The Headlines - Harris and Trump’s Next Moves, and Francine Lashes Southern Louisiana

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Plus, debunking claims about immigrants in Ohio.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Harris, After a Debate Success, Confronts a Battleground ‘Game of Inches,’ by Reid J. Epstein, Erica L. Green and Nicholas NehamasTrump Says He Had a Great Debate. His Allies Privately Say Otherwise, by Jonathan Swan, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie HabermanGrieving Ohio Father Tells Trump and Vance to Stop Talking About His Son, by Miriam JordanHeavy Rain From Francine Floods Parts of New Orleans, by Isabelle Taft, Jacey Fortin and J. David GoodmanTop Election Officials Warn Postal Service of Mail Ballot Issues, by Chris CameronThese Monkeys Call One Another by Name, by Emily Anthes

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracey Mumford. Today's Thursday, September 12th. Here's what we're covering. In the wake of the Harris-Trump debate, both campaigns are in full strategy mode, trying to read public reaction and map out their next moves with less than two months before the election. 67 million people tuned into the debate, making it the most watched moment of the presidential race. And many commentators, including some Republicans,

have concluded that Harris succeeded in knocking Trump off the messaging his team had hoped he'd stick to. The debate on Tuesday did not go how Donald Trump's allies and supporters had hoped. Shane Goldmacher covers Trump's campaign for The Times. He says while Trump has been calling it his best debate ever, privately, several of his aides and allies have conceded he had a rough performance. His team had prepared him for pivots during this debate, how to transition from attacks that Kamala Harris was expected to make

back to the issues he wanted to talk about, chiefly the economy and immigration. Instead, he was drawn into the fights that Harris wanted him to have. His supporters are bracing for the possibility of a series of negative news cycles and even a potential bump in the polls for Kamala Harris. Now he's looking to get back on track. He's scheduled to go to Tucson and Los Angeles and then a rally in Las Vegas as well. A series of events,

some of which are built specifically about the economy, in order to get himself back on the topics that he wants to talk about. For Harris, her campaign's riding some momentum from the debate. She's got stops in North Carolina and Pennsylvania this week. And Times politics reporter Reed Epstein's been covering her team's post-debate plans. election, a real referendum on Donald Trump and his fitness and capacity to serve again as president of the United States. With Tuesday's debate, Harris's campaign believes that the American people and voters in the critical battleground states will turn their focus to whether Trump is up for the job. And they intend to place this question at the front of voters' minds through her public appearances and television advertising

through the last eight weeks of the campaign. Reid says that Harris' team is all in on a second debate. For his part, Trump said yesterday he didn't know if he would agree to that. In this week's debate, the town of Springfield, Ohio was name-dropped when Trump repeated an outrageous and false claim that immigrants there were eating their neighbors' pets. It's a claim his running mate J.D. Vance has also amplified,

as Vance has made Springfield one of his talking points. The town has a large population of Haitian immigrants who've moved there in recent years. City officials say that 20,000 Haitians have arrived, filling manufacturing and warehouse jobs and helping revitalize the town that had been shrinking. Their arrivals put pressure on housing, schools, and health services, and tensions have simmered, though they reached new heights when conservatives focused in on one family's tragedy to accuse the Haitians of being dangerous. They've been highlighting the story of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who died last year after a Haitian driver crossed the center line and crashed into his school bus. On social media, Vance called it murder.

To clear the air, my son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti. This week, Clark's father, Nathan, told politicians, including Trump and Vance, not to talk about his son. And look what you've done to us. We have to get up here and beg them to stop. Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose. At a town meeting, Clark called on them to stop spreading hate in his son's name.

You know, I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt. But if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone. Some areas have already seen seven inches of rain, and that's going to increase over the next several hours. In Louisiana this morning, hundreds of thousands of people are without power, and local officials are warning about dangerous flooding after Hurricane Francine made landfall. The storm strengthened to a Category 2 hurricane just an hour before coming

ashore near New Orleans yesterday. The airport closed down, and many colleges and universities in the area canceled classes today and warned students to stay sheltered. Francine, which is now weakened to a tropical storm, is tearing through a stretch of the country that's been battered by a number of devastating storms in recent years. Hurricane Ida, which hit the coast as a Category 4 in 2021, caused so much damage and then made insurance so unaffordable that many residents left the region altogether. New Orleans has seen the steepest population drop of any major metro area in the country. Election officials are raising the alarm that issues with the Postal Service could prevent some Americans' votes from being counted this year. A bipartisan group of officials from around the country

sent a letter to the U.S. Postal Service yesterday urging it to take action on lost and delayed mail. Officials say they've seen hundreds of recent instances where ballots are arriving 10 days or more after being postmarked. As first-class mail, ballots are supposed to get there in three to five days. They also warned that some ballots were being mistakenly marked as undeliverable, which could eventually get people kicked off of voting rolls for being inactive. The letter said, We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action, and that, quote,

failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process. In response to the letter, the Postal Service told the Associated Press that there have been issues with mail delivery as it works to modernize its systems, but that it's ready to handle election season. Still, the Postal Service urged people voting by mail not to procrastinate. And finally, marmosets are chatty. The small South American monkeys whistle and chirp and trill. And a new study says that buried in all of that noise, the monkeys are calling each other by name.

They're the first non-human primates to be observed doing that. The research went like this. They'd bring two monkeys into a room. They could see each other, talk it up. Then a curtain would come down between them. Recordings show that when the monkeys lost sight of each other, they'd start producing unique, high-pitched calls. After analyzing over 50,000 of those calls, the researchers found differences depending on who a monkey was calling out to. For a long time, scientists used to think giving names was a uniquely human thing to do. Then dolphins were observed using names, and parrots, and earlier this year, scientists announced elephants appeared to be doing it too, in their low-pitched rumbles. The recent discoveries about elephants and marmosets in particular have been driven in part by artificial intelligence, which allowed scientists to analyze huge amounts of audio.

It's part of a growing trend of using the tech to decode animal communication. One biologist told the Times it's likely more animals use names than we even know, saying, quote, we just never were really looking properly. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, has been trying to buy the company U.S. Steel for $15 billion, why President Biden is likely to take the rare step of blocking the deal. You can listen on the Times audio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.