At first glance, new billboards in Arizona look like Chick-fil-A’s iconic “Eat Mor Chikin” promos. But instead of cows, the billboards erected Tuesday feature four cats dressed in cow costumes.

“EAT LESS KITTENS,” the billboards say. “Vote Republican!”

Arizona’s Republican Party announced Tuesday that it had designed about a dozen of the billboards in the Phoenix area in response to false claims shared by some top Republicans that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating Americans’ pets. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who plans to visit Arizona on Thursday, amplified those claims at an ABC News debate on Tuesday, despite police telling local news outlets that there was no evidence of anyone eating pets.

In a news release, the Arizona GOP said the billboards are “a humorous, but sobering reminder of the stakes involved in the fight for secure borders and safe communities.”

“Our newest billboard highlights just how horrific things have become under the failed policies of ‘Border Czar’ Kamala Harris,” Arizona GOP Chair Gina Swoboda said in a statement, referring to the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee’s role in the Biden administration working with three Central American countries to reduce unauthorized migration. “Trump is committed to securing our borders and ensuring that what we’ve seen elsewhere does not become the norm in our country.”

Rumors of immigrants hurting animals in Springfield, a city about 40 miles west of Columbus, appear to have started from a post first shared in a city Facebook group. A user claimed a friend of their neighbor’s daughter had found her lost cat hanging from a branch at a home where a Haitian lives.

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, shared a post on X on Monday in which he cited unnamed “reports” claiming that people in Springfield “have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Tuesday called Vance’s claim “dangerous” misinformation.

“There will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is,” Kirby said at a news briefing.

At Tuesday’s debate, Trump said immigrants in Springfield are “eating the dogs,” “eating the cats” and “eating the pets of the people that live there.” With her microphone turned off, Vice President Kamala Harris laughed and said: “What? This is unbelievable.”

When moderator David Muir said Springfield’s city manager had stated that there were no credible reports of immigrants eating pets, Trump doubled down on his statement.

“I’ve seen people on television … the people on television claimed my dog was taken and used for food,” Trump said, interrupting Muir. “So maybe he said that, and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.”

Haitian immigrants are a growing population in Springfield, where they generally live and work legally, according to an FAQ on the city’s website.

But the top Republicans’ claims had already inspired the Arizona GOP’s billboard campaign, which the party used to make broader statements against illegal immigration.

“We’re not going to sit idly by while our communities are overrun by tens of thousands of ‘newcomers’ imported by Kamala Harris who have no interest in assimilating into our culture and have no regard for the laws of the United States,” Swoboda said in a statement.

A Chick-fil-A spokesman told The Washington Post that the restaurant chain wasn’t aware of the Arizona GOP’s billboards before Tuesday. He declined to comment on the design.

Yolanda Bejarano, chair of Arizona’s Democratic Party, accused the state’s GOP of committing “racist stunts.”

“The AZGOP’s weird AI-looking billboard is xenophobic and entirely unserious,” Bejarano said in a statement to The Post. “While the AZGOP focuses on online dog whistles, we are talking to voters about the issues they care about most.”

Robert Graham, who served as the Arizona GOP’s chair in the mid-2010s, said creating billboards based on rumors — and not directly addressing issues important to voters — was a “waste of money.”

“Americans right now are faced with making a decision: Who they want to elect into office, and especially the presidential office,” Graham told The Post. “They don’t want to have to filter through cutesy [messages] because they don’t have time for it.”

The Arizona GOP did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday but wrote on Facebook: “The media and Democrats are more concerned with billboards than with the deadly reality of the border crisis.”

The party was muddled in controversy at the start of this year after a leaked recording revealed that chairman Jeff DeWit dissuaded Kari Lake from running for the state’s Senate seat in 2024, prompting DeWit’s resignation. The Arizona GOP has seen significant election losses in recent years; neither of the state’s two senators are Republican, nor are Arizona’s governor, secretary of state or attorney general.

Republicans tried to largely hide from former president Donald Trump’s debate performance Tuesday, mostly cheering him on or just avoiding the issue altogether.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) focused entirely on a failed government funding plan. What did he think of Trump’s debate performance, reporters asked him. Johnson walked away, into the House chamber.

Across the Capitol, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 GOP leader, fell into the passive voice to avoid criticizing Trump when asked about the missed opportunity to define Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Well, um, that job’s got to get done,” said Thune, who is asking colleagues to promote him to majority leader.

Who should take up that task? Thune ducked into a closed luncheon for GOP senators without answering the question.

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement from the two people who, if he won the presidency, Trump would rely on to advance his agenda on Capitol Hill.

Almost 11 weeks after congressional Democrats faced a political come-to-Jesus moment surrounding President Joe Biden’s standing, Republicans confronted their own version of a presidential nominee who handled his debate performance with confused, rambling answers that diverged into territory few voters care about.

But they had far more reserved reactions than those exhibited by Democrats at the time, who showed up in mourning to a brief series of votes the morning after Biden’s debate with Trump.

Trump on Tuesday came across more energetic than Biden did back on June 27, but his grasp of issues left many Republicans privately expressing deep regret over how their candidate did not do much, if any, of the traditional debate preparation that has been common practice for a few decades.

Other Republicans just blamed moderators for poor questioning, even though Trump spoke for more minutes than Harris and had ample opportunities to drive home those points.

“I think he preps every day. Like President Trump, I do a lot of meetings, town halls, roundtables, and I think that’s the best prep in the world that you can do,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said Wednesday.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has won three deeply contested statewide races through a disciplined, well-funded campaign operation, did not blame Trump for wandering into strange ideological cul-de-sacs and suggested he is so incredibly well known to voters that debate performances won’t matter for him.

“If you don’t know Trump, I don’t know where you’ve been,” Scott said. “Under a rock?”

Other Republicans begrudgingly offered a slight critique — “missed opportunity” was the description of choice — noting how Harris never found herself on the defensive about her two decades of elected service as a prosecutor, senator and vice president.

“I believe that we missed a lot of opportunities last night,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said.

“It was a huge missed opportunity to nail Kamala Harris on some very easy, easy points. Could have been a lot worse,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.).

How could it have been much worse?

“I mean, I don’t think Trump, you know, became overly emotional or lost his cool. He remained stoic,” Crenshaw said. “He never looked over at her the way she kept sneering and jeering at him like a child.”

Contrast that with Democrats’ reactions after Biden’s June debate.

“I think people are panic-stricken,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), a 20-year incumbent who serves as a minister and at the time cautioned colleagues not to make rash decisions. “They’re panic-stricken, and I don’t think that’s a good time to think.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who would go on to play a behind-the-scenes role in helping push Biden aside, told reporters “it could be” when asked whether that debate was Biden’s “worst night” as president.

Republicans do not feel free to be that critical of Trump out of the fear that, even if he loses, he will continue to use his influence over base voters to extract revenge in primaries against the wayward lawmakers.

Marshall, a onetime traditional conservative who reinvented himself as a far-right agitator, adopted the blame-the-moderators approach to explain how the Biden-Harris record on border security and crime did not become focal points.

Yet he has no explanation for why Trump didn’t make more of those issues in his nearly 43 minutes of speaking, which included plenty of topics that were not questions from moderators.

“I don’t have an answer,” Marshall said.

Crenshaw, who is not considered a MAGA ally of Trump, even defended Trump’s diversion into an unproven claim, based on racist tropes, that Haitian refugees were stealing and eating pets in a small Ohio town, saying the issue has appeared on television.

“It’s like in the news right now, and it’s disgusting. And it’s, yeah, there’s Haitian migrants in Ohio reportedly eating ducks and things at the local parks. Like, I don’t know about pets but, I mean, it’s a thing,” Crenshaw said.

In his formal statement, released moments after the debate ended, Johnson began with remarks that read as if they were written before the debate.

“Tonight, President Donald Trump exposed Vice President Kamala Harris for the dangerous radical she has always been,” the speaker said.

By Wednesday morning, most Republicans had acknowledged that their biggest regret was that Harris had not been exposed and that, in some regards, she came off looking presidential.

“People saw, ‘Oh, actually, she’s an intelligent, capable person who has a point of view on issues,’ and she demonstrated that time and again,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), the retiring Republican who opposes Trump’s election bid but has not endorsed Harris.

Tillis stood out as the rare Republican who openly criticized Trump for not doing real debate preparations, evident from his lack of ready-to-use quips to criticize Harris for the Biden administration’s handling of the border and inflation, issues on which voters tend to favor Republicans.

“There you go again, Harris,” Tillis said, offering his imaginary answer along the lines that Ronald Reagan used in his debates. “You want to do everything except talk about an agenda that you were partially responsible for implementing.”

Trump has openly mocked his senior campaign advisers at rallies and in interviews for their efforts to get him to focus on policy issues and not personal attacks or false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. According to news reports, those advisers made clear Trump was not doing the traditional mock debates with someone standing in as the opponent and trying to practice lines.

Tillis recalled how, after trailing his opponent for a good portion of his 2020 election, he worked with senior aides who came up with a line that they made Tillis rehearse over and over again.

“If you will say that 11 times, I’ll buy you a steak dinner,” his debate coach said, according to Tillis. He uttered the line 11 times and narrowly won reelection.

“I got the steak dinner,” he recalled, a bone-in porterhouse, medium-rare.

“When you do not heed the advice of experts in politics, you’re probably going to go into dangerous waters,” Tillis said.

On the first night after Donald Trump was injured in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., some supporters and allies, including campaign staff, immediately began blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats before any information was available about the shooter or his possible motive. Trump himself didn’t go there. In his first public statements after the July 13 shooting, Trump thanked law enforcement, offered condolences to the rallygoers killed and wounded, and called for unity.

But his tone changed in recent weeks, as the Republican presidential nominee began promoting such conspiracy theories as those that label the assassination attempt an “inside job” by government agencies or make up Democratic ties to lawyers representing the shooter’s parents. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), frequently portray the attempt as part of efforts by political opponents to prevent the former president from returning to power.

“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” Trump said at Tuesday’s ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, referring to the bullet or bullet fragment that authorities said grazed his right ear.

The photo of Trump raising his fist with blood on his face has supplanted his mug shot as the defining image of his campaign, adorning everything from T-shirts to Christmas ornaments, and symbolizing the feeling of defiance that Trump has made core to his political persona. Republicans’ new rallying cry became the “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chant inspired by Trump’s first words after getting shot.

His frequent retellings of what happened in Butler serve to deepen his bond with his supporters by fostering a collective experience of overcoming adversity. That shared feeling gets intensified by a perceived indifference from the media and the rest of the country, as attention quickly moved on from the shooting to Trump’s selection of Vance and Harris’s replacement of Biden as the Democratic nominee. And as with previous MAGA myths, such as unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, Trump’s supporters bring him information and suspicions that he amplifies and validates, creating a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.

“The more we see what happened that day, the more suspicious it all looks,” right-wing podcast host Monica Crowley said in an interview with Trump released on Aug. 29. “It looks like the three-letter agencies are slow-walking a lot of this evidence, a lot of the videos, etc. Does it look increasingly to you like this was a suspicious, maybe even inside job?”

“It’s very suspicious,” Trump replied. “The more you see it, the more you start to say, ‘There could be something else.’”

Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said: “President Trump wants to ensure we learn where failures happened and how to prevent them in the future, because the American people, especially Corey’s family and those who were wounded, deserve to know the truth.”

Researchers who study political violence said these words, images and emotions have the dual effect of mobilizing Trump’s supporters to vote for him and delegitimizing the outcome in case he loses. They also said Trump’s emphasis on the shooting could inspire some of his supporters to resort to violence in his defense.

“It is creating a permission structure for at least some people to want to take matters into their own hands,” said Matt Dallek, a George Washington University professor who studies the conservative movement and is working on a book about presidential assassination attempts and political violence in the 20th century. “It operates similarly to the ‘big lie’ about the 2020 election being stolen, and therein lies the danger to the country.”

Investigators have yet to identify a motive for the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who was killed at the scene by a Secret Service sniper. Authorities said Crooks’s phone had pictures of Biden and a member of the British royal family as well as Trump, and they have found no sign of an ideological or political motive. Instead, the available evidence points to Crooks as a troubled young man like many of those behind past assassination attempts or, more often, school shootings.

A series of lapses made it so Crooks was able to take multiple shots at Trump using his father’s rifle from about 150 yards from where Trump was speaking, firing from the roof of a building where local police were staged. Police searched for Crooks as a reported suspicious person for 30 minutes before Trump’s detail found out, and one officer found him on the roof but had to retreat just before Crooks opened fire.

The Secret Service repeatedly turned down the Trump campaign’s requests for additional resources as the agency struggled to keep up with expanding protection needs for more than two dozen people. Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned under pressure in July, and there are ongoing investigations by congressional committees, the FBI and Homeland Security’s inspector general. No evidence has emerged of White House involvement in resource decisions.

The shock of freak events like assassinations almost always tempt imaginations, with loose ends about the political murders of the 1960s that linger still today. In the case of the Butler rally, the embarrassing revelations and stubborn unknowns have given Trump and his supporters ample jumping-off points. Some on the left have also engaged with unfounded suspicions about the source and nature of Trump’s injury. In a recent podcast interview, Trump pointed to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray’s initial uncertainty in congressional testimony about what hit Trump’s ear as reason to distrust him; Wray, whom Trump appointed, clarified that the former president was injured by a bullet or fragment.

“This is all set up to prime his base to believe that, if his loses in November, the Democrats have once again stolen the election, that Harris is illegitimate, and they should in some respects come to his defense,” said Barbara F. Walter, a professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them.” If his polls deteriorate in coming weeks and it looks like he may lose, she added, “he’s going to ratchet up that narrative even further.”

‘Don’t they have to kill you now?’

The prospect of an assassination was on the minds of some Trump supporters long before the Butler rally. In December 2020, Trump told friends he feared Iran might try to kill him as retaliation for the drone strike he ordered to kill Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, according to the book “The Divider” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Fans at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club would sometimes come up to him and warn he shouldn’t pick a running mate more favorable to the “deep state” or the supposed ill-defined cabal would take him out, according to people familiar with those conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private interactions.

Last year, as Trump stared down four separate criminal cases, he repeatedly passed on invitations to speculate that an assassination attempt could be in his future. “Are you worried that they’re going to try and kill you?” Tucker Carlson asked Trump in an interview released on the same night as the first primary debate, in which Trump did not participate. Trump didn’t directly answer, and Carlson tried again: “Don’t they have to kill you now?” Trump again changed the subject.

The eventual attempt on Trump’s life left him unusually spiritual and amazed to be alive, according to people who spoke to him immediately after. He stayed relatively quiet through the start of the Republican National Convention that opened just two days later.

That week of speeches and meetings quickly developed the accepted meaning of the assassination attempt within the party and movement. The “fight” chant became a constant refrain. Photos of Trump’s raised fist frequented the arena screens and, before long, the merchandise available outside. There would be shirts proclaiming “Still Standing … Impeached, Arrested, Convicted & Shot” and “You Missed.” Some delegates wore paper flaps over their ears in solidarity with Trump’s bandage.

“When he stood up after being shot in the face, bloodied, and put his hand up, I thought, at that moment, that was a transformation. This was no longer a man,” Carlson said in his speech on the convention’s final night. “I think it was divine intervention. But the effect that it had on Donald Trump — he was no longer just a political party’s nominee, or a former president, or a future president. This was the leader of a nation.”

Trump’s staff said ahead of time that his own speech for that night would transcend his usual controversies and insults, showing the former president like Americans were not used to seeing him. He began with a dramatic retelling of the assassination attempt, saying it would be the only time because it was “too painful.” He was joined onstage by the firefighter uniform of slain rallygoer Corey Comperatore and at one point walked over to kiss the white helmet.

As the speech went on, Trump returned to form, vilifying immigrants and demanding the dismissal of the criminal cases against him. By the end of the month, Trump would acknowledge how short the respite lasted.

“They all said, ‘Trump is going to be a nice man now. He came close to death.’ And I really agreed with that for about eight hours or so,” he said at a July 31 rally in Harrisburg, Pa. “So, I was nice for about, what would you say, three, four, or five hours, and then I said, ‘These are bad people. We have to win this battle.’”

‘A lot of coincidences’

Notwithstanding his caveat at the convention, Trump proceeded to recount the shooting again and again. At the July 31 rally in Harrisburg, he marveled that the Butler rally hadn’t turned into a stampede when the gunshots rang out. He singled out a man wearing a green floppy hat in the bleachers behind him, visible in news footage standing and staring at Trump while others ducked.

People in the crowd started shouting, “He’s here!” and pointing Trump’s attention to a man standing in the audience in Harrisburg. “Wow, that’s great,” Trump said. “You can be in a foxhole with me anytime, man.”

The person standing to accept to adulation in Harrisburg was not, in fact, the man in the green floppy hat whom Trump had been describing. That man asked not to be identified.

Still, the observation that the rally attendees in Butler stayed and watched Trump rather than flee quickly became a popular feature of the story, usually offered as testament to their courage and dedication to Trump — making the brush with disaster something they survived together.

“The people of Butler County didn’t run,” said Jim Hulings, chairman of the county’s Republican committee, who was seated in the front row. “I didn’t duck. I stood up on my chair.”

That night, after Trump took off in his plane and police cleared the fairgrounds where the rally had been, someone down the road set off fireworks. People put out Trump signs and banners and spray-painted “FIGHT” on the streets. Hulings remembered driving the next day to show his wife the fairgrounds but it was blocked off by investigators, and he noticed the church parking lots were full.

“I’ve never met anybody who says, ‘Hey, there’s a conspiracy,’” he said. “A lot of people say there’s a lot of coincidences. Some of us grew up with the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Robert Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King assassination. They still haven’t told us what happened with John F. Kennedy. We’ll never know all the facts because they’ll cover it up. Why would they do that?”

An anonymous petition circulating online gathered more than 7,000 signatures to ask the county judge to impanel a grand jury to investigate the assassination attempt, alleging that federal agencies have conflicts of interest and “possible perceived corruption.”

Trump allies and surrogates are already echoing his language or going further. In a Sept. 6 radio interview, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) drew a line connecting the JFK assassination, the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon and the Butler shooting.

“We’ll probably never know because there’s a reason you call it the deep state,” he said. “It’s very deep. It’s very pervasive.”

CHARLOTTE — Lawrence Call Jr. didn’t want to vote for Donald Trump again. “As a human being I can’t stand him,” the 57-year-old told a Democratic door-knocker at his front porch. And President Joe Biden was too old, as he saw it. But now Call had another option: Vice President Kamala Harris.

“She’s got a newer outlook,” said Call, who is a registered Republican but votes “independently,” after taking a pro-Harris flier last week. Leaning toward voting for Harris, he agreed to bring it to a meeting with fellow veterans.

“We’ll be back around,” vowed Aiden Graham, the Democratic organizer, as he left for the next house on Call’s cul-de-sac.

Harris has raised Democratic hopes of winning North Carolina, a populous battleground that has been just beyond their grasp since Barack Obama briefly turned it blue in 2008. The elusive prize represents the party’s best chance of winning a state Biden couldn’t in 2020, and the race here is a dead heat eight weeks before Election Day, according to nonpartisan analysts and strategists from both parties. Harris, who is back in the state Thursday, has energized voters in a way Biden could not, Democratic organizers said, forcing Republicans to expend significant resources here.

The stakes for Trump are especially high: His likeliest paths to the presidency rest on holding North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes. (Only seven states offer more.) Republicans have nominated polarizing candidates up and down the ballot, especially GOP gubernatorial pick Mark Robinson, whose offensive comments keep drawing scrutiny. Trump visited the state on Friday for his fourth campaign visit since Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

But many Democrats, stung by years of almost-but-not-quite victories, still see themselves as underdogs in a state Biden lost by just over one point in 2020. Republicans have dominated in federal races in recent years even as Democrats held the governor’s mansion; Democrats haven’t won a Senate race since 2008 and disappointing presidential outcomes have become the norm since Obama’s victory that year ended a Republican winning streak dating back to 1980.

Democrats have long believed the state’s rapidly growing population and demographics — including a significant number of Black voters and millennial voters — put it firmly in play. Yet roughly 40 percent of the state lives in rural areas, which tend to be conservative strongholds that have helped the GOP stay on top.

Trump is polling better here than he did at this point in either 2016 or 2020, when he ultimately won, and his allies said they see support for his rival leveling off. While Harris is emphasizing abortion rights in a state where the procedure is banned after 12 weeks of pregnancy, both Republican and Democratic strategists said economic issues are more salient in this Bible Belt state.

North Carolina GOP chair Jason Simmons said his party always expected North Carolina to be close and that polling shows the economy is voters’ top issue, while security at the U.S.-Mexico border also ranks highly. “Those are the issues that are going to drive voters to Donald Trump,” he said.

Democrats have increased the pressure on Republicans by booking about $50 million in advertising in the state. Trump’s main super PAC has not made reservations for most of September and October, but Republicans have roughly matched their opponents in ad spending through this weekend, according to AdImpact. Meanwhile, Democrats have sought to capitalize on fresh energy for Harris. Recruiting less politically engaged union members to organize used to feel like “pulling teeth” with Biden at the top of the ticket, Graham said. No longer.

The ground war is in high gear: As Graham and his colleagues recently knocked doors for Democrats with the hospitality workers union Unite Here Local 23, they took note of the pro-Trump mailers stuffed into mailboxes along their route and ran into a young pro-Harris canvasser from another group.

Unite Here canvasser Tekeria Colvin, 26, pulled out her phone to play a brief recording of her visit with a group of Trump-supporting men she stumbled across while trying to speak with one of their girlfriends.

“Trump is top G — that’s who we need in the chair,” a man said, using a slang term for someone who commands respect that is associated with the self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. The man wasn’t sure of Harris’s first name. (Trump has constantly mispronounced it.)

The campaigns are also battling over unaffiliated voters that make up more than one-third of registered voters in North Carolina — more than either Democrats or Republicans. Many are prone to changing their minds.

Democrats look beyond urban centers

In some ways, North Carolina resembles other states that have shifted in Democrats’ direction, such as Georgia, said Amy Walter, editor in chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which last month moved North Carolina from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.” It has a Black population of more than 20 percent and lots of out-of-state transplants. But there are key differences.

“It is a more small town, rural state than Georgia is,” Walter said. Cities quickly give way to red territory. Harris needs to “post better numbers in the suburbs right outside of Charlotte or right outside of the research triangle, and that’s the challenge,” Walter said.

Democrats are not only banking on high turnout in large cities including Charlotte, noting the Harris campaign has 26 field offices around the state, including in deep-red counties. On Saturday, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison was in Robeson County — which favored Trump by about 19 points in 2020 — to address a small gathering of church and community leaders at the local African American Cultural Center.

Harrison told the mostly Black crowd that if North Carolina went blue, Harris would be their next president. “We remember how he treated the first Black president,” he said of Trump, alluding to the former president’s years-long false claims that Obama was not born in the United States. Speaker after speaker invoked former first lady Michelle Obama’s charge to “do something.”

By the time megachurch pastor James Gailliard brought things to a close, people were on their feet, shouting their agreement.

“No disrespect to my folk in Durham, Charlotte — but we’re not going to trust y’all to get us over the finish line,” Gailliard said. They would need to juice turnout everywhere.

Outside Charlotte, in Gaston County, which voted for Trump by nearly 28 points in 2020, a Harris campaign office has attracted voters like Gary Boggess, a registered Republican in his 60s who can’t stand Trump and dropped by the Democratic outpost late last month interested in helping. “We put a sign in our yard — he just cannot win,” Boggess told a reporter who ran into him later.

In a sign of North Carolina’s importance to Harris, the vice president chose to unveil her first major policy speech in Raleigh just before the Democratic National Convention.

The speech and its policy proposals were aimed squarely at some of the central issues in the state, according to a Harris campaign official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning. Harris detailed economic proposals aimed at boosting the middle class, holding “corporate landlords” accountable for rent hikes and putting homeownership within reach of more Americans.

“Together we will build what I call an opportunity economy,” Harris said. “Everyone, regardless of who they are or where they start, has an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children.”

Trump and allies still see an edge

When Trump’s team has laid out their paths to 270 electoral votes, they have said they might only need to flip two states, Georgia and Pennsylvania — as long as they keep North Carolina. They could replace North Carolina with wins elsewhere, but the math gets tougher.

GOP operatives acknowledged that Harris has solidified the Democratic base that threatened to revolt against Biden. But Trump officials said they believe Harris’s support is now leveling off after a peak.

“President Trump’s position in North Carolina is stronger today than it has ever been since 2016,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement, predicting Harris “will lose ever more support as more and more North Carolinians understand just how dangerously liberal she is.”

In a major victory for Trump, a North Carolina court recently granted independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s last-minute request to have his name removed from ballots, delaying absentee ballots that were supposed to start mailing out last Friday. RFK Jr. endorsed Trump as Republicans worried that he would pull more voters from their side than from Democrats.

While Trump has often bashed mail voting, he recently released a TikTok encouraging North Carolinians to take advantage of absentee ballots.

“I still think that the wind is at Trump’s back in North Carolina,” said Paul Shumaker, a longtime GOP strategist in the state who predicted Harris would struggle to overcome voter concerns about immigration and the economy. Shumaker voiced confidence about Trump’s standing with the state’s “unaffiliated” voters, many of whom he calls “Ping-Pong” voters because they often change their minds.

Trump returned to North Carolina on Friday for a police union event where he reprised his disparaging nickname for Harris — “Comrade Kamala” — and portrayed her as too far left. He spoke in his usual, apocalyptic terms, rejecting federal statistics that show a decrease in murders.

“Kamala Harris and the Communist left have unleashed a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death upon our land,” Trump said.

Some Republicans in North Carolina have grown nervous about downballot candidates such as Robinson, who fires up the base but has alienated many other voters. In a statement, Harris campaign spokeswoman Dory MacMillan said the vice president’s “positive vision for the future” contrasts with that of “Trump and his MAGA allies like Mark Robinson.”

Yet Republicans say they see little evidence in the polls that Robinson is dragging Trump down and believe many voters will split their tickets — as they often do in North Carolina.

Marianne Levine in Washington contributed to this report.

In theory, the question should have been easy.

Debate moderator Linsey Davis on Tuesday night pointed out to former president Donald Trump that he had repeatedly promised during his first two presidential bids to present a new approach to health care. She pointed out, too, that he hadn’t delivered one.

“So tonight, nine years after you first started running,” Davis said, “do you have a plan, and can you tell us what it is?”

Trump treaded water for a bit, bashing the Affordable Care Act but also taking credit for “saving it.”

Davis was not hoodwinked. “So just a yes or no,” she followed up: “You still do not have a plan?”

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump replied.

Don’t we all, Mr. Trump. Don’t we all.

This should theoretically have been an easy question because Trump should have assumed someone at some point would ask. Davis was responding specifically to Trump’s most recent promises to revamp access to and the cost of health care, but she was also responding to those literal nine years of similar promises. When Trump pledged a new health-care policy shortly before the 2020 election, I created this chart showing his past similar promises, none of which had been kept. (You will note that the line labeled “now” is not actually now.)

Over and over, promises of a new health-care plan. Over and over, no plan. Or even concepts of one.

Trump’s failures to deliver on his health-care policy promises in particular are punchlines in his political career, surpassed only by his efforts as president to launch “infrastructure week.” Remember that time Trump handed a journalist a giant binder of paper with his policy proposals, only to have her visibly flip through a few pages that were blank? That was his health-care plan! Or, it seems, some of the concepts.

So, again: Trump should have had an answer. Except that, as I wrote on Wednesday, he’s not used to having to answer difficult questions. He’s not used to being in a place where the interviewer isn’t sycophantic and he can’t simply walk away. Davis had a unique opportunity and earned a revealing response.

The damage done, though, wasn’t simply in the clumsy phrasing, one that will live alongside “alternative facts” in defining an aspect of Trumpism. Nor was it simply that it revealed the hollowness of all of those Trump promises on health care. It was also unusually problematic for Trump in this moment against this opponent.

Trump and his allies have spent the past few weeks pillorying Vice President Kamala Harris for having no delineated policy proposals. This is ironic in part because Trump in 2015 publicly rejected the idea that voters actually cared about such proposals (which is generally true). But, still: This was one central line of attack. On matters of policy, his team insisted, Trump would prevail over Harris easily, in part because she had nothing to offer.

What does Trump have to offer? Well, concepts of plans.

His supporters will counter that he does have policy proposals, ones articulated in what his team calls “Agenda 47.” It was presented largely through video snippets in which Trump talks generally about things he wants to do, most of them very familiar. This section of his website has been de-emphasized in favor of the “platform” Trump helped write for the Republican convention (which is somehow even vaguer). But when I looked at it in June, there was no specific proposal on health care — and very few mentions of it in general. (Search for yourself!)

This has made it much easier for Harris and her allies to suggest that the thick sheaf of proposals compiled by the Heritage Foundation — the infamous “Project 2025” — is what Trump actually plans to do if he is elected again. Trump correctly points out that the descriptor “Trump’s ‘Project 2025’” is misleading, since he didn’t write it. But his critics correctly point out that the authors of the document are largely people who worked for Trump when he was president and can be expected to return to the federal government if he wins. And, since Trump has no plans of his own, their plans would become his.

It is okay if Trump doesn’t have a detailed proposal for overhauling the health-care system. It is a system that is notoriously complicated and involves countless competing priorities. It is one in which expense is unevenly distributed, making it that much harder to figure out a fair way to cover the costs. The reason the Affordable Care Act was such a big deal in the first place (to paraphrase Joe Biden) was that it managed to address a significant chunk of the issue in one fell swoop (through a clunky and patchwork process).

But for that reason Trump should stop pretending he has a plan. It’s not that people thought he did, mind you. Even when he first started touting his imminent proposal, it was understood that he was blowing smoke. Donald Trump, the political neophyte who shrugs at policy details, was not going to be the person to slice this Gordian knot. But he keeps saying it because he says untrue things all the time, and his supporters grant him the benefit of the doubt.

Trump’s “concepts of a plan” comment, though, will make it that much harder for anyone else to grant him that benefit before Election Day.