Latest news on the 2024 election: Trump and Harris focus on economic policy plans before the first debate

The two presidential candidates are using the week before their debate to hone their economic messaging about who could do more for the middle class. Vice President Kamala Harris will outline her policy plans in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Wednesday, while Donald Trump will speak to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.

Harris will use her campaign appearance in New Hampshire to propose an expansion of tax breaks for small businesses. This business-friendly plan could water down her previous calls for higher taxes on wealthy Americans and big corporations. Trump, on the other hand, is betting that Americans crave trillions of dollars in tax breaks – and that growth will be so fantastic that it won’t be worth worrying about budget deficits.

The candidates will debate next week, their first ever meeting. Pennsylvania, the country’s most important swing state, will begin mail-in voting the following week. Early voting will begin in at least four states by the end of the month, with a dozen more to follow by mid-October.

In just 62 days, the final vote will decide which of them will lead the most powerful nation in the world.

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Here is the news:

Insights from the AP report on JD Vance and the Catholic post-liberals in his sphere of influence

Ohio Senator JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019 shaped his political worldview, he wrote.

This also brought him into close contact with a Catholic intellectual movement that is viewed by some critics as reactionary or authoritarian and is little known to the American public.

This is now changing with Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican candidate for vice president and running mate to former President Donald Trump.

The professors and media personalities in this network are generally considered “post-liberal.” Vance has also used this term for himself.

▶ Here are some insights from AP reporting.

Harris visits New Hampshire, away from the larger swing states, to present her tax plan for small businesses

Vice President Kamala Harris is using a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday to propose an expansion of tax incentives for small businesses, a business-friendly plan that could water down her previous calls for higher taxes on wealthy Americans and big corporations.

She wants to increase the tax credit for small business startup costs from $5,000 to $50,000 in order to encourage 25 million new small business applications within four years.

Harris is expected to stop at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton outside Portsmouth and meet with co-founders Annette Lee and Nicole Carrier. Their brewery received assistance opening its current location through a small business loan and installed solar panels using federal programs sponsored by the Biden administration, according to the Harris campaign.

The trip to New Hampshire is a rare departure for a candidate who spends most of her time in the Midwestern and Sun Belt states that will play a key role in the November election.

▶ Read more here.

The Catholicism of JD Vance shaped his views. So did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers

By his own account, Ohio Senator JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism in 2019 gave him a spiritual fulfillment that he could not find in his education at Yale or in his professional success.

It was also tantamount to a political conversion.

Catholicism gave him a new perspective on the addictions, family breakdowns and other social ills that he described in his 2016 bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

“I desperately longed for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are nevertheless moral beings with individual duties,” he wrote in a 2020 essay.

Through his conversion, Vance also came into close contact with a Catholic intellectual movement that was viewed by some critics as reactionary or authoritarian and was little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican candidate for vice president.

▶ Read more here.

Federal judge rejects Donald Trump’s request to intervene after hush money conviction

A federal judge on Tuesday denied Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, thwarting the former president’s latest attempt to overturn his felony conviction and delay sentencing.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that Trump had not met the burden of proof required for a federal court to take control of the case from the state court in which it was heard.

Hellerstein’s ruling came hours after prosecutors in Manhattan objected to Trump’s effort to delay post-trial decisions in the case while he tried to appeal to a federal court.

In a letter to the state court’s presiding judge, the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that it was not legally required to wait to make decisions after the trial and to forego Hellerstein’s decision.

Read more here.