Avalon Broaden didn’t vote in 2020, unmotivated by a pair of older male candidates that she felt didn’t really represent her values. Her feelings remained the same this year — until the race was upended in July and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee.

“She’s a woman, she’s Black, and I like her. I genuinely think that means something for this country,” said Broaden, 24, a beauty adviser and freelance artist from Omaha. “I’d rather vote for something I strongly believe in rather than voting in spite of someone.”

So when Broaden was recently filling out her Medicaid renewal form, she checked the box that would also register her to vote — and plans to cast a ballot for Harris in November.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll finds that the commitment of Black Americans like Broaden to vote this fall has rebounded since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, with Black voters unifying around her candidacy despite lukewarm ratings of Biden’s presidency.

The Post-Ipsos poll of 1,083 Black Americans finds that 69 percent say they are “absolutely certain to vote” in November, up from 62 percent in April, albeit still lower than 74 percent in June 2020.

That increase is important for Harris, as she tries to rebuild the multicultural coalition that put Barack Obama in office in 2008 and Biden in 2020. It also mirrors other polls showing that she has gained ground among Black voters in the last two months. Her gains have been more pronounced among Black Americans than the general public, but she has also seen growing support from Americans writ large.

The increased engagement among a critical Democratic constituency is concentrated among younger Black Americans, especially younger women, who were less enthusiastic about voting this spring.

The share of Black people under 30 years old saying they are certain to vote this fall is up 15 percentage points from April — to 47 percent — and among Black women under 40, turnout interest is up 18 points to 57 percent. Turnout interest among younger Black men also rose, from 43 percent to 51 percent.

Among Black registered voters, 82 percent say they will “definitely” or “probably” vote for Harris this November, up from 74 percent who said they would support Biden in April, albeit still shy of Biden’s 87 percent mark among Black voters according to 2020 national exit polling. The share saying they would “definitely” vote for the Democratic candidate is up from 48 percent for Biden this spring to 68 percent for Harris today.

A 77 percent majority of Black voters under age 30 say they would support Harris if the election were held today, up from 59 percent who said they would support Biden in April. Among Black women under age 40, Harris’s support has grown by 19 points over Biden’s, from 57 percent to 76 percent.

Harris’s support is even stronger among other segments of the Black electorate, including 80 percent support among Black men overall and 84 percent among Black women, 86 percent among Black voters ages 40 and older; 86 percent among those with at least a bachelor’s degree; and 81 percent among those with less formal education.

The Post-Ipsos poll, conducted before Tuesday’s debate between Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump, reflects how much Biden’s exit and Harris’s ascendancy transformed the presidential race. The two candidates are in the midst of a two-month sprint to the Nov. 5 election, and further gains or losses with key voting blocs will be crucial in a toss-up contest.

Azaria Shaw, a facilities manager from Durham, N.C., didn’t watch the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — she has a small child, and a 9 p.m. start time is generally a nonstarter. But the clips she saw afterward left her devastated. She voted for Biden in 2020 to kick Trump out of the White House; after the debate, she felt he was headed right back. She spent the next three weeks furious, half-joking with her friends that she was getting her family’s passports in order.

“I was terrified. I was angry with the Democrats. I didn’t understand why they didn’t have the foresight to see this was going to happen. Meanwhile, the Republicans are over there writing manifestos,” said Shaw, who is Black and who planned to vote for Biden again in 2024, if dejectedly.

But when Harris became the nominee, Shaw said she breathed a sigh of relief. She’s put away the passports and picked up a pen — and spends a few nights a week writing letters encouraging people to vote for Harris.

“I’ve never been involved like this,” she said, not even for Biden. “But now I feel super positive. I do have some hope.”

The share of Black voters saying they would definitely or probably vote for Trump (12 percent) has barely shifted from April when 14 percent said they would support the former president, though that is still slightly higher than he received in 2020. Third-party support has plummeted since April, with support for Cornel West dropping from 14 percent to 5 percent and support for Green Party candidate Jill Stein down from 9 percent to 4 percent. Neither Trump nor third-party candidates have benefited from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out, despite 20 percent of Black voters saying they would probably vote for him in April.

Lafayette Cates, 42, a software engineer from Philadelphia, said he voted for Trump in 2020 and plans to do so this year, because he feels that Harris doesn’t fully understand the needs of Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved people. Harris’s father was born in Jamaica; her mother was from India.

“She doesn’t come from a background similar to the majority of Black Americans, so I don’t think she can be an effective leader,” he said. “She doesn’t face what the majority of African Americans face.”

Black Americans have become sharply more positive toward Harris since she became the party’s standard-bearer. A 72 percent majority of Black Americans have a favorable view of Harris, up from 59 percent in April. Now, nearly half (48 percent) are “very favorable” of the vice president, up from 28 percent five months ago.

About 7 in 10 Black Americans say it is important that Harris become the first female president, including 75 percent of Black women and 67 percent of Black men.

“I think it’s a step forward to have a Black woman represented,” said Teandre Meehan, 27, an attorney from St. Louis. “But I also think Kamala Harris will enact policies that she believes will favor African Americans. I think she understands the plight of African Americans and the ways they’ve been left behind.”

In addition, nearly two-thirds of Black Americans (64 percent) say Harris becoming the second Black president and first president of Asian descent is important, including three-quarters of Black people ages 65 and older (75 percent).

Harris has higher expectations on her ability to help Black people if she is elected president. About 6 in 10 Black Americans (59 percent) say her policies would help Black people if she were elected. That’s higher than the 48 percent who say Biden’s policies have helped Black people, although that figure is up from 38 percent in April.

Both Harris and Biden rank higher than Trump: Just 11 percent say Trump’s policies would help Black people if he were elected again, similar to the 13 percent who say he helped Black people when he was in office. Two-thirds predict another Trump presidency would hurt Black people.

Two-thirds of Black Americans approve of how Biden is handling his job as president (66 percent), while about one-third disapprove (32 percent).

While Harris’s popularity has grown, Black voters continue to see Trump in a starkly negative light. About 8 in 10 Black Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump and roughly 6 in 10 say they’d be “upset” if he won the election. Three-quarters say Trump is biased against Black people and a similarly large majority say he is biased against women.

Black Americans trust Harris more than Trump to handle a wide range of issues, often by significantly larger margins than Biden held this spring.

For example, in April, Black Americans trusted Biden over Trump to handle the economy by 50 percent to 16 percent, today Harris leads Trump by 60 percent to 15 percent on this issue. Biden enjoyed a 45-point margin over Trump in April on trust to handle abortion, which has grown to a 63-point margin for Harris in August. Her smallest advantage is on handling the war between Israel and Hamas — 36 points — and it’s only slightly bigger than Biden’s 31-point advantage over Trump in April.

Harris also enjoys a 59-point margin over Trump on trust to protect American democracy among Black Americans, an issue that was not measured in the previous poll.

Nearly 9 in 10 Black Americans say Harris, 59, is in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president compared with a quarter who say the same for the 78-year-old Trump. About 8 in 10 say she has the mental sharpness it takes to serve as president, compared with 2 in 10 who say Trump does. Eight in 10 Black Americans say Harris is a positive role model for young people while only 1 in 10 say the same for Trump. Over 7 in 10 also say Harris cares about people like them and is honest and trustworthy — just over 1 in 10 says the same about Trump.

Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, enjoys positive favorable ratings among Black Americans, with 52 percent favorable and 13 percent unfavorable. Republican Sen. JD Vance is seen unfavorably by 57 percent of Black Americans, while just 10 percent view him favorably. About one-third of Black Americans say they don’t know enough about each vice-presidential candidate to form an opinion.

Obama — who sparked Democratic convention attendees to chant, “Yes, she can!” in a speech supporting Harris — enjoys the highest favorable ratings of anyone measured in this poll: 82 percent of Black Americans are favorable, including 69 percent who feel “strongly favorable” toward the former president, far above Harris’s 48 percent.

At the National Association of Black Journalists conference in July, Trump said he “didn’t know” Harris was Black “until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Trump’s attempts to question Harris’s identity appear to have fallen flat or backfired with most Black people. Asked what best describes Harris’s racial or ancestral background, 65 percent say she is “both Black and Indian,” while 11 percent say she is Black, 7 percent Indian and 16 percent are not sure. Harris has long identified as both Black and South Asian.

About three-quarters of Black Americans, 75 percent, say Trump’s comments were disrespectful of Harris, including 63 percent who say his remarks were “very disrespectful.

And a similar 71 percent of Black Americans say Trump’s comments about Harris’s race were disrespectful toward Black people overall, including 59 percent who say his remarks were very disrespectful toward Black people.

More broadly, 8 in 10 Black Americans say Harris understands the experiences of Black people in America, compared with about 6 in 10 (59 percent) who say the same about Biden and 13 percent who say the same about Trump.

More than 8 in 10 Black Americans (86 percent), including the same share of men and women, say Harris understands the experiences of women in America at least somewhat well. Just 10 percent of Black people say the same of Trump, including 9 percent of Black women.

Black Americans are more likely to say Harris’s race and gender will help her chances of winning the election than hurt her. About 4 in 10 Black Americans (41 percent) say Harris being Black and Asian will make no difference to Americans’ votes. Another 36 percent say her racial identity will make Americans more likely to vote for her, and 2 in 10 (20 percent) say it will make people less likely to vote for her. Similarly, about 4 in 10 Black Americans say Harris being a woman will make people more likely to vote for her, a third say it won’t make a difference and about a quarter say it will make Americans less likely to vote for her.

Black women (46 percent) are more likely than Black men (36 percent) to say Harris being a woman will make people more likely to vote for her. But Black men are no more likely to say being a woman will hurt Harris, with nearly 4 in 10 of them saying it won’t make a difference.

Meehan, the attorney from St. Louis, said he worried Harris would face racist and misogynistic attacks, similar to assaults on Obama and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But he said he’s been impressed with Harris’s ability to parry attacks rooted in race and gender.

“I think she’s been pretty effective so far at just dodging those attacks and just brushing them off,” he said. “She’s just ignoring them and not giving them any airtime or daylight. I’m sure that Kamala Harris knows that is a challenge of hers: She has to win over people that will never vote for a Black person.”

The Post-Ipsos poll was conducted Aug. 23-Sept. 3 among 1,083 non-Hispanic Black adults ages 18 and older through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing survey panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. Results among Black Americans have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points; the error margin is 3.4 points among the sample of 924 Black registered voters.

Congress returns to Washington on Monday with limited time to prevent a government shutdown and November’s elections already clouding conversations over federal financing.

Funding for the federal government expires Sept. 30, when the 2024 fiscal year ends. Without new legislation, the government would shut down while millions of voters, including in some battleground states, are already able to cast their votes.

Congress is set to consider a stopgap funding bill, called a continuing resolution or CR, to keep operations going at current levels and buy legislators more time to craft annual spending bills. But Republicans, who control the House, and Democrats, who run the Senate, disagree on how long to extend funding for — a crucial question in which control of the White House weighs heavily.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) plans to put a CR up for a vote that extends federal funding until March 28. He is set to attach unrelated legislation that would require voters to show proof of citizenship before registering to vote for federal elections. That bill already passed the House in July. Noncitizen voting is already illegal in federal races, and election administration experts say the proposal could wreak havoc on states’ ability to run elections.

“House Republicans are taking a critically important step to keep the federal government funded and to secure our federal election process,” Johnson said in a statement. “Congress has a responsibility to do both, and we must ensure that only American citizens can decide American elections.”

Democrats — and even some senior House Republicans — prefer a continuing resolution that extends until just after the November vote, allowing lawmakers in an end-of-year “lame duck” session to hammer out funding bills with fewer political consequences for either side and freeing whoever is president come January from an early spending fight.

“I would rather get these fiscal year 2025 bills out of the way so that when you do have Trump in the White House, you have a Republican House and Republican Senate, we can spend the beginning of this next Republican presidency not dealing with last year’s battles, but dealing with the very, very ambitious agenda the President Trump has put forward,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, told The Washington Post.

The disagreement is not much of an impasse, lawmakers say. The most likely scenario, officials from both parties privately concede, is that Democrats will reject the voting restrictions while Republicans demand the March funding deadline.

The longer bill, though, will force Congress later this calendar year to consider additional spending legislation for other programs set to expire before March or those that need supplemental resources.

The Department of Veterans Affairs requires an additional $15 billion: $3 billion to make up for a looming benefits shortfall, and $12 billion in resources to provide care for military service members suffering from the affects of toxic burn pits. House appropriators introduced legislation Friday to make up for the benefits needs, but have not addressed the remaining issues.

Portions of the farm bill, the massive five-year agriculture policy legislation, expire Sept. 30, and others expire at the end of the year. Lawmakers considered attaching a one-year farm bill extension to the CR, but opted against it.

Leaders from both parties favor providing Maryland additional money to rebuild Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. That, along with funding for other failing roadways, could cost up to $3.1 billion. Those funds were also not included in the CR.

“We need a continuing resolution because House Republicans let their most extreme members drive the ship. A continuing resolution that ends in December — rather than one that lasts a half year — is better for our national security and military readiness, veterans and their families, victims recovering from natural disasters and all hardworking American taxpayers,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.

The relative calm in the spending debate is tenuous. Election momentum could change the political calculus of either side.

House Democrats are bullish on their chances of winning the majority, and with a March deadline could control the levers of power to write their own funding bills if they hold the Senate and the White House. Republicans, also eyeing a sweep of Congress and the White House, see the later deadline as a chance to solidify their legislative priorities, too.

But pushing the funding fight into 2025 would complicate the next president’s first 100 days in office, when Democrats would hope to expand voting rights and pursue new social spending for child care and other programs, and Republicans would try to pass a sweeping tax law.

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump could also influence the government funding picture. Trump and Republican officials nationwide have falsely spread rumors that noncitizen voting could sway the outcome of the presidential race. In fact, noncitizens casting ineligible ballots is vanishingly rare. But as Trump makes the innuendo a larger part of his campaign, some of his chief backers in Congress could feel compelled to demand voter eligibility restrictions remain part of the continuing resolution. And Republicans hope to use the issue to force vulnerable Democrats to discuss immigration, a policy area where polls show conservatives with a clear political advantage.

Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.

When Vice President Harris and former president Donald Trump meet Tuesday night in Philadelphia, they will have taken dramatically different approaches to preparing for the first — and likely only — presidential debate between the two candidates.

Harris spent most of the past four days ensconced in Pittsburgh’s Omni William Penn Hotel for an intensive “debate camp.” Her aides created a mock set-up to mimic the layout of the debate studio; cast a veteran Donald Trump stand-in to unleash harsh attacks and offensive comments; and put the vice president through hours of rehearsed questions.

About 330 miles to the east, Trump spent much of the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., opting for “policy sessions” with aides and allies instead of traditional practice runs. The former president has participated in about a half-dozen of the sessions in recent weeks, reviewing Harris’s policy record from her 2020 presidential campaign and practicing how to respond to an expected barrage of attacks on his character.

And yet for all the attacks they have exchanged, Harris and Trump have never met. The event will likely draw the largest audience for either candidate before November, and both sides agree the faceoff, hosted by ABC News, carries unusually high stakes, given the campaign’s compressed timetable and the fact that polls show it is essentially tied.

The previous presidential debate, in June, dramatically reshaped the campaign when President Joe Biden stumbled over his words, struggling at times to complete sentences and landing few attacks on Trump. The performance exacerbated long-standing concerns about Biden’s age, eventually leading him to abandon his reelection campaign and endorse Harris.

This time, Trump will face an opponent who is expected to be far more formidable on the debate stage and is intent on creating a contrast not only with Biden but with Trump’s often-rambling appearances. A former prosecutor who burnished her national profile in Senate hearings by aggressively questioning Trump appointees, Harris planned to deploy the same tactics on Tuesday, firing back at any questionable remarks by Trump and trying to fact-check him in real time.

Those plans have hit a snag of sorts. Harris’s aides wanted ABC to change the debate rules so both microphones would remain unmuted throughout the debate, hoping that would encourage Trump to go wildly off-script and let Harris issue sharp retorts. Trump signaled a willingness to unmute the mics, but his aides were determined to keep the rules in place, telling the former president that Harris’s team was trying to set him up.

Harris aides fear Trump will unleash so many dubious statements or attacks during his uninterrupted speaking time that she will be unable to challenge them all, according to people familiar with her planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy. After losing the fight on the microphones, Harris aides spent the weekend revising their strategy, hoping she will find other ways to parry Trump’s attacks, the people said.

Harris’s aides say she is prepared for whatever version of Trump shows up Tuesday, although given the rules, they expect the former president to be relatively disciplined and perform much as he did against Biden in June.

Some Harris allies privately concede that the fracas over the microphones was part of an effort to lower expectations for the vice president’s performance, fearing that too many Democrats and swing voters expect Harris to obliterate Trump on stage. Harris’s campaign has repeatedly noted that Tuesday will be Trump’s seventh presidential debate.

“We expect Donald Trump will be ready for the debate,” Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement. “He is a showman who won his most recent debate back in June, and we know he has been practicing even more and preparing harder than ever before.”

He added: “The Vice President will come to the debate prepared to share her vision for a new way forward for our country that turns the page on the past, and we believe it will crystallize for the American people what is at stake in this election.”

One concession that Harris’s campaign won: ABC News has assigned a producer to monitor each candidate during commercial breaks, especially if they leave the stage, to ensure no aides pass them notes or try to communicate with them, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

Trump’s camp, for its part, tried to raise expectations for his rival.

“The high-bar expectation facing Kamala Harris is that for every new idea put forward, Harris has to explain both the damage she’s done to our economy as the sitting Vice President, as well as answer why she hasn’t implemented any of these new plans during the last 3 ½ years,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, said in a statement.

“Further complicating matters is that Harris’ new Obama campaign advisors have told her to hide from the press for two months, further raising expectations for the voters,” Miller added. “The one thing we do know, however, is that Kamala Harris’ values have not changed, and we will be educating the American public as to what that means policy-wise, in great detail.”

Politicians who have debated Trump in the past say a key to success for Harris will be her ability to avoid taking the former president’s bait on personal attacks, a mistake Biden made in the June 27 debate when he sparred with Trump over their respective golf games.

“Be who you are,” said former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican primary. “Figure out what you want to communicate and communicate it. Don’t get sidetracked. If somebody’s going to be really rude to you, you can point that out, but my sense is getting into a name-calling situation doesn’t benefit anybody.”

In his preparations, Trump has largely leaned on the same small group of aides to help prepare for this debate as he did for the last one: Miller, the senior adviser; Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.); Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser; and Vince Haley and Ross Worthington, two of his speechwriters.

The Trump team also brought in former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who sought the Democratic nomination in 2020 but is now backing Trump. Gabbard debated Harris during the 2020 primary and has helped Trump think through how the vice president might answer questions and how she might use gender against him, Trump advisers said.

Gabbard has not played Harris in a mock debate setting, but one Trump adviser said she has helped Trump “tremendously.”

Trump’s aides expect Harris will unleash a litany of personal attacks about his legal cases, contrasting her record as a former prosecutor with his status as a felon. They are also planning for criticisms of his record on the covid-19 pandemic and his lack of progress on passing infrastructure legislation when he was president, despite years of promises to do so.

“One of the goals is to condition him to those attacks so he doesn’t overreact,” a Trump adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential preparations.

Trump’s aides have given him reams of materials as fodder for attacks on Harris’s previous liberal policy positions, including her proposal to ban fracking and her support for Medicare for All, neither of which Harris still embraces. They have also compiled information on Harris’s record as a prosecutor in San Francisco, bringing up individual cases they think will embarrass her.

“We are trying to get her off-script so she will make a mistake,” said the Trump adviser with knowledge of the preparations.

Trump has eschewed practicing with podiums, and he does not like the public perception that he is practicing at all, advisers say. Instead, he has often used conference tables at his clubs or taken time during airplane flights. Aides say the former president views rallies — he held one in Wisconsin on Saturday — and interviews as the best preparation for the debate.

The former president has promised his advisers he will not be as aggressive as he was during the first 2020 debate with Biden, when he repeatedly interrupted Biden and talked over him in a widely mocked performance. Trump now privately blames a coronavirus diagnosis that he denied at the time as the reason he did so poorly, people who have spoken to him say.

In preparing for Tuesday’s debate, Harris aides say they know the vice president still faces the challenge of introducing herself to large swaths of voters, and they expect the viewing audience Tuesday night to include many voters who have not yet made up their mind and might ultimately decide the election. There will not be a live audience in the studio.

Harris’s campaign appearances so far, including her speech at the Democratic National Convention, were widely seen as successes by her advisers, but they said they recognize that an unscripted debate will have a different, potentially more skeptical audience.

“We feel good about how the convention introduced her to the country,” a Harris ally said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the preparations. “We understand more target voters — whether swing voters or soft potential nonvoters — are going to be watching the debate more intensely than they did the convention.”

For that reason, Harris has spent the weekend focused on answers that incorporate her agenda and her biography, especially aspects of her life before the vice presidency. Aides hope she will create a sharp contrast with Trump on abortion rights and the economy.

Harris aides are also planning for the Trump attacks on the liberal positions she endorsed in the 2020 Democratic primary. While her campaign has signaled she has abandoned many of those policy preferences, Harris herself has not always publicly stated as much, instead putting out statements through anonymous aides.

Harris’s debate prep has been led by Karen Dunn, a veteran Washington lawyer who coached her for her 2020 vice presidential debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, a longtime policy adviser. In addition, the prep sessions have featured Harris’s White House chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, and her campaign chief of staff, Sheila Nix.

Also on hand have been Tony West, Harris’s brother-in-law; Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair; David Plouffe, a senior adviser on the campaign; Brian Fallon and Kirsten Allen, her two top communications aides; Sean Clegg, a longtime political adviser dating to her California days; Minyon Moore, a longtime Harris ally who chaired the Democratic convention in Chicago; and Cedric L. Richmond, a former congressman and top White House staffer.

Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton aide, was initially enlisted to play Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) when Harris was preparing to face him in the vice presidential debate. Now that Harris has ascended to the top of the ticket and will face Trump, Reines has stayed on to play the former president, reprising the role he played for Clinton during her 2016 debate preparations.

After the debate, the Trump campaign is planning to bring more than two dozen allies to the spin room, including Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ended his independent bid for president and endorsed Trump, people familiar the plans said. There are also discussions about bringing Vance to the spin room.

Harris’s campaign is planning to have California Gov. Gavin Newsom appear in the spin room, the same role he played for Biden after the June debate.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign posted a list of her policy positions on her website Sunday, as the latest polls show her locked in a tight race with former president Donald Trump.

Titled “A New Way Forward,” the page outlines her agenda on the economy as well as immigration and foreign policy. On each issue, the campaign contrasts her positions with the agenda of Project 2025, the far-right policy proposal that Democrats have warned could form the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, even as the Republican nominee has distanced himself from it. Harris and Trump will face off in their first debate Tuesday.

The page says Harris’s economic policies are aimed at “lowering the costs of everyday needs” for working- and middle-class families. They include the expansion of two tax credits, which the campaign said would benefit 100 million families: the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, for which Harris aims to include a $6,000 cut for families with newborns.

Harris, who has sought to build on President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, says she will extend to all Americans the cap on prices of lifesaving prescription drugs brought in by their administration — including capping the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at $35 per month and limiting annual out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs to $2,000. Those two provisions are currently in effect for Medicare beneficiaries, but extending them to all Americans could face resistance from the pharmaceutical industry and Republicans, The Washington Post has reported.

Another campaign promise for the middle class is the provision of a $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers. She has also promised the “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries.”

Harris’s economic agenda also includes the expansion of the existing $5,000 tax deduction for start-up firms to $50,000. This, The Post has reported, is an attempt to draw a contrast with Trump, who has called for reducing the tax rate paid by corporations and maintaining lower tax rates for high-income people, along with policies aimed at helping people in other tax brackets.

On health care, the Harris campaign does not mention support for Medicare-for-all. She has said she no longer supports it, reflecting a shift away from some of the progressive stances that marked her 2019 presidential campaign.

The campaign also promised to revive a bipartisan border security bill and make it law to tackle the thorny issue of immigration. Trump — whose criticism and mischaracterization of the bill helped torpedo it — has repeatedly attacked Harris on border security and disparaged her as a failed “border czar.” Although she wasn’t placed in charge of the border as vice president, she was assigned to address the root causes of migration, such as poverty and violence, in Central America.

On her foreign policy outlook, the Harris campaign said she will “stand with” the United States’ allies and “stand up to dictators” while ensuring that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.” On Israel’s war in Gaza, an emotional and divisive issue for many Democratic voters, the campaign repeated her pledge to stand up for Israel’s right and ability to defend itself as well as making sure Palestinians have a right to self-determination and security.

The Trump campaign attacked Harris in August for not having a policy page on its campaign site. On his own campaign site, Trump has a brief list of 20 policy items, including “seal the border” and “end inflation.”

No one has summarized the engine of Donald Trump’s politics more aptly than the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, writing in 2018: the cruelty of his presentation and plans and promises is the point.

“It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them,” Serwer wrote, “that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.”

All that has changed over the past six years is the extent to which that cruelty manifests and the urgency that Trump and his supporters feel in demanding it.

Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump inveighed against immigrants, as he does, with his now-familiar hyperbole about the purported danger posed by those seeking new lives in the United States. When he announced his initial candidacy in June 2015, his comments about how Mexico was intentionally sending criminals and rapists into the country met with backlash from Republican politicians still operating under the assumption that such dishonest hostility was anathema to Americans. It wasn’t, and Trump’s reiterations of similar false claims barely makes it into news stories.

The comments in Wisconsin did, though, because he added an important adjective to the mix.

“In Colorado,” Trump said, immigrants are “taking over. I mean, in Colorado they’re so brazen they’re taking over sections of the state.” (This is obviously not true.) “And, you know, getting them out will be a bloody” — he seemed to search for a word — “story.”

He continued on for a bit, claiming (falsely) that the United States is now home to “the worst criminals in all of these countries,” people told that “if you come back, you will be executed.”

That “bloody” descriptor, though, is potent. It’s a pledge not just of the cruelty of ostracism or subjugation. It’s a promise that the purported dangers of immigrants will be met with force, with cracked skulls or — as Trump reportedly suggested while serving as president — gunfire.

One of the lingering images from July’s Republican convention was a sea of giddy delegates, then expecting a Trump romp in November, waving signs reading, “Mass Deportation Now.” For nine years, Trump supporters have been reminded that dark-skinned people coming to the United States from other countries are a critical problem. Trump’s 2024 campaign has been more explicit than his prior two about how he’ll rip those immigrants out of the national fabric, and his party seemingly couldn’t have been more thrilled. Sure, there are legal protections for people seeking asylum in the U.S., but there used to be legal protections for access to abortion, too.

But he has to win first — or at least, be inaugurated. To that end, Trump offered another pledge of action in a post on the social media site he owns.

“[T]he 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny,” he wrote, “and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.” He added that the threatened “legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.”

There are multiple layers here, obviously. Trump wants to suggest that the election is already under threat, mirroring his months-long effort before 2020 to suggest that any negative results were suspect. He also wants to instill a sense of trepidation among those who finalize election results, a fear that accurately reporting a Trump loss will bear costs that falsely reporting a victory wouldn’t.

But he’s also making another promise of punishment. Trump’s definition of election “cheaters” is as vaguely defined and expansive as his definition of “illegal immigrants.” In the wake of 2020, he accused myriad officials and observers of having skewed the results — all accusations that were meritless. As with a national effort to remove immigrants, an effort to settle scores with those who weren’t willing to rubber-stamp his victory would necessarily be scattershot and personal and chaotic. But there would be an earnest effort, as there was after 2020.

Instead of picking out isolated bad actors, Trump identifies bad actions. He then folds people into those categories as needed.

Trump’s allies on the broader right understand how useful this approach is. A campaign predicated (as Trump has said) on retribution is one in which the person facing the retribution is less important. An entire galaxy of people and institutions can be presented as enemies of Trumpworld, including former members of Trumpworld. And his base is primed for them to be punished. Elites, Democrats, people who live in cities, gay people, immigrants, elections officials.

And government rulemakers: One of Trump’s central goals, should he return to office, is to upend the federal bureaucracy, ostensibly because it’s a Deep State or because it’s Wasting Your Tax Dollars. Also because making money is easier when you don’t have to worry about the law, and a lot of Trump’s allies are centrally interested in making more money.

And those in popular culture: Conservative activist Leonard Leo has pledged to spend $1 billion in an effort to “crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious” — meaning “news and entertainment, where left-wing extremism is most evident.” His effort is an institutional one, aimed at creating an explicitly right-wing entertainment and informational space, like Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter brought to scale. He’s doing so, in part, by leveraging the right’s — that is, Trump’s base’s — hostility to those perceived or identifiable as left-wing and/or as anti-Trump.

The Washington Post’s Tim Craig visited Butler, Pa., the site of the attempt on Trump’s life last month, finding a community deeply divided along partisan lines. He spoke to a local businessman who supports Trump.

“Everyone knows you got to ‘fight, fight, fight,’ ” Bob Oesterling told Craig, “or we are done as the United States of America.”

Oesterling was mimicking Trump’s exhortation to the crowd after the attack, a call to do battle with unidentified enemies. But everyone in the audience knew who the enemies were. Everyone reading this knows who the enemies are.