The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris announced Saturday that it will reserve at least $370 million in television and digital advertising between Labor Day and Election Day, a massive investment in the fall that roughly matches a similar investment by outside groups supporting her campaign.

The new Harris plan includes $170 million in traditional national and local television advertising, focused on reaching voters in the core battleground states, along with more than $200 million in digital advertising, much of which will be consumed through living-room televisions with streaming services such as Hulu, Roku and YouTube TV, the campaign said.

Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager, who oversees the advertising efforts, said the spending has been designed to ensure that Harris is competitive in both northern and more-Southern states, such as Georgia and North Carolina, as well as Arizona.

“We have multiple pathways,” Fulks said. “We are making sure as we place these reservations, we don’t allow any of those doors to be shut.”

The campaign is continuing its focus on advertising during major television events and top-rated shows, with planned ad placements for the season premieres of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Golden Bachelorette,” as well as for professional football, hockey, basketball and baseball games. Other prime-viewing shows have also been targeted, including “Jeopardy!,” “Wheel of Fortune,” “Abbott Elementary” and “Survivor.” Fox News programming in the daytime, which is watched by targets of the Harris campaign, will also be purchased, the campaign said.

The reservations do not include traditional social media, search and some other types of digital advertising, said Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager in charge of the digital efforts. Additional television and streaming reservations are also likely as the campaign progresses, depending on fundraising.

“This reflects a modern cross-media campaign,” Flaherty said. “We are going where we need to go, and that is more places than ever right now.”

Future Forward, an independent group supporting Harris, has reserved an additional $250 million after Labor Day to support her campaign. American Bridge to the 21st Century, another group backing Harris in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, has said it will spend about $100 million more before the election.

By making reservations early, political advertisers can often secure cheaper rates. Under federal law, campaigns benefit from more favorable rates than outside groups in the final weeks before an election.

When President Joe Biden was the presumptive nominee, the campaign spent $155 million on advertising, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. Harris has spent an additional $47 million between taking over the campaign and Friday. The campaign has also built out a large infrastructure in states that is aimed at reaching voters in other ways, with more than 1,600 paid staff and 280 offices.

Much of the early Biden advertising was focused on improving his favorability rating and researching how target voters get their information. Those lessons are now being applied Harris, who has different strengths and weaknesses than her former running mate, campaign officials said.

The Trump campaign, which has not yet announced a fall advertising plan, has spent only $47 million on ads through Friday, after declining to match Biden’s ad reservations in the spring and early summer.

Trump advisers say they will have enough money to fund a robust campaign, but they do not expect to match the spending by Harris and allied groups. Trump’s top advisers believe they can overcome that disadvantage because of the ability of Trump to attract free news coverage and social media posts.

MAGA Inc., an independent group supporting Trump, announced a $100 million ad campaign from early August to Labor Day but has not yet previewed its fall spending. Other outside groups backing Trump are expected to announce additional reservations in the coming weeks.

The switch from Biden to Harris has also changed the mix of advertising for the Democratic campaign, with more focus on introducing Harris and her agenda than Biden would have needed at this point in the campaign.

“Once we feel we have introduced the vice president to America and her record of fighting for the American people, it is also about the future,” Fulks said of the ad themes. “We have got to do all those things, and we have to do it very well. But I think the campaign has laid out a very sophisticated strategy.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has done almost everything right since President Joe Biden announced a month ago that he was ending his candidacy. But as Democrats prepare to open their national convention in Chicago on Monday, the question is this: Has she done enough to win the election?

Harris has flipped the script on the presidential election, able to run as a new generation candidate. She and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are drawing huge and enthusiastic crowds and raising massive sums of money. Former president Donald Trump has been confounded by the switch from Biden to Harris and is flailing, unhinged in many of his comments and, for now at least, unable to deliver a disciplined, coherent message.

The polls have shifted in Harris’s favor, but for all that, the presidential contest is a toss-up. Some Democrats warn that too many in the party may be suffering from irrational exuberance about her chances of winning. “She’s had the best four weeks in modern American political history, and we’re still basically in a tied race,” said one Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment.

Harris has drawn universally positive assessments from Democrats, and good marks from some Republicans, for how she has handled her sudden elevation as the party’s presidential nominee. But questions remain about her. What and how does she think about most issues? Where would she take the country? Would she separate herself from Biden, and how? How would she reconcile her past and current positions? How well prepared is she for the inevitable potholes ahead?

Those questions will be answered only in part at the Chicago convention. The four-day event will be almost entirely celebratory, lights-years different in mood from what it would have been with Biden as the nominee. The program will amount to a nightly infomercial designed to say a polite, respectful goodbye to the current president and introduce Harris to millions of voters who may know little about her other than that she is vice president.

Her speech Thursday night will cap the convention. When the Republicans gathered in Milwaukee for their convention last month, Trump squandered an opportunity on the final night to build on the previous three nights of unity with a rambling, too-long acceptance speech. Harris can’t afford to waste her moment, though there’s little likelihood that she will go off script the way Trump did. She has rarely departed from the words on the teleprompter in the past four weeks.

The speech will let her tell her own story. As the first woman of color to head a national ticket, she presents a unique biography. What she says about how she grew from the daughter of a mother from India and a Black father from Jamaica to the presidential nominee 59 years later offers a potentially rich narrative about a changing and diverse America, one in which opportunity abounds. The fact that people know little about her, as one strategist put it, is both “a wonderful opportunity, but it’s also kind of a warning.”

In retrospect, Harris has been lucky in the timing of all this. Had Biden quit the campaign earlier in the year, Harris might have faced competition for the nomination, or a longer and more difficult introductory period. With Biden leaving the race when he did, Harris was able to dominate the presidential election discussion for the last week of July through her convention — and probably will right up to Labor Day.

Doug Sosnik, a former Clinton administration official and a Democratic strategist, noted in a memo released Friday that “Harris has not lost a single news cycle since she announced that she was running for president on July 21st. At times it appears that she is leading more of a movement than a political campaign.”

Her convention speech will be one indication of how she navigates the issue of being tied to Biden and his administration’s record while also defining herself as separate and apart from him. She is not the first vice president to confront this. The risk is that Trump and the Republicans turn her into a continuation of the Biden presidency and force her to own some of the administration’s least-popular policies.

Harris has only begun to fill out her ideological profile. On Friday, she unveiled an economic program focused on lowering prices, a set of populist ideas that build on the policies of the Biden administration and that includes a proposed ban on price gouging by grocers. The plan also includes a proposal to eliminate medical debt, a cap on prescription drug prices, a child tax credit and incentives for first-time home buyers.

The proposed gouging ban is likely to be popular with Americans burdened with higher prices, but it represents a further intervention into the economy by the government without a clear prospect for success. Its effectiveness would depend on so-far unspecified details.

Harris staked out liberal positions on a number of issues as she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 2020. This time, Harris has not made any obvious moves to the center. On foreign policy, Harris has been somewhat more forceful than Biden in calling for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas, to the approval of her party’s left wing. The choice of Walz, who has a very progressive record as governor, rather than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose profile is more moderate, also reinforced her comfort with the party’s left flank.

Harris also has yet to explain her shifts on positions she took in the run-up to the 2020 primaries and caucuses, among them opposing fracking; supporting a single-payer, government-run health-care system; and ending private health insurance. Her campaign has said she no longer holds those positions, but she has not talked about how and why she changed.

“She will have to reconcile some of the positions she took four years ago and the positions the Biden administration has taken that aren’t the same,” said Beth Myers, a Republican strategist and longtime top adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). “That doesn’t mean she can’t do that, but it will be a challenge.”

Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have tried to paint the Democratic ticket as radically liberal, though Trump’s attacks threaten to get lost behind his barrage of lies, grievances and misinformation. But the risk for Harris is that, the more she is becoming known, the more people see her as very liberal, potentially compromising her ability to appeal to moderate voters.

Four weeks into her campaign, Harris has yet to do an interview or an extended session with reporters. Republican pollster Whit Ayres, acknowledging that “it’s hard to imagine a better start” to her campaign, said he wants to see how she handles unscripted moments. “There are numerous examples of her sounding utterly incoherent when she can’t have a teleprompter,” he said.

Harris has been a happy warrior as the party’s nominee, and Democratic strategists say she must do everything she can to maintain that posture. They argue that she should focus more on values and optimism — and on her time working at McDonald’s while in college — rather than multi-point plans about policies.

“Her task is pretty simple,” David Axelrod, who was chief strategist in both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said of her to-do list at the convention. “I don’t think there’s a majority of people who want to reelect Donald Trump president. She needs to make herself an acceptable alternative, and she has to introduce herself.”

Were Biden still the candidate, the convention would be overwhelmingly negative in tone — relentless in attacks on Trump as a threat to the country’s future and with many delegates downbeat over fears of losing. There will still be plenty of anti-Trump rhetoric from the stage all week. But Harris can take a different approach, seeking to move past Biden and presenting herself as the candidate who looks to the future. “She is the turn-the-page candidate, the one who will put the Trump era behind us and reduce the level of rancor and reknit the American community to some degree,” Axelrod added.

Trump has performed poorly since Biden quit the race, and perhaps may never find his footing against an opponent he didn’t expect to face. But strategists in both parties note that, in 2016, he floundered in August but became steadily more solid as a campaigner, surging past Hillary Clinton at the very end in the states that counted when it really mattered. Some Democrats worry that that could happen again.

“Everything [for Harris] has been charmed so far,” said a Democrat with experience in past campaigns. “It’s almost the exact opposite of Hillary — everything was litigated and questioned.” Harris, in contrast, has been given “a total benefit of the doubt” and an extended honeymoon period, he said, adding, “We know it can’t continue like that.”

Democrats expect the good times to roll throughout the coming week and into the week beyond. Then, they say, reality will set in.

Former congressman George Santos — who was expelled from the House after being caught in a web of fabrications about his background and money grifting — is expected to plead guilty to multiple felony counts Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A plea agreement would mean Santos does not have to stand trial in federal court in Long Island next month on 23 counts including wire fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.

Santos is scheduled to appear for a pretrial conference Monday afternoon in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., according to court records.

Last December, court papers revealed that Santos had been negotiating a plea agreement to settle the case.

Messages seeking comments from a lawyer representing Santos were not returned.

In May 2023, Santos was charged with 13 counts related to allegedly defrauding his donors, using their money for his personal benefit and wrongfully claiming unemployment benefits. He pleaded not guilty and called the investigation a “witch hunt” at the time.

Santos also pleaded not guilty to 10 additional charges last October. Those additional charges accused him of stealing the identities of family members and using donors’ credit cards to spend thousands of dollars.

Days before the additional charges were brought last year, Nancy Marks, treasurer for the Santos campaign, pleaded guilty to fraud conspiracy and implicated him in a scheme to embellish his campaign finance reports with a fake loan and fake donors. The next month, another Santos staffer, Samuel Miele, pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge, conceding that he had claimed to be chief of staff to former House speaker Kevin McCarthy to attract donors to Santos’s campaign.

Santos was elected to Congress in 2022 as a Republican to represent portions of Queens and Long Island. He was expelled from Congress on Dec. 1, 2023, after a lengthy investigation found rampant misuse of campaign funds and ethical issues, marking the first time the chamber had moved to remove a member in more than 20 years.

Santos has lied about many elements of his background, including his ethnicity, family hardships, his education and past jobs. Since his expulsion from Congress, he’s been making videos on Cameo, an app that lets fans buy personalized video messages from celebrities and other public figures.

News of an expected plea deal was first reported Friday night by Talking Points Memo.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

Jaclyn Peiser, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Anumita Kaur contributed to this report.

Donald Trump’s top brass gathered reporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., this month to showcase the inner workings of the former president’s campaign and exude a we-have-it-under-control confidence.

As PowerPoints flashed on a screen, they laid out their 90-day plan — the 11 percent of the U.S. population they had identified as “target persuadables,” a ground strategy that would motivate Republicans and discourage Democrats and the five-word frame to dismantle his new rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “failed, weak and dangerously liberal.”

The only thing missing was the candidate, who sat a few miles away at his Mar-a-Lago estate with his own plans for blowing up the news cycle.

Hours after the Aug. 8 briefing ended, Trump appeared on cable news networks for a news conference filled with false or unsupported claims unrelated to the campaign’s plan to defeat Harris — his crowd sizes, the “unconstitutional” elevation of Harris as the nominee, a near-helicopter crash with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown that Brown says never happened. Trump decided to hold a news conference because he heard his team was holding the briefing, but he wanted to talk, according to people familiar with the situation who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. The reporters who had come to South Florida for a campaign briefing suddenly found themselves with a more pressing story.

Most presidential candidates rely on their campaign teams to advise them on what to say, where to say it and how to shift course when trouble arises. But Trump’s 2024 campaign operation, much like his 2016 and 2020 operations, runs on the opposite assumption: The candidate follows his instincts, while the campaign tries to keep up — offering suggestions along the way and adapting on the fly.

That dynamic has challenged his team as it seeks to regain momentum after Harris replaced President Joe Biden in the race, with the addition this past week of new advisers to his team and a broadening network of people kibitzing in his ear. Trump campaign officials are barreling forward with their plan, focused on Harris and her record while well aware that there are limits to their control.

Advisers and donors are trying to keep Trump focused. At a high-end fundraiser in Aspen last weekend, hotelier Steve Wynn encouraged the former president to stick to the issues at a private roundtable, according to people who attended. His team was mingling with donors at the fundraiser. Trump had gotten frustrated earlier that day after his airplane malfunctioned.

At times, Trump has taken pride in having a disciplined operation without the infighting and drama of some previous efforts. But the former president has also mocked the “disciplined” line he often hears in the news media about his campaign.

Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung described Trump as the “best” candidate in recent history, adding that he had overcome significant obstacles — including legal prosecutions and an attempted assassination — while keeping up a steady travel schedule.

“President Trump has continued to speak about sky-high inflation that has crushed American families, an out-of-control border that threatens every community and rampant crime while Kamala Harris continues to hide from the press,” Cheung said in a statement.

For his part, Trump announced Thursday that he is sticking with his campaign’s senior leadership of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — unlike in 2016 and 2020, which saw shake-ups at the top of his operation. He has expressed confidence in the campaign’s strategy, making a point of attempting to focus his appearances this past week — such as standing in front of a display of groceries meant to highlight recent inflation — on driving the message prepared by his advisers.

“We want to close it out,” Trump said in Bedminister, N.J., when asked about the new hires to his campaign. “We have great people. Susie is fantastic, as you know. And Chris is fantastic. They are leading it.”

Yet hours later, he kicked off another controversy by downplaying the importance of the Medal of Honor awarded to wounded or dead soldiers while praising a top donor.

Trump is spending part of this weekend beginning to prepare for a scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Harris and expressing confidence to allies that he would still win. He was at his New Jersey club, advisers said, with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, his daughter and son-in-law.

The new hires this past week include Corey Lewandowski, a campaign manager from Trump’s 2016 campaign who had been pushed from the former president orbit after he was accused of assaulting a donor in Las Vegas. Taylor Budowich, a former Trump adviser who has been working for an allied super PAC, is returning to the campaign as an adviser who is expected to travel with Trump.

The campaign has recently grown its rapid response and social media teams. It also brought back Tim Murtaugh, a press secretary from the 2020 campaign, and brought in Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump-aligned social media consultant who has worked with the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Dan Boyle has been added to do opposition research.

Trump described Lewandowski as “a personal envoy,” though his exact role remains unclear given his history as a senior adviser. His first public action was to give a quote to Puck News repeating an attack on LaCivita for consulting fees paid by the campaign — including payments for advertising that LaCivita’s firm bought, a normal practice for media strategists used in past campaigns.

Lewandowski dismissed the criticism, calling “innuendo,” “speculation” and “outright lies.” Two people involved in the response said LaCivita and Lewandowski spoke about how to respond to Puck before the statement was sent.

But it was immediately seen by some top Trump advisers as a breach of their team ethic, which has previously avoided giving oxygen to such attacks. Some campaign advisers are concerned that it is a sign of problems to come, given Trump’s own past practice of fostering tension between members of his senior team.

There are other unresolved internal tensions as well. In recent weeks, Trump has attacked a popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp at a rally in Atlanta; falsely alleged that a photo enhanced with artificial intelligence inflated the crowd size at a Harris rally; and questioned Harris’s Black identity. Those last comments at the National Association of Black Journalists meeting raised particular concerns for his campaign advisers — who were not with him in Chicago that day, people familiar with the response said.

His comments about Kemp were not planned by the campaign, which hoped that the governor would be helpful this fall and that the two could be on good terms even if Trump still did not like him. After the comments made at a Georgia rally, the campaign was flooded with concerned calls, one of these people said.

None of those were moves that the campaign leadership sanctioned. During the Aug. 8 briefing of reporters in Florida, one campaign official made it clear that they are aware of the distraction such claims can cause.

“Instead of focusing on the issue differences that he wants to focus on, we look for the sensational,” one campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to address the reporters, said in a way that echoed his view of what reporters wanted. “We understand that’s the world we live in. Everything’s all about getting the clicks. It is. We get it.”

A few hours later, Trump went into a long riff about how the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day rioters, inspired by him, stormed the U.S. Capitol — was larger than the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was that day,” he said.

The following week in North Carolina, he joked about a speech on the economy.

“They say it’s the most important subject, but I’m not sure it is,” he said, giving a speech that he said his advisers wanted. He deemed it an “intellectual speech.”

Some Republicans outside the campaign have expressed concern about whether the former president will be able to deliver the message he needs.

“I feel between the border crisis and inflation and what you’ll likely see this fall with campus unrest, the record for Biden-Harris should be a huge millstone,” said Marc Short, an adviser to former vice president Mike Pence. “But I’m not sure that President Trump will prosecute the case in a way that’s convincing because he doesn’t seem as focused on the policy differences that should be highlighted.”

The campaign leadership wants the focus to be on Harris, making the case that Trump is the antidote to the problems Democratic governance has created. “Our basic tenet of the case is that when American voters know her, they will not support her,” explained a senior adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe strategy. “And it is our job to have American voters know her.”

Trump put it more concisely in Bedminster: “People don’t know who she is.”

One challenge is that the former president has continued to use advisers who do not answer to his campaign and sometimes work at cross-purposes. Natalie Harp, a longtime personal adviser of Trump who frequently handles his social media posts and prints out documents for him to read, has so far resisted efforts to answer to the larger campaign operation, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

When he wants something posted immediately to his Truth Social site — such as a vow to hold a news conference on election fraud — she posts it. And she provides him reams of pages of material every day from the internet.

At one point, when top aides made suggestions to Harp, she responded that she did not report to the campaign, people briefed on the exchange said. “She has extraordinary power,” one person close to Trump said. Cheung described her as “a valued member of the team.”

Former 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who is not working for Trump at the moment, has also caused concern within the campaign orbit, recently meeting with Trump in Bedminster to discuss her thoughts on the future of the campaign. She had been vocal in her criticism of Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) as his running mate but has begun telling others that Vance now needs the support of everyone because he is the pick.

One longtime Trump adviser said the 2024 campaign had been “drama-free, almost boring” until this summer. But this person said it was always inevitable that when Trump hit a rough patch, he was going to return to figures like Lewandowski.

In recent weeks, the former president spent his weekends and evenings complaining about the state of his campaign, this person said, while defending it publicly.

On one recent weekend, Trump dialed allies raising concerns and asking questions about the campaign’s direction and strategy, this person said.

But the following Monday, he again assured top advisers that their jobs were safe and that he did not know where speculation about their fate had come from, the person said.

“He is never going to take the blame himself,” this person said. “He’s not going to say, ‘Oh I shouldn’t have said this, or maybe we shouldn’t have done that.’ So there has to be a shake-up.”

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fixated on Vice President Kamala Harris’s appearance in terms he acknowledged were offensive, rejecting pressure from GOP allies to emphasize policy differences over personal attacks.

“You’re not allowed to say this anymore. You know, David, don’t ever get caught in this trap,” Trump said at a rally Saturday, calling on Republican Senate candidate David McCormick in the audience. “David, please don’t ever call a woman beautiful, because that will be the end of your political career.”

He appeared to take exception to a Wall Street Journal column that listed Harris’s appearance as one of her political assets, saying, “I am much better looking than her. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.” He also said he mistook an illustration of Harris on the cover of Time Magazine for the actresses Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor.

In other recent remarks, Trump suggested Harris’s appearance would undermine her with world leaders, saying they would view her as a “play toy” and declining to specify why. House Republican leaders have advised lawmakers to stop attacking Harris based on her identity, but Trump has brushed off advice from Republican allies, including former rival Nikki Haley, to avoid personal attacks of the Democratic presidential nominee.

“I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he told reporters on Thursday. “I have to do it my way.”

Trump’s continued focus on Harris’s gender and race comes as the Democrat has opened a gaping lead with female voters. A new New York Times-Siena poll found Harris ahead of Trump by 14 percentage points with women in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, where Trump and President Joe Biden were tied with women in May. In Pennsylvania, women backed Harris 54 percent to 41 percent, while men supported Trump, 49 percent to 42 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll this month.

Trump has a long history of insulting the appearance of women rivals and critics, including 2016 Republican candidate Carly Fiorina and the adult film actress who accused him of a sexual encounter, Stormy Daniels. A New York jury convicted Trump in May of covering up hush money payments to Daniels.

On Thursday Trump acknowledged the newfound challenge of running against Harris since she replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee last month. “This is a different kind of a race,” he said. “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”

At times in Saturday’s speech, which lasted almost two hours, Trump sounded nostalgic for running against Biden. “I spent $100 million fighting Joe Biden. They told him he couldn’t win,” he said, baselessly accusing Biden of hating Harris for succeeding him on the ticket. He then seemed to catch himself by adding, “She’ll be easier than him.”

Trump repeatedly described Harris as a “lunatic” and mocked her laugh. “As soon as she laughs, the election’s over,” he said.

Elsewhere in Saturday’s speech, Trump attempted to inflame Democratic divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza by baselessly accusing Harris of passing over the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro, to be her running mate because he is Jewish.

Shapiro was one of three finalists who had a personal interview with Harris over the first weekend in August, before she announced her choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. His interview included questions about his position on Israel, which emerged as a concern among some progressive activists. He also faced criticism from teachers unions over his support for school vouchers, The Washington Post reported.

After his interview, Shapiro told Harris’s team that he was struggling with the prospect of leaving his current position, a person familiar with the matter told The Post. Shapiro has denied antisemitism had any impact in the decision, and a campaign official told The Post the most important factor in Harris’s decision was her personal rapport with Walz.

Trump’s campaign and many Republicans feared Shapiro because of his dominant popularity in his home state, which they view as likely to decide the electoral college. Once Walz was chosen instead, many Republicans were quick to point to Shapiro’s faith as the supposed reason.

Trump has baselessly accused Harris, whose husband is Jewish, of disliking Jewish people. He repeated a refrain in Saturday’s speech that Jewish Americans who vote Democratic should “have their head examined.” Many American Jews object to being stereotyped as single-issue voters on Israel, which reminds them of an old antisemitic trope questioning their loyalty to this country. But similar comments from Trump were met with enthusiastic applause during a speech to Jewish supporters at his New Jersey golf club on Thursday.

In Saturday’s speech, Trump veered from one topic to the next over almost two hours, dwelling on the June 27 presidential debate against Biden, illegal immigration, and a story about negotiations with French President Emmanuel Macron during which Trump imitated Macron’s French accent.

Trump took exception to his speeches being described as meandering. “They’ll say he was rambling,” he said. “I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble.”

In the speech, Trump defended his proposal to impose tariffs on China and other countries. Trump falsely described tariffs as a tax on those countries; in reality tariffs are paid by domestic consumers.

“A lot of people like to say, ‘Oh, it’s a tax on us,’” Trump said. “No, no, no, it’s a tax on a foreign country.”

Trump’s appearance in Wilkes-Barre comes as both campaigns are heavily focused on the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Harris and Walz plan a bus trip on Sunday near Pittsburgh; Trump will return to Pennsylvania on Monday. According to The Post’s polling average, Harris is now leading Trump by two points in the state.

The Harris campaign attacked former president Donald Trump on Saturday for an upcoming event in Howell, Mich., where white supremacists last month rallied and chanted “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” A Trump spokeswoman strongly denied any link between their planned campaign event Tuesday and the racist rally, calling the accusation “absurd.”

About a dozen masked white supremacists marched through downtown Howell on July 20. Pictures and video from the event showed attendees declaring their support for the former president while waving banners with white supremacist slogans. Howell has long been associated with the Ku Klux Klan because of the rallies Michigan-based Grand Dragon Robert Miles held on a nearby farm in the 1970s and 1980s, although community leaders have worked to shake off that image. (Miles died in 1992).

“The racists and white supremacists who marched in Trump’s name last month in Howell have all watched him praise Hitler, defend neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and tell far-right extremists to ‘stand back and stand by.’ Trump’s actions have encouraged them, and Michiganders can expect more of the same when he comes to town next week,” Harris’s Michigan communications director, Alyssa Bradley, said in a statement.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said there was no connection between the choice of campaign stop and the history of extremist activity in the city. She noted that President Joe Biden visited Howell in 2021, and said Harris also visits cities where “racist protests and marches have occurred in the past.”

“President Trump will travel to Howell to deliver a strong message on law and order, making it clear that crime, violence, and hate of any form will have zero place in our country when he is back in the White House,” Leavitt said in an email.

A person familiar with the Trump campaign said the location was chosen to be in the Detroit media market, a potentially crucial area given Michigan’s status as a swing state in recent elections.

Biden visited Howell in 2021 to promote his infrastructure initiatives and a package to expand social programs. He was met with protests upon arrival to the county, which he lost in 2020 by more than 20 percentage points, while still winning Michigan. Trump narrowly won the state in 2016.

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris holds a narrow lead over former president Donald Trump in the presidential election, a notable improvement for Democrats in a contest that a little more than a month ago showed President Joe Biden and Trump in a dead heat, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.

As Democrats gather this weekend in Chicago for the upcoming national convention, Harris stands at 49 percent to Trump’s 45 percent among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup. When third-party candidates are included in the survey, Harris is at 47 percent and Trump at 44 percent, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5 percent. In early July, Trump stood at 43 percent, Biden at 42 percent and Kennedy at 9 percent.

Given the margin of error in this poll, which tests only national support, Harris’s lead among registered voters is not considered statistically significant. The vice president’s three-percentage-point advantage in a race that includes third-party candidates is slightly smaller than Biden’s 4.5-point popular vote margin in 2020, which translated into an electoral college majority.

Though the dynamics of the campaign have shifted since Biden left the race in July, the findings in the new Post-ABC-Ipsos poll continue to point to a tight election in November, when seven swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — are likely to determine who wins in the electoral college. Other public polls have indicated that Harris has gained ground in most if not all those swing states since Biden left the race, but they, too, show the race in most of those states as being within the range of a normal polling error.

One sign of how the shift from Biden to Harris has affected voters’ attitudes is on the question of how satisfied people are with the choice of Harris vs. Trump. In July, when the contest was still Biden vs. Trump, 28 percent of voters overall said they were satisfied with the choice. Today, 44 percent say they are satisfied with the choice of Harris or Trump.

The biggest shift in sentiment has come among Democrats. Last month, 20 percent of Democrats said they were satisfied with the choice of Biden vs. Trump. Now, with Harris as the party’s nominee, 60 percent of Democrats express satisfaction with the current matchup.

A 62 percent majority of Harris voters say they support her “strongly,” compared with 34 percent of those who supported Biden last month.

That change has been palpable as Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have barnstormed through battleground states, drawing huge and enthusiastic crowds. The rallies have been so large that they appear to have unsettled Trump, who falsely claimed that photos of turnout for the Democratic ticket at one event were fake and generated by artificial intelligence.

The new poll comes after a remarkable series of events that began with Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 CNN debate in Atlanta. The weakness Biden displayed that night prompted ever-increasing calls from leading Democrats for him to stand down as they feared that his continued presence at the top of the ticket could put not only the White House in jeopardy but also lead to the loss of the Senate and the failure to regain the majority in the House.

Biden yielded to the pressure on July 21 and endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination. That handoff was unprecedented at this point in a presidential campaign, and Harris’s quick consolidation of her party has dramatically altered the trajectory of the election. Democrats hope to build on the current momentum with their convention in Chicago ahead of a Sept. 10 debate, hosted by ABC News, between the two nominees.

In a head-to-head matchup with Trump, Harris has improved her standing over Biden among several key groups in the Democratic coalition, including voters under the age of 40 and independents who lean Democratic.

The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll shows her margin over Trump among voters under age 40 at 25 percentage points, compared with Biden’s seven-point advantage in July.

She also has improved over Biden among independents, who support her by a margin of eight points compared with the two-point margin for Trump last month. That change was concentrated among Democratic-leaning independents, who shifted from 77 percent supporting Biden after the first debate to 92 percent for Harris in the new poll.

Black voters’ support for Harris is slightly larger than it was for Biden last month: 79 percent supported him then and 83 percent support her now.

Among White voters with college degrees, Harris leads Trump by 10 points and is faring about the same as Biden with this group. Among White voters without college degrees, her deficit against Trump is 27 points, also similar to the 31-point deficit for Biden in July.

Biden’s job approval ratings have hardly changed since he left the race, with 55 percent saying they disapprove of the job he is doing and 37 percent saying they approve — a net negative of 18 points. Those approval ratings, along with national and swing-state polls showing him trailing Trump, were principal factors in the effort among Democrats to persuade the president to step aside.

Harris too has a net negative job approval rating, but less so. In the latest poll, 39 percent say they approve of the job she is doing as vice president, while 49 percent disapprove and 12 percent say they have no opinion — a net negative of 10 points.

Trump does better than either Biden or Harris in a retrospective look at his presidency. Today, 44 percent say they approve of the job he did as president between 2017 and 2021, while 49 percent say they disapprove, a net negative of five points. Almost without exception, these ratings are better than he did when he was in office.

But when asked whether they had a favorable or unfavorable view of Trump and Harris “as a person,” Trump does worse than Harris. Views of the vice president split almost evenly, with 45 percent expressing a favorable impression and 44 percent an unfavorable one. Trump is net-negative 22 points on favorability, with 35 percent viewing him favorably and 57 percent unfavorably.

Another area where Harris stands better than Biden is on personal attributes, where she leads Trump on all five qualities that were measured.

Throughout the campaign year and especially after the CNN debate, Trump, 78, had huge advantages over Biden, 81, on mental sharpness and physical health. Today Harris leads Trump on both. Trump led Biden by 30 points on mental sharpness and 31 points on physical health in July. Harris, 59, bests Trump on mental sharpness by nine points and on physical health by 30 points.

She also is seen as more honest and trustworthy than Trump, by a margin of 15 points. She has smaller advantages over Trump on questions of which candidate “represents your personal values” (six points) and who “understands the problems of people like you” (seven points).

The percentage of American adults who have an unfavorable view of both — the so-called “double haters”— is now 13 percent, down from 19 percent last month when Biden was in the campaign. Among this group, Trump is heavily favored over Harris.

Americans are closely divided on how they would feel if Harris were elected in November, with 50 percent saying they would be either “enthusiastic” or “satisfied but not enthusiastic” and 48 percent saying “dissatisfied but not angry” or “angry.”

Views on Trump are slightly more negative, with 45 percent expressing a positive reaction to a victory by him and 53 percent a negative reaction, including 34 percent who say they would be angry. That last figure is 13 points higher than those who say they would feel angry if Harris wins.

More than 4 in 10 Americans (46 percent) say Harris’s views on most issues are “too liberal,” while 6 percent say they are “too conservative” and 43 percent say they are “about right.” For Trump, 42 percent say his views on issues are too conservative, 9 percent say too liberal and 44 percent say they are “about right.”

The economy and inflation remain the dominant issues in the election, with about half of all Americans saying each is “one of the single most important” in their choice of a candidate.

Four in 10 say protecting American democracy is one of the single most important issues, though Democrats are significantly more likely to cite this issue than are Republicans or independents. Next on the list is the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, though this issue is far more significant to Republicans than to Democrats or independents.

Below those issues in significance are a series of others that have been part of the campaign-year dialogue: health care, crime and safety, abortion, gun violence and appointments to the Supreme Court. Democrats are far more likely to cite the last three as important along with health care, while Republicans are more likely to mention crime and safety.

Meanwhile, just 14 percent of Americans say the war between Israel and Hamas is one of the single most important issues in their vote this fall. This issue has caused splits within the Democratic coalition this year and unhappiness with Biden’s handling of the war. Harris has taken a firmer line than the president in calling for a cease-fire, though she is generally aligned with him on overall policy. Democrats are preparing for protests from pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the Chicago convention next week.

A similarly low percentage cite race relations as one of the single most important issues in their vote (13 percent).

On a list of 11 issues, Harris is seen as more trusted than Trump on six of them. The former president is more trusted on the economy, inflation, immigration and the Israel-Gaza war. Harris’s advantages come on race relations, abortion, health care, protecting democracy, appointments to the Supreme Court and gun violence.

Her only double-digit advantages are with the first two: race relations and abortion. Trump holds a 10-point lead on immigration — though Harris’s deficit is four points smaller than was Biden’s last month — and Trump now holds nine-point leads on the economy and inflation.

Americans continue to see the economy in negative terms, with 72 percent saying the current economy is either “not so good” or “poor.”

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they believe Harris has had “just some” or “very little” influence on the administration’s immigration policies and more than 6 in 10 say she’s had limited influence on the administration’s economic policies. Democrats are more likely to say she has had more significant influence than are Republicans or independents.

Meanwhile, a majority of Americans (56 percent) say Trump had at least a good amount of influence for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending the constitutional right to an abortion, which about 3 in 5 Americans oppose. Over 8 in 10 Democrats and over half of the Americans who strongly oppose that ruling say Trump influenced the outcome.

The Post-ABC-Ipsos poll was conducted online Aug. 9-13 among 2,336 U.S. adults, including 1,901 registered voters. The sample was drawn through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing panel of U.S. households recruited by mail using random sampling methods. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus two points for U.S. adults and 2.5 points among registered voters. Error margins are larger among other subgroups.