Of the three states that President Trump captured to the surprise of overconfident Democrats in 2016, Michigan has long seemed to Republicans the most at risk of slipping away this year. The other two — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — appear as competitive ever.
Mr. Trump suspended his television advertising in Michigan over the summer, and several polls suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had established a decent lead there over the president.
But it looks as if Michigan is back on the Trump battleground map. Mr. Biden is heading to Warren, Mich., a Detroit suburb, today to talk about the economy. The president is planning a campaign trip to the state on Thursday.
More revealingly, Mr. Trump resumed his television advertising in Michigan this week, this time with an ad trumpeting the “Great American Comeback.” The ad claims that the “finish line is approaching” in the race for a coronavirus vaccine (certainly that is Mr. Trump’s election season hope; whether it actually happens is an entirely different matter) and that the economy is on the rebound despite the ongoing pandemic.
The advertisement also selectively edits an interview with Mr. Biden to make it appear, incorrectly, that he wants to shut down the economy to contain the pandemic.
For now Mr. Biden — whose campaign is flush with cash — is notably outspending Mr. Trump in Michigan. Mr. Trump has bought just under $1.1 million in time on Michigan television stations for the week, compared with $2.4 million for Mr. Biden, according to data from Advertising Analytics.
But for the duration of the fall, Mr. Trump has reserved almost as much time on television in Michigan as Mr. Biden. Those numbers will almost certainly change as the campaigns adjust their advertising strategies based on polls and other data in the weeks ahead. As of now, though, Mr. Trump has purchased $13.1 million in television time, compared with $13.9 million for Mr. Biden.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., taking on President Trump over protecting American jobs, announced plans on Wednesday to change the tax code to discourage moving jobs overseas and to reward companies for investing in domestic production.
Mr. Biden, who was expected to discuss his proposals during a trip to Michigan on Wednesday, is also promising to take a series of executive actions in his first week in office to ensure the purchase of American goods in the federal procurement process.
As part of the new plans, Mr. Biden would create a tax penalty aimed at American companies that move jobs to other countries, known as offshoring. Mr. Biden has already proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, from 21 percent. The penalty would apply to “profits of any production by a United States company overseas for sales back to the United States,” bumping up the tax rate to nearly 31 percent on those profits.
Mr. Biden would also create a tax credit for companies that make domestic investments, such as revitalizing closed manufacturing plants, upgrading facilities or bringing back production from overseas.
Mr. Biden is scheduled to give a speech Wednesday afternoon in Warren, Mich., a city in Macomb County — a place associated with white working-class voters who traditionally voted Democratic but embraced Ronald Reagan and, later, Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden has intensified his efforts in recent months to unveil more populist policies aimed at boosting American workers.
In a highly unusual legal maneuver, the Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private lawyers and defend him against a defamation lawsuit brought in state court by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.
Lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll.
Citing a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act, the lawyers asserted the right to take the case from Mr. Trump’s private lawyers and move the matter from state court to federal court. The tort claims act gives employees of the federal government immunity from lawsuits, though legal experts say that it has rarely, if ever, been used to protect a president, especially for actions taken before he entered office..
“The question is,” said Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, “is it really within the scope of the law for government lawyers to defend someone accused of lying about a rape when he wasn’t even president yet?”
Ms. Carroll’s lawyer said in a statement issued Tuesday evening that the move by the Justice Department to intervene in the case was a “shocking” attempt to bring the power of the United States government to bear on a private legal matter.
“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” the lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said in the statement, “and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”
The Justice Department’s motion came only a month after a state judge in New York issued a ruling that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump being deposed in the case before the election.
Ms. Carroll, a writer, sued Mr. Trump last November, claiming that he lied by publicly denying he had ever met her. In a memoir published last summer, she maintained that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her nearly 30 years ago in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman.
President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are tied in the perennially close state of Florida, according to an NBC News/Marist poll released Tuesday, and there were signs that some of the state’s old alliances were shifting.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden had the support of 48 percent of likely voters according to the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. It was released on a day that Mr. Trump traveled to Florida, now his home state, to court voters.
But if the poll’s top line seemed familiar — Florida has come to define close presidential elections at least since the contested 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — the poll suggested that the sources of each candidate’s support were evolving this year.
The candidates are virtually tied among likely voters 65 and older, with Mr. Biden edging out Mr. Trump by 49 percent to 48 percent, it found. That was a big shift from four years ago, when Mr. Trump won a majority of the age group in Florida, according to exit polls.
The candidates were tied among likely voters under 45, the poll found. Four years ago Hillary Clinton carried young voters in the state by double digits, according to exit polls.
In another major shift, the poll found Mr. Trump was narrowly leading Mr. Biden among likely Latino voters, by 50 percent to 46 percent. Mrs. Clinton won among Latino voters in Florida four years ago by 62 percent to 35 percent, according to exit polls.
Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, easily won primary races in New Hampshire on Tuesday, reinforcing the state’s status as a battleground eight weeks ahead of the general election, when the top two down-ballot races will now feature popular incumbents, one from each party.
President Trump visited New Hampshire the day after accepting his renomination last month, and his campaign has identified the state as a possible pickup opportunity after Mr. Trump lost it in 2016 by fewer than 3,000 votes, or less than one percentage point.
Mr. Sununu, whose favorability has been lifted all year by his handling of the coronavirus outbreak, and Ms. Shaheen, a former governor and two-term senator, both faced nominal opponents in their own parties.
Most of the campaign-season intrigue centered on the contests to select their November challengers: the Democratic governor’s primary, featuring a candidate endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of neighboring Vermont, and the Republican Senate primary, in which Mr. Trump made an endorsement.
Corky Messner, the Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, held off a rival in the Republican primary, Dan Bolduc, who had blasted Democrats as “a bunch of liberal, socialist pansies,” a remark criticized as being homophobic.
Mr. Messner, a wealthy lawyer who built his law career in Denver and did not register to vote in New Hampshire until 2018, fended off accusations of carpetbagging during the primary. He said he had bought a second home in the state a dozen years ago. He may face a similar attack in the general election.
In a Granite State Poll last week, Ms. Shaheen held nearly a 20-point lead over Mr. Messner.
In the tight Democratic primary for governor, Dan Feltes, the State Senate majority leader, was leading Andru Volinsky, a lawyer and education activist who was endorsed by Mr. Sanders, by 51 percent to 49 percent as of Wednesday morning.
The support of Mr. Sanders, who won New Hampshire’s presidential primary in February, helped rally progressive voters in a contest that was little noticed compared with other face-offs this year between the Democratic left wing and the party establishment.
As in other states’ primaries since the coronavirus outbreak, the election was marked by a huge spike in absentee ballots: More than 75,000 absentee ballots had been returned as of Monday, according to the New Hampshire secretary of state, an eightfold increase over the 2016 primary.
The National Rifle Association continues to lose ground in Congress, with the last remnants of its Democratic support vanishing and its still-high Republican support eroding slightly, according to a New York Times analysis of the candidate grades and endorsements it released last week.
As is typical, most representatives and senators running for re-election received the same grade from the N.R.A. this year as in 2018. But among the small number whose grades changed, nearly three times as many have been downgraded (14) as upgraded (5). This is true among both Democrats (8 to 3) and Republicans (6 to 2).
Of the 416 incumbents running this year, 43 percent received “A” ratings and 49 percent received “F” ratings. Of the 919 candidates total — both incumbents and non-incumbents — who have received grades, 36 percent have A’s and 42 percent have F’s.
About 30 grades are still to come from Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, which held late primaries. Every congressional incumbent in those states received an F in 2018, and several are running unopposed, which suggests that the percentage of F’s will probably increase slightly and the percentage of A’s will decrease slightly once the last grades are released.
This means that for the second election in a row, F’s will outnumber A’s. Before 2018, that hadn’t happened in well over a decade, at least.
The grades are divided strongly along party lines, with most Republicans receiving A’s and most Democrats receiving F’s, but there are more than twice as many defectors on the Republican side: Nine Republicans got D’s or F’s, while only four Democrats got A’s or B’s. (Five Republicans and three Democrats got C’s.)
After the 2008 elections, there were 63 A-rated Democrats in the House and at least eight in the Senate. After this year’s elections, there will be no such Democrats in the Senate and, at most, one in the House.
Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota is the last A-rated Democrat in Congress and is in a close re-election race. The last B-rated Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, is also in a tight race, raising the possibility of a Congress in which not a single Democrat has an N.R.A. grade higher than a C.
When the current Congress convened in January 2019, Mr. Peterson was one of three A-rated Democrats, along with Representatives Sanford Bishop of Georgia and Henry Cuellar of Texas. But in the newly released ratings, both Mr. Bishop and Mr. Cuellar have been downgraded to C’s after supporting some gun restrictions.
The new ratings also show a significant defection on the Republican side: Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio, whom the N.R.A. endorsed in the past five elections. He went from an A to a D after calling for restrictions on military-style weapons and high-capacity magazines in the wake of last year’s mass shooting in Dayton, which he represents.
The N.R.A. has been embroiled in a series of legal and reputational battles, and gun control groups have begun to catch up in terms of political clout. A previous Times analysis of six cycles of N.R.A. grades found that, despite the group’s huge influence on policy, voters did not generally punish lawmakers who broke from it.
A powerful but little-known group of Republican donors installed by President Trump to oversee the United States Postal Service has helped raise more than $3 million to support him and hundreds of millions more for his party over the past decade, prompting concerns about partisan bias at the agency before the November election.
The largest amount of fund-raising has been by Robert M. Duncan, who continues to sit on the boards of two super PACs pushing for Republicans to win in 2020, one of which has spent more than $1 million supporting the president’s re-election.
But he is only one of five Republican members Mr. Trump has named to the board — most of whom have given generously to the party — who have taken a hands-on role in trying to defend the embattled agency against accusations that it is trying to help the president win a second term by sabotaging voting by mail.
At least one of the governors expressed concerns in an interview like those voiced by the president about possible voter fraud, citing an anonymously sourced news report circulated by the Trump campaign and the president’s son Eric Trump about how mail-in ballots can be manipulated.
“If any doubt is ever raised — like in the New York Post article, or by any other reputable publication — we want to get to the bottom of that,” said John M. Barger, one of the Republican board members named by Mr. Trump and a participant in a newly formed election mail task force.
Other governors have done little to hide their loyalty to the president, even as the board meets behind closed doors to plot a strategy for handling what is expected to be a record crush of mail-in ballots this fall.