TUCSON, Ariz. — In a stop here Wednesday afternoon, Sen. JD Vance told a crowd of supporters that “Trump’s message to illegal aliens who are in this country without any right to be here, pack your bags. Because in four months, you’re going home.”

Fifteen miles north later in the day, Gov. Tim Walz told supporters that Vice President Kamala Harris would work for “what you want … an earned pathway to citizenship for those who’ve lived here in this country for years.”

In a span of roughly six hours, the vice-presidential candidates offered voters a clear split screen in how Democrats and Republicans view one of this year’s more salient electoral issues: immigration and the southern border.

Trump and Vance’s campaign has been heavily focused on closing the southern border and assailing broad swaths of immigrants, often with misleading or false claims. Harris and Walz have conversely shaped their message around cracking down on asylum claims and illegal crossings while showing compassion for the millions of immigrants in the United States, many who fled their home countries in search of a better life.

The candidates’ visits underscore the significance of the state, which President Joe Biden narrowly flipped in 2020. Pima County, where Tucson is located, leans blue — Biden won the county by more than 18 percentage points in 2020, an increase from Hillary Clinton’s win in 2016. Harris will campaign in the state Thursday night, and Trump will do so on Sunday.

A poll of likely voters in the state released this week found 40 percent said immigration and border security is the single most important issue when deciding who to vote for in November. Polls have also shown that voters trust Republicans over Democrats when it comes to the border, and in a border state like Arizona, many voters said the issue is top of mind.

Vance kicked off the day at the at the Tucson Speedway racetrack, taking the stage 15 minutes early and speaking for around 20 minutes — telling supporters he would condense his remarks because of the intense heat at the outdoor venue. He spoke to several hundred attendees without a teleprompter, predicting that Republicans will flip the state, while flanked by two giant statues of anthropomorphic cactuses wearing sunglasses, red bandannas and cowboy hats.

Vance devoted the event to criticizing Harris — showing jeering attendees a clip of her declining to distance herself from Biden in an interview on “The View”; blaming her for the increased cost of food, energy and housing; and framing her as unable to fix problems she helped create as vice president. He did not mention Walz during the event, though he did discuss his opponent later in the day at an event in Mesa.

“Tucson is facing a historic border crisis and a historic increase in crime and fentanyl and drug trafficking and sex trafficking. Kamala Harris bears the failures. She bears the responsibilities for the failures of the Joe Biden regime. Don’t let her run away from a record,” Vance said, claiming “the wide open southern border has affected Tucson, maybe more than any other community in our country.”

Supporters waved signs with messages like “Trump secure border Kamala open border” and “Latino Americans for Trump.” Many wore shirts featuring the photo of Trump moments after he was shot in the ear in an assassination attempt earlier this year. Outside the venue, vendors sold other swag, including shirts that depicted Trump in a mariachi outfit.

Bob Padgett, 79, an attendee at the Vance event from Oro Valley, praised him as “very bright, very authentic, and his success story is over the top.”

Asked about Walz’s nearby appearance, Padgett said “Dope. D-O-P-E.” He said that Walz lost credibility after inconsistencies in his record were identified, like Walz claiming to be in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests though he wasn’t there until later that summer. (Walz said he misspoke).

Walz later took the stage at Palo Verde High Magnet School over two hours late, long after the school gymnasium hit capacity. He drew a larger crowd than Vance, but hundreds of supporters waiting outside in the 98 degree heat were turned away by event staff who said that no one else was allowed inside on order of the fire marshal. Following the directive, the venue held one of the smaller crowds Walz has addressed in recent weeks, but the supporters who made it inside made the most of delays by dancing in large groups to Beyoncé and doing the Cupid Shuffle.

Walz, speaking off a teleprompter, told supporters that border crossings are now lower than they were under Trump and that Harris worked to negotiate a bipartisan border deal that Trump blocked for electoral reasons.

“This issue should not divide us. It should unite us. She wants a solution,” Walz said.

Walz continued, “[Trump] came down here, he comes down to Arizona and tells you, ‘Oh, I’ll build a big, beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it.’ He had four years, he built like two percent. Mexico paid nothing.”

Unlike Vance, he explicitly attacked his opponent by name multiple times during his speech, calling him out for saying he created stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets and for his answer on family separation during the debate.

As attendees streamed out of the high school past large flags reading “Keep abortion legal” and vendors hawking stacks of “Dogs Against Trump” and “Cat Ladies for Kamala” buttons, Walz fans projected the same confidence as the Vance supporters across town hours before — both sides confident that Tucson will be close, but is theirs to lose.

“I love him. He’s just a down-to-earth, really good guy. He’s almost like the guy that politicians want to pretend to be, he really is,” Lori Gunnell, 63, a supporter from Bisbee, said of Walz. She shuddered at mention of Vance.

“I just think he’s creepy as hell, I really do. And I think he’s an opportunistic … He said Trump was like Hitler, and now he’s his sidekick. And I’m like, I don’t trust him,” she said of Vance.

Both vice-presidential contenders also targeted portions of their speeches toward Latino voters — a key voting group who in polling has shown some drifting away from traditionally supporting Democrats.

“Our message to Kamala Harris is, why don’t you show some compassion for your own citizens and for your own people? Close down this border,” Vance said.

“Latinos in particular ought to be pissed off about Kamala Harris’s wide open southern border,” he added. “Think about what an insult it is to Latinos who came to this country, whose parents or grandparents came to this country, who waited in line, who paid the fees, who worked hard, who did it the right way. It is an insult to them to have Kamala Harris welcome people who break our laws.”

Walz’s rally coincided with the launch of the campaign’s new effort to reach Latino men, called Hombres con Harris. Actor and singer Jaime Camil told attendees at the rally, “There is so much on the line for the Latino communities across the country, for our livelihoods, our health care, and for our families.”

The Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that repeatedly published bogus stories claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, has settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers whom the site falsely reported had tampered with the election results in their state.

A notice of the settlement was filed on the Missouri Courts website on Monday afternoon. “The Parties have reached agreement to settle all claims and counterclaims asserted in the … action,” the notice read. The language specified that “the Parties respectfully request that this Court vacate the trial date set in this matter and stay this matter until March 29, 2025, at which point the Parties will dismiss this matter pending satisfaction of the terms of the Parties’ settlement agreement.”

The terms of the settlement, which was first reported by the Gateway Journalism Review, were not disclosed.

“The dispute between the parties has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” according to a statement issued by the legal team for Freeman and her daughter, Moss. Protect Democracy is representing the two women, along with several private law firms and attorneys and the Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.

Jim Hoft, the founder and owner of the Gateway Pundit, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

But the six-month delay between the announcement of the settlement and the March 29 date could signify that there are certain requirements that the site needs to fulfill to satisfy the terms of the settlement, according to legal experts.

In April 2022, Freeman and Moss settled a similar claim with One America News Network. Terms were not disclosed. OANN later broadcast a statement saying that a Georgia investigation by the state’s officials had shown that the women “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night.”

The Gateway Pundit wrote a series of articles about the 2020 presidential election amplifying spurious claims that Freeman and Moss and former Dominion executive Eric Coomer helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. The Gateway Pundit denied wrongdoing and previously said it was seeking bankruptcy protection to fight against “progressive liberal lawfare attacks” against the site.

In July, a federal judge in Florida threw out a bankruptcy case filed by the Gateway Pundit, ruling that the site sought bankruptcy protection in “bad faith” to avoid having to pay potential damages in defamation suits related to the site’s reporting on the 2020 election.

The ruling allowed the defamation cases, which had been held up during the bankruptcy proceedings, to proceed.

Moss had served as a poll worker in Fulton County for more than a decade. In 2020, she urged her mother to join her.

Their lives changed irrevocably on Dec. 10, 2020, when Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump’s top campaign lawyer, publicly claimed at a state senate hearing that the mother-daughter pair had rigged the outcome in their state. Giuliani and his allies claimed the two poll workers could be seen cheating on behalf of Biden on surveillance video at a massive vote-counting facility inside Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.

Showing choppy black-and-white footage captured by overhead cameras, the team claimed that Freeman and Moss had pulled mystery “suitcases” full of forged ballots from under a table and run them, in some cases three times, through tabulation machines. They claimed that Freeman and Moss passed a memory stick between them to try to hack into the tabulation machines — an act that Giuliani described as a “powerful smoking gun.”

That day, the Gateway Pundit published the first of 58 articles on the women that would appear over the next year and a half. The Gateway Pundit’s stories cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!”

In the days after the first allegations, the Trump campaign released ads featuring footage from the December hearing. Trump himself called Freeman a “professional vote scammer and hustler.”

The claims were false, according to Gabriel Sterling, a top aide to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who distributed and explained the full surveillance video in the days following the hearing. Sterling showed how Giuliani’s team had selectively edited the tape to suggest the boxes had been smuggled in. Giuliani’s team had also obscured the moment when the ballot boxes — not suitcases, but authorized storage cases for ballots — were placed under the table in open view of news media and Republican poll watchers after county election officials announced that they would be going home for the evening. Only after Raffensperger’s office instructed the county not to suspend the count that evening did Freeman and Moss pull the ballot cases back out from under the table to resume their work.

The women would also later explain that the “memory stick” they had allegedly passed between them was a mint.

None of the explanations stopped them from becoming targets of harassment, threats and racist attacks. “It was just a lot of horrible things there,” Moss said at a hearing in June 2022 before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Many of the messages were racist and “hateful,” said Moss, who, like her mother, is Black.

“A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’ ” In one instance, a publicist for hip-hop artist and Trump ally Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, confronted Freeman at her home and urged her to confess to the fraud or she would go to jail. Freeman refused. She also went into hiding.

“I lost my name, I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman testified. “I’ve lost my sense of security — all because a group of people, starting with Number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”

Last year, in the midst of a defamation suit filed against him by Freeman and Moss that he eventually lost, Giuliani declared in a court filing that he was no longer contesting their claims that his statements were false.

Although Giuliani lost his Moss-Freeman defamation suit, he has avoided paying out the $148 million awarded by the court. The two women sued him in August in an attempt to seize his assets, including his condos in New York and Florida, and also his New York Yankees World Series rings — among the items he listed as assets when he filed for bankruptcy during the defamation case. A status conference scheduled for Oct. 17 in federal court in the Southern District of New York will hear arguments related to that case.

The Gateway Pundit still faces a separate defamation suit from Coomer, the former Dominion Voting Systems executive who was falsely accused by Trump allies of helping to swing the 2020 election.

One of the more consistent criticisms of the news media over the past decade or two has been that it is overly reliant on coverage of the “horse race” — that is, a focus on who is likely to win an election rather than stories about the actual candidates and their positions.

At times, that criticism is fair. New polling data provides new information about a campaign that triggers a response from the news industry that consistent rhetoric from candidates doesn’t. The repetition of the word “new” in the preceding sentence is not an accident, of course. It’s also often the case that news outlets have covered candidates and their positions but, since those positions don’t generally change much, those stories are displaced by the newer developments.

But there’s another reason that news outlets cover developments in who’s likely to win: Readers and viewers are often very interested in the answer to that question! There is demand for analyses of the state of the race and its trajectory, quite understandably. That’s more true of races seen as more important, like the contest for the White House.

With that admittedly defensive context established, we can now turn our attention to the point of this article: differentiating between assessments of the likely outcome of the race that are useful and those that are garbage. Both exist! None is perfect! And some predictors that are garbage or garbage-approximate might end up close to the mark simply by virtue of the broken-clock truism. If you want to understand what might happen next month, though, it’s useful to know where to look.

Without further ado, here is an assessment of some of those predictive vehicles, arranged from least to most sophisticated.

Social media surveys

These fall into the category of “garbage.”

To be clear, we’re talking here about polls conducted on platforms such as X (né Twitter). Random user @PartisanDude2 asks his 200,000 followers if they plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump, and 85 percent of those users — who followed him because they like his pro-Harris commentary — say they plan to vote for the vice president. This doesn’t tell us much.

It’s important to highlight a precise reason this doesn’t tell us much: because the respondents can self-select. There are lots of other reasons, too, like that bot accounts can weigh in, as can foreign users, and like that there’s no reason to think that any respondents are registered to vote or plan to cast a ballot. This issue of people being able to choose to participate, though, is worth remembering.

Because the next predictive vehicle is …

Betting markets

Betting markets, sites where people can invest in the likelihood of a particular electoral outcome, are relatively new and exist in a murky and evolving legal landscape. The theory, though, is uncomplicated: Let people put money on how they expect an election to unfold, and the wisdom of the market will produce predictive results.

These markets don’t have a lengthy track record in the United States that allows us to determine just how often that theory might be borne out. You can probably see one problem immediately, though, which is that the markets are going to overweight the beliefs of people with the time and personality to spend money betting on campaigns.

And then there’s the problem of self-selection. One X user noted this week, for example, that the 2024 presidential-contest betting on the site Polymarket was being swayed by one pro-Trump bettor with very deep pockets. That person might simply believe fervently in Trump’s chances, certainly, making his or her purchase of shares in Trump’s victory seem like a wise investment. But that belief is shifting the odds for everyone else.

Past predictors

Another way in which people attempt to predict the outcome of the election is to look at certain indicators that correlate to past results, like presidential approval ratings and shifts in the economy. The most famous purveyor of this approach is American University professor Allan Lichtman, who generates media attention every four years with his assessments of what the indicators he looks at say about the upcoming race.

So how has he done? Well, Lichtman predicted that Joe Biden would win in 2020, which he did, and that Trump would win four years before that … which he did, despite losing the popular vote. In 2000, Lichtman predicted that Al Gore would win, his sole “wrong” prediction since 1984 — except that Gore won the popular vote, too. In national races where the popular-vote margin was 3 percentage points or less, in other words, Lichtman is 2 for 3, depending on whether you want to say he got 2000 or 2016 wrong.

This year, he says Harris will emerge victorious.

Statistically weighted polls

We have, at last, arrived at attempts to actually measure support among American voters.

Before we get too far, though, let’s dispel some myths. No, pollsters don’t only speak to people with landlines. (For years, pollsters have called cellphones and, these days, reach people by text message, with — controlled, limit — online questionnaires and using ongoing panels.) No, polling isn’t irretrievably broken as demonstrated by misses in 2016 swing-state polling. (2018 and 2022 polling was very accurate, for example.) No, talking to respondents who aren’t perfectly representative of the voting population doesn’t mean that results are necessarily wrong. (Pollsters use mathematical weighting to compensate for differences between who they are talking to and the target population.)

This isn’t to say that polling is perfect, of course. For one thing, election polls are dependent on predictions about who will vote; get that wrong and your poll’s in trouble. But no one is more interested in getting polling right than the pollsters whose reputations and livelihood depend on their being accurate.

The business model for betting markets is making money on betting. If they get the results right, great. The business model for pollsters is providing accurate assessments of opinion.

Most pollsters. There are polling firms that work for candidates or that seem to have found a niche in providing partisan media outlets with talking points. 538’s Nathaniel Rakich recently wrote a guide to reading political polls that addresses this and other useful considerations. It’s worth a look.

Election polls also tend to jump around a lot, particularly in a close race. As we’ve noted before, these polls are not meant nor designed to be able to tell you which of two equally-supported candidates is going to win. There are various considerations — again, well-known to pollsters! — that can affect results. There’s the margin of (sampling) error, a statistical calculation of how much uncertainty applies to the poll. There is that question about the electorate. There’s a big difference in the margin of error between a poll of 100 people and a poll of 600 people — but not much difference between a poll of 600 people and a poll of 1,100 people.

Math can get weird, so it’s worth remembering that a 49 percent to 47 percent poll is almost always best read as “tied.” Not very satisfying, but accurate.

Polling averages

One way to accommodate those mathematical fluctuations is with an average of polls. For this part, let’s use an example.

Imagine a race between candidates from two parties, the Circles and the Squares. Over the last 100 days of the election, both parties have their conventions and both campaigns are rocked by scandals. The actual support each candidate has — that is, the support each candidate would see if the election were that day — goes up and down in a range from 45 percent to 50 percent, as below.

This data is fake, mind you, generated solely for illustrative purposes. For the same reason, we also generated polling of the race from four different pollsters, each with different margins of error (from 4 to 6 percent), different polling frequencies and different “house effects” — tendencies of different pollsters to advantage one party or the other.

Below we show how those four firms “polled” the race. (To generate these, we shifted the “real” value of support for a given day based on randomized consideration of house effects and margins of error.) Firm A had a low margin of error (MOE) and low house effect. B had a high MOE and low house effect. C had a higher MOE and modest house effect, while D had a low MOE and big house effect. We assumed each poll lasted three days; the release date of the poll (the day after it was completed) is shown.

All over the place! With 50 days until the election, for example, at a point when the “real” support had the Circle Party with a 1-point lead, the most recent polls from the four pollsters showed Square plus-2, Circle plus-6, Circle plus-3 and Circle plus-6. Hard to know what to think!

One issue is that those polls were taken at different times. Another is that the race changed in the days before the 50-day mark, as our “real” data shows. Polls wouldn’t yet have captured the shift.

If we look at the average of the four polls (using a seven-day average of when polls were actually being conducted), the trends become clearer.

In fact, the average comports well with the “real” values. At the 50-day mark, Circle still has a 4-point lead in the average, but in less than a week it has the two candidates running even.

Notice that the end result, though, isn’t that accurate: the average has a 7-point Circle lead in a race that ends up being Circle plus-2. Why? In part because the race shifted in the last few days, something not captured in the polls. This is, in part, what happened in 2016: Undecided and independent voters shifted to Donald Trump in the closing days of that race.

Overall, though, the average was a better predictor of “real” sentiment over the course of the last 100 days. It was, on average, about 0.1 points away from the “real” margin between the candidates on any given day. The pollsters ranged between 0.5 points (Pollster C) and 1.7 points (Pollster D) away from the “real” values on the dates their polls were released — in part because the release dates of polls themselves are later than support is actually measured.

Again, this is just an example, done with randomized values. But the point is the same: Averages end up giving a better sense of the course of an election, albeit an imperfect one. And the more polling, the better the average tends to do.

Weighted polling averages

One way in which poll watchers and the media try to ensure more accuracy is by eliminating or de-emphasizing dubious or historically inaccurate polls. The Washington Post’s ongoing average uses only results from certain public polls. (One effect of this is that our average moves more slowly than others.) Nate Silver’s The Silver Bulletin average gives more credence to pollsters with better track records. 538 does a little of both.

There’s a lot of complicated math that undergirds this, more than was worth generating for our fake polling above. (Particularly since it was designed to be tumultuous.) That math also includes adjustments that can themselves be subjective.

How effective are the results? Well, we don’t have a huge pool of examples of applying this approach to presidential elections — Silver, the best-known of those who compile such averages, has only been doing it since 2008 — and this cycle includes several new entrants, some with new models. So … we’ll see?

Election forecasts

Of course, those national averages are also hobbled by the same asterisk that tripped up Lichtman: The president isn’t decided by the national vote. So Silver Bulletin and 538 and others do election forecasts, running hundreds of iterations of the election with state-level results determined by consideration of state-level polling averages (which are themselves often dependent on national polling) and occasional other factors like economic data.

Right now, 538 suggests that Harris would win 53 times if the election were run 100 times as polls stand at the moment. This doesn’t mean she has a 6-point lead, given that Trump wins 47 times out of 100. A 6-point lead is a big lead. A 53-times-to-47-times advantage is a narrow advantage, if you can say it’s much of an advantage at all.

If I said that 53 percent of the judges in a baking competition thought you had the better pie — a measure of support equivalent to a polling average — you’d be pretty excited about your odds. If I said that you had a 53-in-100 chance of being brained by a meteor as you went to receive your trophy — analogous to the forecast — you’d be pretty unhappy about your imminent victory.

After the 2016 election, 538 (then under Silver’s direction) received a lot of criticism for suggesting that Hillary Clinton was likely to win. But the site gave Trump a 3-in-10 chance of winning — hardly a prediction that such an outcome was impossible.

The current forecasts are probably the most useful predictor of what will happen, precisely because they demonstrate so much uncertainty about the outcome. Unlike Lichtman or the anonymous investors in betting markets, forecasts based on polling averages suggest that the race is (and has long been) a toss-up.

Might as well add that to our list, in fact:

Tossing a coin

This is admittedly not the most sophisticated means of determining who will win. But it remains the approach that best captures the state of the race.

Former president Donald Trump said Thursday that CBS News should lose a broadcasting license over how it edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, even though the federal government does not issue licenses for such television networks.

It was the latest example of Trump calling for media outlets that have angered him to lose their rights to broadcast — a push that evokes government control of media, which is a hallmark of authoritarianism.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel denounced Trump’s latest call targeting CBS, flatly rejecting an idea the agency has ruled out under both the Biden and Trump administrations.

“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” Rosenworcel said in a statement. “As I’ve said before, the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

CBS declined to comment.

Trump has been fixated for days on Harris’s interview with “60 Minutes,” which came after he backed out of sitting for his own interview with the show, according to the network. Since Harris’s interview aired Monday night, Trump has focused on how it featured a shorter version of Harris’s answer to a question about Israel than was shown in a clip previewing the interview.

It is standard for television networks to edit interviews for broadcast, especially to fit time restraints.

“Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better,” Trump claimed in a post on his social media platform Thursday morning. “A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.”

Trump went on to baselessly accuse Democrats of making CBS “do this,” calling it “Election Interference” and saying the party should be forced to concede the election.

Trump raised the issue again during an afternoon speech in Detroit, claiming the edited Harris interview “will go down as the single biggest scandal in broadcast history.”

The FCC says on its website that its “role in overseeing program content is very limited.” The agency licenses individual broadcast stations, not networks in their entirety.

“We do not license TV or radio networks (such as CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox) or other organizations that stations have relationships with, such as PBS or NPR, except if those entities are also station licensees,” the FCC website says.

It is not the first time Trump has called for a network to lose its broadcasting license because he was not happy with what aired or with how he was portrayed. Trump last month suggested ABC should lose its license over its moderating of the debate between him and Harris. Rosenworcel also rejected that suggestion at the time.

Even the FCC head during Trump’s presidency, Ajit Pai, had dismissed Trump’s talk of targeting broadcast licenses.

“I believe in the First Amendment,” Pai said in 2017 after Trump suggested NBC should face consequences for critical coverage of his administration. “The FCC, under my leadership, will stand for the First Amendment. Under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

Democrats have long criticized Trump over his authoritarian tendencies, both in his public comments and in his affinities for certain foreign leaders. He said last year that he would not be a dictator if he wins the November election — “except for Day 1,” a comment that Harris has continued to highlight through the final weeks of their race.

The “60 Minutes” episode broadcast Monday — a special pre-election episode — sparked controversy in the days before it aired. CBS said Trump pulled out of an interview with the show because it would be fact-checked, per usual. Trump’s campaign said Trump never fully committed to the interview but also acknowledged that fact-checking was an area of dispute.

Jeremy Barr contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump asserted in Detroit on Thursday that he had new proof that he was awarded Michigan’s “man of the year” years ago, dredging up a debunked claim he’s repeatedly made over the past decade.

In an address to the Detroit Economic Club aimed at pitching policies to rescue the American auto industry, the Republican presidential nominee said he had asked his team to find proof that he received the honor.

“And guess what? They found it,” Trump claimed, before pulling a printout of an article from the Oakland Press from his suit pocket. “It says, ‘Oakland County GOP to honor Donald Trump, former president, to speak at upcoming Lincoln Day fundraising dinner.’ And it says down here, ‘The county party gave Trump the man of the year award at the dinner, too.’”

The only problem? The story has since been corrected to clarify that Trump was not honored as Michigan’s man of the year in 2013.

Trump claimed he won the Michigan award at least 20 times while he was in office, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker database, and he’s repeated the claim on the campaign trail this cycle. But there’s been no evidence that Trump’s assertion is true.

The Post previously noted that factcheck.org investigated the claim and it appeared that Trump was referring to a 2013 dinner hosted by a county Republican Party organization, which presented him with token gifts — including a statuette of Abraham Lincoln. But a former Republican congressman who organized the dinner said Trump did not receive an award, and the group has never given out “man of the year” awards.

The printout of the Oakland Press story that Trump held up on Thursday in Detroit had most recently been updated in 2023, a photograph from the event shows. But an editor’s note at the top of the story as it appeared online Thursday afternoon states that the publication is “setting the record straight after the former president incorrectly cited the 2013 Man of the Year award during a recent speech to the Detroit Economic Club.”

“A reference in the 2023 story, headlined ‘Oakland County GOP to honor Donald Trump,’ about the 2013 award was incorrect. Trump was the keynote speaker at the 2013 dinner in Novi, which drew a record crowd. He was not honored as Man of the Year. During the 2023 dinner, Trump was honored as the Man of the Decade which was reported in the 2023 story,” the editor’s note states.

An archived version of the story from 2023 obtained by The Post shows that the Oakland Press initially quoted Amber Harris, then the executive director of the Oakland County Republican Party, as having said the county GOP gave Trump a “Man of the Year” award in 2013. The author of the story, Peg McNichol, wrote Thursday in a since-deleted post on X that she “made an error” using that quote in the story without verifying the claim’s veracity.

The Oakland County Republican Party claimed in a Facebook post Thursday evening that it had awarded Trump the man of the year honor in 2013, citing the former county party chair, as well as unnamed attendees and event organizers. But the post offered no documentation to back up its assertion and claimed without evidence the Oakland Press was “lying.”

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement that it was “widely reported” more than a year ago that Trump received the “2013 Man of the Decade award.” Trump did receive a “man of the decade” honor from the Michigan county’s GOP, but that honor was given last year and not in 2013.

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

PITTSBURGH — Former president Barack Obama on Thursday made a direct, impassioned plea to black men to support Vice President Kamala Harris — a key demographic she is struggling to mobilize — at times admonishing them for thinking about sitting out the presidential contest and suggesting sexism might be at play.

During an unannounced stop at a campaign field office in Pittsburgh, which came just hours before he was set to appear at his first campaign rally for Harris, Obama said he wanted to “speak some truths” and address black men specifically, making his most stark and direct remarks about their hesitancy in supporting Harris to date.

“My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” Obama said, adding that it “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

Obama questioned how voters, and black voters specifically, could be on the fence about whether to support Harris or former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.

“On the one hand, you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experience,” Obama said, ticking off a list of Harris’s policy proposals. In Trump, he added, “you have someone who has consistently shown disregard, not just for the communities, but for you as a person,” Obama said. “And you are thinking about sitting out?”

The former president then directly addressed what he thought might be contributing to the soft support among black men: some men’s discomfort with the idea of electing the first female president.

“And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said. “Because part of it makes me think— and I’m speaking to men directly— part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

Obama’s comments created a remarkable moment: The nation’s first Black president urging other Black men to rally behind potentially the first female president, who is a woman of color, amid suggestions that the voting bloc is showing a notable lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy. Harris is Black and Indian American.

The “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time,” Obama said. “When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting. And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

Obama began hitting the campaign trail on Thursday, stopping first in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, perhaps the most important to Harris’s path to victory. In all seven battleground states — which also include Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona — Trump and Harris are effectively tied, as the Harris campaign has said it expects a tightly contested presidential race that will come down to razor-thin margins.

Obama’s efforts will largely be focused on states and counties where early voting has begun in the hope that his appearances can then motivate voters to immediately act and cast their ballots. But his message to black men on Thursday marked a departure from the upbeat and joyful message Harris, her running mate Tim Walz and other surrogates have largely adhered to in their efforts to motivate the small number of undecided voters across the critical battleground states and demographic groups that Harris is struggling with.

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said in an interview that the direct address to black men was the “right thing to do,” adding that Obama can motivate other key groups Harris needs to win.

“He is one of the most broadly popular figures and impactful surrogates within the party,” Axelrod said. “But he has particular reach into some of the constituencies she needs to motivate: younger voters, and particularly younger Black voters.”

Aides said Obama and Harris are likely to appear together at some point before the election on Nov. 5, but it is not yet clear when. In the final 25 days before the presidential election, Harris, Walz and the campaign’s most effective surrogates are blanketing the airwaves and crisscrossing the country hoping to convince the small number of undecided voters to support Harris.

They are also targeting people who have not yet decided whether to vote — particularly young voters and people of color, groups that Obama turned out in record numbers during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Harris was campaigning on the other side of the country from Obama on Thursday as the campaign works to reach as many voters as possible each day. She pre-taped a Univision town hall in Las Vegas Thursday afternoon, then was scheduled to deliver remarks at a campaign rally in Arizona later in the evening.

Obama’s efforts will also focus on supporting House and Senate Democrats, including Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who released an ad featuring Obama earlier this week. Democrats are hoping to hold on to their razor-thin Senate majority and retake the House of Representatives.

Harris and Obama have a relationship that dates back about 20 years, an Obama aide said. The two first met on the campaign trail when Obama was running a long-shot bid for one of Illinois’s U.S. Senate seats and Harris was an early supporter. Since 2020, when Harris became President Joe Biden’s running mate, Obama has been in regular touch with Harris “to provide counsel and be a sounding board whenever asked,” the Obama aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personal relationship.

The two have also been in regular touch since Harris launched her presidential bid less than three months ago after Biden’s exit from the presidential race. Obama told Harris he would help her in the final months and weeks of the campaign, including fundraising, policy or strategic advice and hitting the campaign trail, the Obama aide said.

LAS VEGAS — Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday presented the stakes of the 2024 election to Latino voters — many of whom fled authoritarian regimes — as a fight for the future of American democracy in the face of Donald Trump’s vow to be a dictator on his first day in office.

Harris faced intense questions during a Univision town hall with undecided Latino voters who asked about an array of issues, including the Biden administration’s response to devastating hurricanes, immigration policy, reproductive rights and the high cost of living. And one of her most impassioned responses came when she talked about the stark difference between her and the former president.

“Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator on Day One. Many people come from backgrounds and countries of origin, and we know what that means when you’re talking about someone who wants to be president of the United States and wants to be a dictator, and what that means in terms of taking freedoms from their people,” she said, referring to Trump’s previous pledge that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for on Day One.”

The vice president was responding to a question from Mario Sigbaum, a 70-year-old independent voter from Santa Monica, Calif., who shared that the circumstances surrounding President Joe Biden’s decision to quit the race in July and Harris’s ascension as the Democratic nominee had him leaning toward voting for Trump. Sigbaum said he remains undecided; he pressed Harris to clarify the process leading up to her becoming the nominee.

The vice president acknowledged that it was “unprecedented,” adding that “this is an unusual time where we are literally having a choice as the American people about choosing a path either that is about rule of law, democracy or something that is about admiring dictators and autocracy.”

Trump has frequently praised authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“Do we support a democracy and the Constitution of the United States, or are we going to go on the path of somebody who is a sore loser and lost the election in 2020 and tried to have a violent mob undo it?” she asked in describing the choice before voters.

She cited what happened in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as thousands of Trump supporters stormed the building to stop the certification of Biden’s win. Harris said that was one reason many Republicans who once backed Trump are supporting her candidacy, calling what happened following the last presidential election “a bridge too far” for some people.

The town hall, billed as “Noticias Univision Presents: Latinos Ask, Kamala Harris Responds,” was held at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where Harris fielded questions before several dozen Latino voters from different parts of the country. The event is part of a Sun Belt swing for the Democratic presidential nominee, who also planned to hold a rally in Phoenix.

Separately, as the candidates focus on the battleground states in the final weeks of the campaign, former president Barack Obama was campaigning for Harris at a rally in Pittsburgh on Thursday night.

Trump is scheduled to participate in his own Univision town hall next week in Miami.

The participation of both candidates in Univision’s town halls underscores the fight for Latino voters this election.

Latinos were part of the coalition that helped elect Biden in 2020, but the president had been facing an erosion in support among these voters before he ended his reelection bid in late July. Harris’s candidacy offered a boost of energy among Latinos that has been visible in polls, but she still hasn’t reached the level of support she needs and lags behind past Democratic candidates’ performances.

A new Pew Research Center poll found Harris leading Trump among Latinos by 16 percentage points, as she garnered 54 percent of registered Hispanic voters to Trump’s 38 percent. In 2020, exit polls showed Biden winning this group by 33 points, with 65 percent of Latinos backing him compared with 32 percent who voted for Trump.

Harris tackled the issue of immigration and border security multiple times during the town hall. Immigration has been an issue where she and Biden have been closely scrutinized by both liberals and conservatives. She argued that the United States can both secure the border and offer pathways to citizenship for immigrants already here.

“I think it is a false choice for people who say you do one or the other. I believe we must do both. I believe we can do both. And my pledge to you is to work on that. The solutions are in hand. We need the political will,” she said.

In one emotional moment, Harris faced a question from a 40-year-old woman, who lives in Las Vegas, who cried as she talked about how her mother recently died and never was able to secure legal status. The vice president acknowledged that her story was an example of the “real people who are suffering because of an inability to put solutions in front of politics.” At the end of the town hall, Harris was seen holding the woman’s hand and talking to her before she exited the venue.

Harris also discussed reproductive rights, noting that there were probably many people in the audience and some tuning in at home who do not believe in abortion access.

“The point that I’m making is not about changing their mind about what’s right for them and their family. It’s simply saying the government shouldn’t be making this decision,” she said.

Harris also directly decried misinformation that has been spreading related to the federal government’s response to hurricanes that hit Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

“People are playing political games suggesting that resources and support is only going to certain people based on a political agenda, and this is just not accurate,” Harris said in response to a question from an undecided voter from Tampa, which was affected by both Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Trump has falsely claimed that the Biden administration took money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to aid hurricane victims to use on “illegal migrants.”

The town hall wrapped up with a voter asking Harris to name three virtues of Trump. The vice president laughed after she thanked the voter for the question.

“I know that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us, and part of what pains me is the approach that frankly Donald Trump and some others have taken, which is to suggest that it’s us versus them … and having Americans point fingers at each other, using language that’s belittling people,” she said. “I don’t think that’s healthy for our nation, and I don’t admire that.”

She paused before offering one virtue.

“I think Donald Trump loves his family, and I think that’s very important. I think family is one of the most important things that we can prioritize. But I don’t really know him, to be honest with you. I only met him one time — on the debate stage … so I don’t really have much more to offer you,” Harris said.