Live Election Updates: Harris and Walz Tour Pennsylvania Ahead of Convention

Convention officials said each night would include at least one influencer. The speakers are Deja Foxx, Nabela Noor, Carlos Eduardo Espina, Olivia Julianna and John Russell, a group of millennial and Gen Z influencers who, collectively, have well over 24 million social media followers.

They will speak on the same podium as President Biden; the Democratic nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota; and party luminaries, including two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, among others.

“This feels very affirming,” said Ms. Foxx, 24, a reproductive rights activist from Arizona who worked on Ms. Harris’s first presidential campaign. She’ll speak about abortion rights on Monday night in a program that will also feature Mr. Biden. “I don’t take it lightly that I’m speaking on the same night as the president of the United States,” she said.

These speakers represent a significant shift for the convention and underscore the Democratic Party’s efforts to speak to voters whose news diet exists outside traditional media. Last month, a conservative influencer, the actress and model Amber Rose, spoke on the first night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

The speaker roster at conventions tends to mix elected officials with entertainment figures and regular citizens who can speak to particular policy issues. The Republicans’ convention last month featured a number of people the party called “Everyday Americans,” who discussed topics including immigration, inflation and crime.

A study by the Pew Research Center last year found that almost half of Americans get some of their news from social media and that a third of adults under 30 get their news from TikTok.

To help chase those potential voters, the D.N.C. has, for the first time, granted credentials to more than 200 influencers, offering them the kind of wide-ranging access to events and people traditionally provided only to the press. It’s also giving them a special “creator platform” within the convention venue in Chicago, the United Center: a special V.I.P. box directly above the arena floor.

Providing influencers time onstage gives them the chance to repost clips of their speeches to their own social media accounts as well as the feeds of other influencers watching the show, all in pursuit of the modern media era’s most valuable prize of all: virality.

“Content creators are a vehicle to reach new audiences, not just through their content, but through their unique ability to speak authentically to their own communities,” said Emily Soong, a spokeswoman for the convention.

Ms. Foxx said she was first approached by organizers a few weeks ago and has since worked with a campaign speechwriter to hone her presentation. “I was pretty nervous but now I’m feeling really ready,” she said. “I’ve been running through my speech every day.”

The lineup on Tuesday night will include Ms. Noor, a Muslim American known for her makeup tutorials, cooking videos and frank talk about her challenging journey to motherhood. With more than 11 million followers spread across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, she will speak on a night whose theme, “A Bold Vision for America’s Future,” is meant to draw contrasts between the Harris-Walz ticket and their Republican rivals, Donald J. Trump and Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

For Wednesday’s program, Mr. Espina, the son of Latin American immigrants who has amassed a huge following on TikTok with his videos about news, politics, food and soccer, will talk about immigration. Although he normally posts in Spanish, he is expected to deliver his remarks in English.

That night will also include Ms. Julianna, who has called herself “a plus-size queer Latina from rural Southeast Texas” and gained a following from her involvement in Gen-Z for Change, a youth-oriented political activism group. Her top issues include climate change and, like Ms. Foxx, abortion access.

“Peer to peer organizing is one of the most powerful tools we have in our democracy,” said Ms. Julianna, whose speech topic will be “freedom.” For years I’ve spoken directly to my fellow young Americans through my social media pages, knocking doors for Democratic candidates, and rallying for fundamental freedoms across the country.”

During the convention’s final night, which organizers are describing, thematically, as a narrative about how the 2024 election is a fight “for our future,” Mr. Russell, a self-described “dirtbag journalist” will have a chance to speak.

Based in West Virginia, he worked on rural policy and engagement for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in 2020, ran unsuccessfully for Congress, and has built a following on his progressive coverage of the industrial Midwest and his strong support of labor unions. In his social media bios, he describes himself as “biased for the working class.”

Mr. Vance mostly skirted the question on removals, but he stood by his comments on crime and ethnic and interethnic conflict, pointing to the Martin Scorsese film that depicts gang violence between Irish migrants and nativist Protestant Americans.

“Well, first of all, I also said there were a lot of benefits to that wave of immigration, but has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “We know that when you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.”

Later, he added: “What happens when you have massive amounts of illegal immigration? It actually starts to create ethnic conflict. It creates higher crime rates.”

Asked to provide evidence for the claims, a campaign spokeswoman pointed to a report from an anti-immigration think tank that argues crimes committed by immigrants are underestimated because many crimes go unreported and to a rise in violence in Minnesota that the authorities have attributed to a rivalry between St. Paul and Minneapolis East African gangs.

Since the nation’s founding, nativist politicians and anti-immigrant activists have sought to conflate immigration with crime. But historians and criminologists say there are no empirical studies to support claims like those made by Mr. Vance. The studies that do exist have repeatedly concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. A 2023 study by researchers at Stanford, Princeton and other major institutions found that, since 1880, immigrants have not been more likely to be imprisoned than people born in the United States. And as immigration into the United States has increased, crime has decreased in recent years.

Tyler Anbinder, a historian who wrote the book “City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York,” and served as a historical adviser for the movie “Gangs of New York,” said immigrants in New York during the film’s time period and since have not committed crime disproportionate to their population numbers and have almost always been arrested at lower rates than natives.

“Immigrants are so happy to be in America,” Mr. Anbinder said, adding that one of the main reasons immigrants commit less crimes than natives is “because they don’t want to be deported.”

Alex R. Piquero, a criminology professor at University of Miami and a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said Mr. Vance was also wrong to raise concerns about “ethnic enclaves.” Immigrants — regardless of the time period or ethnic background — tend to cluster in neighborhoods where they have relatives, know others who can speak their native language and can feel secure in their new environment.

“What’s very peculiar about these statements is that those ethnic enclaves do not breed crime,” he said of Mr. Vance’s stance, adding that “they actually serve as a protective buffer from crime.”

In his remarks, Mr. Vance also argued for a return to early 20th-century thinking when he said the United States was “welcoming country to immigrants” but Americans realized that the nation “could only take so many people,” arguing that deportations would benefit the country.

“I think that will promote assimilation and a common American culture that’s in the best interest of everybody,” he said.

But in arguing that more immigrants lead to higher crime and ethnic conflict, historians said, Mr. Vance was echoing arguments that American nativists have used since at least the 19th century to classify and marginalize some demographic groups as racially inferior, genetically predisposed to crime and unable to be assimilated.

Those negative stereotypes and misconceptions — once centered on certain Europeans but more recently focused on Mexicans and Latino migrants — have fueled prejudice and led to more extreme treatment of immigrants by government officials, police, the courts and the press.

In “Gangs of New York,” the most ruthless killer is the nativist who disdains immigrants, Mr. Anbinder said. But Mr. Vance appears to associate the Irish immigrants in the movie with the violence, he added.

“Throughout American history, those who fear or hate immigrants have always wanted to speak of them and scapegoat them as bringing crime to America,” Mr. Anbinder said. “What Vance is doing is not much different now.”

On Sunday, the party revealed the themes for each of the four nights of the convention:

• Monday: “For the People” — President Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, are scheduled to speak on the opening night of the convention, one that party officials said would focus on the record of the Biden-Harris administration and the president’s decades of public service. Organizers said the program would lean into a narrative that Mr. Biden has put the American people’s interest ahead of his own. On July 21, he became the first sitting president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 not to seek a second term.

• Tuesday: “A Bold Vision for America’s Future” — Democrats will seek to draw a contrast between what they said was the party’s optimism and the drumbeat from Republicans who say that the country’s best days are behind it. They will also try to make former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, take ownership of Project 2025, a right-wing playbook for reshaping the federal government that the Republican ticket has sought to distance itself from.

• Wednesday: “A Fight for Our Freedoms” — Mr. Walz will formally accept the Democratic nomination for vice president on the penultimate night of the convention, when the party will argue that Mr. Trump, if elected, would continue to strip away fundamental rights.

• Thursday: “For Our Future” — Ms. Harris will accept the party’s nomination, becoming the second woman, and the first woman of color, to lead the Democratic ticket, and Democrats will seek to cast Mr. Trump as a danger to the nation whose second term would be even more extreme than his first.

Mr. Trump blamed Ms. Harris for high prices, in what was effectively an inversion of her remarks at her rally in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, where she said Mr. Trump’s proposed import tariffs would amount to a “Trump tax” on groceries. The former president argued that she had placed a “Kamala Harris inflation tax” on average Americans over the course of her term as vice president and that, if elected, he would lower prices on consumer goods, just as she has said she would do.

“Yesterday, she got up, she started ranting and raving,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris’s explanation of her economic agenda in North Carolina. He mocked her remarks that, he said, suggested he would tax “every single thing that was ever invented.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers have urged him to emphasize his economic policy plans, which, according to polling, many voters trust more than Ms. Harris’s, and some Republicans have hoped he would leave behind his characteristic personal attacks, including his frequent insults of Ms. Harris’s intelligence and appearance.

But at two events earlier this week — a speech in Asheville, N.C., and a news conference in Bedminster, N.J. — both billed as opportunities to discuss the economy, Mr. Trump veered into personal attacks against Ms. Harris, which he said he was “entitled” to do.

Mr. Trump opened his rally in Pennsylvania, his final one before the Democratic National Convention begins in Chicago on Monday, by addressing inflation and the economy. But he quickly said, “You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you?” adding of Ms. Harris, “Joe Biden hates her.”

He went on to attack Ms. Harris for having a “crazy” laugh and said that he was “much better looking than her,” a line that drew cheers from the thousands of rallygoers gathered in the Mohegan Sun Arena.

In a statement, a Harris campaign spokesman, Joseph Costello, said that Mr. Trump was trying to distract from his “dangerous” agenda by resorting “to lies, name-calling and confused rants.”

Mr. Trump also said that Democrats would be hosting a “rigged convention” next week because of Ms. Harris’s entry into the race after a primary season in which millions of voters cast their votes for President Biden. Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in July and endorsed the vice president, who moved quickly to unite delegates behind her.

Mr. Trump repeated his campaign promise to increase oil and gas production, and then attacked Ms. Harris for calling for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, during her 2020 presidential campaign.

Ms. Harris’s campaign has said that she no longer supports such a ban. Pennsylvania, a large producer of natural gas, could see an economic benefit from increased fracking even as the process risks air and water pollution. And Mr. Trump’s calls to “drill, baby, drill” were particularly salient in Wilkes-Barre, in a region of northeast Pennsylvania that was historically defined by anthracite coal mining.

Mr. Trump also continued his effort to try to peel off American Jews, a substantial majority of whom are liberal, from the Democratic Party. He claimed that Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, was not chosen as Ms. Harris’s running mate because of his religion.

“They turned him down because he’s Jewish,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I don’t think he’s a good person.”

As Ms. Harris was choosing her running mate, Mr. Shapiro faced a pressure campaign from activists who considered him too sympathetic to Israel. Mr. Shapiro has rejected the idea that his religious identity played into Ms. Harris’s decision.

Still, Mr. Trump, who during his presidency was accused of emboldening white supremacists, invoked the Holocaust as he warned of broad antisemitism in America and insisted, as he has before, that Jews who vote for Democrats “should have their head examined.”

Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are particularly focused on Pennsylvania, a swing state with the potential to decide the election. Mr. Trump won the state by a slim margin in 2016, but he lost it to Mr. Biden in 2020.

Both campaigns are holding events in the state in the coming days. On Sunday, Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, will embark on a bus tour of western Pennsylvania. On Monday, Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, will make separate campaign stops in York, Pa., and Philadelphia.

“He’s never brought a lawsuit in his life,” Mr. Cotchett said of Mr. Brown. “But you know who’s pushing him to it? A guy by the name of Trump.”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Brown have been verbally sparring since Mr. Trump falsely claimed at a news conference on Aug. 8 at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that he had once nearly died in a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.

Mr. Trump also said that Mr. Brown, who dated Vice President Kamala Harris in 1994 and 1995, said “terrible things” about Ms. Harris just before they almost plummeted to their deaths.

“He was not a fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Brown promptly called the tale a lie — saying he had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and had never told him disparaging things about Ms. Harris. In fact, he repeatedly told reporters that he respected her and desperately hoped that she would beat the man with whom he had never ridden in a helicopter.

Mr. Trump repeated his claims on his social media site, Truth Social, and threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting that the helicopter story was made up. “Now Willie Brown doesn’t remember?” Trump wrote.

That’s when Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said he had taken a rocky helicopter ride with Mr. Trump in 1990 and speculated that the former president might have confused him with Mr. Brown. Both California politicians are Black.

Mr. Trump has not spoken about the helicopter incident since Mr. Holden came forward. But Mr. Brown and Mr. Cotchett said they wanted to make sure that he stayed quiet.

Asked whether he wanted an apology from Mr. Trump, Mr. Brown said he would rather not hear from him at all.

“No, I don’t want his apology,” Mr. Brown said. “I don’t want him to mention my name.”

When asked to comment, a spokesman for Mr. Trump pointed to the former president’s threat to sue The Times but did not address what Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Holden on Saturday applauded Mr. Brown’s legal threat.

“If he’s propagating a lie, he should be held accountable,” Mr. Holden said of Mr. Trump in a telephone interview on Saturday from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m 95 years old, and Willie is 90, and he made the assumption we wouldn’t be here anymore, and nobody would challenge it. Well, we’re alive and well.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Mr. Walz spoke of growing up in the tiny village of Butte, graduating from Chadron State College — “the Yale of the Midwest,” he said to laughs — and serving in the state’s Army National Guard, in which he enlisted at 17. He was introduced by one of his former high school students in the state and had former Butte classmates in the audience.

“We have a slogan here — Nebraska, it is not for everyone,” he told a boisterous audience at a theater in La Vista, Neb., a suburb of Omaha. “Well, it certainly ain’t for Donald Trump, I’ll tell you that much.”

The stop in his home state offered Mr. Walz another chance to reach rural, working-class and moderate voters, as he and Vice President Kamala Harris cast themselves as fighters for the middle class.

Nebraska is one of two states (along with Maine) that award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. A presidential candidate can lose the state and still earn electoral votes there.

Nebraska is solidly Republican, but its Second District, which encompasses Omaha and is known as Nebraska’s blue dot, is a swing region that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. Mr. Biden won it with 56.4 percent of the vote.

In the spring, Nebraska Republicans, under pressure from Mr. Trump; the state’s governor, Jim Pillen; and conservative activists, renewed an effort to move to a “winner-take-all” system in presidential elections. State legislators overwhelmingly voted against the proposal.

“It is not just symbolic,” Pete Festersen, the president of the Omaha City Council, said of Mr. Walz’s stop in the state. “It shows they can compete through the Midwest and certainly for our electoral vote and that can make a difference this election.”

Mr. Vance is expected at a fund-raiser in Omaha this month.

In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, criticized Mr. Walz’s platform and record, saying that Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris had “nothing to offer the American people other than their radical, Communist ideas.”

Mr. Walz was born in West Point, a rural town of roughly 3,500 people northwest of Omaha, and spent much of his younger days in Butte and Valentine, Neb. His mother was a community activist and his father a public school administrator, and he became a high school teacher and coach in Nebraska after a year of teaching in China. He met his wife, Gwen, also a teacher, at the Nebraska school, and the two moved to her native Minnesota in 1996.

Onstage, Mr. Walz joked that Mr. Vance would probably call a runza — a bread pocket filled with beef, cabbage or sauerkraut, and a regional specialty — “a Hot Pocket.” He said his parents and the communities he grew up in taught him to “show generosity towards your neighbor,” to “work for the common good” and that chili and cinnamon rolls — a sweet and spicy favorite in Nebraska — is a good combination.

He pledged that a Harris administration would cut taxes — and “not for the billionaires” — lower the cost for rent and prescription drugs and work to give families relief from medical debt. He argued that it was the Harris-Walz campaign that embodied small-town values.

“As we are running on these values, let’s take them to the White House,” he said.