In the week since Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate, Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies have arguably spent even more time attacking him than Harris. They’ve called his record as governor too liberal and focused extensively on his claims about his military service — even as Republicans have fretted about the Trump campaign’s failure to define Harris.

It’s still early, but so far there is little evidence that the Walz attacks are getting much traction in the court of public opinion.

Multiple polls in recent days have tested views of Walz, and they suggest he’s a relatively popular VP pick. That includes among middle-of-the-road voters and independents.

YouGov national polling and a New York Times/Siena College poll of three crucial states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) last week both showed Walz’s favorable rating outpacing his unfavorable rating by 11 points. The YouGov poll showed 41 percent had a favorable opinion, while 30 percent had an unfavorable one. The Times/Siena poll showed Walz’s split at 39-28.

YouGov found that Americans said by about a 2-1 margin Walz was a good pick (though about 4 in 10 offered no opinion). The Times/Siena poll showed that about half of those swing states’ voters were at least “satisfied” with the pick, while just over one-third were dissatisfied or worse.

The YouGov poll was conducted Thursday and the Times/Siena poll concluded Friday, which means they might not reflect the continued hits on Walz in recent days.

But we just got a new poll of Florida from Suffolk University that was conducted through Sunday, and it also suggests Walz is in relatively good shape.

The poll showed his overall image rating about evenly split (30 percent favorable versus 32 percent unfavorable). That’s not exactly sterling.

But this is also an increasingly Republican-leaning former swing state, with a large Republican voter-registration advantage (the poll sampled registered voters). And when you drill down specifically on independents and moderates, Walz does significantly better. Independents liked him by 15 points, 32-17, while moderates liked him by 13 points, 34-21.

Those positive numbers among more middle-of-the-road voters also show up in the other polls, despite efforts to argue Walz is extreme.

The YouGov poll showed Walz’s image among independents was a positive 39-31, and the gap was even bigger among moderates — 47-22. The Times/Siena poll showed independents favored Walz 40-29.

The polling also suggests Walz could carry the kind of appeal that Democrats might have hoped for with some key groups that are big question marks with Harris atop the ticket. While Harris trails among non-college-educated Whites by 13 points, and rural and small-town voters by 17 points in the Times/Siena poll, Walz’s image among both was about evenly split (33-31 and 34-32, respectively).

It is, as mentioned, early. And these numbers will shift as more Americans consume information about Walz. Large numbers, especially among middle-of-the-road voters, are not offering opinions about him yet.

But at least for now, his numbers are pretty good. They’re also notably better than GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s ever were. The Ohio senator has been underwater in just about every national poll since shortly after he was picked in mid-July, with his numbers continuing to decline in recent weeks. By contrast, every national public poll thus far shows more voters like Walz than dislike him.

And the Florida poll is a case in point. While Walz is in double-digits positive territory with independents and moderates, both groups dislike Vance by the same 17-point margin, 46-29. Vance has lost significant ground among such voters in other polls, too.

That suggests a running mate is a significant liability in the 2024 election. It’s just not Walz right now.

Donald Trump’s political history is easy to summarize. Polls leading up to the 2016 and 2020 general election underestimated his support. In 2016, that was largely because his support increased sharply in the final week of the contest. In 2020, the polls were simply further from the mark.

In both elections, though, he got similar levels of support: 46 percent of the vote in 2016 and 47 percent in 2020. The first time around, the Democrat — Hillary Clinton — got only 48 percent, thanks to third-party candidates. That was enough to squeeze Trump into the White House. In 2020, though, very little of the other 53 percent of the vote went to anyone but Joe Biden. Hence: President Biden.

This pattern actually extends a bit beyond those two general elections, in fact. Trump has the remarkable distinction of being elected president in 2016 after getting less than 50 percent of his party’s primary votes and less than 50 percent of the vote in the general election. He fared far better with his party’s voters in 2020 and 2024, but Trump has otherwise been, rather ironically, a president of the minority.

That seemed as though it was likely to change this year. Trump’s support in national polling has almost never been at or above 50 percent, with only 2 percent of polls catalogued by RealClearPolitics in 2016 and only 1 percent in 2020 indicating majority support for the Republican candidate. In 2024, though, Trump was pulling in 50 percent or more of support in 1 in 5 polls — at least until Biden opted not to run for reelection. A few polls showed him lingering over 50 percent once his opponent became Vice President Kamala Harris, but now he’s back where he was late in the previous two presidential elections.

Of course, as noted at the outset, Trump’s position in the polls understated his actual support in 2016 and 2020. If we average all of the poll results in the RealClearPolitics data — not accounting for poll reliability — you can see the patterns. The steady improvement in 2016. The miss in 2020. And Trump in polling over the past few weeks coming in at about that same 47 percent mark.

The state of the race now? In RealClearPolitics’ average, Trump is at — 47 percent, down from 48 when Biden dropped out. Trump trails Harris by about 3 points in Nate Silver’s (weighted) polling average, getting about 44 percent of the vote. In 538’s (weighted and more selective) average, he trails by about the same amount, with an average of 43 percent of the vote. In The Washington Post’s (far more selective) average, Harris has a smaller lead.

Harris’s nomination is still new and her support is buoyed in part by the enthusiasm surge among Democrats. That surge, in fact, helps explain why she’s doing better against Trump than was Biden: Democrats who were flirting with a third-party candidate have increasingly come home and they are also presumably more likely now to want to participate in polling in the first place. That enthusiasm edge will probably last for a while, given that the Democratic National Convention is next week.

Regardless, swapping Biden for Harris clearly reshaped the race. But it isn’t necessarily that the race is now bounded by new parameters and expectations. Instead, it seems as if it is newly bounded by the old parameters; Trump’s unusual strength against Biden seems to have waned against Harris.

No wonder Trump is spending time wishcasting that Biden would retake the nomination at the convention. Running against Biden, Trump actually had a majority of voters backing his candidacy with some regularity. No longer.

An attorney involved in efforts to upend the results of the 2020 election was arrested in federal court in Washington this week and ordered to turn herself in to authorities in Michigan as civil and criminal cases involving claims of voter fraud collided.

Stefanie Lambert’s arrest came more than a week after officials had issued a bench warrant for failing to appear for a hearing in her criminal case in Michigan, where she is charged with illegally breaching voting machines, and days after she came under scrutiny for the release of documents as the attorney for an ally of former president Donald Trump in a federal defamation case.

Lambert was held at a D.C. detention center as a “fugitive from justice” until Tuesday, when a judge released her on an unsecured $10,000 bond with orders to turn herself in to the police in Michigan by Wednesday or face rearrest.

“As long as there is still a warrant out for your arrest, you can continue to be arrested over and over again,” D.C. Superior Court Judge Heide L. Herrmann told Lambert at her bail review hearing. The judge added, “If you don’t appear, you will owe $10,000.”

Lambert was in D.C. federal court Monday representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for repeatedly and falsely saying the company’s machines were used to tamper with votes in 2020. But she was the one being questioned, asked why she made public thousands of Dominion documents she had sworn to keep confidential.

Right before her arrest, Lambert admitted that she used the Dominion documents to argue that the case against her in Michigan is illegitimate. She said she also shared them with a southwestern Michigan sheriff who was investigated as part of the alleged voting machine plot. Over 2,000 pages of the documents were put on the social media site X over the weekend by an account using the sheriff’s name and photograph.

Dominion attorney Davida Brook said in court that “the cat is out of the bag” and there is no hope of getting those papers out of the public domain. But she said Lambert should be removed from the defamation case and face penalties for violating court rules and fueling fresh violent threats against Dominion employees.

“It has been nearly four years. When does it stop?” Brook asked the court. She said the company sued Byrne and others “to stop the lies, to end the threats of violence.” Now, she said, Lambert was “using these very lawsuits … to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya said she needed more time to decide whether Lambert should be disqualified as Byrne’s attorney. But the judge said that in the meantime, both Lambert and Byrne could not have access to any of Dominion’s records, and that Lambert must move to seal the Michigan court document containing them.

After the hearing ended, the other attorneys left while Lambert was asked by the judge to stay behind. Several U.S. Marshals then entered the courtroom and locked the door behind them.

Lambert’s Michigan defense attorney, Daniel Hartman, said Monday that her failure to appear in court in Michigan “was not willful.” Instead he said it was because of “mixed messages” about whether she had to get fingerprinted while challenging the court’s orders. Just before Lambert appeared in court in D.C., Hartman asked the Michigan judge to reconsider the warrant for her arrest, calling the whole case a “tragedy.”

In a filing Monday, prosecutors in Michigan said they had tried to avoid having Lambert arrested “for fear that would unnecessarily traumatize her children.” But, they said, she “has been given several opportunities to turn herself in and has failed to do so,” and that there was no ambiguity about her requirement to show up in court.

In a civil suit, both sides are required to exchange evidence that might be relevant at trial. But in the Dominion case as in most, all the attorneys involved — including Lambert — signed a protective order not to share the material in any way unless the judge agrees it should be public.

Lambert argued in court that she was under no obligation to adhere to the protective order because the emails contained “evidence of a crime,” suggesting the situation was analogous to being handed “a dead body” as part of the case files. Specifically, she alleged that they were proof that “Dominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia” to undermine the U.S. election system. Dominion’s attorneys responded that this was a “xenophobic conclusion” based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A Dominion spokeswoman added in an email that “any allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.”

Lambert only recently became Byrne’s lead attorney in Washington, but she said in court that she had been helping with the case since late last year and gained access to the documents sometime “after the holidays.” Given that she had them for weeks, if not months, Upadhyaya said “the dead body analogy rings hollow.” But she said she needed more time and more information before sanctioning Lambert. Her focus on Monday, she said, was “to prevent further bleeding” by figuring out who had access to Dominion’s information.

Lambert said in court that she gave only Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf access to the files, which Brook said totals over a million pages. But Lambert said Leaf shared the documents with other sheriffs and members of Congress. Leaf, who has not been charged in the Michigan case but is fighting a subpoena, did not return a request for comment. Lambert added that Byrne shared the documents with “the U.S. attorney’s office.” She said she did not know which one; there are nearly 100 U.S. attorneys running federal prosecutors’ offices across the country.

Lambert argued that Byrne is “a national intelligence asset” who was entitled to share “national security information” with law enforcement. Byrne left the company he founded in 2019 after saying he had been instructed by the FBI to pursue a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a Russian national convicted that year of being an unregistered foreign agent. (Former FBI officials have called that assertion “ridiculous.”) Byrne has since become a prominent source of false claims about the last election, and he met with Trump and others at the White House to discuss ways to keep Joe Biden from taking office.

Byrne did not appear in court Monday; Upadhyaya said he must come to the next hearing to answer questions about what he did with the Dominion papers. Asked about the documents, he said by text message: “I’m just a humble concerned citizen.”

Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne’s previous attorney, Robert Driscoll, who also represented Butina. In an email made public in court filings, he said he had learned about the leaks through social media and “asked Ms. Lambert to take immediate steps and reasonable efforts to prevent further disclosure of Confidential Discovery Material.”

Lambert was involved in former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s unsuccessful lawsuits to block certification of the 2020 election results, and records indicate both were involved in efforts to access voting machine data in Georgia as well as Michigan. Powell has pleaded guilty in Georgia state court to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties. A description of an unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia case, in which Trump and others are described as engaging in a racketeering scheme, matches Lambert.

Lambert’s criminal trial was set to begin April 1, but prosecutors say her recalcitrance has forced a delay. They added that they may now seek to have her detained until trial because she did not voluntarily turn herself in on the bench warrant.

A trial date has not been set in the Dominion case. The company last year settled a similar suit with Fox News for $787 million, and is also suing former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Powell along with the right-wing television station OAN and the pillow businessman Mike Lindell.

LOS ANGELES — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pushed back on GOP attacks on his military service and the timing of his departure from the Army National Guard during his first solo campaign appearance a week after being named Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.

During a speech Tuesday before one of the nation’s largest public sector unions, the longtime National Guard member took a moment to address recent scrutiny of his military record by former president Donald Trump and his allies, including his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

“I firmly believe you should never degenerate another person’s service record,” Walz said at the convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). “To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words: thank you for your service and sacrifice.”

Walz served for more than two decades in the Army National Guard and his military service was likely viewed as an asset by Harris when she chose Walz as her running mate. But at least three of Walz’s former Guard colleagues have publicly voiced disappointment about his decision to leave the service when the unit was preparing to go to war in Iraq. Walz ultimately chose to leave the guard in 2005 to run for Congress and won a House seat the following year.

On Tuesday, Walz noted that he signed up for the Army National Guard two days after his 17th birthday with encouragement from his father, who served in the Army during the Korean War, and he said he did so because of his love for his country.

“In 2005, I felt the call of duty again, this time giving service to my country in the halls of Congress,” Walz said on Tuesday. “My students inspired me to run for that office, and I was proud to make it to Washington. I was a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee and a champion of our men and women in uniform. I’m going to say it again as clearly as I can, I am damn proud of my service to this country.”

The Trump campaign has tried to capitalize on the controversy over the timing of Walz’s retirement. And Trump allies have also focused fresh scrutiny of Walz’s comments during a 2018 gubernatorial campaign event where he stated “we can make sure those weapons of war that I carried in war” are not on America’s streets. A campaign spokesman acknowledged Friday that Walz “misspoke” during the 2018 exchange.

Walz did not serve in combat, according to the Minnesota Army National Guard. Vance, who is also a veteran, has specifically drawn attention to that 2018 comment: “When were you ever in a war?” Vance said at a recent campaign event in Michigan in comments directed to Walz.

After Walz said that he would never denigrate the service of a fellow veteran, Vance responded to him on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Hi Tim, I thank you for your service,” Vance wrote. “But you shouldn’t have lied about it. You shouldn’t have said you went to war when you didn’t. Nor should you have said that you didn’t know your unit was going to Iraq. Happy to discuss more in a debate.”

The Minnesota Governor’s address to AFSCME, that otherwise largely focused on how Democratic policies would benefit working class voters, underscored the fierce battle for the loyalty of blue-collar voters that is underway between Harris and Trump.

Before President Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race this summer, some polls suggested that support for the Democratic ticket was softening among working-class voters. On the campaign trail, Trump had repeatedly faulted Biden for the rise in prices due to inflation.

Trump has also strategically courted key labor leaders as he has attempted to drive a wedge between union leaders and rank-and-file members, who he has argued should be more receptive to his candidacy. He attended a meeting with the Teamster union in January and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was one of the featured speakers at the Republican National Convention, though he did not endorse Trump.

As Harris and Walz try to solidify their relationship with organized labor in this new phase of the campaign, Harris unveiled a proposal last week to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. Trump first proposed eliminating taxes on tips in June during a rally in Las Vegas.

Walz offered harsh criticism of the records of both Trump and Vance on Tuesday, arguing that they would “wage war on workers” if they are elected in November. Walz, a former teacher and football coach, highlighted his own union membership in his remarks, telling the crowd as he opened his remarks that he was “the first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Reagan.” (Trump was a member of the Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists but resigned after leaders considered removing him for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.)

Walz questioned whether Vance “was a value add to this campaign or not” and mocked Trump’s work ethic — asking the boisterous and receptive audience to imagine whether Trump would make it as a worker at McDonald’s.

“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to make a McFlurry or something?” Walz asked. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”

He later said Vance “has never cast a vote on a pro-worker bill in his life.”

“The only thing those two guys know about working people is how to work to take advantage of them,” Walz said.

A pro-Trump lawyer facing criminal charges for illegally accessing Michigan voting machines after the 2020 election was disqualified Tuesday from representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne after a judge found her and Byrne responsible for leaking up to 1 million confidential records turned over in a separate defamation lawsuit.

Stefanie Lambert was barred from representing Byrne, a prominent funder of adherents of election misinformation, in a $1.6 billion damages lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, the target of false attacks over former president Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya of Washington disqualified Lambert over violations beginning last March with her disclosure of Dominion emails to a county sheriff in southwestern Michigan and to a court filing in her own criminal case in Michigan, despite a court order requiring that records in the defamation case be kept confidential.

“The record clearly shows that Lambert deliberately violated multiple court rules and orders and continues to do so despite having had ample warning of the consequences and assuring the Court she would comply,” Upadhyaya said, raising the “serious concern” that she joined Byrne’s legal team “for the sheer purpose of gaining access to and publicly sharing Dominion’s protected discovery.”

The judge wrote that Lambert’s “truly egregious misconduct” warranted disqualification because it had already marred and would undoubtedly continue to “infect future proceedings.”

Byrne also violated confidentiality orders in the case, the judge wrote, but the scope of his actions and any penalties sought by Dominion were to be determined.

The courtroom punishment shows how legal consequences continue to pile up for many allies who amplified Trump’s false 2020 election claims 3½ years after he attempted to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory, even as top Republicans led by Trump have refused to commit to accept November’s election results with 12 weeks to go until Election Day.

Still, Byrne — who has funded efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election — has continued to attempt to use evidence disclosed in the litigation to push false accusations against Dominion, while claiming that law enforcement would face “a piano wire and a blowtorch” if they did not drop a case against an ally, who a Colorado jury found guilty on Monday.

Lambert said Tuesday that Byrne will file an “immediate appeal” of Upadhyaya’s decision. Byrne did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dominion has won settlements of $787.5 million from Fox News for airing baseless claims that its voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election against Trump and for Biden, and it has sued seeking similar $1 billion-plus damage payouts from Byrne, conservative businessman Mike Lindell, and former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

In December, Byrne hired Lambert, a lawyer who tried to upend Trump’s loss in Michigan and who is also known as Stefanie Lambert Junttila. She was charged in August 2023 with four state felony counts of accessing voting machines in 2020 in a fruitless search for evidence of a conspiracy theory against Trump. Lambert’s repeated defiance of court authorities while under criminal prosecution have created more drama in the key 2024 swing state and in D.C., where her civil and criminal cases have become entangled.

Lambert did not appear for a March 7 hearing in her criminal case, prompting a bench warrant for her arrest. She was taken into custody by U.S. marshals in Washington after a hearing in Byrne’s civil case March 19 and was released on an unsecured $10,000 bond by a D.C. Superior Court judge. She was ordered to turn herself in to the police in Michigan.

Right before her arrest, Lambert admitted in Byrne’s case that despite a court order to protect the confidentiality of Dominion records in the case, she shared some with Dar Leaf, a county sheriff in southwestern Michigan who was investigated as part of the alleged voting machine plot. More than 2,000 pages of the documents were posted to an account under Leaf’s name on X the previous weekend. Lambert cited the contents of the disclosures to argue that the case against her in Michigan is illegitimate.

Dominion urged the court in Washington to remove her from the case, saying it sued Byrne and others “to stop the lies, to end the threats of violence” against its employees but that Lambert was “using these very lawsuits … to spread yet more lies and do yet more harm.” The company said Lambert’s actions “should shock the conscience” and continued to undermine the integrity of the legal and election systems.

Lambert alleged that they were proof that “Dominion conspired with foreign nationals in Serbia” to undermine the U.S. election system. Echoing his argument to the court, Byrne wrote on X that Lambert “signed an NDA, but she found evidence of ongoing crime, and reported it to law enforcement. If she found a severed head in discovery box she had a duty to report it to law-enforcement, too.”

Dominion’s attorneys responded that this was a “xenophobic conclusion” based only on the fact that the company has some overseas employees. A company spokeswoman added in an email that “any allegation that Dominion employees anywhere tried to interfere with any election is flatly false.”

Lambert argued that Byrne was entitled to share “national security information” with law enforcement. Byrne left the company he founded in 2019.

Byrne has since become a prominent source of false claims about the past election, and he met with Trump and others at the White House to discuss ways to keep Biden from taking office.

Dominion was alerted to the leaks by Byrne’s former attorney, Robert Driscoll, who told the court that he learned about the disclosures through social media and asked Lambert to prevent them. He and his firm left Lambert’s case March 12 but continue to represent him in other matters.

Lambert was involved in former Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s unsuccessful lawsuits to block certification of the 2020 election results, and records indicate both were involved in efforts to access voting machine data in Georgia and Michigan. Powell has pleaded guilty in Georgia state court to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties. A description of an unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia case, in which Trump and others are described as engaging in a racketeering scheme, matches Lambert.

Separately on May 9, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced additional felony charges against Lambert and former Adams Township clerk Stephanie Scott, alleging that they accessed voting systems without authorization in search of fraud. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Lambert is tentatively set for trial in her first Michigan case in October. Trial dates have not been set in her second case or in Dominion’s case against Byrne.

NEW ORLEANS — President Joe Biden announced $150 million in additional funding for cancer research during a Tuesday visit to Louisiana, a rare public appearance since announcing he would not seek reelection on July 21, and one that hints that he may focus the remainder of his tenure on issues that are especially close to his heart.

The cancer “moonshot,” originally started in 2016 and relaunched two years ago, is aimed at halving cancer deaths by 2047 and improving the lives of people diagnosed with the disease. Biden’s oldest son, Beau, died of an aggressive brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, and the president routinely infuses speeches on health policy with anecdotes about his son’s ordeal and his family’s experience as caregivers watching a loved one succumb to illness.

“Imagine bringing innovations to all communities nationwide,” Biden told the crowd gathered at Tulane University, which will receive millions of dollars in funding as part of Tuesday’s announcement. “It’s not just personal, it’s probable.”

Biden, 81, announced late last month that he would not seek reelection to a second term, following a presidential debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump during which he repeatedly stumbled and sometimes had difficulty finishing his sentences. That prompted fears among many Democrats that he would struggle to defeat Trump; Biden ultimately ended his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since then, Biden — who, before pulling out, had been crisscrossing the country in an effort to show that he had the energy to conduct a robust campaign — has significantly scaled back his public schedule. His only other public event this week will be a joint appearance with Harris on Friday, as the two leaders deliver an economic message in suburban Maryland.

Biden spent last weekend at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., and is planning to spend next weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md. He is slated to speak next Monday on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He will then depart for vacation as the rest of the Democratic Party celebrates Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and outlines its goals and values to the country.

At Monday’s White House briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would devote the bulk of his remaining time in office to focusing on “initiatives that have been a key part … of his platform and how he wants to deliver for the American people.” She identified the economy, health care and foreign policy as areas where Biden will concentrate his energies.

The American people are “at the center of everything that he does, making sure we deliver for them, give them a little bit breathing room, and deal with issues that matter to them,” Jean-Pierre said.

Biden is also likely to continue facing his share of foreign policy challenges. Earlier this month, he announced a complex prisoner swap that brought several long-imprisoned Americans home from Russia. The White House is now closely watching events in the Middle East, where tensions have been growing between Israel and Iran amid a devastating war in Gaza.

Still, it is clear that much of the nation’s attention has shifted from Biden to Harris, as she travels the country holding rallies that have been greeted enthusiastically by Democratic voters. Jean-Pierre opened Tuesday’s press briefing by noting that there were “a lot of empty seats back there in the press briefing room.” And while Harris has been addressing overflow crowds of thousands of voters, Biden’s event Tuesday was attended by about 100 people.

Biden has talked about renewing the cancer moonshot — named after former president John F. Kennedy’s successful push to put Americans on the moon within a decade — since he was on the campaign trail in 2020, stressing that the United States has the medical and technological wherewithal to make strides against a disease anticipated to kill more than 600,000 Americans this year. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in America.

In its first two years, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), as it is officially known, has distributed more than $400 million to programs that prevent, detect and treat cancer.

The $150 million in ARPA-H spending that Biden announced Tuesday will go to researchers who are trying to more effectively remove tumors from cancer patients. The $23 million going to Tulane University will be used to create an imaging system that surgeons can use to scan a tumor during surgery, so they can determine if any cancer tissue has been left behind.

“Currently, it can take days to weeks before a surgeon knows whether all the tumor has been removed, and our goal is to get that down to 10 minutes, while the patient is still on the table,” J. Quincy Brown, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Tulane, said in a news release. “If successful, our work would transform cancer surgery as we know it.”

Biden heralded the potential advance as a step forward in a course of treatment that can often come down to an agonizing race against the clock.

“Imagine cancer surgery that removes all the cancer the first time,” Biden said. “Compare that to today. … As we all know, cancer surgery is one of the most challenging surgeries.”