Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will remain on the ballot for North Carolina’s general election, the state decided Thursday, WBTV reports.

A new Quinnipiac poll finds Kamala Harris just ahead of Donald Trump in the presidential race, 49% to 47%.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver each receiving one percent support.

Said pollster Tim Malloy: “Conventions done, debates in the planning, rhetoric getting rougher, there’s a slight numerical difference, but it is essentially a tie as the presidential race roars toward November 5th.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) urged tech billionaire Peter Thiel to “get off the sidelines” and help bankroll Donald Trump’s presidential bid in a Financial Times interview.

Said Vance: “I’m going to keep on talking to Peter and persuading him that — you know he’s obviously been exhausted by politics a little bit — but he’s going to be really exhausted by politics if we lose and if Kamala Harris is president.”

He added: “He is fundamentally a conservative guy, and I think that he needs to get off the sidelines and support the ticket.”

Nate Silver: “Harris is ahead by 3.8 points in our national poll tracker — up from 2.3 points the day before the Democratic Convention began — which does suggest some sort of convention bounce. However, she’s fallen to a 47.3 percent chance of winning the Electoral College versus 52.4 percent for Donald Trump. (The numbers don’t add to 100 because of the possibility of an Electoral College deadlock.)  Some of this is because of the convention bounce adjustment that the model applies to polls that were conducted during or after the DNC. It assumes Harris’s polls are somewhat inflated right now, in other words — just as it assumed Trump’s numbers were inflated after the RNC.”

“While there’s a solid basis for this empirically, you could argue we’re under unusual circumstances because of her late entry into the race. So if you want to treat all of this as a little fuzzier than usual, I don’t really mind that. The good news for Harris is that if she merely holds her current numbers for a couple more weeks, she’ll begin to track up again in our forecast as the model will become more confident that she’s out of the convention bounce period.”

“There’s another, longer-term concern for Harris, though: it’s been a while since we’ve seen a poll showing her ahead in Pennsylvania, which is the tipping-point state more than a third of time in our model. Today, in fact, we added one post-DNC poll showing Pennsylvania as a tie, and another (conducted during the DNC) showing either a tie or Trump +1, depending on what version you prefer.”

“The most disqualifying thing about Donald Trump is that he does or says something disqualifying every day.”

— Windsor Mann, on X.

“Next month’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump won’t have an audience, live microphones when candidates aren’t speaking, or written notes, according to rules that ABC News, the host network, shared this week with both campaigns,” the AP reports.

“The Harris campaign on Thursday insisted it was still discussing the muting of mics with ABC.”

An aide to Donald Trump “abruptly pushed aside” an Arlington National Cemetery employee on Monday when the former president visited the site with family members of U.S. service members killed in the 2021 Kabul airport attack during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, NBC News reports.

The Trump aide pushed the cemetery employee out of the way to get past to take photos and video at Section 60, where service members killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are buried.

Politico: Army defends employee involved in Trump campaign incident at Arlington.

Rick Hasen: “There is a decent chance we will not know whether Trump or Harris has won by Nov. 6, the day after the election. There may also be bumps in the road during the weeks before Congress counts the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6. Trump’s campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita signaled in July that a postelection legal and political battle lies ahead: ‘It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath…. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, ‘cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.'”

“No doubt we’re on track for another tense postelection season. The race is now looking very close, which leaves more room for uncertainty on Election Day and beyond. States such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have failed to pass laws that would let them process mail-in ballots more quickly before Election Day, which means that Trump could again appear to be ahead on election night only to see his lead disappear as more votes are counted. He may again declare victory prematurely.”

“But there is also some good news: The country is now in far better shape to avoid the kind of protracted mess we saw in 2020. The fact that we are no longer facing the emergency demands of a pandemic is a big help, but no less important are the electoral guardrails that have been put in place since then.”

Donald Trump is expected to reject assistance from the General Services Administration for a presidential transition if he wins, Politico reports.

“For one, accepting GSA help means adhering to $5,000-per-donor contribution limits in funding overall costs that can exceed $10 million, and Trump allies would prefer to ease the fundraising burden by having fewer people cutting bigger checks.”

“For another, Trump’s team simply does not trust the GSA after its 2016 experience, with some blaming federal workers for leaks of potential administration hires and widespread dismay with the agency’s decision to hand over transition records to special counsel Robert Mueller.”

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) told Newsmax that Vice President Kamala Harris doing a joint interview with Gov. Tim Walz — and being “propped up” by a man — is insulting to hard working women.

But then she suggested Walz was only there in case Harris “started giggling” and “looking crazy.”

“​Donald Trump’s campaign insists that they’re pursuing multiple strategies against Kamala Harris, but the true picture that is emerging is that the Trump senior advisers’ grand plan, for now, is to pray that the former US president ​has a good night at the presidential debate next month,” The Guardian reports.

“​The game plan, in other words, has become one of hoping that Trump wins the debate so they can regain momentum – a stunning approach that shows the serious predicament for Trump and his campaign as he struggles to find ways to land effective attacks against the vice-president just months before the election.”

“​What has happened internally in the Trump campaign in recent weeks is the realization that nothing they do in the period up to the debate is likely to cut through in a significant way that blunts Harris’s gains that have her level in key swing state polls, according to people close to the matter.”