North Carolinians set a record on the first day of early voting in the state, casting 353,166 ballots on Thursday and becoming the second battleground state this week to top its previous mark.

Voting proceeded at a brisk pace despite the carnage from Hurricane Helene, which devastated the western part of the state late last month. The state was able to open 76 polling sites across the 25 counties declared federal disaster areas, only four fewer than planned.

The first-day totals in North Carolina, released by the state Board of Elections on Friday morning, only slightly bested the first-day numbers in 2020, near the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But Thursday’s figure blew past that of other recent election years.

Earlier in the week, Georgia doubled its day one record, and early voting remained robust through the week. As of Friday morning, more than 960,000 Georgia voters had cast ballots since early in-person voting began Tuesday — nearly 20 percent of the total number who voted in 2020 and more than double the number who had voted during the same period four years ago.

The numbers suggest voter enthusiasm — at least among some — is high in both states, though it is difficult to know how much they show beyond that. Former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are polling neck-in-neck in both Georgia and North Carolina, either of which could be decisive in determining who wins the White House.

Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College, said early voting showed an equal number of Democrats and Republicans cast ballots on Thursday, a dramatic change from 2020, when more Democrats took advantage of early voting on the first day.

“There’s a great deal of interest in both sides of the aisle,” Bitzer said. “The great unknown is what are the unaffiliateds doing. We don’t have a good sense of where they may be landing in all of this.”

In 2020, Trump beat Biden in North Carolina by fewer than 80,000 votes, his smallest margin of victory in any state. In Georgia, Biden prevailed by an even narrower margin, which Trump contested.

Republicans have made a concerted push to encourage their voters to cast ballots early or by mail even as Trump has continued to baselessly undermine the legitimacy of both methods.

In North Carolina, where nearly two-thirds tend to vote early, an additional 73,133 ballots have been cast by mail. Other key battlegrounds have already seen large numbers of mail-in ballots, including 857,270 in Michigan, 690,891 in Pennsylvania, 283,123 in Wisconsin and 172,145 in Arizona, according to data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Early in-person voting kicks off in parts of Michigan on Saturday, including Detroit. Harris and Trump were both campaigning in the area on Friday, and Harris was expected to hold another event in Detroit on Saturday.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump compared the detention of his supporters who have been charged or convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to the mass imprisonment of people of Japanese descent without charges during World War II.

The remark, in an interview with pro-Trump radio host Dan Bongino that aired on Friday, was the latest escalation in Trump’s defense and glorification of charged and convicted rioters, including some who attacked police officers. Trump has repeatedly pledged to pardon the defendants and called for their immediate release.

Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,500 people in the Capitol breach, including 1,200 who pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial. Nearly 600 were charged with assaulting police or rioting, while the majority were misdemeanors such as trespassing or disorderly conduct on restricted Capitol grounds. At least five people died during or immediately after the violence, which injured 140 officers and delayed Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.

“Nobody’s ever been treated like this,” Trump said in Friday’s interview. “Nobody’s ever — maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. But you know, they were held too.”

In 1942, following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, the federal government forcibly evacuated and detained about 112,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including 70,000 U.S. citizens. None of the detainees were individually charged or held on any individual suspicion, and they had no opportunity to contest their denial of liberty, according to the National Archives.

In 1988, Congress officially apologized for the injustice of imprisonment and paid $20,000 to each incarcerated person.

“It’s flat-out offensive. It’s a night-and-day difference what happened,” David Inoue, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, said of Trump’s comparison. “Japanese Americans’ whole families were incarcerated without any sort of trial — their own crime was they were of Japanese descent. For these January 6 people, they have had their day in court, they’ve either been indicted or convicted of crimes, and that is why they’re being incarcerated.”

Inoue also raised concern about Trump’s proposal last week in Aurora, Colo., of a mass deportation operation citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law that was used to justify Japanese incarceration.

The U.S. Supreme Court sustained incarceration camps in a 1944 decision called Korematsu v. United States that established broad deference to the president’s war powers. The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees technically overturned the Korematusu ruling in their 2018 decision that upheld Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries, over the objection of Democratic-appointed justices who said both decisions used the same underlying logic.

In Friday’s interview, Trump questioned the ongoing imprisonment of some Jan. 6 defendants based on a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that said prosecutors misapplied an obstruction charge in some cases. The decision did not automatically free anyone but affected the cases of 259 people charged with or convicted of that crime. No one was charged with that crime alone, according to the Justice Department.

As of Oct. 6, one defendant received a reduced sentence because of the decision, and prosecutors said they do not oppose dropping the charge in about 49 affected cases that were already adjudicated. For 126 affected cases that are still pending, prosecutors said they dropped the charge for 73 defendants and are still pursuing it for 13 while reviewing others.

“This is an egregiously inaccurate and flawed historical analogy,” said Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. “There is no comparison between between the treatment received by the January 6 rioters and Japanese Americans who were denied due process when they were forcibly removed from their homes, systematically dispossessed and incarcerated for the duration of the war. Now more than ever, the lessons from the Japanese American incarceration must never be forgotten, ignored, minimized, or erased.”

Trump also repeated a false claim about weapons at the riot. Six people were arrested on Jan. 6 while having guns in the vicinity of the Capitol, and a seventh the next day. Police officers testified to observing more weapons that they did not confiscate because of their focus on defending the Capitol. More than a dozen people have been charged with bringing weapons to D.C., and others acknowledged stashing them at hotels or other locations. Some who brought guns were not charged with firearms offenses.

“Nobody was killed and there were no guns involved,” Trump said in the interview.

Trump repeated the same falsehood on Wednesday during a Univision town hall. In those remarks, he used the first person plural to group himself with the rioters.

“We didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”

Later on Friday, Trump reposted a social media meme falsely accusing the government of stealing the 2020 election and staging the Jan. 6 riot.

Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.

Donald Trump makes curious comments about the war in Ukraine; he has done so since the moment Russia invaded in early 2022. His suspiciously friendly public posture toward Russia dates back years.

But he and his allies have long suggested that this is effectively a diplomatic posture. You’ve got to be able to deal with Vladimir Putin, after all, so why would you jeopardize that?

Trump’s latest comments undermine that oversimplified justification.

On Thursday he turned more than a few heads by effectively blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s invasion. Trump said Zelensky “should never have let that war start.”

It was a remarkable statement in and of itself; Zelensky was the one whose country was invaded, but it’s his fault? Was he supposed to just give Russia the territory it wanted and cave to its threats that it would invade?

But it’s also remarkable for another reason, one that gets at the facile rationalizations of Trump’s soft public line on Russia: Trump rarely levels the same kind of judgment against Putin.

Since the war’s earliest days, Trump has frequently talked around any sort of blame being cast on Putin. He for a time cast the war as tragic and questioned Putin’s strategy; he is loath to actually say Putin did something bad or morally wrong. Almost every comment deprives Putin of agency and casts what’s happened as a result of the Biden administration’s (and now Zelensky’s) failings.

Trump’s strongest statement came on Feb. 26, 2022, after members of his own party criticized him for calling Putin’s strategy in Ukraine “savvy” and “genius.”

“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) while doing some cleanup work. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur. We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all.”

A week later, Trump on Fox Business Network labeled what was happening in Ukraine “a holocaust.”

But even in those comments, there was a preview of what was to come. At CPAC, Trump quickly pivoted to attributing the war to his no longer being president. Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo interviewed Trump, asking him whether he would “still afford Putin respect.” Trump deflected by criticizing President Joe Biden.

A week later, Fox News host Sean Hannity — who often tries to nudge Trump in a more politically palatable direction — seemed to believe his ally needed a course correction. So he repeatedly coaxed Trump to call Putin “evil” or an “enemy.” Trump wouldn’t take the bait. He wanted to talk about how this wouldn’t have happened on his watch, as he had before.

Hannity urged Trump to set aside that talking point and more directly answer the question. “I think you also recognize he’s evil, do you not?” Hannity asked.

Trump did not — or at least wouldn’t say as much. He instead suggested Putin had “changed.”

A year later, at a CNN town hall, Trump said Putin had made a “bad mistake” with the invasion. But it was a strategic review rather than a moral one; he declined to say whether he thought Putin was a war criminal and even, despite being asked multiple times, whether he wanted Ukraine to win.

A similar exchange transpired at last month’s presidential debate, with Trump talking around two questions about whether he wanted Ukraine to win.

And now Trump has increasingly blamed Zelensky. His comments Thursday were preceded by Trump effectively arguing that Ukraine has lost and suggesting it should have cut a deal.

“Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now,” Trump said on Sept. 25 in North Carolina. “If they made a bad deal, it would have been much better.”

The upshot is that Trump is willing to blame Zelensky for not giving in. But he’s far less willing to blame Putin for forcing such awful choices on Zelensky with an illegal invasion. Trump did, early on, call the war “appalling” and “a holocaust,” but he’s largely excised any judgment of Russia’s conduct from his public commentary. And even when he did say things like that, he often focused more on the Biden administration’s culpability than Putin’s.

There’s perhaps something to be said for maintaining a negotiating posture. But refusing to even say you want Ukraine to win — something Americans overwhelmingly do want — and declining to condemn Putin’s actions don’t preclude that. Doing those things could actually apply pressure on Putin by showing that the Western world isn’t going to tolerate or legitimize these kinds of actions.

Instead, Trump is now casting this as somehow being Zelensky’s fault. If that perception catches on with the American public, it’s a gift to Putin.

DETROIT — Kamala Harris and Donald Trump converged on the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, pushing hard for an edge with blue-collar voters as they sparred over their records on creating jobs for union workers, their plans to boost manufacturing jobs and their respective energy levels on the campaign trail.

Harris is drawing strong support among college-educated voters in suburban areas of Detroit, but to prevail in Michigan, she faces pressure to bolster her backing among union workers. At three stops in the state on Friday, she tried to cut into Trump’s advantage with blue-collar voters who helped him win this state in 2016, challenging the sweeping but often vague promises the former president has made about creating more jobs and ramping up domestic manufacturing.

In both Grand Rapids and Lansing, the vice president accused Trump of failing union workers during his first term because he did not revive manufacturing nor support organized labor in its battles with management, warning that Trump is now making the same “empty promises” and “hoping you will forget how he let you down the last time.”

“No matter what the noise is out there, he is no friend of labor,” Harris said. “Look at the record, and let’s not fall for the okie doke.”

A short time later in Hamtramck, Trump painted a contrasting portrait of himself as a staunch friend of the American worker, saying his ability to grow jobs is the best guarantee of their well-being. “So many of them … support me because I’m going to bring back the auto jobs,” Trump said of United Auto Workers members.

The UAW has endorsed Harris, and she enjoys strong support from its president, Shawn Fain, though Trump argues that many rank-and-file UAW members back him. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, another powerful union, decided last month it would not make an endorsement this year after decades of supporting Democratic presidential candidates, though many individual Teamsters chapters and locals then rushed to back Harris.

While Harris and President Joe Biden have taken more overtly pro-union positions, supported organized labor in various battles and walked the picket line with striking workers, Trump has sought to play up the cultural affinity that many blue-collar workers feel for him. On Friday, at a manufacturing roundtable in Oakland County, Mich., Trump touted his support among union members and described Teamsters president Sean O’Brien as a “great guy.”

The convergence of the two candidates in a single Midwestern state Friday reflected their increasingly bitter battle for perhaps a half-dozen swing states that will determine the winner of the electoral college. It also showcased how, in a campaign that features razor-thin margins, Harris and Trump are engaging in hand-to-hand combat to win even the smallest boost with an array of voting blocs. The battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have seen the preponderance of visits by Harris and Trump this year, along with Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Trump won Michigan by less than half a percentage point in 2016 after performing better than expected with working-class voters, many of whom had previously supported Democrats. In 2020, Biden won the state back in part by rebuilding Democratic support among union members and boosting turnout among Black voters — as Harris will try to do on Saturday when she appears with the Grammy-winning singer Lizzo, a Detroit native.

Harris is looking to replicate Biden’s 2020 playbook, but she is contending with a complex array of factors including voters’ frustration with inflation and anger in Michigan’s large Arab American community over Biden’s support of Israel during the war in Gaza. In addition to courting working-class voters, Harris has made a particular effort this week to reach Black men. Some Democrats fear she is underperforming with the demographic.

Seeking to puncture Trump’s enduring appeal among working-class voters, Harris and her campaign have repeatedly pointed to the 2017 tax bill that Trump signed into law, which they say created incentives for American companies to move jobs offshore. On Friday, the vice president also touted funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s marquee economic bill, that went to companies in Michigan.

She noted that the legislation allowed General Motors to preserve 650 jobs and upgrade its Grand River assembly plant in Lansing, calling out the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, for referring to that grant as “table scraps” in comparison to what Vance said were the benefits a Trump presidency would bring to American workers.

“Trump’s running mate called your jobs table scraps,” Harris said in Lansing. “I will always have your back.”

At UAW Local 652, addressing union members who work at the General Motors Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant, Harris played a clip of Trump denigrating the skills of autoworkers. “He’s got his club, and I’m going to tell you, union workers are not part of his club,” Harris said, adding that Trump has always been a union buster: “Let’s be clear about that, right? No matter what he does in his rallies, let’s be clear about that.”

Campaigning in Michigan in recent weeks, Trump and Vance have promised to increase jobs, especially for autoworkers and other manufacturing employees. Trump in particular has pledged to levy high tariffs on foreign-made goods, which he says will spur domestic production and jobs by encouraging companies to build or keep factories in the United States.

On Friday, he twice recounted an anecdote about an executive who, he said, abandoned plans to build plants abroad because he expected Trump to win and then impose substantial tariffs.

And he repeated his statement that “tariff” is a beautiful word. “I think it’s more beautiful than ‘love,’” Trump said.

Many economists, however, say the sweeping tariffs Trump is proposing could significantly raise prices, harm the stock market and ignite trade wars with other countries.

The Trump-Vance ticket has also gone after Harris in other ways aimed at Michigan workers. Republican ads have falsely claimed that Harris supports an electric vehicle “mandate,” and Vance recently said that Harris “has declared war on the Michigan auto industry.”

With the campaign becoming increasingly personal in recent days, the two candidates also traded barbs over their energy levels on the campaign trail after Harris seized on a report in Politico saying the Trump campaign had withdrawn from potential interviews due to the Republican candidate’s “exhaustion.”

Harris, who has questioned Trump’s fitness for office and his cognitive abilities in myriad ways this week — echoing Trump’s strategy against Biden when he was still in the race — tried out a new line in Grand Rapids. “If you are exhausted on the campaign trail, it raises real questions about whether you are fit for the toughest job in the world,” she said.

The Trump campaign has said the Politico report is false, and the Republican nominee responded a short time later. “Tell me when you’ve seen me take even a little bit of a rest,” Trump said to reporters on a tarmac in Detroit. “I’m not even tired. I’m really exhilarated. You know why? We’re killing her in the polls because the American people don’t want her.”

He also said Harris does not have the energy of a “rabbit,” adding that she is “not a smart person” and “wasn’t born smart.”

Harris also went after Trump for insulting of the city of Detroit, which he visited last week, when he compared it to a “developing nation” and suggested that even a child could do the jobs performed by autoworkers. Harris has criticized Trump for the comments, saying he had “trashed another great American city.”

In Lansing, she mocked Trump for suggesting he is the only person who can create manufacturing jobs — at one point imitating his deep baritone to laughter — as she argued he has “a very different view of workers, of hard work, of the dignity of work.”

“He tries to, you know, do his rhetorical thing at rallies, like he understands what it means to earn a living,” Harris said in Lansing. “He pretends that he understands workers and the hard work and the battle workers face every day to get their due wages and benefits. Well, we’re not falling for the okie doke.”

Voters who gathered in Grand Rapids on a sunny, warm fall day said they were glad to see Harris visiting this part of Michigan.

“This is Michigan, and we understand all of our jobs are on the line,” said Bonnie Norment, 63, an indoor landscaper. “Everything that I hear about what her policies are going to be, that’s the way forward. … Trump, he’s just going to help the few people, the richest Republicans in the area.”

DETROIT — For a second time this week, Republican nominee Donald Trump spent long stretches of a public appearance without speaking — this time not because he chose a long musical interlude, but because of a faulty microphone.

Ten minutes into his speech here, Trump told the crowd: “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary, it’s not love, it’s not respect —”

He was warming up to say “tariffs,” but no one got to hear it. His microphone cut out.

A Trump rally is a tightly controlled spectacle — the lights, the music, the setting all choreographed to aggrandize him. Thousands hang on his every word. His speeches have been interrupted by chants, hecklers and even gunfire, but production glitches are rare.

On Friday, the stagecraft deflated. For 20 minutes, Trump paced the stage, voiceless, helpless, frustrated, alone. For a moment, he was no longer the entertainer.

His fans tried to give him comfort.

“Fight, fight, fight,” they chanted.

“Too big to rig!”

“Can’t stop Trump! Can’t stop Trump.”

“Thank you, Trump!”

He took in the adoring crowd, holding red and blue signs with the words “Build it in America” and “Make Detroit Great Again.” Someone handed a second microphone. He tried to speak into it, but no sound came through. He threw up his hands.

He tried talking into the lectern microphone again, but with no luck. He stood with his arms in front of him. He then shook his hand and put his arms out.

A sign flashed on the screens: “Technical Difficulties Complicated Business.”

As “Eye of the Tiger” began to play, Trump walked back to the lectern. He leaned into the microphone. “Hello,” he said, his voice now booming through the crowd. The audience cheered.

“I won’t pay the bill for this stupid company that rented us this crap,” Trump said. “I won’t pay the bill. And then we’ll have a story that Trump didn’t pay the bill to a contractor. No. When they do that kind of a job, don’t pay the bill.”

Trump continued his stump speech, but the microphone was not far from his mind.

As he reprised his apocalyptic language about the state of the country, he vowed that “November 5th, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America.”

He then added: “And when I get rid of this microphone at the end of this speech, it’s going to be Liberation Day for Donald J. Trump because I’m blowing out my voice to get this sucker done.”

Minutes later, he thanked U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers but said he didn’t want him to come onstage and use the “crappy microphone.”

“I want to keep him good and healthy,” the former president said. “I want him to have his voice tomorrow. When I get up tomorrow and I can’t speak, I’m going to say, ‘Detroit did it to me.’”

Trump returned to Detroit after Democrats seized on his remarks made here last week, when he compared the city to a “developing nation.” Friday’s rally was notably smaller than most of his events, with few standing beyond the rows of chairs in a downtown convention hall. Trump did not revise his dim view of the city but promised a brighter future under his leadership.

“You owe me big,” he said, after recounting that a friend and supporter claimed that plans to build car plants in Mexico were on hold because of Trump’s threatened tariffs. “You owe me.”

Trump mocked the pronunciation of Vice President Kamala Harris’s name — “I don’t give a damn if I pronounce it right,” he said — and repeated false claims about her record, such as misrepresenting reduced sentences that California voters approved during her tenure as the state’s attorney general. He again misrepresented Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics on immigrants with criminal histories, many of them serving sentences and in the country for many years, by claiming they had all been released by Harris.

He repeated a pledge to launch a mass deportation operation using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law last used to displace and detain Japanese Americans during World War II. In an interview earlier on Friday, Trump equated Japanese incarceration to the imprisonment of his supporters who are serving sentences for convictions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Also on Friday, Trump complained about his campaign schedule during a roundtable in Oakland County. “You think this is an easy life I have, right? I go from here, I say, ‘Am I finished?’ They say, ‘No, sir, you have one more speech.’ ‘Oh, good. Where is it?’”

In the Detroit speech, the former president encouraged his supporters to vote early by dramatizing how a supporter might encourage a friend named Jill to motivate her husband.

“Jill, get your fat husband off the couch,” he said. “Get that fat pig off that couch. … Slap him around. Get him up.”

TUCSON — Former president Barack Obama further sharpened his criticism of Donald Trump at a rally Friday, casting the Republican nominee as a huckster who lacks the mental fitness to lead the nation, leaning into a strategy of withering mockery as he hits the campaign trail in support of Vice President Kamala Harris.

With just over two weeks until Election Day, Obama spoke to a crowd the Harris campaign estimated at 7,000 people, who packed onto the turf field inside the University of Arizona’s football practice facility the night before the school’s hotly anticipated homecoming game. The Tucson rally was Obama’s first stop in a six-day, five-state whirlwind tour of the election’s fiercest battlegrounds.

The speaking spree underscores Obama’s evolving role in the presidential campaign’s waning days: from Harris’s trusted behind-the scenes sounding board and fundraising powerhouse, to a visible and vocal presence on the trail itself.

In his recent remarks — including Friday’s — Obama has assumed a distinct tone that few others could pull off, leaning on his experience, credibility and popularity, speaking in increasingly direct terms as he criticizes Trump and exhorts fellow Democrats.

“You would be worried if your grandpa was acting like this,” Obama said of Trump’s bizarre town hall appearance this week in which he stopped taking questions and instead swayed to music onstage for more than half an hour. “Tucson, we do not need to see what an older, loonier Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails.”

The speech continued Obama’s tactic of needling Trump where he’s most sensitive, an apparent effort to get under the Republican nominee’s skin and throw him off message. Obama’s prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention in August, for instance, was memorable for a suggestive barb about Trump’s obsession with “crowd sizes.”

In Arizona, Obama continued to workshop his critiques of Trump, sometimes assuming the tone of a stand-up comedian as he riffed on the Republican former president’s mental fitness and penchant for selling self-branded wares.

“When he’s not complaining, he’s trying to sell you stuff,” Obama said, grinning as the crowd laughed. “This is my favorite: He’s got the Trump Bible — wants you to buy the word of God, Donald Trump edition.”

Then Obama walked the crowd up to his real punchline: The Bibles, he noted, were printed in China.

“So, Mr. Tough Guy on China, except when he can make a few bucks hawking his Trump edition Bibles,” Obama said. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Attendees embraced Obama’s new tone, with some saying it was refreshing to hear their side criticize Trump in a more direct, personal way.

“I’m enjoying that,” said Barbara Mosley, a retired teacher and Arizona native. “When he was president, he kind of held back, and you could tell. To me, I was like, ‘Why don’t you just spit it out?’ So I’m happy he’s doing that now.”

But Obama has also had some blunt words for voters, and he has caught some criticism for it. In Pittsburgh last week, Obama made headlines when he admonished Black men who were hesitant to vote for Harris because they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

For Marco Ruiz, a retired Tucson school administrator, the comments didn’t sit right. They felt too scolding, he said.

“I think his intent is always good, but I don’t really approve of that approach,” he said.

But his wife, Thelma Ruiz, had a different take: Tough but fair.

“If it’s going to get people off their couch, I think it’s great. I think they need it,” she said.

Before the Friday rally, Obama and Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate, met with a small group of male Latino voters, encouraging them to support Harris, who is trailing Trump in Arizona among young and middle-aged Latino men, according to a recent poll from USA Today and Suffolk University.

The meeting was private, and at the rally Obama opted for a more generalized and moderate version of the reproach, addressing any man who sees strength in Trump’s “bullying and putting people down.”

“I am here to tell you that’s not what real strength is,” Obama said, as he urged Arizonans to vote early.

The race in the state has tightened significantly since President Joe Biden dropped out in July, and The Washington Post’s polling average now shows Trump hanging onto a razor-thin lead. Biden won Arizona narrowly in 2020 and in 2022, a slate of Democrats prevailed in the contests for the state’s top offices.

This year, in addition to reprising its role as a key swing state, Arizona could also prove decisive in the battle for control of Congress. Gallego is running for Senate against Republican Kari Lake, who lost her gubernatorial bid two years ago, and there are several consequential House races throughout the state.

Voters also will decide whether to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution, and Democrats hope that the issue will energize one of the country’s most purple electorates. Speaker after speaker at the Friday rally invoked reproductive rights and stressed that this year could be a historically close election.

“The issue of abortion access is very much on the ballot,” Kirsten Engel, a Democrat who is running to represent Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, said in an interview before the rally. “That is what I’m hearing at the doors I’m knocking on, women being very upset at their freedoms being taken away from them.”

The race for the southeast Arizona district — a rematch of 2022 — is especially competitive. “This is a battleground district in a battleground state,” Engel said.

Obama is the latest high-profile Democrat to visit Arizona, as the party puts on a full-court press with fewer than 20 days left in the race. Harris has stopped by twice in the past month, vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz was here last week and former president Bill Clinton — the last Democrat until Biden to win the state — is scheduled to visit Wednesday.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have likewise made recent trips to the state and Vance is scheduled to return next week.

After Arizona, Obama is heading to Las Vegas on Saturday; Detroit and Madison, Wis., on Tuesday; and to Georgia on Thursday, where he’ll make his first joint appearance with Harris in a yet-to-be-announced city.

The two have been allies and friends for 20 years. In his August convention speech, Obama explicitly cast Harris as the successor in his political movement, saying then: “Now the torch has been passed.”

In 2008, Harris — then the district attorney in San Francisco — traveled to Iowa to knock on doors for Obama ahead of the state’s caucuses. Obama has been eager to return the favor.

His former aides have previously told The Post that he is relishing the rallies, which give him the chance to speak freely and act as an outlet for the anxiety he feels about the prospect of another Trump presidency.

On Friday, he appeared to be having fun. After some customary college football talk — “Don’t bet against the Wildcats tomorrow,” he said — Obama paused to clear his throat.

“You guys have to forgive me, because let’s face it, I’m a little out of practice,” he said with a smile. “But that’s okay, because what I have to say is going to make so much sense that even if I’m coughing a little bit, you’re still going to catch what I’m saying here.”