“Labor Day is a critical mile-marker on the road to the general election, and Kamala Harris has reached it with a slim advantage over Donald Trump. But the former president would still be well within striking distance if the election were held today,” Politico reports.

“Because of Republicans’ advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it’s set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states.”

“The polls are extraordinarily tight in all of them, and that isn’t expected to change much over the next nine weeks. In modern presidential elections, where the race stands on Labor Day is usually pretty close to where it ends up once the votes are counted.”

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A new Wall Street Journal survey “found that while a majority of voters continue to hold negative views about the direction of the country and the economy, there has been a slight uptick in optimism.”

“Nearly 30% of respondents said the country is headed in the right direction, a 9-point jump from early July, while 61% said the country is headed in the wrong direction, a 9-point decrease. The figures reflect the most favorable view of the country’s trajectory since at least November 2021.”

“President Joe Biden reemerges on the campaign trail this week, entering a new political phase as he closes out his time in the White House and works to ensure Vice President Kamala Harris succeeds him,” CNN reports.

“Biden and Harris will kick off the final sprint to the election together on Labor Day, using the holiday to woo working-class voters with an event at a local union hall in Pittsburgh – a symbolic show of force in a city Biden himself often turned to at key points in his political career.”

“Who ever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it.”

— Donald Trump, in an interview with Fox News.

“Elon Musk’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump was meant to buoy the candidate’s chances in November. But more than a month after Musk officially put his weight behind Trump, a series of Democratic attacks have suggested that the endorsement has exposed a vulnerability,” NBC News reports.

“Since the tech billionaire endorsed Trump on July 13, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly attacked Musk for his anti-worker stances. The campaign has called Musk and Trump ‘self-obsessed rich guys’ and reposted audio from an event on Musk’s social media app, X, in which the two laugh together about firing striking workers.”

Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said he hasn’t endorsed in the 2024 presidential race yet because he hasn’t yet met with Vice President Kamala Harris, and “you don’t hire someone unless you give them an interview,” CBS News reports.

“For weeks, former President Donald Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message,” the New York Times reports.

“But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.”

Said Trump: “You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Associated Press: “Across the country, a network of Republican political operatives, lawyers and their allies is trying to shape November’s election in ways that favor former President Donald Trump. Their goal is to prop up third-party candidates such as West who offer liberal voters an alternative that could siphon away support from Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.”

“It is not clear who is paying for the effort, but it could be impactful in states that were decided by miniscule margins in the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.”

A new EPIC-MRA poll in Michigan finds 28% of voters said Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz as her running mate made them more likely to vote for her, compared with just 14% who said Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance made them more likely to back Trump.