Trump says he won’t participate in future debates as Harris says ‘we owe it to the voters to have another’ – live | US elections 2024

Kamala Harris just took the stage at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she continued to push Donald Trump to debate again, despite his announcement that he would not do so.

“Two nights ago, Donald Trump and I had our first debate, And I believe we owe to the voters to have another debate, because this election and what is at stake could not be more important,” the vice-president said to applause.

An Atlanta-area judge dismissed two of the charges brought against Donald Trump by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 elections, but allowed the rest of the case to proceed, Reuters reports.

The charges dismissed by judge Scott McAfee deal with filing false documents in federal court. McAfee allowed eight other allegations against the former president to stand.

Donald Trump announced he will not participate in a second debate with Kamala Harris, saying she has turned down previous opportunities to meet and alleging she lost their Tuesday night face-off.

“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate,” the former president wrote on Truth Social.

Trump restated his much-repeated claim that Harris and Joe Biden have “destroyed our Country”, then said:

Everyone knows this, and all of the other problems caused by Kamala and Joe – It was discussed in great detail during the First Debate with Joe, and the Second Debate with Comrade Harris. She was a no-show at the Fox Debate, and refused to do NBC & CBS. KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!

The Harris campaign has previously said she would be willing to debate Trump again sometime in October. Trump’s running mate JD Vance remains scheduled to debate Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, on 1 October in New York.

Donald Trump’s pollsters say support for the former president has increased in swing states since his debate against Kamala Harris.

In a memo, Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis write that the candidates were tied before the debate, but after surveying 1,893 likely voters in seven swing states, Trump now leads Harris 48% to 46% when third-party candidates are included, and 50% to 47% in a head-to-head matchup.

“Clearly, target state voters were not impressed by Kamala Harris’ empty platitudes and while the media would have people believe she is cruising to victory, this couldn’t be farther from the truth,” the pollsters write.

Robert Tait

Republicans are blaming the influence of Laura Loomer, a rightwing conspiracy theorist, for this week’s botched debate performance by Donald Trump, which included the former president repeating a bizarre and unfounded claim that pet cats and dogs were being eaten by Haitian immigrants.

Loomer flew with Trump on his private plane to Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia and has been identified as a key promoter of the pets rumour, which has been dismissed as false by authorities in Springfield, Ohio, where the practice was alleged to have been taking place.

The Semafor website quoted an unnamed source close to Trump’s campaign as saying they were “100%” concerned about Loomer’s sway over the Republican nominee. “Regardless of any guardrails the Trump campaign has put on her, I don’t think it’s working,” the source said.

Trump this year proposed giving Loomer an official role on his campaign, but the idea was resisted by staffers. Loomer, who styles herself as an “investigative journalist”, last year promoted a conspiracy theory alleging that 9/11 was an “inside job”. On Wednesday she posted an unfounded allegation that Harris had worn earphones disguised as earrings during the debate.

It’s back to the campaign trail for both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, two days after their first and perhaps only debate. The vice-president has two events planned for this afternoon in North Carolina, while Trump will be in Arizona. Speaking of the debate, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds Harris the overall winner of the Tuesday evening face-off, and slightly improving her lead nationally. In the legal arena, a New York appeals court just rejected another attempt by Trump to get the gag order imposed on him in his hush-money case lifted.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• North Dakota’s strict ban on abortion was tossed out by a judge who said it ran afoul of the state constitution and was vague.

• The joint session of Congress scheduled for 6 January 2025 to count and certify electoral votes will be considered a “national special security event” by the homeland security department, all because of what happened last time.

• Alberto Gonzales, a Republican who served as attorney general under George W Bush, announced he will vote for Harris.

Reuters is out with one of the first polls since Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debated on Tuesday evening, and found voters view the vice-president as the winner in the debate, where Trump came off as the less sharp candidate.

Harris is also building her lead among registered voters nationally to 47% over Trump’s 42%, a slight jump from previous weeks, according to the survey, which was conducted with Ipsos. Here’s more about it:

The two-day poll showed Harris with a five percentage point lead among registered voters, just above the four-point advantage she had over Trump in an Aug 21-28 Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Among voters who said they had heard at least something about Tuesday’s debate, 53% said Harris won and 24% said Trump won. Some 52% of respondents said that Trump stumbled and didn’t appear sharp, while 21% said that of Harris.

Harris, 59, put Trump, 78, on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office and his myriad legal woes.

The poll surveyed 1,690 US adults nationwide, including 1,405 registered voters. It had a margin of error of around three percentage points for registered voters.