Chinese leader Xi Jinping made a plea for less fractious U.S.-China ties in a meeting with national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Thursday, according to a statement from Beijing.

Xi touted the U.S.-China “traditional friendship” and told Sullivan that Beijing wants to “maintain the stability of China-U.S. relations … [and] improve and take forward the relationship,” according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry statement. Xi also veered from his normally frosty public persona with a request that Sullivan “pass on his regards to President Biden” and expressed a “readiness to stay in touch” with Biden.

Xi’s tone suggests an effort by Beijing to try to slow the slide in U.S.-China relations over issues including U.S. restrictions on high technology exports, tensions across the Taiwan Strait, China’s support for Russia’s war on Ukraine and what Sullivan called Beijing’s “destabilizing actions” toward the Philippines in the South China Sea.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said that Sullivan reassured Xi that the U.S. also seeks to maintain stable U.S.-China ties.

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For years, the anti-abortion activist Lila Rose has pushed the GOP to curtail access to abortion. But now, as Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance conspicuously soften their abortion message ahead of the November election, Rose — who leads the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action — is embracing a more radical strategy: Urging her followers not to vote for Trump unless he changes course.

That position — which she teased in a series of social media posts earlier this week — defies both Democratic and Republican common sense about Trump’s strategy on abortion. In the eyes of many Democrats and anti-abortion conservatives who support Trump, a second-term Trump would still be sympathetic to the anti-abortion cause — even if he needs to moderate his message to win in November.

But since Trump and Vance have come out against a number of the anti-abortion movement’s key policy priorities — including a national abortion ban, a crackdown on the abortion pill and restrictions on IVF — Rose, who leveraged her large internet following into influence in the first Trump White House, is no longer confident that Trump is an ally, she told POLITICO Magazine. “It’s disappointing to say — but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue,” said Rose.

Rose’s position has inspired fierce resistance from some on the right who argue that a Trump presidency would still be better for the anti-abortion movement than a Harris administration. (Several of the most prominent anti-abortion groups are still backing Trump.)

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Kamala Harris is now in a tight race with Donald Trump in four Sun Belt states where President Joe Biden was struggling just before he dropped out of the race, according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday.

The vice president had a narrow lead, within the margin of error, against Trump in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada while the former president had a similarly slight edge in North Carolina in a poll that came after the Democratic convention and suggests momentum in her campaign.

The poll comes as the vice president was at the start of a bus tour of rural Georgia with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in hopes of repeating Biden’s 2020 win in the battleground state.

Trump’s campaign quickly dismissed Fox News for “atrocious” polling in a statement that said the candidate is ahead of where he was in 2020 in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and elsewhere.

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SAN FRANCISCO — For more than a year, Gavin Newsom was everywhere as a star surrogate for President Joe Biden. Since Kamala Harris took over as the nominee, you almost have to squint to see California’s governor.

Newsom has spent little time campaigning in other states since his fellow Californian leaped to the top of the Democratic ticket, an abrupt shift after barnstorming the country for Biden, especially during the turbulent final weeks of his candidacy.

The governor also had a small footprint at last week’s Democratic National Convention, opting to make the rounds on cable TV and some podcasts rather than join most of his colleagues at state breakfasts, fireside chats with reporters and on the main stage.

More than a month after the shakeup, it’s still unclear what role Harris has for Newsom, a longtime ally and sometimes rival who is a product of the same elite San Francisco political circles.

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Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing coming out of their respective conventions: Almost no one cares about Covid anymore.

Infections are running rampant after the Democratic confab in Chicago, with staffers on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, reporters and other convention-goers all stricken — and in at least one case claiming the positive test was “worth it.” Cases also cropped up after the Republican National Convention in July.

And yet the single most-animating issue of the 2020 election is an afterthought for the major-party nominees coming out of two of the 2024 campaign’s biggest milestones — even as the virus remains an ever-present threat that's shaped broader debates over key electoral issues like strength of the economy and the future of families' health and child care.

Both campaigns have struggled with how — and how much — to address a pandemic that the U.S. never fully defeated, but that few Americans still want to dwell on.

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The contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remains up for grabs, but one thing seems clear regardless of who wins in November: This is likely Merrick Garland’s last year as attorney general.

That outcome is obvious if Trump wins, but as Democrats contemplate a potential Harris presidency, the party’s political-legal establishment is already buzzing about who might replace Garland if Harris wins — and how that person should steer a post-Garland Department of Justice in new ways.

I found an interest in change at DOJ to be a key takeaway from speaking with about a half-dozen prominent Democrats at the Democratic convention and elsewhere in recent weeks, people who have served in the Justice Department, on Capitol Hill and at the White House. Most were granted anonymity in order to candidly discuss the performance of the sitting attorney general and some of the contenders who might plausibly replace him.

“My assumption is that members of the cabinet and sub-cabinet will move on and that, if Kamala is elected, she will want to put in her own team,” said former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who has known Garland since they attended college together and brought him in as a senior official to the Clinton Justice Department. She praised Garland for restoring “the integrity and morale of the department” and for being “staunch and successful” on fighting crime and protecting national security.

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American parents need a bailout.

Suffering from stress, money woes and loneliness more than their childless peers, nearly half of parents can barely function, according to a new report from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Murthy says government aid, in the form of child tax credits, universal preschool, early childhood education programs, paid family and medical leave, paid sick time and investments in social infrastructure, can help. That’s in line with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign pitch, but GOP contender Donald Trump is also considering how to get more cash in parents’ pockets — an issue his running mate JD Vance has championed.

“The stress and the loneliness that parents are dealing with at a disproportionate level has real implications,” Murthy told POLITICO. “We’ve got to provide more financial support.”

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Kamala Harris returns to Georgia this week in her first post-convention campaign stop — and she’s swinging through a part of the state Democrats at the top of the ticket have long ignored in the final stretch to Election Day.

The vice president and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are setting off on a bus tour in southeast Georgia on Wednesday, where they’ll meet with supporters, small business owners and voters. Harris will finish it out with a rally Thursday night in Savannah, part of the campaign’s renewed effort to prioritize the battleground state now that her team believes it’s in play.

The vice president’s campaign isn’t just relying on metro Atlanta’s bluest counties, a strategy that speaks to the lessons gleaned from President Joe Biden’s ultra slim victory in 2020, when he flipped the swing state by less than 12,000 votes. If Democrats want to win Georgia again, they also must continue to improve their margins in the state’s urban, suburban and rural areas outside the perimeter, too, particularly among Black and working class voters.

“They are campaigning all across this country, and they see a path through Georgia. We have multiple paths to 270 so that we can win the White House once again, and coming to Georgia is an affirmation that we are still a battleground state, we are still in this,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), chair of the state Democratic Party. “And they know just like we know — that we’ve been counted out before.”

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Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen CNN for her first sit-down interview since becoming the Democratic nominee for president.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will face questions from CNN anchor Dana Bash in an interview expected to air 9 p.m. Thursday, the network announced Tuesday. The interview will take place in Georgia as the vice president is on a bus tour through the battleground state.

Harris has drawn criticism from her Republican opponents for not sitting down for a formal interview since President Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, though she has repeatedly taken questions from reporters in brief exchanges.

Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have increased their media appearances and news conferences in part to highlight the contrast between the two campaigns.

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Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance started his Rust Belt sweep this week by attacking Vice President Kamala Harris’ record on the economy and pushing a message of protecting American jobs in the battleground state of Michigan — a key swing state that polls show Harris is leading in.

Speaking at a rally in Big Rapids, Michigan, former President Donald Trump’s running mate tried to tie Harris to the Biden administration’s policies — saying at one point that “Kamala Harris has been calling the shots” — while also warning of China’s emergence as an economic superpower that’s taking jobs away from the U.S.

He stressed the electoral importance of Michigan, telling the crowd that the state will vote for Republicans. After the rally, he told reporters Michigan is “one of the most important states” in the election that has “borne the brunt of a lot of stupid policies.”

“When I tell people that Donald Trump wants to rebuild American manufacturing, unleash American energy and bring those factories back, I think that it resonates in Michigan,” Vance said to reporters, when asked about the vice president’s lead in Michigan. “Maybe more than any other state because Michigan actually saw what happened when those factories closed down.”

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For the first time in history, the Democratic National Committee credentialed more than 200 content creators to have a front-row seat to cover the event, giving them equivalent status to establishment media professionals. The convention spotlighted 5 influencers who spoke on stage for the program. According to convention officials, those five individuals have a combined 23 million followers. According to DNC staff, in total, all of the content creators who participated in the convention had the capacity to reach 500 million accounts on a variety of social media platforms.

In a statement to POLITICO, DNC spokesperson Emily Soong said the 2024 event raked in 350 million views "on partner-created content across the four days of the convention."

“Democrats built a convention that prioritized reaching the American people where they are. Alongside members of the media, content creators were critical to bringing the convention experience and the story of the Harris-Walz ticket to the voters that will decide this election,” Soong said."As the media and information landscape continues to shift, Democrats will keep finding new and innovative ways to reach the American people, on every platform, in every corner of the country."

Soong also added that the influencers invited to the DNC had the “unique ability to speak authentically to their own communities,” which included the LGBTQ+ community, abortion activists, people of color and first-time voters.

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The Harris campaign is planning a Labor Day blitz of events on Monday in nearly every battleground state, including Vice President Kamala Harris’ first joint campaign appearance with President Joe Biden since the switch at the top of the ticket.

Harris will travel to Detroit on Monday, before joining Biden in Pittsburgh for a campaign event, a nod to the president’s union bonafides in states like Pennsylvania. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and first lady Gwen Walz will travel to Milwaukee as the city celebrates its annual Laborfest, while second gentlemen Doug Emhoff will attend a Labor Day event in Newport News, Virginia.

The campaign is also deploying surrogates including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Mitch Landrieu, Tom Perez and others to key battleground states like North Carolina, Nevada and Georgia.

The Labor Day travel barrage, coming at the unofficial start of campaign season when most Americans begin paying closer attention to the election, speaks to Harris’ efforts to consolidate the support of labor across battleground states. She is hoping to limit former President Donald Trump’s push for working-class voters who could swing the election. Harris has stressed to union leaders that she plans to forge ahead with Biden’s pro-union agenda, leaning on the administration’s record that has solidified the movement’s close working relationship with the White House that Biden helped build.

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Former President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on ABC News is still on, after appearing to suggest that the network shows too much “hostility” toward Republicans for him to attend the event.

The Republican nominee said in a Truth Social post Tuesday that the rules of the Sept. 10 debate will remain the same as the ones that he and President Joe Biden agreed to ahead of their June CNN debate, when each candidate’s microphone was muted while their opponent was speaking.

But the Harris campaign rejects the claim that the Sept. 10 debate will have the same rules from June. The issue regarding whether mics will be turned on during the entire debate is still being discussed, a Harris campaign official said.

"Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates — but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad," a Harris campaign official said in a statement to POLITICO.

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Vice President Kamala Harris sprang from the Democratic National Convention with a momentum that’s been building throughout her short campaign — but with just over two months until Election Day, a victory for Harris is still far from certain.

Her team is selling her condensed run as an underdog candidacy, and throughout the convention, a litany of speakers emphasized it would continue to be an uphill battle.

“The energy is good, but the energy has to be harnessed for good, because energy not harnessed doesn't always turn out to be good energy in politics,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based in South Carolina.

Here are five obstacles the Harris campaign will need to address as the race kicks off in earnest.

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The next president, be it Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face a big, early test on a core pocketbook issue: taxes.

A large chunk of Trump’s namesake 2017 tax cuts are set to expire at the end of 2025, including the basic rates paid by individuals and families, and both Trump and Harris are making the issue a big part of their sales pitch to voters.

Trillions of dollars are potentially at stake, and the fight will test whether Democrats can play offense on a field that has long favored Republicans.

Trump has floated the prospect of even more tax cuts on top of extending all of the temporary provisions that he signed into law in 2017, touting the elimination of taxes on tips and Social Security income and teasing another cut in the corporate rate.

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Donald Trump is returning to one of his favorite subjects: outer space.

The former president on Monday said if elected, he’ll push to establish a Space National Guard, throwing his support behind a new proposal for part-time space personnel that the Biden administration opposes.

The surprise move by Trump puts the campaign spotlight on an issue that has governors of both parties — and National Guard leaders — at odds with the Pentagon and has divided Congress.

The pledge came during a speech at the National Guard Association of the United States’ annual conference in Detroit, in the battleground state of Michigan, where the Republican nominee attacked outgoing President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris on a host of foreign policy and domestic issues — chief among them the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and border security.

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With just 15 days left until the scheduled Sept. 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, negotiations between their two campaigns have hit an impasse over whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to four people familiar with the issue.

In June, President Joe Biden’s campaign came to an agreement with Trump’s: There would be two debates — CNN’s on June 27 and ABC’s on Sept. 10 — conducted by mutually negotiated rules. One of the Biden team’s demands — which the Trump team agreed to — was that microphones “will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” as CNN announced on June 15.

But Biden is no longer running for president. And Harris’ campaign wants the microphones to be hot at all times during the ABC debate — as has historically been the case at presidential debates.

“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, tells POLITICO. “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”

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A first-in-the-nation California proposal could make undocumented immigrants eligible for up to $150,000 in state-supported home loans just as immigration has become an incendiary topic in the presidential election.

The measure is likely to pass the California Legislature this week where Democrats enjoy a supermajority and in a state that has the largest share of undocumented immigrants in the country.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, a top surrogate for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, declined to say whether he would sign the measure if it clears the statehouse by the Aug. 31 deadline. He would likely make a decision while Republican nominee Donald Trump criticizes Harris over the influx in migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border early on in Biden’s tenure and as Harris moves to the right on immigration.

Harris, in her DNC acceptance speech Thursday said the country can “live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants, and reform our broken immigration system.” While the California proposal targets prospective homebuyers and not new migrants, it could nonetheless carry a political risk for Harris by providing fodder for Trump as he seizes on anything that could link his opponent to the border crisis.

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President Joe Biden executed one of the most sweeping progressive agendas on labor, climate change and “corporate greed” in recent decades — only to see the Supreme Court lay it so bare that a Kamala Harris victory may not protect large chunks of it.

A suite of Supreme Court rulings this summer freed up federal judges to freeze many regulations the president once campaigned on or enacted to get around a deeply divided Congress. In Texas, a federal judge blocked Biden’s ban on noncompete agreements for workers, and a judge in Mississippi stopped his discrimination protections in health care for transgender people. And an Ohio-based appeals court temporarily halted a policy preventing internet companies from throttling service.

Biden appointees have spent years writing rules to crack down on credit card late fees, require airlines to fork over cash refunds and make millions more people eligible for overtime pay while reining in polluting industries. But the future of those policies, along with the president’s unfinished business on student debt relief and artificial intelligence, are far less secure than they were just two months ago.

While having a successor from the same party long served as the simplest way for presidents to protect and continue their legacies, the high court has made it harder for Harris to defend Biden’s even if she bests former President Donald Trump. The court rulings, particularly one overturning the “Chevron doctrine,” now make it more difficult for Harris to secure her own agenda — or even, in some cases, for Trump to cement his.

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