’s ascent was being celebrated. One Black woman has the chance to make history as the first female president, while another Black woman, dressed in her pajamas and a headscarf, is regarded as a threat and shot to death in her kitchen.

Harris will formally accept the nomination at the Democratic convention later this month in Chicago, 200 miles northeast of where Massey died in Springfield.

“It’s good to see Black women are making strides, but we are not making enough strides. Because if that was the case, my cousin should have been able to call for help and not been killed by a police officer,” Hudson said.

Massey’s death comes four years after the police killings of Taylor and George Floyd, whose final minutes beneath the unrelenting knees of a Minneapolis police officer were captured in a horrific viral video that spurred worldwide protests and an American reckoning on race and policing that continues to divide the country.

Floyd’s murder spurred promises of change from across the political spectrum. But for many Black Americans, who still live in fear of their interactions with law enforcement, that change hasn’t materialized. Many of the proposed reforms championed by President Biden and Harris haven’t passed — including legislation that would make it easier to punish and fire problem officers and enact limits on racial profiling and the use of deadly force.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who was retained by Floyd’s family and Taylor’s mother, is now representing the Massey family and fought for the public release of the body-cam footage. “It is the worst police-shooting video I have ever seen,” Crump said last week.

On the morning after the footage was made public, Crump was with Massey’s parents when he saw that he had missed a call from Harris, a friend and ally who regularly calls him for updates about his cases. She was trying to connect with Massey’s family, he said.

The night before, Crump had been one of the speakers on a call with thousands of Black men, urging them to rally behind Harris’s bid for the presidency, and now he was with Massey’s family in the darkest moment of their lives.

“I was thinking about my dear friend … ascending to this place where no other Black woman has ever been in the history of the United States,” Crump recalled. “And literally at the same time … I’m thinking about the loss of so much the world could have gotten from Sonya Massey.”

Crump thought of his 11-year-old daughter. Would Harris’s milestone change things for her? Or would she grow up in the reality that Massey and other Black women have faced? “The fact is that no matter how high a Black woman rises in America, there is no guarantee that she will be respected and protected,” Crump said.

In the stories of Harris and Massey, Crump said, “it really is a tale of two historical moments in America. It’s like the best of times and the worst of times.”

Springfield’s ugly history on race

That dichotomy was on the minds of many here in Springfield, the state capital of Illinois and a city of roughly 110,000 known for its connection to two storied American presidents who made history on issues of race: Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. They both launched their political careers here, and their names and images are everywhere.

But Springfield also has an ugly history on race. A violent 1908 race riot left several people dead, hundreds injured and scores of Black-owned businesses burned and destroyed, leading to the founding of the NAACP. And more than a century later, the scars from that seismic event linger, residents say, in a city that remains deeply segregated and where discussion of Springfield’s fraught racial history was rare until recently, despite its connection to the first Black president.

“People talk about Abraham Lincoln, and they talk about Barack Obama. But many people didn’t know about the race riots because it was a taboo secret that people didn’t talk about,” said Teresa Haley, a Black activist and former president of the local NAACP.

Massey’s killing at the hands of a White police officer has only enforced a feeling that little has changed over the past 115 years, Haley said.

Haley, 59, has barely slept since she saw the video of Massey’s shooting. “Each time I watch it, I think about Black women all over America being hunted,” she said last week, as she stood with members of the Massey family during a news conference at the local NAACP headquarters. “Those of us who have sons and daughters, we used to be concerned about our sons. But now we need to be concerned about Black women, as well.”

She is skeptical Harris’s political rise will change anything for Black women or protect them from being killed. “It’s our reality. It’s become our new normal. And it should not be that way,” she said.

Others worry that Harris’s candidacy will only intensify the racism and sexism that women of color already experience — especially as she runs against former president Donald Trump, who has a history of insulting women and people of color. Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity on Wednesday, saying that she “was Indian all the way” but then “became a Black person” for political benefit. Harris later condemned “the divisiveness and the disrespect” of Trump’s words.

The incident that led to Massey’s killing unfolded in the early morning hours of July 6 when she called 911 reporting a potential intruder. Two deputies from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office responded and searched around Massey’s house. Finding nothing, they knocked on the front door. According to the body-camera footage, it took roughly three minutes for Massey to open the door, and when she did, she immediately seemed nervous, quietly telling the officers, “Don’t hurt me.”

The video shows Deputy Sean Grayson towering over Massey — who, according to her autopsy, stood 5 feet 4 inches and weighed 112 pounds. As he pressed Massey on why she had taken so long to come to the door, she quickly apologized and explained that she had been getting dressed.

According to her family, Massey had been suffering from mental health issues, and she was home alone — her teenage son and daughter were staying with relatives while she sought help. Her mother, Donna, had called 911 a day earlier to report that her daughter was having a mental breakdown and pleaded with an operator: “Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced — please.”

It is unclear whether Grayson or his partner knew about that call or Massey’s mental troubles. In the video, Massey appears confused, but she remains unfailingly polite, at one point thanking the officers for coming. “I love y’all. Thank y’all,” she says, as she seeks to close the door.

The footage shows the officers ending up inside her home — waiting for Massey to produce identification. At one point, Grayson notices a pot of boiling water sitting over a flame on the stove. “We don’t need a fire while we’re here,” he tells Massey, according to the footage from his partner’s body camera. (Grayson had not activated his camera, a violation of department policy, according to the sheriff’s office.)

The video shows Massey walking to the kitchen to remove the pot from the stove, taking it near the sink. Suddenly, the officers, who are standing in the living room, appear to consider the boiling water a potential threat, and as they back away, Massey twice tells them, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”

The officers appear to regard Massey’s words as a threat — though the statement is a common spiritual phrase that invokes the power of the Messiah to speak out against something untoward, negative or evil. Massey’s family has said the phrase was common in their predominantly Black church, and they believe she sensed something bad was about to happen.

Grayson drew his gun and pointed it at Massey, shouting expletives and threatening to shoot her. The woman ducked and immediately apologized. The footage shows Grayson step from the living room toward Massey, firing three times.

Massey’s autopsy, made public last week, found she was hit once in the face, near her lower left eyelid. The bullet trajectory was downward, exiting out the back of her neck, according to the coroner — a detail Crump says suggests that Massey was in a stooped position when Grayson shot her.

The video shows Grayson discourage his partner from trying to help Massey, who was still breathing. “That’s a headshot,” Grayson said. “There’s nothing you can do, man.”

Grayson, 30, who had worked for Sangamon County since May 2023, was indicted July 17 on five counts, including three charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. Grayson has pleaded not guilty and is being held at the Sangamon County Jail without bond. He was fired from the sheriff’s office. Daniel Fultz, an attorney for Grayson, declined to comment.

The morning after the video footage was released, Harris said, “Sonya Massey deserved to be safe.”

“The disturbing footage released yesterday confirms what we know from the lived experiences of so many — we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name,” Harris said in a statement. She called on Congress to pass police reforms, including legislation that would enact uniform policing rules across the country and make it easier to punish or charge bad officers.

That bill, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, was co-authored by Harris in 2020 when she was in the Senate — and still has not passed.

‘A completely different world’

Massey’s death has not drawn the national attention other high-profile police killings have — something that many of those grieving in Springfield have blamed on the intense barrage of news in recent weeks, including Trump’s attempted assassination and Biden’s exit from the presidential race.

And likewise, few Black women here say they’ve had the emotional capacity to process what it would mean to have a Black woman atop the presidential ticket. But many have drawn parallels from this moment to the past.

Tiffani Saunders, a sociologist and organizer with Black Lives Matter Springfield, is reminded of the post-slavery era when some Black people were getting elected to office for the first time, even as other Black people were being lynched. “In some ways,” she said, “this is more of the same historical narrative than like a blip of something different.”

Sunshine Clemons, 45, thinks of Philando Castile, a Black man who was fatally shot in July 2016 by a Minneapolis-area police officer during a traffic stop. Days after his death, Clemons helped found the local Black Lives Matter chapter to help Black residents cope with their grief and fight for change.

Clemons couldn’t stop thinking about how Castile and Massey were killed on the same day, eight years apart. “He launched us, and now we’re fighting for her in our city,” Clemons said, wiping tears away. It added to a sense of futility, that nothing would bring real change — not even a Black woman president.

She said she’s been too “overwhelmed and exhausted and angry and sad” to process the presidential race. “I can’t even see outside our city right now,” Clemons said. “It’s almost like that’s an alternate reality that’s happening. You talk about, this is progress. But that just feels like a completely different world.”

Last week, a couple hundred people marched through downtown Springfield toward the county government building, home to the courthouse, sheriff’s office and jail where Grayson remains in custody.

The crowd of mostly Black people, but also a few Whites, paused before the front steps and chanted, “Justice for Sonya Massey!” Several parents walked with their young children or wheeled them in wagons. One woman carried a sign with Massey’s words: “Don’t hurt me.”

Among those peacefully marching was Doris Turner, 70, an Illinois state senator who made history when she became the first Black woman to represent Springfield in the state legislature. Turner said she was thrilled by the history Harris could make if she becomes the first Black female president.

“It’s for the future generations,” Turner said. “When I talk about my own history, it’s not because I think I am all that great or fabulous. It’s because I want the little Black girls to know they can do it, too. And that’s what Vice President Harris’s election means to me.”

But Turner acknowledged that the history Harris could make stands in stark contrast to what happened to Massey, a close family friend who had just been on Turner’s porch talking to her a week before she was killed.

Turner has found herself questioning God about why two such cataclysmic events happened at once. “God is at work in everything that we do. … What are we supposed to be learning from this; what are we supposed to be doing?” she said.

For now, Turner has joined with Massey’s family in seeking justice. But she wondered whether the tragedy could serve as a wake-up call for Black people. “I think that people who have been pretty disinterested about the election and thinking about it in terms of, ‘It’s not going to matter to me one way or another.’ I think that this shows them the difference and shows them that elections matter, and it shows them that representation matters,’ Turner said.

But many weren’t convinced that Harris’s rise would mean a dramatic difference in how Black women are treated by society and by the police.

“Black women are not respected. They are not cared for,” said Hudson, Massey’s cousin. “They are held to different standards.”

Hudson began to cry thinking of her 9-year-old twin daughters and their futures. She had never been one to mince words with her girls — warning them from a young age of what it means to be Black in America, including how to interact with law enforcement, how people perceive you because of the color of your skin. It was the only way she knew to keep them safe and alive.

She took them to one of the protests over Massey’s death, explaining what happened to her cousin and why they were there.

“They are so smart,” Hudson said, crying. “They need to know what kind of world we live in.”

For weeks, Senate Republicans delighted in the misery of their Democratic counterparts. The political story of the summer — whether President Biden would back down from his run at a second term — left GOP senators smiling and away from the media’s glaring spotlight on their foibles.

But the tables quickly turned. Their party’s presidential nominee recently returned to his natural form and lashed out against Vice President Harris in divisive terms that had little basis in truth. Republicans went right back into the political PTSD of the Donald Trump era, mouthing the same platitudes that they grasped onto during his presidency.

“He needs to focus on the policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) told reporters Thursday morning.

Was she comfortable with Trump’s rhetoric? “He needs to focus on the Biden-Harris policies. That’s the successful pathway to November,” Capito said.

If that’s the path to success, why does Trump instead dive right into attacks on race instead of policy?

Capito let out a roaring laugh that lasted six whole seconds, incapable of answering the question — or unwilling to share her honest answer.

“I’m a really good mother and grandmother. I can’t answer that one,” she said.

Senate Republicans have always had the strangest relationship with Trump. The traditional Reagan-Bush ethos remains strong in their caucus even as the populist, nativist elements have come to dominate the House Republicans.

Republicans remember how Trump’s grievance-filled stumping for their two candidates who lost in the early 2021 Georgia runoff elections handed control of the Senate to Democrats. Many blamed Trump for inciting the Capitol riot — although just seven voted to convict him in the February 2021 impeachment trial.

After growing tired of constantly responding to his crazy tweets or wild statements during his time in the Oval Office, Senate Republicans were reluctant to endorse Trump’s campaign last year.

Yet, as Trump marched through the GOP primaries without any serious competition, and as voters soured on Biden amid questions about his capacity to serve, Senate Republicans embraced what they considered to be a certain victor, especially since he led them to believe that he was a different candidate.

They particularly embraced Trump’s call for “unity” after the July 13 attempt on his life in Butler, Pa., which some pundits declared to be the end of any Democratic chances of success.

“I hope that one good thing that comes out of this tragedy is a renewed sense of what unites us, a renewed respect for our fellow Americans,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who previously clashed with Trump, wrote in a July 19 op-ed distributed in his state.

The accommodations came before then. When Trump met at the Senate GOP political headquarters in June, he twice shook hands with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who went 3½ years without speaking to Trump after the 2020 elections.

“Tremendous unity,” Trump said after that meeting.

Later that day the ex-president even publicly backed one of his harshest Republican critics, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, in his Senate race.

After Harris locked up the support to replace Biden on the top of the ticket, House and Senate GOP leaders even cautioned their rank-and-file to drop any mentions of Harris as a “DEI” candidate. Trump wanted to focus on policy issues such as inflation and border security.

By 3 p.m. Wednesday, all those hopes for a unity-and-policy-centric campaign came undone.

Trump had just used his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference to falsely question whether Harris hid her Black identity and accuse her of being only Indian. He mocked a prominent journalist as “that woman” and again praised the insurrectionists serving prison time for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He continued to tout those claims in a rally that same evening.

A couple of reporters followed Thune down a hallway before one politely told him to stop, that he was going to get a ton of questions about these comments. He read Thune the verbatim of Trump’s most incendiary remarks.

“Um, the campaign is — needs to be — mostly about the issues. There’s plenty to talk about, and I just think that’s where the focus needs to be,” Thune said, never addressing the substance of Trump’s assertions.

In the flip of a switch, Republicans were back on defense, reassuming the same roles they had been playing in years past.

A very small bloc tried to defend or explain the comments. “I mean, he’s going to say what he’s going to say,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Wednesday evening, acknowledging he had not watched the comments.

“He knows it’s all about policy,” Tuberville said, suggesting that it must have been a leading question that prompted the remarks. “It is what it is.”

Some Republicans took the duck-and-dive approach, making a very brief critique of an obviously outlandish statement.

“I don’t think it was helpful,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said, swiftly jumping on an elevator to whisk him away from the Capitol press corps.

Only a few Senate Republicans forcefully criticized Trump, along with the incendiary statements that have resurfaced from his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

“Think about it,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters Wednesday. “What have we been talking about all week long? Childless cat women, DEI candidates. Now, is she Black? Is she Indian?”

Murkowski is one of only four Senate Republicans to say publicly that they will not vote for Trump, so she has more political freedom to offer her unvarnished thoughts. She recalled how Trump had previously — falsely — questioned whether Barack Obama was a citizen. She questioned if his campaign is capable of carrying on in a normal fashion.

“Maybe they don’t know how to handle the campaign. And so you default to issues that just should simply not be an issue,” she said.

Most Senate Republicans jumped onto the same rhetorical life raft: Avoid addressing the actual Trump comments and instead wish for a return to the seemingly disciplined, policy-focused candidate of early summer.

“I’d say the policies are the key issues that we need to be talking about,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) told reporters Thursday morning.

Lankford’s most recent policy foray would be a keen illustration of Trump’s aversion to substance. Lankford spent months negotiating a border-immigration compromise with Senate Democrats, and just as it was coming together, Trump demanded Republicans torpedo the Lankford bill because he wanted to keep the issue alive to use against Democrats in the November election.

Will Trump’s rhetoric would hurt Republicans in November? “I think we’ll know more once the election happens,” Lankford said.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has about as strong a relationship with Trump and his family as any GOP senator. He’s worked closely with the ex-president in recruiting candidates and securing endorsements at the right time to get the best candidates through their primaries and into the general election for the Senate.

He had not heard Trump’s comments by Wednesday evening, when a pack of reporters trailed him, so he stopped and listened to a summary.

“I don’t think it’s that difficult to litigate this race. This is the most liberal candidate for president that we’ve had in our nation’s history. I served with Kamala for four years,” Daines responded.

He blasted her “San Francisco politics and ideology” and said Republicans should focus on contrasting “the two visions of where we’d like to take this country.”

“That’s a better strategy, and that’s what I’ve been talking about,” Daines said.

But it’s not what Trump enjoys talking about. Republicans learned — relearned — this lesson again from the NABJ appearance.

Trump likes to talk about the border crisis, but his solutions are the simplistic answers of finishing the wall or the impractical idea of creating mass deportation camps for millions of undocumented migrants.

In selecting his running mate, Trump considered several Senate Republicans with real policy expertise in cutting taxes and national security. Some accomplished governors received interest.

Then he settled on Vance, the least experienced GOP running mate since before World War II. Vance’s biggest credential, his friends said, was his embrace of Trump’s political persona.

By Thursday morning, Murkowski had grown more furious.

“A campaign built on insults of an individual — we should be so far beyond that,” she told reporters. “It should not be about which nasty name you can call somebody. It should be about the issues.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed late Friday night to have struck a deal for a new debate with Vice President Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

But the Harris campaign said Saturday that she never agreed to a new debate deal. Harris is urging Trump to keep the debate date he agreed on with President Biden before Biden withdrew from the race last month.

In a social media post late Friday, Trump claimed he and Harris had agreed to debate on Sept. 4 on Fox News. Trump said his previous commitment to a debate on Sept. 10 hosted by ABC News was “terminated” because Biden dropped out as the Democratic candidate.

Harris’s team was baffled by Trump’s claims. The Harris campaign said Saturday that there is no agreement for a new Fox News debate on Sept. 4. A person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said the campaign held no negotiations with Trump or Fox about a new debate. Fox representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Harris spokesman Michael Tyler said the campaign would discuss additional debates after the one Trump already agreed to. He said Harris will attend the Sept. 10 forum whether Trump shows up or not.

“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Tyler said. “Mr. Anytime, anywhere, anyplace should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th,” he added, referring to language Trump previously used to pressure Biden into agreeing to a faceoff.

Trump spokesmen did not immediately respond to requests to clarify his post on Saturday.

In Friday’s post, Trump also raised objections to ABC serving as moderator, even though he previously accepted the network’s role. Trump referenced a lawsuit against ABC accusing host George Stephanopoulos of defaming him by misstating a jury verdict in a New York trial that found the former president liable for sexual abuse. A federal judge in Florida said in July that the case could proceed.

Trump agreed to the ABC debate in May two months after filing his lawsuit against the network. The moderators will be David Muir and Linsey Davis, not Stephanopoulos.

ABC representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s post on Friday said the purported deal would feature rules similar to June’s debate with Biden “BUT WITH A FULL ARENA AUDIENCE!”

Vice President Harris will interview at least three of the finalists to serve as her running mate Sunday in Washington as she moves closer to making her choice, according to multiple people familiar with her plans.

Harris will meet with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations. It is unclear how many of the three other finalists — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Govs. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois — have been invited to meet with Harris. In choosing her running mate, Harris is not solely concerned with electability but is also looking for a governing partner and someone she feels chemistry with, her allies say.

Harris spent Saturday at her residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, where lawyers, led by Eric Holder, the former attorney general, gave presentations on the finalists based on deep examinations of their backgrounds, experience and potential vulnerabilities, a person familiar with the process said. Holder and a team of lawyers at Covington & Burling oversaw the vetting of the officials in contention on an extremely compressed timeline.

Presidential nominees usually take months to select a running mate, but only a few 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.

Harris will announce her vice-presidential pick by Tuesday, when she and the candidate 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.

On Friday, some of the finalists interviewed with Harris’s senior staff, including Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, and Sheila Nix, Harris’s campaign chief of staff. Harris’s campaign also brought on Liz Allen, the current undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department, to serve as chief of staff to Harris’s running mate. Allen worked as Harris’s communications director when she was Biden’s running mate on the 2020 ticket.

Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Harris’s campaign, declined to comment on the process, pointing to his previous statement that the campaign does not “expect to have additional updates until the Vice President announces who will be serving as her running mate.”

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.

Since Harris became the presumptive nominee, her potential running mates have blanketed the airwaves trying to demonstrate how they would be an asset as vice president while also taking shots at Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), former president Donald Trump’s running mate, ahead of a potential debate with him should they be selected.

Pritzker put out an almost four-minute video on social media to tout his accomplishments as governor while Gabby Giffords, the wife of Kelly, posted a video about their marriage. Allies to Buttigieg, meanwhile, have asked his donors and supporters to make the public case for his bid.

As Harris wraps up her process, the finalists have had to change their schedules to accommodate interviews. Walz had originally planned to campaign for Harris in New Hampshire on Sunday before canceling the appearance. Teddy Tschann, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement that Walz’s “schedule has changed” without providing additional information.

Buttigieg, who pulled out of an official stop in Indiana on Friday, attended a fundraiser for Harris in Holderness, N.H., hosted by Gary Hirshberg, the co-founder of Stonyfield Farms, the yogurt maker and dairy company. The fundraiser raised more than $800,000, according to a person familiar who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share financial information.

Shapiro pulled out of a weekend fundraising swing in the Hamptons, and Beshear canceled a Friday stop in western Kentucky.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez in Phoenix contributed to this report.