Donald Trump’s team is approaching the final nine weeks of the presidential campaign as a race to drag Kamala Harris down.

Americans’ views of the Republican nominee have barely budged over the past nine years, spanning three White House bids, two impeachments, an insurrection, four indictments and an assassination attempt. He remains deeply divisive, with enthusiastic support and intense opposition.

President Joe Biden was also broadly unpopular, but now Trump faces Harris, whose favorability rating is roughly even. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday found that 46 percent of likely voters viewed Harris favorably versus 43 percent unfavorably, while Trump’s ratings were 33 percent to 58 percent.

With little chance of improving Trump’s standing, Trump’s advisers see the only option as damaging hers.

“What matters is their ability to prosecute a case to the point where she feels like she needs to answer questions and that she’s on defense,” said Josh Holmes, a prominent GOP consultant. “I think it’s a serious paper tiger we’re dealing with here. I don’t think for 60 days they can keep the train on the tracks.”

Republicans have already started pummeling Harris with attack ads. The bulk of television spending by the campaigns and their allied super PACs between Aug. 23 and Aug. 29 — 57 percent — were attacks on Harris, according to data from the media-tracking company AdImpact. Twenty-one percent were pro-Harris ads that drew a contrast with Trump, and another 14 percent were purely positive about Harris, the data showed. Only 8 percent were anti-Trump attack ads.

“This is a moment in the message arc of us seeking to define her, she’s seeking to define herself,” a Trump adviser said. “We have a defined candidate — everyone knows everything about the person. There’s lots of new information about Kamala Harris that people just don’t know.”

As another adviser told reporters last month: “If you think this race is going to be decided on likability, you’re making a grave error because neither one of them is going to be liked at the end of this race.” Like others, the advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity to more candidly discuss strategy.

Democrats see the more hardwired views of Trump as an opportunity for Harris to define herself by contrast. While the Trump campaign emphasizes the issues of immigration, crime and inflation, Harris’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said Harris has room to expand her support on the issues of democracy, abortion, health care and gun violence. In a memo dated Sunday, she pointed to public polling that showed Harris within the margin of error on crime and the economy — issues on which voters have historically favored Republicans.

“Make no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs,” O’Malley Dillon wrote in the memo. “This race will remain incredibly close, and the voters who will decide this election will require an extraordinary amount of work to win over.”

Harris has largely avoided engaging with Trump over his most personal attacks, including his baseless questioning of her racial identity as the daughter of a Black father and an Indian American mother. In her first interview Thursday as the Democratic nominee with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris addressed the question by saying, “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.”

“I thought she handled it brilliantly in that interview,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic political strategist. “Getting sidetracked on that discussion is unprofitable for her. … She’s not made herself a kind of symbol, she’s not made herself a historic candidate. She’s simply running as someone who has the experience and the values to move the country forward and to deal with the problems that people are most concerned about, and I think that’s a wise strategy.”

The vice president and her allies have taken on Trump on other fronts. She used her Democratic National Convention speech to call for moving “past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past.” Her campaign and its surrogates have also waged an effort to tie Trump to “Project 2025,” a right-wing policy agenda from his allies and administration alumni that the former president has tried to distance himself from in recent months. The campaign is training volunteers to criticize Project 2025 to echo paid advertising.

The tension within Trump’s campaign centers on how to make the case against Harris. Many allies and advisers want him to focus on policy positions, concerned that personal insults could backfire. But Trump wants to do things his way. Trump recently polled a rally crowd over whether to focus on personal or policy attacks — and when the crowd favored the former, joked that his professional advisers were worthless or fired.

Trump often relies on his own instincts — particularly at times when he feels things aren’t going his way. Many Republicans fear the feuds and controversies he instigates — recent examples include attacking Georgia’s Republican governor during a rally in the state, clashing with Arlington National Cemetery over a visit that produced a campaign video contrary to federal law, amplifying a joke about Harris performing a sex act, sparring with megadonor Miriam Adelson over staffing of a super PAC and defending his supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — can damage him more than any Harris attack.

He gave mixed messages on abortion in recent days, first signaling he was opposed to a Florida amendment that would strictly curb the procedure after six weeks, then reversing his answer the next day.

“Being off message, that’s everything. A few bad days wipe out a lot of gains,” Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist, said. “But he still needs to be interesting, exciting and volcanic and go to crazy town once in a while because that’s what keeps his supporters excited and motivated. He can’t go cold turkey and start reading boring speeches.”

The cemetery controversy continued into the weekend as Harris weighed in with a post on X on Saturday that criticized his Aug. 26 filming at Arlington as “a political stunt” that “disrespected sacred ground.” Trump responded with a searing statement from family members of some service members killed in a 2021 bombing in Afghanistan saying Harris was the one politicizing Trump’s visit.

Many on Trump’s team are now tired of arguing with him and inclined to let him campaign his way. In August, he brought back his 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, despite past allegations of unwanted sexual advances. Lewandowski has been interviewing staffers about whether they are getting what they need and how they think the campaign is going, according to people who have talked with him. Campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called the staff “a world-class team.”

“Our focus every day is on ensuring the American people know Kamala’s dangerously liberal record and see her for who she is — a phony, radical, San Francisco liberal who would further spiral our once great nation into a sanctuary for illegal immigrants and a nightmare for law-abiding Americans,” Leavitt said.

Beyond the campaign, many Trump supporters have expressed despondency because of the sudden lurch from anticipating a landslide at the time of his formal nomination in July to fearing his campaign could blow it. Still, Trump remains in a better polling position than at this point in 2020 or 2016, and his advisers said the race was reverting to the close nail-biter they always expected.

“The campaign is better positioned today than it was in 2016 and 2020. There’s no reason to panic,” said Reince Priebus, an informal adviser and Trump’s former chief of staff.

Democrats also expect a razor-thin margin on par with the 40,000 votes across three states that decided the 2020 election.

Republicans view Georgia as a must-win for Trump and Pennsylvania as pivotal for Harris. Heading into the traditional start of the peak campaign season after Labor Day, Trump led in Georgia by 2 percentage points in The Washington Post’s polling averages as of Sunday, and Harris led in Pennsylvania by 3.

“Gen Z, Black males and metropolitan, White college-educated voters, he was just not doing as well as he should with those groups,” said Brian Robinson, a Georgia-based GOP strategist, speaking of Biden. “A lot of that is just coming home, they want to be Democrats but couldn’t vote for Biden.”

TV ad spending highlights the pivotal role of Pennsylvania, where, as of Thursday, Democrats had invested nearly $69 million on television ads related to the presidential race, while Republicans are spending $66 million between Labor Day and Election Day, according to AdImpact.

After Pennsylvania, Democrats are spending the most on television commercials in Michigan ($52 million), followed by Arizona ($35 million), Georgia ($35 million), Wisconsin ($33 million), North Carolina ($25 million) and Nevada ($20 million). Republicans, meanwhile, are spending $34 million in Georgia, $9 million in Arizona, $7 million in Michigan, $4 million in Wisconsin, $4 million in North Carolina and $2 million in Nevada.

“Every single one of these competitive battleground states is within the margin of error, this is a race that’s going to be decided like the last two elections … on the margins,” said Amy Walter, editor in chief of the Cook Political Report. “The benefit that Trump had in 2016 and for much of 2024 was that he was seen as the outsider, he could grab the mantle of change. … He doesn’t own that in the same way anymore.”

Going forward, Harris and her allies have reserved more airtime than Republican presidential advertisers through the election, according to AdImpact, though those bookings often fluctuate in the final weeks. A Trump campaign official declined to comment on ad-spending strategy.

The Harris campaign is also counting on a large turnout operation powered by 2,000 staff across 312 offices in the core battleground states. Fueled by $540 million raised since Harris entered the race in July, the campaign is targeting moderate independents and Republicans to cut into Trump’s leads in rural areas and red counties such as Washington and Jenkins in Georgia, Union and Jefferson in Pennsylvania, Jackson and Wilson in North Carolina, and Waushara and Rusk in Wisconsin.

The Trump campaign, by contrast, is relying on 18,000 volunteers trained to turn out their neighbors, alongside various field programs run by allied super PACs.

Both candidates are preparing for the Sept. 10 debate. After much bluster from Trump, the date, moderator and rules will be the same as the debate he did with Biden in June.

Labor Day now also marks the beginning of voting season, as the first mail ballots go out to voters in North Carolina this week. Republicans have sought to make up ground with early and mail voting after deficits cost them in 2020 and 2022, but Trump has continued to cast doubt on mail voting.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

SAN ANTONIO — Leticia Sanchez was a church deaconess, teacher’s aide and an activist in her majority-Latino community helping register people to vote before she was arrested in 2018 for the first time in her life.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) accused her and three other Hispanic women of forming an “organized voter fraud ring” that targeted elderly voters by applying for mail-in ballots they had not requested.

Five years later, the case was dismissed after the state’s highest criminal court ruled Paxton didn’t have the authority to prosecute Sanchez. But even with her record cleared, the cost of being branded a felon was enormous.

“It’s been difficult to move forward,” Sanchez, 63, said in her first interview since the arrest. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We were just helping people.”

The church leader’s case fits a pattern that has emerged in Texas under Paxton: Aggressive prosecutions for alleged election fraud crimes that upend lives but result in few cases that go to trial and end in a conviction. The Republican attorney general and his supporters believe election fraud is rampant, and point to the large number of charges filed as proof. Yet many of those charged have stories like Sanchez’s.

Civil rights groups say the charges tend to target Black or Latino voters and volunteers, many of whom are Democrats. The result has been a chilling effect on volunteers and community groups that for decades have worked to increase turnout in a state with one of the nation’s lowest voter participation rates. Critics say the charges are part of a wider effort by predominantly White, Republican state lawmakers to suppress votes in some of the fastest-growing parts of the majority-minority state: urban and suburban communities that lean Democrat.

“The goal isn’t to get a conviction,” said Chad Dunn, legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project, who has defended Texan clients against election-fraud claims and won a 2021 case that curbed the attorney general’s prosecutorial power. “It’s to set up a climate of fear around voting. He uses these witch hunts to gain attention and money.”

Paxton’s work in combating alleged voter fraud is back in focus after a recent spate of state raids on the homes of South Texas “abuelitas,” or older women known for their community work. One of the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organizations has called on the Justice Department to investigate. The department confirmed they are aware of the matter but declined to comment further.

Critics, both Democrats and Republicans, said they have become accustomed to the election season rollout: After a contested race result, the attorney general’s election police announce an investigation. Indictments and raids are timed to the run-up to early voting in the next election. And new, inexperienced voters and volunteers are scared off.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Paxton’s efforts to prosecute alleged voter fraud to date. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office also did not comment.

“There is nothing more important than the integrity of our elections,” Paxton said in a recent announcement in which he touted a new “illegal voting” tip line. “Any attempt to illegally cancel out legal ballots with fraud, vote harvesting, or other methods will be met with the full force of the law.”

Paxton’s supporters say the election integrity unit’s work has been hamstrung by the court ruling three years ago that determined the attorney general cannot unilaterally prosecute election fraud cases. Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Paxton ally, rejected the idea that the unit has been used for political playback, saying investigators are targeting long-problematic parts of the state.

“There has been a history in South Texas of election corruption and official corruption,” said Bettencourt, who represents the Houston area. “This is just an extension of that.”

‘Lives turned upside down’

Latino residents in Fort Worth’s Northside knew Sanchez well. The naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico was a trusted community member who helped Spanish-speaking seniors with things like getting food and medicine. She also worked through her Lutheran church to help people fighting substance abuse.

But Sanchez said she felt her community was disempowered, and that much of that had to do with the lack of Hispanic representation in local government. So she said she got certified to help register people to vote and also learned about the process to request mail-in ballots.

“They didn’t believe they could effect change,” Sanchez said of Latino residents in Fort Worth. “They needed more information about the value of their vote and lived in fear. I wanted to help break that fear.”

Working with other leaders, Sanchez registered hundreds to vote and helped elect Hispanic leaders for local office. But those elections raised the suspicion of a Republican activist, Aaron Harris, who began interviewing seniors and concluded Sanchez was illegally collecting absentee ballots, court records show. He alleged she formed part of a “Mexican mafia” scheme to help certain candidates starting in 2014. Those candidates were largely Democrats of Hispanic descent, some of whom were successfully elected.

Harris declined to offer further information on how he reached that conclusion when contacted by The Washington Post, saying only that “the evidence is pretty clear” and then insulting the reporter who asked the question.

Harris sent a full accounting of his investigation to Paxton’s office. They dove in. Investigators surveilled Sanchez, obtained warrants to search her home and finally, handcuffed her at her job. Prosecutors charged her with one count of illegal voting and 16 counts of providing false information on an application for a mail-in ballot. Sanchez’s daughter was also charged in the sting.

The mug shots of Sanchez, her daughter and two others were plastered on local and conservative media. Her arrest was cited in reports for congressional Republicans and conservative think tanks.

Sanchez’s attorney, Greg Westfall, said his client doesn’t dispute helping voters request mail-in ballots, but that she never filled out the form or submitted one on behalf of someone else. Texas law states that voters over the age of 65 — like the ones Sanchez volunteered to help — can request a mail-in ballot and if someone assisted them, that should be noted on the application.

Sanchez’s attorney said she followed that protocol.

“What she did was perfectly legal,” Westfall said. “It would’ve been a problem if she told them how to vote.”

Harris and state investigators, who did not speak Spanish, based their accusations on interviews with elderly Latinos who barely spoke English, according to Westfall, who listened to recordings of the interrogations.

Over the next five years, the case stalled. The coronavirus pandemic hit, slowing prosecutions. The attorney general’s office failed to show up twice to court, Westfall said, and there was only one hearing. The judge in the case was waiting for a ruling from a court of appeals on Paxton’s prosecutorial authority.

“Real people’s lives are turned upside down by a police officer showing up at their home, taking their phones and searching their space,” said Dunn, who brought the case challenging Paxton’s authority. “And that is the not the kind of despotic behavior that is envisioned in the credo of Texas freedom.”

That ruling came in 2021, when Texas’s Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Paxton could not prosecute election fraud cases without a referral or consent of a local prosecutor. The court ruled that a decades-old law giving the attorney general powers to prosecute election crimes was unconstitutional. They reaffirmed that decision in 2022.

As a result of the ruling, Sanchez’s case was dismissed.

For Sanchez and others who were charged with crimes, only to later see them dismissed, much has been lost: six-figure fortunes, dream homes and for some, faith in their adopted country. The deaconess was fired from her school job. Her grandchildren were bullied. Friends and family kept their distance.

Prayer was her only salve.

Chilling effect

Though Texas attorneys general have long gone after election fraud, state leaders have ramped up their efforts since former president Donald Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen.

Paxton led a lawsuit that unsuccessfully sought to throw out election results in four battleground states. And in 2021, state legislators passed a sweeping bill that eliminated practices like drive-through and overnight voting that had helped draw more Black and Latino voters to the polls.

Community leaders say the law has had a negative impact on nonprofit groups that have long worked to help get disadvantaged voters to the polls. Tania Chavez Camacho, the executive director of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a civil rights group, said her organization has turned away members looking for help with their ballots. They also no longer drive people to the polls.

“We have seen a drop off in volunteers for voting events,” she said. “I think that is a real threat to democracy.”

When there is fraud in Texas, experts said, the cases rarely impact the outcome of elections or provide evidence of massive organized efforts to overturn them. Often, they say, it’s the result of a mistake or misunderstanding about complicated laws.

Crystal Mason’s years-long prison sentence was overturned earlier this year after she said she made an honest mistake when she filled out a provisional ballot in 2016 while on supervised release for felony tax fraud. A person with a felony conviction can only vote in Texas if they have finished serving their sentence.

Mason’s vote was never counted. Still, the local prosecutor charged her with illegal voting and is asking the state’s criminal appeals court to reinstate her sentence.

Paxton’s election integrity unit opened at least 169 cases of alleged voter fraud that appear to have resulted in just one judgment since 2016, according to records they released in response to a request from the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight. The rest of the cases were closed due to, among other things, insufficient evidence or prosecutors declining to pursue them. It is unclear how Paxton’s office defines a “judgment,” and they did not respond to a request to explain the records.

Other records obtained by American Oversight indicate at least 20 individuals pleaded guilty or were found guilty in trial up until 2021, when a court ruling limited the attorney general’s powers. Another 54 entered diversionary programs to avoid trial. Those numbers represent a minuscule fraction of the state’s 17 million registered voters.

The election fraud unit’s work has slowed since the 2021 ruling, but Paxton has continued filing charges, most recently touting a series of electioneering cases brought against school officials. He said in a statement the cases were filed in civil rather than criminal court because he was constrained by the 2021 ruling.

Paxton, members of his office and his supporters often cite the unusual metric of how many charges they have brought forward — rather than the number of successful convictions — to prove that the election unit is having success.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson nearly a year ago, Paxton derided the court of criminal appeals ruling that barred his office from pursuing voter-fraud cases unilaterally. He accused district attorneys in the state’s largest cities, all Democrat strongholds, of being “controlled” by Democrat donor George Soros and unwilling to pursue voter-fraud cases.

“They are not going to prosecute. We were doing it. We had 900 cases. So this whole idea that there’s no voter fraud? Complete fabrication,” Paxton said.

Right-wing Texas groups that complain of voter fraud praise Paxton’s efforts.

“Every bit helps in increasing awareness and decreasing the occurrences of fraud,” Julie McCarty, founder of True Texas Project, a tea party group, said of Paxton’s election integrity unit, adding that Paxton has been “on fire” this year.

An ACLU of Texas analysis of prosecutions by Paxton’s election integrity unit shows the targets of election fraud investigations tended to be people of color, said Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney with the group.

“We know for individual voters who are simply trying to have their voices heard by participating in elections, these prosecutions can completely derail their lives,” Kumar said. “The incentives are just not there for people to have their voices heard and risk years in jail.”

A high price

Tomas Ramirez III, a Republican justice of the peace in Medina County, outside San Antonio, was among those charged in a February 2021 election fraud indictment. Three older Hispanic women who volunteered for his campaign were also charged. Together they were accused of about 250 offenses. The state levied 35 felony counts against Ramirez that could have imprisoned him for life.

An experienced trial attorney, Ramirez said the charges were illogical. Investigators, he said, alleged he illegally possessed about 17 suspicious absentee ballots. They traced the ballots to a facility in Devine, Tex., where Ramirez had visited once during his 2018 primary campaign and given people there his business card. Then he left. Ramirez prevailed in defeating the incumbent.

“There was absolutely nothing and they brought the charges anyway. They never presented evidence,” said Ramirez, whose case was dismissed in three different courts after 18 months. “It caused all kinds of grief for my family.”

The stress and humiliation weighed on him in both tangible and unexpected ways. Ramirez spent tens of thousands of dollars on his defense. Business at his law practice slowed and bottles were thrown at his door. He was suspended from the bench. His wife and children came home to anonymous hate mail.

Ramirez described himself as “conservative an individual as you’ll run across in Texas” and believes voter fraud exists. He hosts a weekly Bible study class on YouTube, wrote a book on biblical fundamentals for fellow Christians and fits the profile of the type of voter the attorney general considers part of his base.

“All I know is I don’t like the way they handled my case,” he said. “And if they are handling my case in the same way they handled the others, that’s not right.”

Mary Jane Balderrama is a longtime community leader in South Texas and canvassed for Ramirez, who is a friend. The then 73-year-old was on a birthday trip when she received a call from Paxton’s office saying they had a warrant for her arrest. Balderrama said she thought it was a birthday prank. The stern voice on the line assured her it wasn’t.

Balderrama was a state social worker for years and visited the Bandera County jail frequently as a missionary to pray with inmates. Now it was she on the other side as police took her fingerprints.

“It was a horrible experience,” said the now-76-year-old, who leans Republican but has voted for Democrats in the past.

What followed was months of near-nervous-breakdown, visits to the neurologist to stave off facial paralysis brought on by stress, nightmares and the loss of a dream retirement condo overlooking a golf course.

The case was dismissed in 2022. Ramirez, with Balderrama’s help, won reelection that year by far more votes than the race that put him on the attorney general’s radar.

For Sanchez, the church deaconess, hearing about other Latinos being charged with election fraud triggers flashbacks. Details from the day Sanchez’s home was searched come back. One officer took a blood sample from her without explaining why. Another asked for alcohol when she offered the officers a refreshment.

She said the only thing that got her through those days was her faith.

“I prayed to God because this was all beyond my strength,” she said. “I had to believe that the truth would be revealed.”

DETROIT — Vice President Kamala Harris sought to shore up the support of organized labor in so-called “blue wall” states at the end of the holiday weekend, stressing that union members had a binary choice in November between her and former president Donald Trump, a candidate she said has a history of being hostile to workers.

An unconventional race that features a new name at the top of the ticket and a truncated sprint to the White House still held true to one late summer ritual: politicians making their pitch to union workers on the holiday dedicated to laborers — though Trump held no events.

Harris started the day in Michigan and then headed to Pennsylvania, where she will address steelworkers alongside President Joe Biden, their first campaign event together since he announced he was dropping out of the race and endorsing Harris. In Pittsburgh, Harris is expected to say that U.S. Steel should remain domestically owned and operated, a Harris campaign official said.

The sale of U.S. Steel to Japan-based Nippon Steel Corp. comes during political efforts to rebuild American manufacturing, and both Biden and Trump have expressed their opposition to the deal.

The effort is opposed by the United Steelworkers union, which has endorsed Harris.

In Detroit, Harris directed her fire at Trump, saying his record shows he will continue to be hostile to workers.

“As president, we will always remember Donald Trump blocked overtime benefits for millions of workers and blocked efforts to raise the minimum wage,” she said. “He appointed union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, and he supported so-called right-to-work laws.”

As she spoke, the gathered union members chanted “Trump’s a scab.”

Neither Trump nor his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, had any advertised events on Labor Day — something the Harris campaign sought to draw attention to.

In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello said that Trump “is ditching workers on Labor Day because he is an anti-worker, anti-union extremist who will sell out working families for his billionaire donors if he takes power.”

Earlier Monday, Trump wrote posts on his social media platform, Truth Social, wishing workers a happy Labor Day and highlighting his administration’s work to bolster American workers while he was in office. He asserted that “Kamala and Biden have undone all of that.”

Harris is trying to garner the strong union support enjoyed by Biden, who has frequently described himself as the most union-friendly president in history. He was the first president to walk a picket line in 2023, and unions — including steelworkers — helped him win Pennsylvania in 2020 and will probably be vital to Harris’s chances four years later.

Harris’s campaign sought to stress that she too would be protective of American workers. The selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was seen as reinforcing Harris’s union bona fides. Both Walz and his wife are union members, and his tenure as governor was seen as filled with pro-worker benefits.

In Michigan, Harris was boosted by another Midwestern voice, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who painted Trump, who was born wealthy and became a billionaire, as out of touch with workers and everyday Americans.

“When he was president, Donald Trump blew a $1 trillion hole in our national deficit to cut taxes for his wealthy friends and corporations,” Whitmer said. “At the same time, he gutted the job protections for union workers. He made it easier to screw people out of overtime pay and crush organizing meetings.”

“If your most famous line is ‘You’re fired,’ you sure as hell don’t understand workers,” she added.

Tyler Pager and Maegan Vazquez in Washington contributed to this report.