MONTREAL — Kamala Harris was just starting her freshman year at a high school in Quebec when, as one of her classmates recalled, “all hell broke loose.”

After years of deepening conflict over the French-speaking majority’s treatment, a political party advocating political separation from Canada had recently taken power. Tens of thousands of English-speaking families fled as stringent new language restrictions took effect.

In the fall of 1978, everything boiled over inside Westmount High School on the outskirts of downtown Montreal. As students clashed over the political turmoil, the once primarily White and wealthy school was changing dramatically amid an influx of Black, lower-income students, including those driven to enroll when their own English-language schools suddenly were slated for closure.

Harris, a Black and Indian American expat who had left California for Canada 18 months earlier, found herself a target.

“She was bullied to a degree,” said Westmount classmate Jamie Ward, who declined to further detail what she described as racist remarks directed at Harris. “I would never repeat that. Myself being biracial, it’s harmful and it’s hurtful.”

Throughout her political career — as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator, vice president and now Democratic presidential nominee — Harris has rarely mentioned the five years she spent in Canada, between ages 12 and 17. Her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” carries the subtitle “An American Journey,” and in it she describes her time in another country in a little more than one page. She said in her Democratic National Convention speech that she had moved “to Illinois, to Wisconsin and wherever our parents’ jobs took us,” but did not mention living in Canada. Harris declined an interview request, and her campaign declined to respond to a list of questions submitted for this article.

But her little-examined Canadian journey, as much as any period of her life, profoundly shaped her path, from becoming a prosecutor to accepting the nomination for president, according to interviews with more than two dozen classmates, teachers and others who knew her in Montreal.

Daily life in the Montreal of the late 1970s and early 1980s vividly showed Harris the real-world consequences of deep political division, while the eruptions of conflict at her high school drove home the reality of racism she would face as a biracial woman. Harris honed her early political instincts as she navigated high school bullies and a roiling political atmosphere, emerging, classmates say, as a student confident and popular across racial lines.

While many of her former classmates say they understand that Harris may feel it is politically unhelpful to talk about the time she spent in Canada, they also say there’s no doubt that those years are crucial to understanding the woman seeking the presidency.

Indeed, one of the most profound events in Harris’s early life, by her own account, came in Montreal when a high school friend confided that she was being molested. Harris insisted that Wanda Kagan move into her home, and later said the incident led her to become a prosecutor.

“It was at a pivotal point in my life that made a difference,” Kagan said in an interview of the help Harris gave her. And Kagan said navigating the challenges at Westmount “helped in building the character and the person that she is now, to be able to work with so many different people.”

A unique opportunity

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif., and spent much of her early life in nearby Berkeley, where her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, had moved from India to study at the University of California, eventually becoming a scientist at the UC Berkeley Cancer Research Laboratory. Her father, Donald Harris, is an economist from Jamaica.

Her parents divorced in 1971, and six years later, her mother announced that Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, would move with her to Montreal. Harris wrote in her memoir that the thought of moving in the middle of the school year “to a French-speaking foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow was distressing, to say the least.” In Harris’s telling, her mother could not pass up a “unique opportunity” to teach at McGill University and conduct research at Jewish General Hospital.

The reason for the sudden departure went deeper, however, according to her mother’s close friend and fellow scientist Mina Bissell.

In effect, Bissell said, “she got fired” from the Berkeley position in a clash with a male chauvinist supervisor over credit for her research. Bissell stressed that it had nothing to do with the quality of her work. Rather, the supervisor thought the research “was important enough that he would give the job to himself rather than to Shyamala. So he fired her.” The supervisor and Shyamala are both deceased.

Professor Russell Vance, the lab director today, said the institution does not have records going back to Shyamala’s time. While he had never heard of the incident, he said, “I do think women scientists and scientists of color did face a lot of discrimination in those days.”

Shyamala Harris found sanctuary at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, which had been created in the 1930s after doctors went on strike elsewhere over the hiring of a Jewish intern. Shyamala would probably have faced sexist and racist blowback at other hospitals, where the view would have been “What is this Indian woman doing here?” said Michael Pollak, a doctor who collaborated with her at Jewish General, which emphasized diverse hiring. “It was hyper-accepting. And she wanted to do her cancer research more than she wanted to pick a battle. She was strategic. Her battle was with cancer.”

Working at the lab, Shyamala sometimes would bring along Kamala, who has said her “first job” was washing pipettes at one of her mother’s labs after school and on weekends.

“Whatever happened in California interfered with her professional aspirations,” Pollak said of Harris’s mother. “It was important enough to justify this dislocation, a trip to the north with the two young daughters.”

Now the challenge was to find a way for her daughters to fit in during a time of extraordinary political and social upheaval in the politics of Quebec.

Bombs and snipers

In the years before the Harris family arrived in Montreal, the Westmount neighborhood where they would settle was rocked by bombings, protests and massive rallies. At the root of the tumult was a bitter division dating to Britain taking over French-founded Quebec in the 18th century and then discriminating against the Francophone majority.

In the late 1960s, radical groups demanding a sovereign Quebec bombed the mayor’s house and the stock exchange. In 1970, they set off five bombs around Westmount. Snipers were stationed on rooftops to protect businesses run by English speakers, and the military patrolled the streets.

One of Harris’s schoolmates, Nicholas Simons, said that in his youth, “I didn’t know what a fire drill was, but I knew what a bomb-threat drill was.”

Most of the violence had ebbed by the time the Harris family moved in, but a political earthquake had just struck when the party of the French-speaking majority won the 1976 election. The Parti Québécois soon passed the Charter of the French Language, which made French the official language of business and signage, and enacted measures designed to restrict the ability of students to attend English-speaking schools.

The new rules added to divisions between the 80 percent of Quebec’s 6 million residents who spoke French and were predominantly Catholic and the largely Protestant English-speaking minority, whose numbers were being bolstered by immigrants from Caribbean countries and elsewhere.

When Harris arrived as a 12-year-old, she was not really in either world — but she was deeply affected by the political change.

Harris was already homesick for California, and “it was made worse when my mother told us that she wanted us to learn the language, so she was enrolling us in a neighborhood school for native French speakers,” Harris wrote. The school, which she attended in early 1977, was called Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, for Our Lady of the Snows. Harris found it so difficult that she persuaded her mother to let her transfer to a school where she could learn in English — Fine Arts Core Education — for the 1977-78 academic year.

The new law narrowed her educational options as nearly 100,000 English-speaking residents fled Quebec in 1977, according to a New York Times report. By the account of several of Harris’s friends, the English-oriented high school she was likely to attend in the fall of 1978 was among many slated for closure amid that upheaval. Classmate Ariela Katz recalled that she and Harris and some others “slid just under the wire” and were admitted into one of the remaining English-speaking high schools.

As a result, Harris ended up at Westmount High in an area that one classmate described as “the Beverly Hills of Montreal,” with mansions and luxurious apartments on leafy thoroughfares. The school was undergoing de facto integration. When teacher David Bracegirdle had started a few years earlier, he’d watched as limousines pulled up and dropped off students at the mostly White school.

As Harris arrived, Black students, many from nearby Caribbean-dominated communities, were on the way to becoming about 40 percent of the roughly 1,000 students, making the school among the most diverse in Quebec, according to former students and teachers. Westmount was so crowded that some classes were held on the auditorium stage, according to Bracegirdle.

As a freshman, Harris found herself plunged into a school navigating deep changes, an outsider in a tumultuous mix of backgrounds and languages. “When she arrived from California, she was very reserved,” Ward said. “It was an adjustment for her because Americans in that part of the world at that time, it was very heavy with the French.”

Joel Margoles, a Harris classmate and editor of the Westmount yearbook, said the school was clearly divided between those who had been in French immersion programs starting in kindergarten and those, like Harris, who had not. The French-immersion students “tended to get better teachers and better classes and were more the student leaders,” Margoles said. “And Kamala not coming from the area, she would have been kind of disadvantaged from the start in the way the school was set up.”

Kristian Gravenor, who was one year ahead of Harris at Westmount, said English-speaking residents lived in a “kind of fear.” While some classmates recall occasionally violent clashes, Gravenor said it was more psychological tension.

“It was in your mind. It was a really terrible time for being English, and it would have been weird to move to Montreal,” as Harris had done, “because at that time people were moving away.”

As Gravenor recalled it, the school was dominated by English speakers whom Francophones called “White Rhodesians,” a reference to the White minority that ruled the African nation, today’s Zimbabwe. “We were seen as repressing the French, so we felt really targeted,” he said. “The whole thing was falling apart.”

“We just didn’t feel welcome,” said Margoles, referring to how Anglophones felt put upon by the Francophones.

On top of the language divisions, the newly diverse Westmount also faced a racial reckoning.

Margoles recalled that “the White students and Black students did not mix,” a view echoed by other students as well as teachers. Margoles said he didn’t see “inherent racism, but it was definitely a separation. I never thought there was hostility, but it also was never camaraderie or mixing.”

Of Harris, he said, “I could easily imagine she felt not included.”

Katz recalled watching the racism faced by her boyfriend at the time, who was biracial. “If you went to a party and some people started drinking, the rich kids from Upper Westmount would start to say things about him that he should not have been countenancing.”

Harris surrounded herself with a small group of allies, mainly those with Black and biracial backgrounds, according to classmates. Katz said he did not see her hanging out regularly with White student leaders.

Deborah Boykin, who was a year behind Harris and also is biracial, recalled that their time at Westmount may have to American eyes “looked segregated because all of the Black kids come together, all of the White kids come together. But we didn’t know … we just didn’t have the same history as the U.S. — we didn’t have slavery.”

In their group of friends, Boykin said, Harris’s mother stood out as a successful scientist while most other students’ families “were on welfare, on government assistance.”

Undergirding everything at the high school was the growing push to effectively separate Quebec from Canada.

A divisive vote

In May 1980, when Harris was in 10th grade, the province prepared to vote on whether Quebec should gain political sovereignty — giving it the right to enact its own laws — while retaining economic ties to Canada. The city was plastered with posters that said “Oui” or “Non,” with the vast majority of those in Westmount opposing the measure.

Derek Leebosh, a Westmount classmate, said the political wars would have played out before Harris.

“All of a sudden she was a minority within a minority within a minority,” Leebosh said. “You’re a Black minority within the English. The English is a minority community within Francophone Quebec, which is a minority in Anglophone North America. And during this period, language laws are being passed. It’s very emotional; there’s lots of demonstrations. That’s all going on in the background.”

Students held heated meetings at the school, with the vast majority of students against separating from Canada.

Katz, an American who had lived in Israel before moving to Canada, was one of the only students who wore a “Oui” button in favor of separatism. “The idea that an oppressed [group] would finally rise up and say, well, 80 percent of the province speaks French, we should be speaking French, did not seem surprising to me,” said Katz, now a professor of architecture in Paris.

But it made little sense to most of Harris’s classmates. None recalled whether Harris was ever openly for or against the measure, which because of her age and citizenship, she would not have been able to vote on.

“The tension was extremely high,” Ward remembered. In the end, the separation measure lost, 60 percent to 40 percent, but powerful efforts to elevate French continued, as did the exodus of English-speakers.

Harris was shaped by the pressures at the school, her classmates said, and they noticed her transformation. Channeling her parents — who had “talked about apartheid, about African decolonization … and about the history of racism in America,” as Harris later wrote in her memoir — Harris became a student of Montreal’s cultural stew. She began asking questions about where she fit in, and how Montrealers dealt with divisions. “She was very, very interested in diversity in Montreal,” Ward said.

Students were also adjusting to life in a newly diverse school, and many came to appreciate the change, said Anne Peacock, who taught Harris in her enriched English class. Peacock recalled asking classes about the change.

“The privileged kids said that the inclusive education was the best thing that could possibly have happened to them,” Peacock said. “And I think that’s hugely important.”

As Harris’s comfort level increased, she told classmates that her main interests were as an entertainer. Brian Israel, who took drama class with her, recalled doing a fashion show with her, as well as a photo shoot for a blue jeans company, which resulted in an advertisement being placed around Montreal.

“I definitely believed she would go that route of entertaining, acting, singing, dancing,” said Israel, who today is an officer with the D.C. police and often drives by the vice president’s residence.

Katz recalled Harris becoming “very popular, and very cool — a very lively kind of leader” at the school.

Over time, classmates said, Harris invited them to her home and began to feel more confident about how to navigate the political and social tensions.

One of those invitations would lead to an experience that Harris later said altered the course of her life.

A path-changing moment

Harris had gotten to know Wanda Kagan, who is Black, at a Black-oriented community center before either ended up at Westmount, where they became close friends. Harris would bring Kagan lunch at school “because I often did not have one,” Kagan told The Washington Post.

One day, as Harris later recounted in her convention speech, she noted that Kagan was “sad at school, and there were times she didn’t want to go home.” Kagan confided in her “that she was being sexually abused by her stepfather,” Harris said.

Kagan, who spoke to The Post in interviews and emails, said the moment recounted by Harris happened in 11th grade. She recalled that “I came to school one day and this particular day Kamala asked me how come I didn’t really seem myself. I didn’t tell her at first. I was just like, I have a lot going on. … I eventually blurted it out.”

Harris, in her convention speech, said that “I immediately told her she had to come stay with us, and she did.”

The Harris family at this time was living on the second floor of a duplex building on fashionable Grosvenor Avenue, about a 30-minute walk from Westmount High. Kagan recalls thinking during her time living at the Harris home: “I get to make my own good lunches now.”

Kagan and Harris studied and played music together. At dinner, Kagan would marvel at the array of spices displayed in glass jars and used to prepare meals, far from her knowledge of salt and pepper.

Harris said learning about her friend’s molestation “is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor, to protect people like Wanda.”

The Harris campaign and Kagan have not disclosed her stepfather’s name, whether he is living, or whether charges were filed.

A mutual friend of Harris and Kagan’s told The Post she remembered Kagan discussing the matter at the time and confirmed that Kagan lived at Harris’s home for some time. It was not possible to independently verify details about the alleged molestation. The Post left messages seeking comment from an individual whose name and city match the stepfather, but could not be certain it was the same person. He did not respond.

Harris did not mention Kagan or the molestation incident in her memoir, nor that it inspired her to be a prosecutor. She wrote in the 2019 book that she was inspired to be a lawyer by her heroes in the civil rights movement. Harris mentioned Kagan’s stay at her home during the 2020 campaign, but mistakenly said the incident involved Kagan’s father, rather than her stepfather.

In her convention speech in August accepting the Democratic nomination, Harris prominently featured her experience with Kagan — but did not mention that the incident occurred when she was living in Canada.

The campaign produced a biographical video for the convention that featured Harris and Kagan telling their story, which the narrator, actor Morgan Freeman, said was a moment “that changed Kamala Harris’s destiny” by convincing her to become a prosecutor, lighting “the fire within.”

Graduation

By the time Harris completed her years at Westmount, she had transformed from the reserved Californian into one of the school’s more outgoing personalities, remembered for greeting anyone who walked by.

For Harris, her education came in what was taught in her classes, but perhaps even more in the political tensions around her. Still, classmates said they had no inkling of her political future.

“She was an impressive girl — kind, a great singer and comedian,” said Richard Carr, who added that he had a crush on her. “She was a total clown, and usually the one who was actually instigating the pranks on her friends.”

As Harris’s third and final year at Westmount — the equivalent of 11th grade in the United States — came to a close, Carr performed with her in the Purple and White Review, doing a rendition of the Kool & the Gang song “Celebration.”

For graduation, Harris invited her father to join the family in Montreal.

“I still wanted them both to be there for me,” she wrote in her memoir. When Donald Harris showed up, Kamala waited for her mother to arrive, but she was “nowhere to be found.” Harris wrote that she wondered whether her mother would decline to come because her father was in the audience.

Finally, Shyamala entered through the back door, wearing a bright-red dress and heels instead of the jeans and tennis shoes she usually wore to the lab. Shyamala would live in Montreal for another 10 years, for a total of 15.

Harris spent one more year in Montreal, attending Vanier College for the U.S. equivalent of 12th grade. Ward remembers they both felt it was time to leave Montreal. Ward felt the city “was just too racially divided” and she returned to her native New York City.

Harris, who had returned to the United States every summer and for holidays, and who years earlier had been bused to school in California as part of a desegregation plan, now contemplated her future.

Harris later wrote that there was no question she wanted to return to the United States for college. She left Quebec and headed to Howard University, the historically Black institution that her aunt had attended and that Harris had long admired. The Washington campus was a world away from the racial, ethnic and cultural divisions she had seen so often in Quebec.

As she settled into a seat at Cramton Auditorium for an orientation in 1982, Harris recalled in her memoir, she realized that everyone looked like her. “This is heaven!” she wrote. The message she got was that “we were young, gifted, and Black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.”

Aaron Schaffer in Washington contributed to this report.

The Democratic National Committee plans to fly pro-Kamala Harris banners or write messages in the sky in support of the party’s presidential nominee over four NFL games on Sunday, marking the first time this cycle Democrats have advertised aerially at professional football games.

The timing is fortuitous: Teams from six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — happen to be scheduled to play each other Sunday. The DNC hopes to seize on the amassed swing-state audience by flying banners over the following games: the Arizona Cardinals at the Green Bay Packers, the Atlanta Falcons at the Carolina Panthers, and the Cleveland Browns at the Philadelphia Eagles.

In addition, the DNC plans to skywrite “Vote Kamala” over the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Las Vegas Raiders game at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

The banners will read “Sack Trump’s Project 2025! Vote Kamala!” — a reference to an aggressive right-wing agenda touted by former president Donald Trump’s allies and written by several of his onetime administration members and appointees. Project 2025 calls for, among other things, dismantling the Education Department, passing sweeping tax cuts, imposing sharp limits on abortion, giving the White House greater influence over the Justice Department and reducing efforts to limit climate change and increasing promotion of fossil fuels.

Trump has said he disavows Project 2025 and tried to distance himself from it, but Democrats and Harris’s campaign have warned that a second Trump term would look much like what is outlined in the right-wing blueprint.

“That’s why the DNC is meeting voters where they are, with innovative skywriting and plane banners that have a simple message: the most important contest is still to come in November, and America is ready to sack Trump’s Project 2025 agenda, win the game, and cast their vote for Kamala Harris,” DNC spokesman Abhi Rahman said in a statement.

Americans consistently name football as their favorite sport, according to a Gallup poll earlier this year. Forty-one percent of adults say it is their favorite sport to watch. Baseball and basketball essentially tied for second at 10 percent and 9 percent. Gallup said football has been the top sport in its survey since 1972.

It won’t be the first time the DNC has taken to the skies to try to get its message across. On Wednesday, one day before Trump was scheduled to visit Detroit, the DNC flew a banner calling Trump an “anti-union scab” over the Detroit Tigers home playoff game.

Last month, the DNC flew banners over some professional baseball games that read, “Don’t strike out w/Trump! Go to bat 4 Harris!”

In August 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s campaign trolled then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with pro-Trump messaging in the sky over Wilmington, Del.

Azi Paybarah contributed to this report.

ST. PETE BEACH, Fla. — President Joe Biden on Sunday toured the worst-hit areas of Florida after Hurricane Milton ripped through the state, while Vice President Kamala Harris visited North Carolina, still recovering from Hurricane Helene, as she sought to balance a final sprint before Election Day with a demonstration of empathy for those reeling from the deadly storms.

Biden’s and Harris’s stops came after a devastating two weeks when a pair of hurricanes devastated the Southeast. Helene, which made landfall late last month and killed more than 200 people, flooded western North Carolina and caused severe damage in Georgia and Florida. Last week, Hurricane Milton hit the west coast of Florida and killed more than a dozen people.

Harris faces a striking challenge as North Carolina, one of the states most damaged by the storms, is also a critical battleground state she is seeking to win in the final three weeks before Election Day. Later Sunday, Harris was set to hold a campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., hundreds of miles from the hardest-hit western part of the state, ahead of early voting that begins in North Carolina later this week.

The trip to Greenville highlighted the delicate balance Harris faces as she seeks to navigate her role as a compassionate leader with that of a presidential candidate in the final three weeks of a deadlocked race. Harris arrived in the state Saturday night and made an unannounced stop at The Pit, a barbecue joint in Raleigh, pitching in with local volunteers to package supplies for a hurricane relief supply drive.

In Florida on Sunday morning, Biden took an aerial tour of the damage in Tampa and St. Petersburg, the cities hardest hit by Milton, and received a briefing from federal, state and local officials. The damage was extensive, with mattresses, filing cabinets, couches and other large pieces of furniture scattered outside wrecked homes.

Residents of the neighborhoods Biden toured had spray-painted some of the debris with heartfelt appeals for assistance. One read, “Mayor, Gov, Mr Pres, Small Businesses Need Help Too.” Another announced, “Family owned and devastated.” Still another begged simply, “Help us.”

After surveying the devastation, Biden laid out the steps the federal government was taking to help Florida and spoke of the personal losses local officials had suffered as a result of the storm, including flooded homes and family cars that were washed away.

“It’s in moments like this we come together to take care of each other, not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans,” Biden said. “Americans who need help, who would help you if you were in the same situation. We are one United States.”

His comments may have been an indirect response to Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has spread misinformation about the federal reaction to the storms and accused Democrats of mishandling the response.

Biden was joined by Florida’s Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, two of his biggest Republican critics. But Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis did not appear with the president, and when reporters asked Biden if he had spoken to the governor Sunday, he responded, “No, I didn’t.”

The president spoke against a poignant backdrop, with a destroyed home behind him and debris on the street beside him. As he walked through the uneven ground leading to the lectern, he held the arm of Cathie Perkins, Pinellas County’s director of emergency management.

“Thankfully, the storm impact was not as cataclysmic as we’d predicted,” Biden said. “But for some individuals, it was cataclysmic. … Entire neighborhoods were flooded and millions [are] without power.”

After Helene devastated mountain towns in North Carolina — areas unaccustomed to dealing with hurricane damage and still struggling to rebuild — Trump incorrectly said the Biden administration had insufficient funds to mount an effective response because it had used its disaster money for migrants. Trump also accused North Carolina officials of withholding aid from Republican areas, an allegation sharply denied by the office of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

On Sunday, Biden announced $612 million in new federal funding to be distributed through six projects aimed at helping communities rebuild after the two storms.

In the days after Helene but before Milton, the White House was more aggressive about proactively releasing information on the federal response, for example announcing each phone call Biden and Harris made to state and local officials. Biden and Harris also held several public briefings about the hurricane and delivered remarks throughout the week about the work the administration was doing to assist the affected states.

These efforts coincided with a bitterly fought campaign that is entering its final, frenzied weeks. Two of the states hit by the storms — North Carolina and Georgia — are pivotal to the hopes of both candidates. More broadly, voters have a history of judging presidential candidates by their competence and compassion following natural disasters.

Polls show Harris and Trump are effectively tied nationally. Across the seven battlegrounds — North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — Harris and Trump are also within the margin of error of each other.

In Pittsburgh on Thursday, former president Barack Obama criticized Trump for spreading misinformation about the storms. Obama, who was holding his first campaign rally for Harris, said Biden and Harris visited the damaged states to meet with officials and comfort families while Trump “started making up stories” about the administration siphoning off aid to give to undocumented migrants.

“Now the people of Florida are dealing with another devastating storm, and I want you to watch what happens over the next few days, just like the last time,” Obama said. “You’re going to have leaders who try to help, and then you have a guy who will just lie about it to score political points.”

SLEEPY EYE, Minn. — Gov. Tim Walz returned to Minnesota this weekend to kick off pheasant season and to attend a high school football game, as the campaign makes more overt efforts to court male voters.

Here, at the site of the Minnesota Governor’s Pheasant Hunting Opener, a tradition since 2011, Walz was in full hunter’s gear, sporting an orange baseball cap featuring the silhouette of a pheasant and a branded vest for the opener of the season.

Walz’s everyman persona and relatability with male voters could prove critical for the campaign’s efforts to close the gender gap. Since being tapped as Harris’s running mate, the campaign has highlighted his background as a former high school football coach and teacher, and his folksy style and history of connecting with rural voters.

Trump is winning men by an average of 10 points according to high-quality public polls tracked by The Washington Post in September. In 2020 exit polls, Trump won men by eight points, and his campaign has focused in recent months on appealing to young men in particular.

But it’s unclear whether the effort landed on the target audience. During the hunt on Saturday, the governor did not fire his gun, a Beretta A400 he said he purchased for trapshooting.

When one potential target came in range of the governor near a small pool of reporters allowed to watch the hunt, Walz chose not to shoot — invoking the unfortunate incident when then Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently endorsed the campaign, accidentally shot his companion during a quail hunt.

“Every vice president joke ever made was about to be made right there,” Walz said.

The Trump campaign was quick to seize on an online video where he appeared to fumble slightly while trying to clear a shotgun. Right-wing social media posters suggested the gun was not his. But Walz told reporters during the hunt that the Beretta was his own, adding that using someone else’s gun would be like “using someone else’s underwear.”

The Trump campaign also criticized Walz for not carrying a gun in another video, mocking the visit as “a pheasant ‘hunting’ photo op” and “a sign of the future under a Harris-Walz administration.”

Chris LaCivita, the Trump campaign’s top strategist, shared AI images of a hunter loading a gun with tampons (a reference to an insulting nickname that stemmed from Walz signing a law requiring public schools to provide menstrual products to students in 4th through 12th grades).

One member of Walz’s hunting party shot a rooster, but the carcass was not recovered. A member of the group said they also spotted some pheasant hens, which cannot be hunted to preserve the population.

Harris recently reminded voters during the presidential debate in September that she owns a Glock and proclaimed, “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”

As a congressman, Walz initially championed gun rights and was active in the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus. He then earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, often wearing a camo hat reading “NRA ENDORSED.”

But Walz transformed into an anti-gun advocate after deadly mass killings at a country music festival in Las Vegas and a high school in Parkland, Fla.

On the trail now, Walz speaks passionately about the need for gun control, often referring to his time as a high school teacher and saying the top priority is protecting children.

“I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. I’m a gun owner,” Walz said at a Wednesday rally in Tucson, telling attendees that he and his running mate respect the Second Amendment and that he was heading to Minnesota for the start of pheasant-hunting season. “I’m all excited to be back there to see this.”

After eating some venison sticks, Walz met with several social influencers: David Clayton, an advocate for homeless veterans; rodeo athlete Ramontay McConnell; and hunting content creator Brandon Adams. In a TikTok video, Clayton asked Walz about bipartisanship and presented him with a fidget spinner for his son, Gus.

Walz told creators that pheasant hunting is his “favorite thing” in part because having dogs around and the ability to move around during the hunt rather than lying in wait such as during a deer hunt.

“Two things about it: the dogs, and for me, I can’t sit still, so it’s moving,” Walz told them. As he then began to discuss his past as a Democrat representing rural districts in the state, members of the news media were removed.

Later, during a stop for a BLT sandwich, Walz did not respond to questions about what he thinks are the reasons for the gender gap, or his plan to win over male voters.

Asked last week about Trump’s appeal to men and his message to men, particularly Black men, Walz touted the campaign’s policies aimed at the middle class and economic opportunity.

“I think we need to make sure we’re getting out to them. We hear what they’re saying,” Walz said in comments to WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. “I think it’s more of taking it to them, making the message tailored.”

On Friday, Walz attended a high school football game as part of that tailored campaign for male voters. He returned to Mankato, Minn., where he once taught and coached, for the crosstown rivalry football game between Mankato East High School and Mankato West High School. Walz was the Mankato West’s defensive coordinator and led the team to the state championship in 1999.

Walz carried a Mountain Dew as he greeted attendees at the game, and then sat in the bleachers signing baseball caps and taking selfies with supporters while seated next to his mother, Darlene Walz.

After huddling with members of the West team, which went on to win the game, Walz said “This is I think best of America, across the country. This is truly ‘Friday Night Lights’ happening here.”

Walz will campaign more in the Midwest on Monday, traveling to neighboring Wisconsin.

Beth Reinhard and Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed to this report.

Two polls released Sunday show that former president Donald Trump is chipping away at Vice President Kamala Harris’s national advantage in the presidential race, as the candidates gear up for the final weeks of the campaign season.

A new ABC News-Ipsos poll, conducted from Oct. 4-8, showed that among likely voters, Harris led Trump 50 percent to 48 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. Last month, the same poll found Harris at 51 percent support among likely voters compared to Trump at 46 percent.

An NBC News poll also conducted from Oct. 4-8 and showed an even split between Trump and Harris, with each garnering 48 percent support among registered voters. In that same poll last month, Harris was up by five points — another result within the poll’s margins.

A CBS News-YouGov poll conducted a few days later, from Oct. 8-11 but released also Sunday, found less of a shift.

Among likely voters nationally, support for Harris was at 51 percent and support for Trump at 48 percent, similar to Harris’s four-point edge last month. Likely voters in battleground states supported Harris over Trump 51 percent to 49 percent in the latest poll. In both cases, Harris’s advantage is within the poll’s margin of error of 2.3 points — which means that each candidate’s support could be 2.3 points higher or lower.

The Washington Post’s presidential polling average, which includes these surveys, shows that little has changed over the past month, and Harris continues to have a two-point advantage nationally.

The latest polls also show other shifts in Trump’s direction.

The ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 56 percent of Americans favor deporting all undocumented immigrants, up 20 points from a Washington Post-ABC News poll eight years ago. The poll also found that Trump maintained a 10-point lead in trust to handle immigration.

In recent rallies, Trump has been leaning more into a nativist, anti-immigrant message and falling back on fearmongering, falsehoods and stereotypes.

In the ABC News poll, about 59 percent said the economy is getting worse. Among registered voters who say the economy is getting worse, Trump led Harris 74 percent to 21 percent.

A New York Times-Siena College poll, conducted from Sept. 29 to Oct. 6, found that Harris’s support among Latino voters is substantially lower than the support Biden is estimated to have received in the 2020 presidential race.

Some 56 percent of Hispanic likely voters said they were backing Harris and 37 percent backing Trump, compared with Biden’s 62 percent support among Hispanic voters in 2020 according to exit polls and comparable sources.

Among Black likely voters, the latest poll found that about 15 percent of Black likely voters said they planned to vote for Trump — up six points compared to 2020.

PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. — Former president Donald Trump, during a campaign rally Sunday in Arizona, proposed a dramatic expansion of the Border Patrol, looking to deepen his commitment to border security — an issue where his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has sought to challenge him.

Addressing an enthusiastic crowd in this border state, Trump promised he would set a goal of hiring 10,000 Border Patrol agents and “immediately” ask Congress to give all agents a 10 percent pay raise. He also pitched a $10,000 “retention and signing bonus” for agents.

“It’s almost like being a great baseball player or football player, but not quite as much money, but not bad, right?” Trump said, surrounded onstage by Border Patrol agents. “We’re going to retain them, and they deserve it. They’ve been treated unbelievably badly.”

Trump did not offer further details, but his pitch is an ambitious and potentially difficult one for an agency that is already struggling to grow its ranks. There are fewer than 20,000 agents with the Border Patrol, responsible for apprehending migrants illegally crossing the border between ports of entry, so Trump’s proposal would mean a 50 percent increase in the agency’s size.

The Harris campaign dismissed the proposals that Trump made Sunday as “phony,” noting that he has previously made promises about border security — like having Mexico pay for a border wall — that have not come to fruition.

“Trump doesn’t care about solving problems, he only wants to run on one,” Harris campaign spokesperson Matt Corridoni said in a statement. “That’s why he killed the bipartisan border bill that would’ve secured the border, despite the fact that it was endorsed by the Border Patrol.”

Harris has been campaigning heavily on her embrace of a bipartisan Senate border deal that Trump helped defeat this year, one that would have added more than 1,500 personnel to Customs and Border Protection, including Border Patrol agents. Trump rallied congressional Republicans against the proposal, giving Democrats an election-year opening on an issue that has historically favored the GOP.

Adam Isacson, a border security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said Trump would be taking on a long-running staffing problem at Border Patrol that stems from a range of factors. One of them, Isacson said, is the extensive background screening for prospective agents, which includes a polygraph test that most candidates fail.

“This has been a chronic problems for many years,” Isacson said of Border Patrol staffing. “Trump would have to really lower hiring standards to get there.”

Isacson also said CBP’s staffing needs are most pressing at ports of entry, which are staffed by CBP officers, not Border Patrol agents. The agency says more than 90 percent of the fentanyl that it intercepts is at ports of entry, where cartels try to sneak it in using vehicles.

Trump has long championed cracking down on illegal immigration, and he is spending the final weeks of the campaign leaning into an especially nativist message. He visited Aurora, Colo., on Friday — the site of false claims he has made about the presence of Venezuelan gang members — and proposed a deportation program under a law that was last invoked during World War II to intern immigrants.

Trump warned Sunday that if Harris wins the November election, “the entire country will be turned into a migrant camp.”

In an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday morning, 46 percent of likely voters nationwide said they trusted Trump more than Harris on immigration. Thirty-six percent said they trusted Harris more.

In its advertising, the Harris campaign has seized on Trump’s opposition to the bipartisan legislation and promised she “will hire thousands more border agents” if elected. Trump continued criticizing the bill Sunday, saying he never needed legislation when he was president to “close the border.”

The Senate agreement earned the support of the National Border Patrol Council, a union of Border Patrol agents that is otherwise strongly aligned with Trump. The union’s past and current leaders spoke at Trump’s rally Sunday, urging voters not to believe Harris’s promise that she will secure the border.

During his remarks — which featured a backdrop of supporters waving signs reading, “Secure Our Border” — Trump brought at least a dozen Border Patrol agents onstage to make the union’s endorsement official. The group backed him in 2016 and 2020.

The CBP has already been offering generous incentives to address staffing shortages in recent months. The agency announced in January that new Border Patrol agents could be eligible for as much as $30,000 in incentives.

Last year, John Modlin, the chief Border Patrol agent in the Tucson sector, told a House committee that the Border Patrol needed about 22,000 agents to do its job. A May 2023 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general noted that “migrant encounters surged without corresponding growth in staffing” over recent fiscal years.

After he campaigned Saturday in solidly blue California, Trump’s Arizona rally took him to more friendly territory. The site of the event was in Yavapai County, where Trump defeated President Joe Biden in 2020 by nearly 30 percentage points.

Arizona is nonetheless a battleground state after Trump carried it in 2016 but narrowly lost it in 2020.

Trump’s latest Arizona stop came hours after the airing of a Trump TV interview where he suggested “radical left lunatics” could cause unspecified problems on Election Day that would need to be handled by the military. Harris’s campaign denounced the comments, saying they “should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.”

During the rally, Trump elevated his attacks on Harris and included multiple claims that are untrue or unsubstantiated. He repeated his assertion that she had never worked at a McDonald’s and the falsehood that she was the first Democrat to drop out of the presidential race in 2020.

He also accused Harris of being one of the “creators” of the campaign to defund the police, something she has never supported, though she has in the past broadly favored the notion of reexamining the relative money spent on law enforcement and social services. He also said she tried to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is likewise untrue.

Trump inflated a false claim that Harris would raise taxes on “typical American families” by $3,000, up from a prior false claim of a $2,6oo increase. Harris has said she would not boost taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000.

Joseph Menn contributed to this report.

A man was arrested in Riverside County, Calif., and charged with illegal possession of a loaded firearm and a high-capacity magazine after he tried to enter a rally Donald Trump held in the desert area in Coachella, sheriff’s officials announced Sunday.

The man, whom police questioned as he approached the venue in his car, claimed he was a journalist and had VIP access, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said during a news conference Sunday. Trump was not yet at the event when the man was arrested outside the venue Saturday, Bianco said.

The sheriff’s office gave the suspect’s name as Vem Miller, 49, of Las Vegas but cautioned that he had multiple IDs and passports with different names. He was released after posting a $5,000 bond Saturday, jail records show.

Bianco said his office “prevented another assassination attempt,” but federal law enforcement does not appear so far to be treating this incident as such. Local law enforcement provided no evidence Sunday indicating that Miller had been seeking to harm Trump.

The Secret Service said in a statement Sunday that Trump was not in danger. “While no federal arrest has been made at this time, the investigation is ongoing,” a joint statement from the Secret Service, the FBI and Justice Department said.

Miller did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday night but told the Press-Enterprise that he had the guns only for his own safety. He told the Southern California newspaper that he supports Trump and notified police at a checkpoint that guns were in his trunk as a courtesy.

“I’m the last person that would cause any violence and harm to anybody,” Miller told the newspaper.

Miller is scheduled to appear in court in January, according to jail records.

Miller works for America Happens Network, a site that says it aims to be “the anti-thesis of what the mocking bird media has to offer.”

Bianco said Miller had a fake license plate, which prompted deputies to investigate further. They found an unregistered handgun and shotgun in his vehicle, Bianco said.

Federal officials have said that Trump was targeted in assassination attempts twice since July, so Bianco said his deputies were following a “detailed” security plan Saturday. Bianco said he had planned to attend the rally with family members.

“The planning that my team did and the actions of my deputies … is exactly what we had hoped for,” Bianco said. “And we know that we prevented something bad from happening, and it’s irrelevant what that bad was going to be.”

Ryan Routh, who has been accused of attempting to assassinate Trump after he hid out in the bushes of Trump’s Florida golf course with weapons, has been ordered to remain in custody pending trial since his arrest in September. Routh pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include federal gun and attempted assassination charges.

In July, federal investigators said Thomas Matthew Crooks shot at Trump at the former president’s rally in Butler, Pa., before he was killed by a Secret Service countersniper.