Despite an earlier insistence from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on instead heading to a Fox News-hosted debate with a large audience, he’s now agreeing to show up for a debate hosted by ABC News — with which a debate was already scheduled when President Joe Biden was still the expected Democratic nominee for the year. Now, it’s Vice President Kamala Harris instead, who’d said that she’d still show up even if Trump was a no-show.
In the meantime, Trump held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, which was walloped by terrible reviews. “Does the Harris-Walz campaign have to report this gift of a press conference as an in-kind contribution from the Trump campaign?” quipped journalist Brian Tyler Cohen.
Trump appeared before the media while remaining somewhat absent from the campaign trail itself, having not shown up to an actual campaign event for days as Harris remains embarked upon a seven-state campaign sweep amid the roll-out of her running mate, Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz. Trump’s own running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), has been doing some campaigning in Trump’s absence. But for Trump, his schedule has listed — for some time — just one forthcoming rally in Montana, which is not a swing state.
A CNN journalist said on air that Trump staffers insisted his schedule would ramp up… with the election itself just three months out.
Harris, meanwhile, is seeing even more promising poll results, including a new national survey from Marquette University Law School that found her leading Trump by eight percentage points among likely voters when candidates outside the major parties were included. She led by six percent — including respondents who leaned towards one of the candidates — in a head-to-head match-up, both of which are margins larger than Biden’s national margin from the 2020 election.
