September 6, 2024, presidential campaign news

Our live coverage has ended. Follow the latest 2024 election news or read through the posts below.

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley at the Republican National Convention in July.

Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley refused to say if she believed former President Donald Trump was a “good candidate” when pressed in a CBS News interview.

The former South Carolina governor, who served under Trump as US ambassador to the United Nations, was a tough critic of her onetime boss during their primary fight but has since endorsed Trump in a show of party unity.

Haley also said during the interview that she is “on standby” to campaign for Trump though she has not been officially asked.

Haley also said she is not advising Trump at all on his debate preparation, adding, “That’s his choice.”

Earlier today, Trump lashed out at E. Jean Carroll and several other women who have accused him of sexual assault following a hearing where the former president’s attorneys tried to convince a federal appeals court that he should get a new trial after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed the onetime columnist.

Asked if this is the best use of his time and what the message is to female voters, Haley said her focus has always been on policy, but she acknowledged she wouldn’t have run in the primary if she thought President Joe Biden or Trump were “great candidates.”

“I’ve always said, look, if I thought Biden or Trump were great candidates, I wouldn’t have run for president. I ran because I thought I could do a better job.”

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is asking the state Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling which required the state to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from the ballot. 

Ballots were supposed to start going out in North Carolina on Friday, but the appeals court order earlier in the day froze that process. 

In a brief to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the state board wrote that the decision to remove Kennedy at this late stage “has thrown our State’s elections process into chaos.” 

While the board says thatit has begun the process of recoding ballots without Kennedy’s name, its lawyers argue that a quick reversal from the Supreme Court would “avoid most of the irreparable harm” caused by the lower court ruling.

Trump’s reaction: Former President Donald Trump has welcomed the decision, saying in remarks to a police union in the state earlier today that Kennedy’s request to be removed was part of their strategy to send Kennedy’s supporters to Trump.

“He’s an incredible team player, and he didn’t want anybody to be voting his name, because, as you know, he fully endorsed us,” Trump said.

If it wasn’t clear, Kamala Harris’ campaign is very unhappy about the muted mics rule at next week’s presidential debate with Donald Trump.

For weeks, the vice president’s team has raised a fuss about one of the proposed debate rules that the candidates’ mics be muted when it is not their respective turns to speak. Her campaign finally and begrudgingly relented and accepted the rules earlier this week, but not without once again complaining that the muted mics rule would hurt Harris.  

As the vice president hunkers down in Pittsburgh for the next stretch of days with advisers to prepare to face off against Trump, a source familiar tells CNN that remedying for the muted mics is a significant part of their mission. 

Harris allies have pointed to some of her moments in committee hearings as a senator grilling the likes of Brett Kavanaugh or Bill Barr as exemplifying one of the vice president’s biggest political strengths. The campaign had hoped that she could display that in next week’s debate — responding to, interrupting and questioning the former president in real-time in what is expected to be a closely watched and highly anticipated debate.

Her team had also hoped that the mics being on would hurt Trump by showing his more unhinged moments.

“People forget how crazy and unhinged he is,” the source said, adding that they hope the muted mics would not have the effect of making the former president look more “restrained and disciplined” than he actually is.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the fall meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police on September 6 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Former President Donald Trump echoed past falsehoods about the integrity of US elections and asked police officers to “watch for voter fraud” while addressing the nation’s largest law enforcement union on Friday in North Carolina. 

After receiving the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, Trump encouraged the officers gathered for his address in Charlotte to monitor for voter fraud because “they’re afraid of you people.”

The comments are the latest instance of Trump warning of potential widespread voter fraud in the 2024 presidential election. He has repeatedly suggested without evidence that Democrats will commit voter fraud to swing the results of November’s election, tying the claims to his false conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

Trump repeated the baseless accusations at another moment during his remarks, suggesting that he would win the election if an “honest” vote tabulator “came down from on high” to determine the results of the presidential election in each state. 

Trump on crime: In accepting the endorsement from the police organization, the former president reiterated his support for local police departments to adopt “stop-and-frisk” policies, the controversial law enforcement tactic that has been linked with increased reports of racial profiling when utilized. He also expressed support for “broken windows policing,” a controversial crime reduction policy that strictly penalizes minor crimes.

Trump suggested those policies have helped reduce crime rates when implemented in the past.

Tim Walz’s financial disclosure form highlights one of the things that makes him unusual as a modern political candidate: the relative simplicity of his financial life.

The Democratic vice presidential candidate’s finances are straightforward and modest relative to the standards of many of those who have made their wealth in the private sector, according to his disclosure, released by the Federal Election Commission on Friday. Many recent political candidates for high office, by contrast, report millions in income and assets from multiple sources.

Walz reported a $210,287 income from his job as governor of Minnesota from January of 2023 through August of this year, and a bank account with between $15,000 and $50,000 in cash.

He no longer owns a home or rental properties, which had been reflected on his tax returns in prior years. And he doesn’t report owning any individual stocks or bonds.

But Walz does have a few retirement savings accounts, and he reported pension income that he will earn as a result of his years as a public school teacher. His six terms in Congress and his 24 years in the National Guard may also earn him pension income, although that is not required to be reported on the FEC form.

Read more about Walz’s finances here.

Former President Donald Trump reacted to the decision by a North Carolina appeals court that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name must be removed from the state’s ballot. 

While speaking to the Fraternal Order of Police in Charlotte, North Carolina, Trump welcomed the decision and said Kennedy pushed to withdraw from the ballot as part of their strategy to send Kennedy’s supporters to Trump.

Trump expressed confidence that all of Kennedy’s supporters will vote for him in the state.

“It means that all of those who love Bobby — and there’s a lot of them — and all that he stands for, especially regarding the health and well-being of us, can vote,” Trump said. “They vote for me now.”

The North Carolina appeals court decision further delayed the start of early voting in the state, which was originally slated to begin today.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney makes a speech at the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2019.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has released a statement confirming he will vote for Kamala Harris.

The statement comes shortly after the former vice president’s daughter, Liz Cheney, said her father would back Harris during a lengthy interview in Texas, in which she called Trump “depraved” and urged Republicans to abandon the party’s nominee for the sake of democracy.

Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement that Harris is “proud” to receive Dick Cheney’s support, writing that she “deeply respects his courage to put country over party.”

“[Cheney] joins hundreds of Republicans who are backing the Vice President and her patriotic vision of America over former President Trump, because, as Vice President Cheney said, the very future of our republic is at stake in this election,” O’Malley Dillon said.

Trump’s response: Trump attacked the former vice president on his social media platform Truth Social, writing “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter.”

“He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump said of Dick Cheney while again attacking former Rep. Liz Cheney’s work on the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

This post has been updated with comments from Donald Trump and the Harris campaign.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Economic Club of New York on September 5.

Former President Donald Trump was asked how he would bring down the cost of child care — which is a barrier to people having children and a major drain on parents — at a talk with the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.

His response could accurately be described as a ramble without an answer, and it’s worth looking closer at an issue that affects so many Americans.

Trump got off to a good start, referencing a provision in his tax cut law that doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 per child for millions of Americans, according to a CNN fact check. Trump’s doubling of the credit is set to expire next year, so this will be a key issue for whoever wins the White House.

Then things stopped making much sense. He dismissed the issue as ultimately not a very big problem, and not that expensive to fix compared with the money he will raise with his plan to place taxes, also known as tariffs, on all imports coming into the US:

Hear that, parents? The cost of child care is small change compared with all the money the US is going to be bringing in from Trump’s tariffs.

CNN’s Tami Luhby looked at the broad strokes of this claim and found it is not at all clear how that would work. Some economists fear higher tariffs could raise prices, hurt the economy and set off an international trade war.

And what you didn’t hear from Trump is a concrete proposal for a tax credit or a program to transform those tariff dollars into help for affording child care.

Read a breakdown of Trump’s response line-by-line

Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney on Friday unleashed a torrent of criticism against the Republican presidential ticket — calling former President Donald Trump a “depraved human being” and labeling him and running mate JD Vance “misogynistic pigs.”

Cheney, who has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, said she will campaign against Trump in key battleground states, though not as an official surrogate of Harris.

The former House Republican called Trump and Vance “misogynistic pigs” and suggested that Vance has a “real women problem” based on his previous comments.

She called the idea that Trump would willingly leave office a “fantasy.”

Cheney argued that Trump and Vance are driving away Reagan-era Republicans by abandoning the “philosophy of peace through strength and a strong national defense.”

She also criticized Vance over saying he would’ve stopped Congress’ certification of the 2020 election, and for still planning to sit down with Tucker Carlson in the wake of the former Fox host platforming a guest who suggested the Holocaust happened by accident.

Cheney announced earlier in the festival interview that her father, the former Vice President Dick Cheney, would also vote for Harris — a stunning move for the staunch conservative and one of the most prominent figures in former President George W. Bush’s administration.

This post has been updated to reflect Cheney’s plans to campaign against Trump.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance speaks at a campaign event in Phoenix on September 5.

Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee are seizing on Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s comments in the wake of Wednesday’s school shooting in Winder, Georgia. 

Vance in Phoenix said Thursday in response to a question from CNN on what policies he supports to end school shootings: 

“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” he said.  

Harris criticized the remarks in a post on X: “School shootings are not just a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will.”

The DNC also slammed Vance in a statement, writing: “Let’s be clear: no matter what Donald Trump and JD Vance say, tragedies like this do not need to be a ‘fact of life,’ and we don’t just have to ‘get over it’ when Americans, including young children, are violently murdered.”

Vance, defending what he said in Phoenix, replied in a post that “Kamala wants to take security out of our schools instead of protecting our children. Instead of addressing her own failures, she lies about what I said. More desperation from the biggest fraud in American politics.”

Dr. Ben Carson prays during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s "God & Country Breakfast" at the Pfister Hotel, on July 18, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Former President Donald Trump announced that Dr. Ben Carson, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, will serve as the national faith chairman for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, served as the 17th US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021 under Trump’s administration. Both Carson and Trump competed in the 2016 Republican primaries.

In October 2023, Carson endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid during a speech in Iowa.

Rep. Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney on Friday said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in November. 

“If you think about the moment that we’re in and you think about how serious this moment is. You know my dad believes and he said publicly that there’s never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is,” Liz Cheney added.

Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris is a stunning move for the staunch conservative Republican who was vice president to George W. Bush and a former House member, holding several leadership roles in the GOP caucus.

The former vice president was critical of the GOP and Trump in the wake of the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In campaign ads for his daughter’s 2022 reelection, Cheney called Trump a “threat to our republic” and a “coward.”

“He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” Dick Cheney said of Trump.

Cheney and her father are among the ranks of high-profile Republicans saying they will not back another Trump term. Jimmy McCain — the youngest son of the late Sen. John McCain — told CNN he changed his voter registration to Democrat and plans to vote for Harris in November.

This post has been updated with more details of Cheney’s endorsement.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance visited the US-Mexico border wall in San Diego on Friday in a previously unannounced stop, where he railed against Vice President Kamala Harris’ policies and claimed she wants to “give all the benefits of American citizenship to people who shouldn’t even be here” at the expense of US citizens. 

Donald Trump’s running mate also defended his opposition to the bipartisan border deal, which Harris said she would sign as president. He said it was “not a real border bill” and “would not have secured the southern border.” 

Vance claimed that executive action from Biden and Harris on the border negates their argument that the bipartisan border bill was necessary to do their job. He also dismissed lower reported border crossings, claiming the Biden-Harris administration is redirecting migrants to ports of entry and airports so the numbers look lower than they are.  

Other immigration issues: Vance was asked several more questions by reporters, including whether a Trump-Vance administration would reinstate its policy of separating families who cross the southern border illegally and to what degree he supports authorizing the use of deadly force at the border.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during the Republican primary he supported authorizing deadly force against migrants cutting the border wall or bringing drugs across the border.  

Standing in front of border officials, Vance urged Harris to visit the border before the November election. He also wouldn’t directly say if a second Trump administration would separate families, but he didn’t rule it out, saying that “if a guy commits gun violence and is taken to prison, that’s family separation, which, of course, is tragic for the children, but you’ve got to prosecute criminals, and you have to enforce the law.”

Trump has made immigration and the border a central campaign issue, successfully pressuring Republicans to reject a major bipartisan border deal earlier this year. This week, he vowed to ban mortgages for undocumented immigrants.

President Joe Biden does plan to watch next week’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the White House confirmed Friday. 

While Jean-Pierre reiterated Friday that Biden is “proud” of Harris and declined to say if any West Wing officials would join Harris, either remotely or in person in Pittsburgh, for debate prep.

“From our side of things, not anyone that I know, but it’s a campaign debate,” she said. “But not anyone that I know of.”  

Ahead of Biden’s disastrous June debate with Trump, CNN’s MJ Lee reported the president huddled with an array of campaign and administration officials at Camp David, including White House officials Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, Anita Dunn, Steve Richetti, Annie Tomasini, Ben LaBolt, Jake Sullivan, and others. 

A Michigan appeals court has ordered state election officials to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from the ballot.

The court found that officials had improperly denied Kennedy’s request to remove his name after he suspended his presidential campaign last month. 

In Michigan, Kennedy was on the ballot as the nominee of the Natural Law Party, and the state had relied on a section of law which prohibits minor party candidates from withdrawing. But the appeals court found that the section applied only to candidates for state office, not to presidential candidates.

A spokesperson for the Michigan secretary of state told CNN they will appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

Absentee voting in Michigan is scheduled to start September 26, although ballots for overseas and military voters are required to go out by September 21. 

Why this matters: Kennedy has been trying to remove his name from the ballot in battleground states after suspending his campaign and endorsing former President Donald Trump. Kennedy has encouraged his supporters to back Trump “no matter what state you live in.”

Other states: The Michigan decision is the second victory for Kennedy on Friday, after an appeals court in North Carolina ordered that state to remove his name from the ballot as well. Ballots were supposed to start going out Friday, but the process is frozen as the state decides whether to appeal that ruling. If the decision holds, counties will need to restart the ballot printing process without Kennedy’s name.

Kennedy is also challenging the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s decision to keep him on the ballot there.

CNN’s Aaron Pellish and Eva McKend contributed reporting to this post.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) on Friday announced it was endorsing former president Donald Trump ahead of Trump’s scheduled speech later in the day to the group’s board in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The group, which describes itself as the nation’s oldest and largest police labor organization, endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020.

Yoes said the group considered Trump’s responses to a FOP questionnaire and a letter from the Harris campaign “describing some of their positions on criminal justice and police labor issues.” He said a FOP committee member met with Trump but that “no similar meeting was granted by the Harris-Walz campaign.”

“During his first term, President Trump made it clear he supported law enforcement and border security. In the summer of 2020, he stood with us when very few would. With his help, we defeated the ‘defund the police’ movement and, finally, we are seeing crime rates decrease. If we want to maintain these lower crime rates, we must re-elect Donald Trump,” Yoes said.

Earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign sought to undercut Trump’s remarks the group, touting a letter from more than 100 law enforcement officials across the country backing her campaign while framing Trump as a convicted felon who urged an unruly mob of supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6.

The nation’s largest machinists’ union formally endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president after her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz virtually addressed the union at its annual convention on Friday. 

Walz, who is spending his Friday in Minnesota, spoke virtually to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) gathering in New York City, where he reiterated his commitment to supporting unions, the campaign announced on Friday. After Walz’s remarks, the union voted to formally endorse the Harris-Walz campaign.

IAM president Brian Bryant credited Harris for her role in creating “the most union-friendly administration in American history,” and portrayed Trump as hostile to unions, saying he “broke promise after promise to our members.”

The machinists’ union endorsement is latest major union to back Harris’ White House bid, and comes after Walz made a direct appeal to another union group. Walz has previously addressed the government employees union at their gathering in Los Angeles and the firefighters’ union convention in Boston before speaking at a labor event in Milwaukee on Labor Day.

JD Vance speaks during a campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Friday he will still appear with Tucker Carlson in Pennsylvania later this month, after the far-right personality hosted a guest this week who suggested the Holocaust happened by accident.

Touting how he and former president Donald Trump stand for free speech and “anti-censorship,” Vance argued the best way to ensure a Holocaust isn’t repeated is to “push back against bad ideas” rather than “suppress them.”

“The best way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to debate and push back against bad ideas. It’s not to try to censor and suppress them. I really believe that the more you censor ideas instead of fight back against them, the more you give those ideas power,” Vance said. 

As CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Thursday, Darryl Cooper, a podcaster whom Carlson said “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” claimed that Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Jews was an unintended consequence – something akin to poor planning instead of the methodical extermination that it actually was – during an two-hour sit down with Carlson.

Vance denied that the interview has become a distraction for the campaign this close to an election.

Carlson spoke at the Republican National Convention and is a prominent figure in conservative media.

Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York City on Friday.

Former President Donald Trump will not be sentenced in his New York criminal case until after the 2024 presidential election, following another delay announced by Judge Juan Merchan on Friday.

Merchan wrote in a new letter that he would sentence Trump on November 26 — if necessary — in response to a request from Trump’s lawyers to push back the sentencing.

Merchan noted the upcoming presidential election in his decision to delay sentencing, saying that part of his reason for doing so was to avoid the appearance that the sentencing was intended to influence the November election.

In addition to pushing back the sentencing until November 26, Merchan wrote that he would decide on Trump’s motion to vacate the verdict because of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision on November 12, which is also after the election.

The Manhattan DA’s office said it “stands ready for sentencing on the new date.”

While they maintain the case should be thrown out, Trump’s legal team is pleased with Merchan’s decision to delay his sentencing, a source familiar with the reaction tells CNN. Trump was with his lawyers when he found out. 

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to the decision, saying, “there should be no sentencing in the Manhattan DA’s election interference witch hunt.”

Trump later echoed that message in a post on Truth Social, repeating his baseless claim that the case was a “political attack” orchestrated by his rivals and saying the case “should have never been brought.”

More on the case: The former president was scheduled to be sentenced on September 18. Trump was convicted earlier this year of 34 charges of falsifying business records, stemming from his hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

It is one of four criminal cases Trump is facing while running again for president.

This post has been updated with more details from the judge’s decision Friday and reactions from Trump, his team and the Manhattan DA.

CNN’s Kate Sullivan contributed reporting to this post.