A mechanical issue caused former president Donald Trump’s plane to be diverted Friday as he headed to Montana for a rally, according to airport staff at Billings Logan International Airport.

The plane was scheduled to land in Bozeman, Mont., where his Friday evening rally is slated to take place, but instead landed in Billings, Mont., and Trump took another plane to Bozeman. The two cities are more than 100 miles apart.

At 5:30 p.m. Eastern, Trump released a video from inside a plane where he said he “just landed” in Montana but did not address the situation. Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump is scheduled to hold a rally at 10 p.m. Eastern in Bozeman to boost Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for Senate. Sheehy is challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) highlighted the race as key at a Friday event in Atlanta as Republicans try to win back control of the chamber in November.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

As Vice President Kamala Harris ramps up a presidential campaign with almost unprecedented speed, she has been meeting quietly but regularly with a small group of close aides to go over everything from upcoming speeches to her convention address and debate preparation.

Sometimes the meetings are at Harris’s official residence in the Naval Observatory; other times, in deference to her intensifying travel schedule, they take place on the road, with some aides joining via Zoom.

The group, which started convening in June to prepare Harris for what was expected to be a vice-presidential debate, has now become the closest thing she has to a brain trust. The team includes Lorraine Voles and Sheila Nix, her chiefs of staff at the White House and campaign respectively. Also included are Karen Dunn, who helped Harris prepare for her 2020 debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, a longtime policy adviser.

Harris, supplied with briefing books by her aides, often spends time in the mornings or aboard Air Force Two reviewing materials assembled by these aides and others, taking notes and making edits.

This story is based on conversations with half a dozen Harris aides and allies, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes.

In one of the meetings, the vice president told aides she wanted to lean more heavily on her record as a prosecutor. That has now become a central part of her stump speech.

And when Republican nominee Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will take part in a Sept. 10 debate against Harris, it confirmed yet another high-stakes event this group will have to help Harris prepare for. Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, has been lined up to play the part of Trump in debate practice.

The meetings are a reminder that Harris is assembling a campaign on the fly. Less than a month will have elapsed between President Joe Biden’s exit from the race on July 21, making Harris the likely nominee, and the kickoff of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19. That provides a tiny window for Harris to figure out how she wants to talk to voters and shape her message.

At an appearance Thursday in Michigan, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), Harris’s running mate, emphasized the compressed schedule, noting that only 89 days remained until the election.

“Think about this: 89 wake-ups,” Walz told a union audience. “I’ve been saying this. Eight-nine days — we can do anything for 89 days. Telling people, ‘Sleep when you’re dead.’ We’ve got work to do right now — right now. 89 days to make Kamala Harris the next president of the United States.”

The meetings with the inner circle of advisers are central to handling that expedited timetable. Two top communications aides, Brian Fallon and Kirsten Allen, take part. Minyon Moore, who will chair the convention; Sean Clegg, a senior adviser from Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign; former congressman Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), who was a top Biden aide; and Adam Frankel, a former senior adviser to Harris in the White House, have also joined the sessions.

The group was formed under very different circumstances, before the political landscape was upended.

After Harris, then Biden’s running mate, accepted an invitation from CBS News in May to take part in a vice-presidential debate, she put together a team to prepare. But as the weeks dragged on without the Trump campaign agreeing to a date, the team’s meetings morphed into general strategy sessions on policy and messaging, with aides figuring this would help Harris prepare for a ramped-up campaign schedule.

Then, when Trump selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate on July 15, the group accelerated its preparations, lining up Reines to play Vance in mock debates.

But six days after Vance was selected, Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.

After some back-and-forth, Trump has now agreed to join Harris on Sept. 10 in a presidential debate sponsored by ABC. The two campaigns remain in talks about scheduling a second debate with NBC, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations.

“Well, I’m glad that he finally agreed to a debate on Sept. 10,” Harris told reporters on Thursday. “I’m looking forward to it, and I hope he shows up.”

After the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 19-22, the same group will lead her efforts to prepare for the debates with Trump. Reines will play the part of Trump, reprising a role he had in 2016 for Clinton’s mock debates. Reines did not respond to a request for comment.

For now, the small team is mostly focused on Harris’s convention speech and major policy announcements to be made in coming weeks.

To that end, Harris has brought on additional policy aides, including Josh Hsu, who worked for Harris in the Senate and in her vice-presidential office. Hsu is advising Harris on legal and policy issues, including on criminal justice. Brian Nelson, a longtime Harris aide who worked at the Treasury Department, has also joined the campaign as a senior adviser for policy.

In recent days, Trump and his campaign have attacked Harris for not engaging with the media, accusing her of hiding and being afraid to take questions. Harris has not participated in a formal interview with a news outlet since Biden dropped out of the race, only answering brief questions from reporters while traveling.

“She can’t do an interview,” Trump said Thursday during an hour-long news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview. I look forward to the debates, because I think we have to set the record straight.”

Harris said on Thursday she would grant an interview soon. “I’ve talked to my team,” she told reporters. “I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”

Trump and Biden broke with decades of tradition this year by setting up debates directly with television networks, instead of relying on the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization formed in 1987.

The two campaigns eventually agreed to two debates, one hosted by CNN in June and one hosted by ABC in September. In the first debate, Biden struggled to complete sentences and at times appeared confused, leading to a panic in the Democratic Party about his ability to defeat Trump. That eventually led Biden to exit the presidential race.

Biden’s stumbles in the debate may raise the stakes for Harris’s performance in the Sept. 10 showdown, as she seeks to show that she is a stronger candidate and can take on Trump more forcefully.

Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s campaigns for attorney general in California, said the vice president prepares for debates as she does other high-stakes public appearances, with deep dives into the subject matter and an obsession with details.

“When you are an attorney in a courtroom, words matter and details matter and if you get one fact wrong, it can cost you a verdict,” Brokaw said. “I think that’s in part why she is so hyper-focused on facts and getting the details right.”

But Brokaw also cautioned about raising expectations too high for Harris in her faceoff against Trump.

“He knows how to put on a show. He’s no amateur when it comes to this,” Brokaw said. “So it will be pretty interesting to see how their two very different styles line up.”

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the national popular vote for president by 4.5 percentage points, a seemingly safe margin that should have easily put him in the White House.

But under the hood, the presidential race was extremely close. In fact, if just 42,000 votes in three battleground states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — had gone differently, Biden would have lost his electoral vote majority.

Instead, Biden not only won the popular vote but also 306 votes in the electoral college, a convergence that has not always happened over the past 24 years in the U.S. political system.

And given what we’re seeing this year in the data and in The Washington Post’s election model, it may not only happen again in 2024 — but be easier for Democrats to clinch the electoral college and win the White House with a smaller popular-vote margin than in recent years.

Here’s why.

To better understand how elections are won, one of the best signals that political data scientists use are tipping-point states.

To identify the tipping-point state in 2020, The Post’s elections data team ranked all U.S. states and D.C. based on the margin by which Biden won them — that is, he won D.C. by the largest margin, followed by Vermont, Massachusetts and so on, adding up how many electoral votes each state was worth as we went. The state that took Biden over 270 electoral votes was the one we were looking for — the tipping-point state. In 2020, that state was Wisconsin — and it was decided by only 0.6 percentage points.

In recent elections, we’ve seen a pattern that hasn’t helped Democratic presidential nominees who lead in the national popular vote. They have notched a narrower edge — or perhaps no lead at all — in the tipping-point state, which sometimes means the Democratic candidates don’t win the electoral college.

This happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to Al Gore in 2000. Both won the national popular vote by about 2 and 0.5 percentage points but lost the tipping-point states — Wisconsin and Florida — and, thus, the election.

In other words, in those elections, Republicans did better in the electoral college than in the popular vote. The difference between the national popular-vote margin and the margin in the tipping-point state is called the electoral college bias.

Because of this recent history, we’ve come to assume that Republicans have a baked-in electoral college advantage. We think Democrats need to win the popular vote with some buffer, maybe two or three percentage points, to win the presidential election.

But in 2024, things may be changing. That’s because Democrats are performing less well in populous, blue states while simultaneously not losing any ground in the close states that decide the election.

The presidential race has dramatically re-formed after Biden decided not to run again and Kamala Harris, his vice president, became the Democratic nominee and will face Donald Trump in November.

According to The Post’s polling average, the national popular vote between Trump and Harris is currently tied. At the same time, if the election were held today and the polls (and our average) are right, Michigan would be 2024’s tipping-point state (but that might change as we get closer to November and get more polls).

According to our polling average, which ingests quality polls and past voter data, Trump is ahead in Michigan by a single percentage point. With a tied national polling average, our model shows the current electoral college bias as favoring Republicans by a single percentage point.

This is an average-size electoral college bias, relative to elections going back to 1948, and significantly smaller than the one we saw in the last two election cycles.

That means that if the national environment continues shifting toward Harris, our model shows she would not only win the national popular vote but also squeak by in Michigan. Significantly, the polling data has shown real movement toward Harris since she jumped into the contest on July 21. She has improved by nearly two percentage points in every swing state since becoming the candidate.

So why is Republican’s electoral college advantage shrinking?

It’s important to remember that the electoral college bias hasn’t favored just Republicans in recent years. As recently as 2012, Democrats actually had an advantage. Barack Obama won the popular vote by 3.9 percentage points — but he also won Colorado, which was the tipping-point state, by 5.4 percentage points. So the electoral college bias in 2012 was 1.5 percentage points in favor of Democrats.

In more recent elections (2016, 2020), the bias has grown toward Republicans. That’s because Democrats have racked up large popular-vote margins in populous states such as California and New York but didn’t necessarily win over voters in the states that decide elections, such as Wisconsin.

Republicans also win populous states such as Texas and Florida, but by smaller margins. But in 2020, Democrats triumphed in California by 5 million votes and in New York by nearly 2 million votes, while Republicans won Texas and Florida by under 1 million votes.

In 2024, paradoxically, Democrats are doing slightly less well in the really populous states.

According to a recent Siena College Research Institute poll, Harris leads Trump in New York by 14 percentage points — significantly less than the 23 percentage points by which Biden won the state in 2020. We don’t have any recent polls in California, but the most recent RealClearPolitics average before Harris climbed to the top of the ticket showed Biden winning the state by 22 points. That’s still a lot, but less of a landslide than the 29 percentage points by which he triumphed in 2020.

To be clear, the closing Democratic margins in blue, populous states predates Harris and Biden.

Other Democrats also have recently underperformed in those states. In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom won reelection by 19 percentage points, five percentage points less than in 2018 and 10 percentage points less than Biden’s margin in the state in 2020. Similarly, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul beat Republican Lee Zeldin by only 6.5 percentage points in 2022, while her immediate predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo, won by 23 percentage points in 2018.

What does all this mean?

If these trends continue — and that’s a big if, as there is no doubt this is a close race and polls do and can change — Harris could win the presidential race without as many votes as previous Democratic nominees. That is, as long as she can eke out a victory in the tipping-point state.

The Biden administration is lifting its years-long suspension of offensive arms shipments to Saudi Arabia, authorizing an initial shipment of air-to-ground munitions and saying it would consider additional new transfers “on a typical case-by-case basis,” according to senior administration officials.

The sale of certain classes of offensive weapons was frozen in early 2021 to signal administration disapproval of the Saudi war with Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen and strikes against civilian targets there. Since a United Nations-mediated truce in the spring of 2022, “there has not been a single Saudi airstrike into Yemen and cross-border fire from Yemen into Saudi Arabia has largely stopped,” a senior official said.

“So the Saudis have met their end of the deal, and we are prepared to meet ours, returning these cases to regular order through appropriate congressional notification and consultation,” said the official, one of several who discussed the decision on the condition of anonymity imposed by the White House.

The decision was first reported Friday by Reuters, which said that Congress was briefed on the sale this week.

Significant numbers of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the past have opposed any change in the suspension policy toward Saudi Arabia, primarily on the basis of domestic human rights abuses that the administration has also criticized.

Congress can withhold approval of weapons sales, but can only stop any transfer with a veto-proof joint resolution of disapproval. Rep. Joaquin Castro (Tex.), a senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who supported the administration’s initial decision to pause transfer of offensive weapons, said Friday that the Saudis had a “troubling” record on human rights. “I hope to see compelling evidence that Saudi Arabia has changed its conduct,” Castro said.

But relations have grown considerably closer in recent years between the administration and the monarchy in Riyadh, which President Joe Biden called a “pariah” state during his 2020 campaign.

Much of the rapprochement has focused on larger administration goals for the Middle East, including the establishment closer defense ties with Persian Gulf nations to prevent Iranian expansion in the region, to defend Israel against Iran and its regional proxies, and to stem Russian and Chinese influence.

The Iranian threat increased with the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, as the Houthis in Yemen began firing missiles at commercial shipping in the Red Sea, while Hezbollah stepped up its strikes from Lebanon into northern Israel. Both Iranian-supplied and backed groups have said they are acting in support of Hamas.

“Throughout this period, Saudi Arabia has remained a close strategic partner of the United States and we look forward to enhancing that partnership,” the senior official said. “Just this week, the Saudis had a senior delegation in Washington to discuss cooperation in advanced technologies and artificial intelligence. Last week, a senior U.S. interagency delegation visited Jeddah to meet with the Crown Prince and Saudi leaders on regional issues and integrated air and missile defense.”

A senior State Department official also noted “the positive steps that the Saudi Ministry of Defense have taken over the past three years to substantially improve their civilian harm mitigation processes, in part thanks to the work of U.S. trainers and advisers.”

Administration attempts to expand U.S. defense cooperation with the Saudis, which predate the beginning of the war in Gaza, have also been aimed at normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The United States has offered to sweeten the deal with expanded arms sales and civil nuclear cooperation.

But early progress toward that end has been stalled as Arab states have called on the administration to do more to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza from Israeli attacks and to move toward a long-term solution to the Palestinian crisis.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan aided the United States in helping Israel repel an Iranian attack in April. But with a new Iranian threat looming following the Israeli assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 31 and Israel’s foot-dragging in attempts to negotiate an end to the Gaza war, it is unclear whether they are willing to do so again.

John Hudson contributed to this report.

The superficial, oversimplified reason Democrats decided to turn the page on President Joe Biden in the 2024 election was that he was too old. The more specific reason may have been that this problem — manifested in his stilted, often incoherent speaking and a light schedule — rendered him largely incapable of driving a consistent message about Donald Trump.

That fateful June 27 debate epitomized it. Biden didn’t even mention Project 2025, for instance, despite its quickly emerging as a leading Democratic talking point. And that was a big problem, especially with Trump suddenly more popular than he’d been in many years.

That very liability has now landed firmly in Republicans’ laps.

Amid some Republican consternation about Trump and his campaign’s slow build toward making a case against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump emerged Thursday from his relative obscurity to deliver a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.

He spoke and took questions at length — for more than an hour.

One thing he did not do: Offer anything amounting to a coherent or detailed case against Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

Trump has for years been prone to tangents and riffs and generalities, but even by his standards this session was unfocused. And that was despite the apparent reason for calling the news conference in the first place: to take on an opponent who was rising in the polls.

Trump said repeatedly that Harris and Walz were bad on issues, but often without saying how or even clearly describing the issue. He dwelled on process and polling, as well as Biden and Harris’s replacement of him, rather than Harris herself. And he for whatever reason didn’t even summon Walz’s name — referring to him as Harris’s pick, the “new governor from Minnesota” (Walz was first elected six years ago), the “Minnesota gentleman” and Harris’s “new friend.” (Sometimes politicians avoid naming their opponents while lodging attacks, but Trump was perfectly happy to cite Harris by name, repeatedly.)

Just as Biden failed to invoke Project 2025, Trump didn’t even mention many of the biggest potential sticking points for the Democratic ticket. There was nothing on Harris’s 2020 campaign support for banning offshore drilling and fracking, or her approving comments about the Green New Deal and “starting from scratch” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ditto Walz allowing undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses or his stewardship of the Minneapolis unrest after George Floyd’s murder.

Last month I highlighted seven potential vulnerabilities for Harris from that 2020 campaign; Trump mentioned only two of them — both glancingly.

On Harris’s past support for a mandatory gun buyback program for assault weapons, Trump said twice simply that Harris wants to “take away” people’s guns. He also briefly mentioned Harris wanting to “defund the police.” (Harris’s past comments sympathized with the defund-the-police movement but didn’t explicitly advocate defunding the police.)

That the other things went unmentioned was particularly astonishing given that many of them feed into the same themes Trump sought to play up: inflation, energy prices, immigration and crime.

When Trump did bring up specific attacks, they often lacked any real clarity and were almost perfunctory.

He mentioned “what they’ve done to the national reserves.”

“The Strategic National Reserves is, as you know very well, because you cover it, but what they’ve done is incredible,” Trump said. “They’ve just — for the sake of getting some votes, for the sake of having gasoline, you know, that’s meant for wars. It’s meant for, like, tragedy.”

Left out? What the Biden administration actually did with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was to deplete it.

Trump repeatedly accused Harris of having “destroyed” San Francisco and California as a prosecutor and state attorney general. About the closest he got to saying how was a brief reference to “no cash bail, weak on crime.” (In fact, Harris’s push to eliminate cash bail came after she left those state positions; she had previously pushed for higher bail amounts in some cases.)

Trump was asked, “How you are going to go after Black voters now that she is the nominee?”

He proceeded to summarize his poll numbers and express confidence, before landing on this recipe: “I think ultimately, they’ll like me better because I’m going to give them security, safety and jobs; I’m going to give them a good economy.”

Trump referenced Harris having attacked Biden in 2019, saying she was “nasty with the — calling him a racist, and the school bus and all of the different things.” The “school bus” reference appeared to be Harris attacking Biden’s past stance on busing Black students to different schools.

Trump was asked how Harris compares as an opponent to Biden and Hillary Clinton. He briefly spoke about how Clinton was smarter than Harris — rather than, for example, accusing Harris of being more liberal — and quickly asked for the next question.

And with Republicans hitting Walz for a “trans refuge” bill that protected access to gender-affirming care, Trump merely said the Minnesota governor was “heavy into the transgender world.” (He followed that by accusing the Democratic ticket of being “heavy into lots of different worlds, having to do with safety” — whatever that meant.)

Trump summarized:

“These guys get up — think of it: We’re going to give you no security, we’re going to give you a weak military, we’re going to give you no walls, no borders, no anything, we’re going to — all these things they’re doing,” Trump said. “I mean, the transgender became such a big thing. But they do all of these things.”

But “these things” were largely outcomes rather than actual policies. And to the extent Trump won’t or can’t offer details about why Democrats will drive things in those directions — or really demonstrate any familiarity with Harris’s and Walz’s actual records — Republicans might begin to worry about their own candidate’s campaigning wherewithal.

Former president Donald Trump insisted again Friday that he took a dangerous helicopter ride with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, telling the New York Times that he would release flight records.

Trump, who did not release the records, told reporters at a news conference Thursday that he had ridden in a helicopter with Brown, who dated Vice President Kamala Harris 25 years ago, claiming that Brown had criticized her during the flight.

Brown, who is Black, called Trump’s story “fiction.” Former California governor Jerry Brown, who is White, and the state’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, said they rode in a helicopter with Trump to survey the fire-devastated town of Paradise, Calif., in 2018, but they said Harris was not a topic of conversation and the landing was uneventful.

And late Friday night, Politico reported that Nate Holden, who is Black — a former Los Angeles council member who grew close to Trump when he tried to renovate the historic Ambassador Hotel in the 1990s — said he was the one in a helicopter with Trump when it almost crashed.

Trump claimed in the Times interview that he had “flight records of the helicopter” showing he was with Willie Brown and that he would release the records. The Times reported Trump said he was “probably going to sue” the news organization, according to an article written by longtime Trump reporter Maggie Haberman, and he responded mockingly to a request for the flight records by repeating it in a “singsong” voice.

The Times reported that Trump did not provide the records Friday night. His campaign also did not immediately respond to a request from The Washington Post for the helicopter records.

Trump’s dubious account comes less than a month after President Joe Biden, 81, left the presidential race amid concerns over his acuity after a damaging debate performance in June. Trump, 78, told more than 30,000 lies or falsehoods during his presidency and in recent weeks has lashed out as Harris, who is challenging him for the presidency, and who has drawn large crowds and enthusiasm among Democrats.

Trump made the angry call to the Times on Friday as his plane was diverted because of mechanical issues from landing in Bozeman, Mont., where he had a scheduled rally. Trump took another plane from Billings Logan International Airport to Bozeman, airport staff said.

Reiterating a statement made Thursday, a spokesman for Newsom on Friday said Newsom, then governor-elect, was on a helicopter flight in 2018 with Jerry Brown; there was no emergency landing and Harris was not discussed. The spokesman also said that Trump repeatedly said he was worried about crashing and wrongly referred to the fire-ravaged town of Paradise as Pleasure on more than one occasion.

“It was a lively ride, but an utterly safe landing,” Jerry Brown said in an email through his spokesperson, adding that “the subject of Harris never came up.”

“I’m laughing about it,” Willie Brown told KPIX, CBS News’s Bay Area affiliate, on Friday, denying ever being on a helicopter with Trump. Brown enthusiastically praised Harris as highly qualified for the presidency and mocked Trump for making up the story.

In the Politico report, Holden says he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, where they were going to tour the developer’s brand new Taj Mahal casino in what he remembers to be 1990. Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development, told Politico that she remembers the flight, which she wrote about in a book, and that Holden, not Brown, was on board. She said the helicopter had to make an emergency landing due to instrument failure.

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden told Politico. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”

“I guess we all look alike,” Holden added with a laugh.

During his Thursday news conference, Trump first brought the story up with his usual dramatic flare and insisted the helicopter trip was a dangerous mission.

“I went down in a helicopter with him,” Trump said of Brown at his Florida resort. “We thought maybe this is the end. … So I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her.”

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Speaking here Friday to the largest crowd of her nascent presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris responded to protesters by calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and the freeing of hostages there — a contrast with her response to a similar interruption earlier this week.

“Now is the time and the president and I are working around-the-clock every day to get that cease-fire deal done and bring the hostages home,” she said to cheers after pausing her stump speech to acknowledge a disruption in the crowd.

Harris has previously called for a cease-fire, in line with the Biden’s administration policy as it works to secure a deal. But when interrupted by protesters at a rally in Detroit on Wednesday, Harris responded, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

The response garnered explosive cheers at the time, but some on the left were critical of what they believed was a dismissive tone. Democrats have been divided on the issue of Israel’s offensive in Gaza for nearly a year. And Harris — thrust to the top of the ticket when President Joe Biden decided he would not seek reelection — has tried to strike a balance between addressing the concerns of pro-Palestinian voters and Democratic supporters of Israel.

Speaking to an estimated crowd of more than 15,000 people, Harris’s rally in Glendale was her latest stop in a multiday swing through battleground states with her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). The rallies have seemingly grown bigger by the day as Democrats try to harness the newfound enthusiasm for their nominee with just three months before Election Day.

Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, is in red territory at a rally in Montana on Friday, where Republicans are in a fierce race to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D) but have won handily in recent presidential elections.

The Montana visit comes as Trump has in many ways been playing to his base, even when he heads into less supportive territory. In Chicago last week, at a gathering of Black journalists, he falsely claimed that his opponent “turned” Black later in life, sparking a backlash. In Georgia a few days later, he repeatedly bashed Gov. Brian Kemp (R) for declining to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss there.

This week, Trump let his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), do the campaigning in battleground states while Trump focused elsewhere. He sat for a lengthy interview with a supportive young streamer, called into Fox & Friends and on Thursday took the unusual step of holding a news conference, inviting reporters to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.

“What a stupid question,” he said when a reporter asked why he was not campaigning as frequently as Harris.

In a sign of how Harris has shifted the race, nonpartisan election analysts at Cook Political Report changed their assessment of swing states’ competitiveness this week. The publication had rated Arizona, Nevada and Georgia as “lean Republican” with Biden at the top of the ticket but now considers them to be a “tossup.”

Harris and Walz have used this week — Walz’s debut as the vice-presidential pick — to campaign intensively across the map of competitive states. First up were Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan; other stops in Georgia and North Carolina were canceled due to Tropical Storm Debby.

They will head to Nevada next.

Attendees waited for hours Friday in 105-degree heat to enter the Desert Diamond Arena, as the campaign provided water, chairs and campaign-branded navy cardboard fans to try to keep attendees cool. Inside the arena, supporters waved the fans in enthusiasm and chanted “Ka-ma-la.”

The campaign invited more than two dozen Arizona content creators and micro-influencers to the rally, ranging from food creators to a nail tech, and before the programming began they filmed videos dancing as the DJ played pop hits like Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” and multiple songs from Charli XCX’s album “Brat.”

The album has become a cultural symbol of Harris’s campaign, and some supporters wore homemade chartreuse green shirts in an homage to the album and their support of the ticket. “Are there any brats in the house?” the DJ asked, before playing the song “Von Dutch.”

The crowd chanted “we’re not going back” as Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego spoke. Attendees held red, white and blue “COACH” signs, a reference to Walz’s previous role as a high school football coach.

Harris is enjoying a burst of attention, money and enthusiasm from Democrats since she took Biden’s place on the presidential ticket. Trump — who spent the first half of the summer gaining momentum — has had to retool for a new opponent and grown upset about Harris’s rise.

Trump campaign officials argued this week that the fundamentals of the race still favored the Republican, pointing to voters’ pessimism about the direction of the country and the economy under Biden and Harris.

They also expressed confidence about their paths to winning the electoral college. Those paths focus heavily on winning Pennsylvania, where Democrats and Republicans are both spending big. Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020; now, campaign officials say, he could win the presidency by prevailing in Pennsylvania and potentially taking back just one other state he lost in 2020, Georgia.

Republicans were relieved this week when Harris didn’t make Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) her vice-presidential pick and opted instead for Walz, who has a more liberal record. But Democrats see Walz as someone with folksy, down-to-earth appeal to many voters, especially in the “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that they have long viewed as critical.

Montana may not be in play in the presidential race, but it will be pivotal in the fight for Senate control. Tester is one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents; Montana has grown politically redder since he was first elected to represent the state.

Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee to challenge Tester, said he will join Trump on Friday evening at his Bozeman, Mont., rally at Brick Breeden Fieldhouse, an arena on the campus of Montana State University.

Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.