The Latest: Trump heads to North Carolina while Harris stumps in the Midwest

With just over two weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election and the race in a dead heat, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the latest:

First lady Jill Biden says it was ‘the right call’ for President Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign

She made the comments during an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” about revamped White House tours. The interview aired Monday morning.

Asked by Deborah Roberts if it would be tough to leave the White House, Biden said “we’re starting a new chapter of our lives, a new journey.”

Roberts asked if her husband made the correct decision to stop his bid for another four years.

“It was the right call, yes,” the first lady said.

Harris’ campaign maintains a large financial advantage over Trump’s

Kamala Harris’ campaign and affiliated Democratic groups raised about $633 million for the quarter, which ended last month, pushing their total to over $1 billion and maintaining a large financial advantage over Republican candidate Donald Trump in the election’s final sprint.

The vice president’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties raised more than $359 million in September alone.

But Harris’ campaign is spending heavily too. It raised about $222 million on its own in September, only to pay out about $270 million over the same period — helping to boost a large advertising push.

The Harris campaign and affiliated committees entered October with $346 million on hand, according to federal filings.

Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and affiliated groups previously reported raising $160 million in September. By October, they had $283 million in the bank.

How does abortion translate? Ballot measures are a challenge for interpreters

Reproductive rights measures are on the ballots in 10 states after heated debates over how to describe their impact on abortion — and that’s just in English.

In 388 places across the U.S. where English isn’t the primary language among communities of voters, the federal Voting Rights Act requires that all elections information be made available in each community’s native language.

Such translations are meant to help non-native English speakers understand what they’re voting for. But vague or technical terms can be challenging, even more so when it comes to Indigenous languages that have only limited written dictionaries.

For example, there’s no single word for abortion in the native language of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in Colorado’s Montezuma County. New York’s referendum doesn’t even use the word “abortion,” making it all the more challenging to convey intent, advocates complain. And how exactly should the science of “viability” in the Florida and Nevada measures be explained in the oral traditions of the Seminole and Shoshone tribes?

The Navajo and Hopi tribes get more material translated than most, and they have more than enough voters to sway outcomes.

▶ Read more about translating ballot measures into other languages.

Most voters think the economy is poor, but split on whether Trump or Harris can fix it: AP-NORC poll

Voters remain largely divided over whether they prefer Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris to handle key economic issues, although Harris earns slightly better marks on elements such as taxes for the middle class, according to a new poll.

A majority of registered voters in the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research describe the economy as poor. About 7 in 10 say the nation is going in the wrong direction.

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But the findings reaffirm that Trump has lost what had been an advantage on the economy, which many voters say is the most important issue this election season above abortion, immigration, crime and foreign affairs.

“Do I trust Trump on the economy? No. I trust that he’ll give tax cuts to his buddies like Elon Musk,” said poll respondent Janice Tosto, a 59-year-old Philadelphia woman and self-described independent.

An AP-NORC poll conducted in September found neither Harris nor Trump had a clear advantage on handling “the economy and jobs.” But this poll asked more specific questions about whether voters trusted Trump or Harris to do a better job handling the cost of housing, jobs and unemployment, taxes on the middle class, the cost of groceries and gas, and tariffs.

▶ Read more about the poll.

Trump takes questions at a barbershop in the Bronx

Donald Trump went to a barbershop in the Bronx section of New York for a segment with commentator Lawrence Jones that aired Monday on “Fox & Friends.”

He took questions from clients at the business about immigration, energy and taxes. The barbers wore a black shirt with the phrase “Make Barbers Great Again.”

One of the clients asked Trump if, once he generated enough revenue with some of his proposals, it would be possible to eliminate federal taxes.

“There is a way. There is a way,” Trump said, adding that in the 1890s, people did not have to pay income taxes.

The business owner, who leases the building, told him his main challenge was paying for his energy bill, which had shot up from $2,100 to $15,000 in the last seven months.

“What?” Trump said. “How many heads can you take care of? That’s a lot.”

Trump asked how much average hair cuts cost and how much they had gone up. He was told they had gone up from a range between $12 and $15 to between $30 and $40.

Toward the end of the visit, Trump told the men “you guys are the same as me. It’s the same stuff. We were born the same way.”

Some Jewish voters in presidential swing states reconsider their longtime devotion to Democrats

For Rona Kaufman, the signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump.

It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she observed during a question-and-answer at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It’s in her own family.

“The family that is my generation and older generations, I don’t think anybody is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican, ever,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. “My sister has a Trump sign outside her house, and that is a huge shift.”

How big a shift? Surveys continue to find that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she’s an exception.

Still, any shift could have enormous implications in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election is like no other in memory, coming amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year.

▶ Read more about Jewish voters in this election.