The 2020 presidential election coincided with the Census Bureau’s decennial tally of the number of people living in the United States. You know this; every year ending in a zero has a census. But perhaps you don’t recognize the importance of this count.

For one thing, it meant a reallocation of House seats — and, by extension, a rejiggering of electoral vote distribution. If the two-party results of the 2024 election were precisely the same as those of the 2020 election, Kamala Harris would see an electoral vote margin that is six votes smaller than the one Joe Biden enjoyed, thanks to the shift of House seats (and electoral votes) from states that voted blue to states that voted red.

And that’s even before you consider the demographic changes that have taken place. On Monday, the New York Times reported that there has been an uptick in the rate at which new citizens are being naturalized. It’s not uncommon for citizenship applications to increase as an election approaches, but the government has increased resources to grant citizenship to qualified applicants on an expedited timeline.

This approach is “potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” Xiao Wang, head of a company that analyzes immigration data, told the paper. “Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency.”

This exclamation lands differently depending on one’s view of immigration and, in this political moment, one’s view of the idea that the political left is seeking to deliberately flood the country with new immigrant voters. This false belief is stoked by Republicans because it casts the left’s support for immigration as nefarious or self-serving, and because it offers a new way to frame immigration as dangerous to the right.

But while Wang is correct — every eligible voter might be the one to swing a close election — it is important to consider the relatively modest number of naturalized citizens in context.

Demographic data necessarily lags the state of the population in any given moment, since counting people and reporting on the results takes time. But we have data on the population in each state, including the number of naturalized citizens and the number of deaths in recent years that allows us to both project what the population will look like in 2024 and to compare it with the population of each state in 2020.

Using four categories — change in the 18-to-64 population, change in the 65-and-over population, total deaths and the change in naturalized citizens — here’s how the resident population of each state changed from 2020 to 2024.

Notice (as with the Alaska example) that a number of states have fewer adults under the age of 65 than they did in 2020. No states have fewer adults ages 65 and over.

This is a recognized demographic trend. The baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964, swelling the population. Subsequent generations have been smaller, especially relative to the country’s population. Those boomers are now ages 60 to 78, which is why the senior population is growing. That’s pulled a lot of 60-somethings out of the 18-to-64 pool and into the 65-and-up pool. (The peak year of baby-boom births was 1957. People born that year were 63 in 2020 and 67 now.)

The change in naturalized citizens is also uniformly an increase. (This looks at the number of naturalized citizens measured by the Census Bureau, not data on naturalizations.) But it’s more modest than the increase in adults overall or even new senior citizens. There is some overlap between those categories. In fiscal 2023, a fifth of newly naturalized citizens were 65 and over. (A third of all newly naturalized citizens that year were relatives of American citizens.)

The number of deaths in each state since 2020 — swollen by the coronavirus pandemic — is larger than the increase in people 65 and older or than the number of naturalized citizens. In all but nine states, the projected number of deaths from 2021 to 2024 is larger than the number of adults projected to have been added to the population.

The states that saw more deaths than added adults voted for Joe Biden by a seven-point margin in 2020. The states that saw more adults added than deaths backed Donald Trump by three points.

These numbers don’t generally overlap with partisanship, though. Naturalized citizens are not presumptively aligned with one particular party, nor are older voters. In April, we looked at the change in voter registration for people moving between states, which is a better (if itself now outdated) way of assessing that change.

Perhaps the most useful way to consider these numbers, then, is to remember that state-level polling doesn’t reflect huge shifts from the 2020 to the 2024 races. The odds are that changes in state populations from aging, deaths or naturalization have effects mostly at the margins.

Wang remains right, though: Those margins may be what determines the outcome. But that’s true of all voters, not just the new citizens.

Back in June, the Pew Research Center offered a sobering bit of data. The percentage of Americans who viewed both major parties’ presumptive presidential nominees unfavorably had reached 25 percent, 1 in 4. It was the highest such percentage in the history of Pew’s polling, and it suggested that people who disliked both candidates were poised to be the determining factor in November.

But that was June, back when the two still-presumptive nominees were former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. Then Biden — certainly understanding that his broad unpopularity was not a political asset — stepped aside. And, just like that, the race was redefined. No longer is 2024 a contest defined by double-haters, people who dislike both candidates.

Or at least, not so much.

On Wednesday, Monmouth University released new polling showing the difference between a Trump-Biden race and a Trump-Harris one.

Evaluating Trump and Biden, about 4 in 10 respondents viewed Trump favorably but not Biden and another 4 in 10 viewed only Biden favorably. About 2 in 10 viewed both unfavorably — the double-haters.

When comparing Trump and Harris, though, the double-hater pool was sliced in half. A lot more people view only Harris favorably than view only Trump favorably.

Put another way, a bunch of the double-haters shifted to liking only Harris. Asked to choose between Harris and Trump, those who view both Biden and Trump unfavorably picked Harris by a 5 to 1 margin.

You can see Harris’s advantages over Biden and Trump when breaking out the overall responses on Monmouth’s favorability question. Harris is viewed more positively overall. But among members of each politician’s own party, you can see Harris’s wide advantage: A lot of Democrats view Biden somewhat favorably, but three-quarters view Harris very positively. It’s a higher percentage than the percentage of Republicans who view Trump very favorably.

Among independents, a group that’s generally pretty skeptical of politicians, Harris is viewed about as favorably as unfavorably.

YouGov released other polling recently that mirrors Monmouth’s findings. Conducted for the Economist, it asked people how they felt about the two presidential and two vice presidential candidates, the latter being Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

At both candidate levels, the Democrats were more popular. Walz is now much better known than he was when Harris picked him, but more Americans have an opinion of Vance. A negative one, on net.

One detail to notice from those results: Republicans are much more lukewarm about Vance than Democrats are about Walz. It’s also worth noting that a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday shows Harris leading in the state of Pennsylvania. Her selection of Walz was criticized by media observers in part because it was believed that selecting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was important to her success in that state.

YouGov also asked Americans whether certain terms applied to Harris and Trump. Despite Trump’s energetic efforts to portray Harris as unintelligent, that perception hasn’t caught on. In fact, Americans are more likely to describe Harris as intelligent than they are to describe Trump that way. Even members of their own parties are more likely to describe Harris as intelligent than Trump. Harris has slightly smaller advantages on ‘hard-working’ and ‘qualified.’

Perhaps the most striking finding, though, is that most Americans believe it’s fair to describe Trump as ‘corrupt’ — including 1 in 8 voters who say they plan to vote for Trump to be president. Harris, despite having a much more limited political profile, is viewed as corrupt by more than 4 in 10 Americans, including three-quarters of Republicans. This is unquestionably somewhat a function of ‘corrupt’ serving as a catch-all pejorative for disliked political actors — good news, in a sense, for Trump.

For now, Harris holds a strong position in her race against Trump. Voters like her better than Biden, including Democrats, and they’re rewarding her with their support. (In YouGov’s poll, Harris has a slight lead over the former president.) The campaign isn’t over yet, and Trump and his allies are just starting to target Harris and Walz with negative rhetoric and ads. But, for the moment, Harris has managed to break the grip that political skeptics had on the 2024 contest earlier this year. The double-haters may prove to be less important than the Harris enthusiasts.

Update: Within minutes of this article being published, Pew released a new assessment of the presidential race. It found, like Monmouth, that Harris’s favorability numbers have improved. It also found that the percentage of people with negative views of both candidates had fallen — again almost in half.

Kamala Harris, amid a furious battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, embraced a ban on fracking and offshore drilling. She supported Medicare-for-all. At one point, she advocated abolishing private health insurance. And she signaled an openness to a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Now, the vice president’s campaign says she would not pursue the fracking and offshore drilling ban — it’s a highly unpopular position in states like Pennsylvania where natural gas drives the economy — if she becomes president. She does not support a single-payer health-care system, instead focusing on what she and President Joe Biden call “corporate price-gouging” by pharmaceutical companies. And she is taking a much harder line on illegal immigration, arguing that Republicans are to blame for blocking a tough border-control measure this year.

Since Harris catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket less than a month ago, she has been forced to reiterate that she rejects a wide array of positions she embraced five years ago, a dynamic likely to become even more evident as she rolls out pillars of her agenda in coming days. On Friday in North Carolina, she is set to outline her economic plan, which is expected to largely mirror Biden’s efforts to lower costs for middle-class families, including by curtailing late fees, hidden costs and junk fees. But Harris’s aides stress that she will roll out myriad policies that are unique to her.

In 2019, Harris articulated a series of liberal positions as she sought to distinguish herself among a crowded group of Democratic contenders, many of them tacking to the left to court voters in the primaries. Now her singular focus is taking on Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a big emphasis on winning over swing voters.

But Harris’s critics say her dramatic shifts on so many issues point to a deeper issue — that Harris has few core political beliefs and only a vague governing philosophy. That lack of a clear political identity, Republicans contend, gives them an opening to frame her image for voters.

“It’s clear the Kamala Harris who wanted to ban fracking, who supported Medicare-for-all … couldn’t win Pennsylvania or a single swing state,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican campaign consultant. “The average voter does not have a well-defined vision of her, so we have a great opportunity to define her simply on her record.”

John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked for Biden, said a broad message is far more important than gritty policy details.

“What is driving the contrast is Harris talks about that she’s going to be for everyone and for the middle class, while Trump is going to be for himself and corporations,” Anzalone said. “That’s the big umbrella message, and all the policies are underneath it.”

Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket after Biden’s abrupt decision to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, which followed weeks of nervous Democrats calling for a new candidate after the president’s rocky debate performance against Trump. The party quickly coalesced around Harris, who is running on a tightly compressed schedule and has skipped many of the rituals of a presidential race — including a drawn-out primary contest and months of campaigning across the country — that usually force candidates to specify their views on a range of issues.

The Democratic Party platform was locked in before Harris became the nominee, limiting her ability to put her stamp on the document. Since Harris’s emergence, many Democrats have felt relief and even euphoria after weeks of worrying that Biden would lose decisively, and they have shown little appetite to press her even on such contentious issues as immigration and the war in Gaza.

Harris, meanwhile, has inherited Biden’s campaign apparatus and kept on many of his senior campaign advisers, while adding some of her own. So far she has largely adopted the policies Biden pushed or implemented as president, in some cases adding her own touch, such as an emphasis on lower-income Americans. One Harris adviser said many of the policies the administration ultimately pursued — including the child tax credit, student debt cancellation for those who attended Corinthian Colleges, and solving the problem of lead pipes — were ones that Harris pushed the White House to execute.

“On day one, I will take on price-gouging and bring down costs,” Harris said at a rally in Atlanta last month. “We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits. We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases. And we will take on Big Pharma to cap prescription drug costs for all Americans.”

When she has deviated from Biden, it is often a matter of tone rather than substance. Most notably, Harris often speaks forcefully about reproductive rights, while Biden, a lifelong Catholic, can appear uncomfortable talking about abortion.

Biden has devoted a half-century of his life to national politics and developed strong, well-known positions on many subjects. He spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate, chairing the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees, while Harris spent four.

That could give her advisers more input as she shapes her agenda, according to people familiar with her emerging policy agenda who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private and sensitive conversations.

Republicans have not waited for Harris to issue new policy proposals before seizing on her past statements to attack her as dangerously liberal. Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick, for instance, highlighted a series of Harris’s past positions in a widely shared ad he released last month.

A page on the Republican National Committee website calls the vice president “Flip-Flopping Kamala Harris” and lists several current policies that contradict past statements, such as her opposition to banning fracking, her embrace of fixing the “broken” immigration system and her dismissal of a single-payer health-care system.

Anzalone said that it is not unusual for candidates’ positions to evolve and change over time, and that running a primary campaign is distinct from running a general-election campaign. Biden himself has taken a tougher position on immigration as president than he did as a candidate, and Trump no longer talks about repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Under Biden, Harris has taken part in critical White House policy meetings, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. In those sessions, she regularly raised the prospect of unintended effects on individuals she felt were not being discussed or were being overlooked, including people of color, rural residents and low-income workers, the people said.

Harris is likely to adopt a similar approach as she shapes her policy agenda in coming weeks, allies say. On economic policy, for example, she has brought on one of Biden’s senior advisers, Gene Sperling, suggesting an intent to continue the general thrust of Biden’s policies. But there is likely to be an additional emphasis on areas Harris cares about, such as the child tax credit and eliminating medical debt, according to a person familiar with the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.

Harris also hopes to focus on policies aimed at helping working- and middle-class people build wealth, such as making it easier for people to purchase homes and boosting small businesses, the person said.

The vice president has also turned to a number of informal outside advisers, including Brian Deese, Bharat Ramamurti and Joelle Gamble, all of whom held senior positions on Biden’s National Economic Council. Harris has also brought on some of her former staffers, including Brian Nelson, a former Treasury Department official who once worked for Harris in California, and Deanne Millison, the vice president’s former chief economic adviser.

A campaign official noted that Harris promoted many of the same economic principles when she served as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, before being elected to the U.S. Senate. The official cited investigations she led or joined into pharmacies and drug companies for overcharging for prescription medications, and pointed to a probe of high gas prices charged by oil companies.

While foreign policy may attract less attention in a political campaign, it can be crucial to a president’s tenure. Harris has been consulting with some of Biden’s former foreign policy advisers, as well as those of former president Barack Obama.

Tom Donilon, who was national security adviser under Obama, is helping organize outside experts as Harris’s foreign policy takes shape. They include Wendy Sherman, Biden’s former deputy secretary of state; Colin Kahl, a former Biden undersecretary of defense; Susan Rice, who was head of the Domestic Policy Council under Biden and national security adviser under Obama; and Sasha Baker, a top Biden national security aide.

Harris’s current national security adviser, Phil Gordon, works at the White House and therefore is limited in what he can do for her campaign. But he is widely expected to hold a top position if she is elected president.

Biden spent much of his career steeped in foreign policy and came into office with clear, defined views on the world. When advisers tried to move him on certain issues — such as allowing Ukraine to strike deeper inside Russia or rethinking unconditional U.S. support for Israel during the war in Gaza — they have found it extraordinarily difficult, according to several senior administration officials and outside advisers.

While Harris’s foreign policy platform is still somewhat embryonic, she is expected to largely continue Biden’s efforts on Russia’s war in Ukraine and on countering China. Less clear, and of great interest to many Democrats, is whether she will craft her own policy on Israel.

Biden is a staunch supporter of the Jewish state whose views were shaped in the 1970s when he first became a senator. Many Democrats believe that Harris is more in line with the outlook of younger voters and people of color, who often see Israel as a military powerhouse that has oppressed Palestinians.

One ally of Harris said the myriad factors that have made this presidential race so unusual — the tight timeline, the relief within the party, and many Democrats’ view of Trump as an existential threat — favor her and make her specific policy positions less important than they were five years ago.

“Running in 2019 against other Democrats was dicey. Running in 2024 against Trump again is different — it’s clear where he is,” the ally said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy. “The policy task for the next three months is infinitely easier than first round.”

Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to the biggest developments in a 2024 election in which Democrats are about to find out how far “vibes” can take you.

(Make sure you are subscribed to this newsletter here. You can also hear my analysis weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.)

The big moment

Democrats have a new lease on political life with Vice President Kamala Harris atop their ticket. And while the presidential race remains close, the signs are getting better and better for them.

New swing state polling this week showed Harris taking a slight lead over Donald Trump (within the margin of error) in most of the decisive states in the presidential race. And a new Monmouth University poll out Wednesday showed Democrats leapfrogging Republicans on both enthusiasm and optimism, metrics that help turn out voters.

But just how optimistic should Democrats be about the fuller 2024 electoral picture? And could they even dream of winning the “trifecta” — i.e. the presidency and the House and Senate?

What seemed largely out of reach less than a month ago deserves some consideration in the vastly changed political universe.

The bottom line? A Democratic triple play remains tough, particularly when it comes to holding their narrow Senate majority, mostly because the map is so challenging for the party. But Harris’s candidacy has to tempt Democrats to start thinking bigger.

There is little question that Harris performing better than President Joe Biden is a major relief to congressional Democrats who were worried they would go down with him. But there is a real question as to just how much Harris recasts the House and Senate maps.

One key metric on this front is the so-called “generic ballot,” which asks voters to choose between a generic Democrat and a generic Republican for Congress. This is a good measure given that we don’t get regular polling in most Senate and House races, and given that there are fewer and fewer voters who split their tickets between parties.

The generic ballot hasn’t shifted as much as the presidential race in recent weeks, and it has long been neck-and-neck. But Democrats’ current one-point advantage in the FiveThirtyEight average is as good as at any point since mid-2023.

That would seem encouraging for Democrats’ efforts to flip the approximately four districts they need to erase Republicans’ razor-thin House majority. Still, Democrats probably need to win most of the “toss-up” House races, given that Republicans are generally favored in more districts.

Which brings us to the Democrats’ biggest hurdle: the Senate, where Democrats hold their own razor-thin majority, 51-49.

Democrats’ hopes there are a bit more complicated, for a couple reasons.

The big reason is that they are overwhelmingly playing defense, so even a slight advantage nationally might not be good enough. The Cook Political Report’s seven most competitive Senate races are all held by Democrats, and they’re defending a trio of red states: Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. One of those states, West Virginia, is in all likelihood gone with Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (I-W.Va.) retirement.

That means Democrats are basically starting at a 50-50 tie, and they also must win the White House to hold the tiebreaking vote (which is cast by the vice president).

The other reason the Senate is more complex is that Democrats in the vast majority of races were already running ahead of Biden — and often far ahead. In fact, Gabe Fleisher notes that Democrats have yet to trail in any quality poll in six of their eight most endangered states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

Recent polling — from the New York Times/Siena College, AARP, Fox News, NPR/PBS/Marist College and Marquette University Law School — shows that’s continued. Democrats’ margins in those six states have ranged from up three points to up 14 points in recent weeks.

That suggests these Democrats could have survived even if Biden lost.

But they also would have been bucking recent history. As Fleisher also notes, only one out of 69 senators has won since 2020 in a state their party lost in the presidential race. And there’s no guarantee Democrats’ over-performances would have held up over time.

“We saw Senate Democrats outrunning Biden in previous polls even when he was doing poorly, though I’m not sure it fully captured where he was after the [June 27] debate,” said Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate race expert. “I think it’s just a smaller number by which they have to outrun the top of the ticket now.”

Assuming Harris continues to poll well, the big Senate races to watch would seem to be those other two, non-West Virginia red states: Ohio and especially Montana. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) has generally trailed in the limited polling we’ve seen, and that looks most likely to be the tipping point state for the Senate majority.

There’s also a question of whether Democrats can put one or two GOP-held seats in play — potentially Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) or Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) — that could offset a loss elsewhere. Neither Cruz nor Scott won resoundingly in 2018 (by three points and one point, respectively), and some polls have shown a tighter race than some people might appreciate. For instance, Scott has recently led by the low to mid-single digits, and a Suffolk University poll this week showed Floridians disliked him by a 49 percent to 35 percent margin.

So if you’re a Democrat who dares to dream, keep an eye on Montana, Florida and Texas. Those could tell the tale about how much the electoral map has changed.

Another moment you may have missed

There are growing signs of Republican concern about Trump’s messaging. And increasingly, Republicans and Trump allies are going quite public with those concerns.

They’re practically begging Trump to change it up and move beyond falsehoods about Harris’s crowd sizes, her race, her intelligence and other non-policy issues.

To wit:

• Nikki Haley on Tuesday on Fox News: “The campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she’s dumb.”
• Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.): “You have got to make this race not on personalities. Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to what did she do as attorney general on crime.”
• Former senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway: “The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see: It’s fewer insults, more insights and that policy contrast.”
• Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday on NPR: “I think a stronger focus on policy is the path to winning this election.”
• Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro on Monday: “The current rally formula is simply not sufficiently focused on the very stark policy differences. … Instead, when Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises — particularly among women.”
• Fox News host Sean Hannity last week on Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R): “You know the thing is I’m sure they agree on like 85, 90 percent of the issues, and we’re 40 days away from early voting. We don’t have time for this. This is a real threat to the country.”

Trump hasn’t really heeded their advice, including at a news conference last week that barely touched on policy specifics. But he did just call another one for Thursday in New Jersey.

A momentous stat

1 percentage point

That’s Republicans’ current electoral college advantage, according to an analysis over the weekend by Washington Post data scientist Lenny Bronner.

The number represents the approximate gap between Harris’s slight current lead in The Washington Post national polling average and Trump’s slight edge in what looks to be the “tipping point” electoral college state, Michigan.

Why is that notable? Because it suggests a smaller electoral college edge for Republicans than we’ve previously seen in the Trump era. The gap between the popular vote and the margin in the “tipping point” state — i.e. the state that delivered the winner 270 electoral votes — was nearly three points in 2016 and nearly four points in 2020. That allowed Trump to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college in 2016, and it made for a much closer race than many people realized in 2020.

The conventional wisdom has long been that Democrats need to win the national popular vote by two or more points to win the electoral college. It’s still early, but as with other aspects of the new Harris vs. Trump race, that’s worth reconsidering. And as the chart above shows, it’s not as if the electoral college advantage has consistently landed in the GOP’s favor in recent decades.

Take a moment to read:

• “Trump vs. Harris magnifies America’s generational and cultural divides” (Washington Post)
• “Harris cuts Trump’s advantages on economy, immigration” (Washington Post)
• “Tim Walz has good numbers so far, despite GOP attacks” (Washington Post)
• “Kamala Harris honed her Senate identity as a Trump foil” (Washington Post)
• “Trump was close to breaking his poll ceiling. Then Harris arrived.” (Washington Post)
• “Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Detail” (New York Times)
• “The One Policy Idea Uniting Trump and Harris” (Atlantic)

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to open the door to significantly expanding his plans to impose sweeping new tariffs if he returns to office, suggesting an escalation in proposals that many experts already see as likely to cause a global trade war.

Previously, the Republican presidential nominee had called for levying tariffs of 10 percent on all U.S. trading partners, aiming to create a “ring around the collar” of the national economy. But during remarks on the economy in Asheville, N.C., Trump for the first time floated tariffs of between “10 and 20 percent” on imports to the United States.

The Trump campaign sought to play down the significance of the comment and said the former president did not specify that the 20 percent tariff would apply to all nations. Still, the new figure represented an intensification of Trump’s trade proposals, which have already alarmed some Republican donors wary of disrupting the global trade order and have faced heavy criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

“We’re going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re going to charge them 10 to 20 percent to come in and take advantage of our country.”

His comments on trade came as part of a speech designed to focus on the economy that stretched more than an hour. He attempted to hammer his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as polls suggest she is gaining ground in the race. Trump reprised his calls for eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security, said he would lower energy costs, and also exaggerated the extent of inflation and spending under the Biden administration.

The tariff remark could draw renewed attention to the former president’s economic plans and his first-term approach to global trade. A 10 percent universal tariff, coupled with a tariff of as much as 60 percent on China that Trump has also eyed, would cost a typical middle-income household roughly $1,700 per year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-trade Washington-based think tank. Doubling that would increase its costs to U.S. households, while probably doing more to shield domestic producers from foreign competition.

“It has been 10 percent universal across the board — 20 percent would be a doubling of that, and all analyses have already shown that would be detrimental to the economy,” said Erica York, an analyst at the Tax Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank. “It’s an escalation of what would already be an escalation from his first term.”

Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, said: “He has clearly floated the 10 percent, and if he’s now saying ‘10 to 20 percent’ you can assume the baseline is the same — that seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.”

Holtz-Eakin said many business leaders are concerned with the seemingly erratic nature of Trump’s policy process. “If you go to 10 to 20 percent in North Carolina, who is to say you won’t go to 40 percent in Wisconsin?” he added.

Trump’s speech on the economy came two days before Harris is set to roll out her own economic plan in Raleigh, N.C. After Harris said this past weekend that she also supported no taxes on tips, Trump accused her of copying his ideas.

“When Kamala lays out her fake economic plan this week, [it] probably will be a copy of my plan because basically that’s what she does,” he said.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), leaned into a similar argument Wednesday, criticizing the Harris campaign as “a fake platform that offers no specifics about how to do the people’s businesses and a fake promise to change the government.” (Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has committed to an Oct. 1 vice-presidential debate with CBS. Vance has yet to commit.)

Although Trump’s Wednesday speech was billed as focusing on the economy, he frequently veered into other topics and lobbed personal attacks at his rival. He claimed — without evidence — that President Joe Biden was a “very angry man” because he is no longer the Democratic nominee for president and suggested: “He’s going to put you in World War III.” He also attacked Harris as the “border czar,” a frequent Republican attack line. (Though Biden asked Harris to negotiate with Central American countries to help address the root causes of migration, he never put her in charge of border policy.)

Trump also mocked Harris’s laugh, calling it “the laugh of a person with some big problems.” He also repeatedly mispronounced her first name — a move that critics called an attempt to other-ize her — and commented on a recent Time magazine cover story about Harris. (“I want to use that artist, I want to find that artist, I like him very much,” he said.) He spoke in apocalyptic terms as he described what would happen if Harris wins the White House, predicting “a 1929 style depression.”

Trump’s and Harris’s decision to talk about the economy in North Carolina highlights the broader importance of the state in this year’s election. A Democrat has not won North Carolina in a presidential race since 2008, but the party is showing interest in competing there this cycle. The Washington Post’s polling average has Trump leading Harris by three percentage points in the state. Biden was trailing Trump by five points before he dropped out.

Asheville, where Trump spoke, has leaned Democratic in recent presidential elections. It is in Buncombe County, which Trump lost in 2016 and 2020. (Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton received 54 percent of the vote in 2016, and Biden received 60 percent in 2020.) Trump, however, has won all seven counties that border Buncombe County twice.

In the presidential race, Democrats have devoted more than $15 million on television ads between now and Election Day, while Republicans are spending $12 million, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks advertising outlays.

LeVine reported from Asheville. Stein and Arnsdorf reported from Washington. Dan Keating, Meryl Kornfield and Scott Clement contributed to this report

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sought a meeting last week with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to discuss the possibility of serving in her administration, perhaps as a Cabinet secretary, if he throws his support behind her campaign and she wins, according to Kennedy campaign officials.

Harris and her advisers have not responded with an offer to meet or shown interest in the proposal, say people familiar with the conversations.

The Kennedy outreach, made through intermediaries, follows a meeting in Milwaukee last month between Kennedy and Republican nominee Donald Trump to discuss a similar policy role and endorsement that resulted in no agreement. In those discussions, Kennedy spoke about advising Trump in a second term on health and medical issues.

The independent candidate and namesake of the most famous American political dynasty is exploring multiple options for the future of his presidential effort, which has seen a decline in national polling since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. His campaign has produced polling, which it has tried to share with Democrats, that it claims shows both Harris and Trump would get a boost in their public support across 31 states if either candidate announced publicly that Kennedy would have a Cabinet role in their administration.

At the moment, Kennedy says he is continuing to campaign with the expectation that he will defeat both Trump and Harris, making regular interview appearances, releasing an “America Strong” plan for bipartisan governance and planning upcoming rallies in states such as Arizona and Nebraska. But he has also left open the possibility of bowing out of the race if he finds another way to bring about the change he seeks in the country, his advisers say.

“From the beginning of this campaign, we were saying people should be talking to each other,” Kennedy said Wednesday in an interview. “That is the only way of unifying the country.”

Kennedy said he hopes Harris reconsiders his offer of a meeting. “I think it is a strategic mistake for them. That’s my perspective,” Kennedy said. “I think they ought to be looking at every opportunity. I think it is going to be a very close race.”

The latest round of outreach follows earlier efforts to convince Democrats that Kennedy would make a better candidate on their ticket than Biden. Even after Kennedy left the Democratic nomination fight to pursue an independent campaign for president last November, his advisers continued to press the case privately that he could replace Biden as the Democratic nominee.

Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the campaign manager and daughter-in-law to the candidate, argued in an April email to Democrats, obtained by The Washington Post, that Biden could not win the race. “As things are, Biden is going to lose. If Bobby were to drop out, Trump would win by an additional two states,” she wrote. “If Biden were to drop out, Trump would lose. Only Bobby can win this.”

She argued that Democrats had to make sure a president is elected who could handle the responsibility of managing the nuclear arsenal. “I don’t want a president obsessed with the size of his crowds to be given that sacred charge. My bomb is bigger than your bomb is no path to peace,” she wrote. “Nor do I want to entrust my children’s lives to the alertness of a president who, despite honorable service and due to the natural toll of age, I wouldn’t leave babysitting my two-year-old while I went to the movies.”

Democrats have for months attacked Kennedy because Timothy Mellon, a scion of a Pittsburgh banking family, is a top donor to both an independent group supporting Kennedy and a separate group supporting Trump.

“No one has any intention of negotiating with a MAGA-funded fringe candidate who has sought out a job with Donald Trump in exchange for an endorsement,” said Lis Smith, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee.

Kennedy’s campaign reached out this summer to Democratic intermediaries, including Hollywood talent agent Ari Emanuel and director Rob Reiner, in hopes of starting a dialogue with Democratic officials, according to people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. No meetings resulted. Representatives for Emanuel and Reiner did not respond to requests for comment.

One day after Biden had a disastrous performance in a June debate with Trump, Kennedy campaign staff contacted a relative of Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia in an effort to get a message to Ron Klain, a longtime Biden adviser who had recently been hired by Airbnb as chief legal adviser.

“The Dems should nominate Kennedy. He is the only candidate under consideration who can beat Trump,” the message read, according to a copy obtained by The Post. “Please give it some thought. Kennedy would win, the Dems would keep the White House, and Americans would avoid the Trump reprise that so many across this nation dread.”

Klain said in a text message Wednesday that he heard secondhand that the Kennedy campaign was trying to reach him, but that he did not respond to the request.

A person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the interaction spotted Kennedy at a hotel this week in West Palm Beach, Fla., not far from Trump campaign headquarters and Trump’s Florida home. Kennedy, in the interview Wednesday, declined to comment on whether he was in West Palm Beach or whether he has continued conversations with the Trump campaign.

Trump campaign advisers, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, said they are still in touch with Kennedy and his senior team, and some of the advisers are expecting Kennedy to drop out and endorse Trump. In his pitch to Trump in Milwaukee, he also discussed a Cabinet-level job.

Since Biden exited the race in July, Kennedy’s standing in national polls appears to have declined, suggesting that Harris has been able to attract some of his previous supporters. A Post average of national polls in July when Biden was still in the race showed Kennedy polling at about 9 percent. Since Biden dropped out of the race, the same average shows Kennedy polling at about 5 percent nationally.

Kennedy campaign officials believe that overall he is pulling support disproportionately from Trump at this point in the race, though there are state-by-state variations. Even if Kennedy did withdraw from the race and endorse one of the two candidates, his campaign believes there are states where he would not be able to remove his name from the ballot. Early voting in some states begins next month.

Kennedy said Wednesday that he had not had any contact with the Democratic Party since launching his campaign. The Democratic National Committee has launched an aggressive legal and political effort to diminish the appeal of Kennedy and other third-party contenders.

“The only contact I have with the DNC is them suing me through intermediaries,” Kennedy said.