Elections 2024: Trump to travel to Long Island while Harris to speak in Washington

Presidential candidates typically focus on a large part of their travels about battlefield states, but Donald Trump brings his message to a surprising place on Wednesday: the suburbs of New York.

The Republican presidential candidate and former president is traveling to Uniondale, Long Island, an area that could be crucial to his party maintaining control over the HouseHis party is trying to protect 18 Republicans in heavily Democratic-leaning districts that Joe Biden won in 2020, particularly in coastal New York and California, and is going on the offensive to challenge Democrats elsewhere.

Long Island in particular has one of the most closely followed racesbetween first-term Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito and Democrat Laura Gillen. D’Esposito, a former New York Police Department detective, won in 2022 in a district that Biden carried by about 15 percentage points in 2020.

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday that the GOP “has a real chance to win New York” “for the first time in many decades.” In that same post, Trump also promised to “get SALT back,” suggesting he would eliminate a cap on state and local tax deductions that was part of the tax cut legislation he signed in 2017.

The so-called SALT cap has led to higher tax assessments for many residents of New York, New Jersey, California and other high-cost, high-tax states, and it is a key campaign issue in those states, particularly among New York Republicans serving in districts that Biden won.

On the Democratic side of the campaign: Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to speak Wednesday at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 47th Annual Leadership Conference in Washington. He is also scheduled to travel to Michigan and Wisconsin later in the week.

Latino voters are a key bloc in swing states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. This week on the Nueva Network, Harris spoke with the personality known as “Chiquibaby” about her proposed tax deduction for new small businesses, her experience prosecuting border cases as California’s attorney general and her support for offering a “path to citizenship for those who have earned it.”

On Tuesday the Vice President was in Philadelphia for an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists. She blasted Trump’s rhetoric and said voters must make sure he “can’t have that microphone anymore.”

Trump is trying to get back into the rhythm of his campaign after Sunday’s election. apparent assassination attempt while he was golfing in Florida. On Tuesday, he traveled to Flint, Michiganand appears to have made no changes to plans for upcoming trips to the nation’s capital and North Carolina later in the week.

His running mate, Senator from Ohio. JD Vancewill hold an event in Raleigh, North Carolina on Wednesday.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP