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Margin of error race between Harris and Trump as 2024 election enters final stretch

Margin of error race between Harris and Trump as 2024 election enters final stretch

The 2024 Election season is reaching its crescendo. Labor Day traditionally marks the final stretch ahead of a presidential election, and there are just nine weeks of campaigning left until Election Day on Nov. 5. In a slew of states, however, the election actually gets underway this month. In swing state North Carolina, mail-in voting begins on Sept. 6. Early voting begins on Sept. 16 in Pennsylvania and Sept. 26 in Michigan, two other crucial electoral battlegrounds. With the clock ticking, former President Donald Trump says he has the momentum. BIDEN TEAMS UP WITH HARRIS FOR FIRST TIME SINCE DROPPING OUT OF 2024 RACE “We’re leading in the polls now,” the former president said in an interview Friday with Fox News’ Bryan Llenas. Minutes later, at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump touted that “our poll numbers are starting to skyrocket.” NEW FOX NEWS POLL NUMBERS IN 4 KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is urging her supporters to “not pay too much attention to the polls because we are running as the underdog.” Harris, at a rally in Savannah, Georgia, late last week, pointed to her showdown with Trump and said, “We have some hard work ahead of us.” Most of the latest national surveys show Harris with a slight single-digit edge over Trump, but the presidential election is not a national popular vote contest. It is a battle for the individual states and their electoral votes. The latest surveys in the seven battleground states that decided the 2020 election between Trump and President Biden – and will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 showdown – indicate a margin-of-error race. Among those polls are a batch from Fox News that made headlines last week. It is a big change from earlier this summer when Biden was still running. Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in their late June debate turned up the volume of existing doubts from Americans that the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to handle another four years in the White House. It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race. National and battleground state polls conducted in July indicated Trump had opened up a small but significant lead over Biden. The president dropped his re-election bid on July 21 and endorsed his vice president, and Democrats immediately coalesced around Harris, who quickly enjoyed a boost in her poll numbers and in fundraising. Still, pollsters and political analysts stress that the Harris-Trump contest remains a coin-flip at this point. While the former president touts his standing in the polls, his team emphasizes they like the current poll position, as they point out that the former president has a history of outperforming public opinion surveys. “At this point in the race in 2016, Donald Trump was down to Hillary Clinton by an average of 5.9 points. At this point in the race in 2020, it was 6.9 to Joe Biden,” senior adviser Corey Lewandowski noted this weekend in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Meanwhile, Harris predicts that “this is going to be a tight race until the very end.”  Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Biden claims Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure a deal with terrorists

Biden claims Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure a deal with terrorists

President Biden claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure a hostage deal with Hamas terrorists. Biden made the remarks to reporters before heading into the Situation Room, where he and Vice President Harris are convening with a hostage deal negotiating team following the murder of 23-year-old Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin and five other hostages by Hamas on Saturday.  On the South Lawn of the White House, where Biden disembarked from Marine One upon returning from his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, one reporter asked, “Mr. President, do you think it’s time for Prime Minister Netanyahu to do more on this issue? Do you think he is doing enough? “No,” the president responded flatly.  Another reporter asked if Biden had a message for the hostages’ families.  FATHER OF ISRAELI-AMERICAN HOSTAGE PLEADS FOR DEAL ‘WITH SATAN’ BEFORE BIDEN, HARRIS ENTER SITUATION ROOM “Yes. I have spoken to the American hostage… I spoke to his mom and dad, and we are not giving up. We are going to continue to push as hard as we can. Thank you,” Biden said.  Earlier Monday, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of an Israeli-American hostage still being held by Hamas, pleaded for the U.S. and Israel to broker a deal “with Satan.”  NETANYAHU MOURNS DEATHS OF SIX HOSTAGES RECOVERED IN GAZA, VOWS TO ‘SETTLE ACCOUNTS’ WITH HAMAS Dekel-Chen, appearing on Fox & Friends, acknowledged that the United States together with Qatar and Egypt are trying to broker an agreement between Israel and “a savage terrorist organization,” but insisted that Israeli intelligence shows Hamas’ forces are depleted at this stage.  He said Netanyahu cannot offer “an excuse anymore to not complete this deal” to bring the remaining 101 hostages, including seven Americans, taken into Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, home.  Israel saw a massive strike on Monday after demonstrators took to the streets in droves Sunday protesting Israel’s leadership’s failure to reach an agreement to release the hostages 11 months into the war.  This is a developing story. Check back for updates. 

Biden teams up with Harris on campaign trail for 1st time since dropping re-election bid against Trump

Biden teams up with Harris on campaign trail for 1st time since dropping re-election bid against Trump

Six weeks after he ended his re-election campaign amid rising calls from his own party to drop out of the race, President Biden returns to the campaign trail for the first time on Monday. It will be the first of a “robust” schedule of campaign appearances by the president on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris over the next two months, a White House official tells Fox News. “President Biden will be leaning in heavily over the next several months to finish the job,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt said. Biden will team up with Harris, whom he endorsed and who replaced him atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket, at a Labor Day event in Pittsburgh, a union stronghold and the biggest city in the western half of the key battleground state of Pennsylvania. TRUMP TOUTS HE’S WINNING; HARRIS CALLS HERSELF THE ‘UNDERDOG’ It is part of a full court press by the Harris campaign on Labor Day in some of the seven key swing states that will likely determine the winner of the vice president’s election showdown with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. LaBolt said that going forward, Biden will be “campaigning to elect Vice President Harris and Governor Walz and spending time with core constituencies with whom he has a long relationship, continuing to deploy investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, and emerging industries like clean energy, and strengthening our alliances on the world stage.” NEW FOX NEWS POLL NUMBERS IN 4 KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in their late June debate turned up the volume on existing concerns from Americans that the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to handle another four years in the White House. It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race, which he did on July 21. Biden was showered with chants of “thank you, Joe” as he teamed up with Harris on Aug. 15 in Largo, Maryland, for their first joint appearance since his departure from the 2024 race. While it was billed as an official White House event to announce that the federal government had negotiated lower prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies that will likely save Americans billions of dollars, the gathering had the feel of a political rally. Four days later, Biden was praised and applauded on a much larger scale, as he gave the headliner address on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was a remarkable moment for a president, who weeks earlier was essentially pushed out of the race by his own party. Harris, in a surprise appearance, joined her boss at the podium inside Chicago’s United Center following his speech. Since replacing Biden as the party’s standard-bearer, Harris has enjoyed a rise in the polls and a surge in fundraising as part of the wave of momentum and energy she continues to ride. Biden remains popular with many in the base of his party, and the president has a long history of campaigning on behalf of fellow Democrats. He was the most requested Democratic Party surrogate during the 2018 midterm elections when the party reclaimed control of the House. BIDEN PASSES TORCH TO HARRIS AT FIRST NIGHT OF DEMOCRATS’ CONVENTION A source in Biden’s political orbit told Fox News that the president continues to have “a lot of political appeal and juice with some of the key voters that we’re going to need to win in November.” The strategist, who asked to remain anonymous to speak more freely, told Fox News that “the stakes of the election are what got him to run for re-election. It’s what he thinks about every single day… Just because it’s not his name on the ticket doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care just as much about winning this election. That’s why you’ll see him fighting, because all the stuff that he said when he was running he still believes.” “Going to Pittsburgh, talking about the economy and reaching the voters that he has strength with, I think you’ll see him do that a lot,” the source added. The president said this weekend that his stop in Pittsburgh, a city he has frequently visited over the years, would be the first of many campaign trail appearances between now and November’s election. “I am on the road from there on,” the president told reporters on Saturday. However, there are some risks with putting Biden back on the campaign trail. While his approval ratings have slightly edged up since he dropped his re-election bid, they remain well underwater. Additionally, while Harris repeatedly works to portray herself as a leader who will chart a “new path forward,” Biden is a reminder to voters of the present and the past. Sources in the Harris campaign confirm that going forward the president and vice president will campaign together at times – and that Biden will focus on Pennsylvania, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, the two other Rust Belt states that make up the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall.” The party reliably won all three states for a quarter-century before Trump narrowly captured them in the 2016 election to win the White House. Four years later, in 2020, Biden carried all three states by razor-thin margins to put them back in the Democrats’ column, as he defeated Trump. Biden heads to Wisconsin and Michigan later this week to tout the administration’s efforts to lower costs, for official events that will likely pack a political punch, thanks to the president’s continued appeal with White, working-class voters and union members. LaBolt said that the president’s schedule going forward “will be robust and he plans to leave it all on the field in securing as much progress as possible for hardworking Americans, be that through implementation or legislative action.” Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Father of Israeli-American hostage pleads for deal ‘with Satan’ before Biden, Harris enter Situation Room

Father of Israeli-American hostage pleads for deal ‘with Satan’ before Biden, Harris enter Situation Room

The father of an Israeli-American hostage still being held by Hamas demanded a “negotiated agreement with Satan” soon, as President Biden and Vice President Harris head into the Situation Room with the U.S. negotiating team. “It is absolutely clear, the only way to get hostages home alive is by some kind of negotiated agreement with Satan,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is still being held in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” Monday morning. “Keeping in mind that all of Israel’s military and intelligence, senior command have been saying for weeks if not months the fighting needs to stop in order to get the hostages back, as many as possible alive, but all of the 101 hostages remaining.”  There are seven U.S. citizens still being held by Hamas as hostages, including four believed to be still alive, and three whose murders have already been confirmed, Dekel-Chen noted.  “As far as messaging to the Israeli government, my government, it’s that the time is over for selling, perpetuating this fantasy of total victory over Hamas based on the sacrifice of our sons, daughters, grandparents who are hostages in Gaza,” Dekel-Chen said. “We’ve been at this for 11 months, hearing from our government that a little more military pressure and a little more military pressure is going to cause Hamas to come begging for an agreement in exchange for our hostages. Clearly, that has not happened. Six bodies were returned yesterday of hostages who were alive until this past week. A week before that, six other hostages were returned after their murder, months and months after [Oct. 7].”  BIDEN, HARRIS TO MEET WITH US HOSTAGE DEAL NEGOTIATING TEAM AS MAJOR PROTESTS ERUPT IN ISRAEL Biden and Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, plan to meet in the White House Situation Room Monday morning along with the U.S. hostage deal negotiating team after the murder of six hostages, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, by Hamas on Saturday. The White House said the focus of the meeting is to discuss efforts to drive toward a deal that secures the release of the remaining hostages.  Mobs of protesters took to the streets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities on Sunday, after the bodies of the hostages in Gaza were returned to Israel, fueling frustration and anger toward the country’s leadership for failing to achieve a cease-fire deal freeing the remaining hostages. Israeli media reported that the crowds of protesters were estimated to be up to 500,000 in major Israeli cities. A rare call for a general strike in Israel to protest the failure to return hostages held in Gaza led to closures and other disruptions around the country on Monday, including at its main international airport.  “I think the Biden administration itself will say that they will have done enough when all of the hostages are home. The seven Americans, of course, but all of the 101. The Biden administration has given us extraordinary support since Oct. 7, as well as Congress, from wall to wall which is quite extraordinary in these very polarized political times,” Dekel-Chen said.  ISRAEL’S LARGEST LABOR UNION PLANS MASSIVE STRIKE AFTER SIX HOSTAGES’ BODIES RECOVERED “At the end of the day, the Biden administration or any US administration is not the one who has to sign this agreement. The United States together with Qatar and Egypt are trying to broker an agreement between Israel and a savage terrorist organization,” the father added. “To date, I believe that the Biden administration, all of the U.S. families would agree, has done everything in its power to bring those two sides to yes. Clearly, a little more is necessary, and that’s what we’re asking for, that last little push to convince, obviously Hamas and the Israeli government to get to yes, to end this madness, and to get our people home. Americans, the U.S. citizens and everyone else.”  Dekel-Chen said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition don’t have any excuse not to complete a deal. Hamas, though, has rejected recent proposals. Dekel-Chen argued that the complete eradication of Hamas should not be a sticking point for a deal, because they are too weak to control the Gaza Strip anymore. “The entire senior command of the Army and our intelligence services have said very clearly that Hamas at this moment has been so significantly depleted as a military and a governing organization that that simply cannot be used anymore, except for evidently, domestic political purposes by our prime minister and his coalition, that cannot be used as a reason, really an excuse, anymore to not complete this deal,” Dekel-Chen said. “The only resistance in Israel is from the government itself, most of its ministers unqualified really to make these kinds of decisions from military and intelligence standpoint.”  Fox News’ Greg Wehner and the Associated Press contributed to this report.