Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota is intensifying his preparations for the vice presidential debate Oct. 1, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg serving as a stand-in for his opponent, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, according to five people with direct knowledge of the preparations, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private efforts.

Buttigieg, one of the Democratic Party’s most skilled communicators and a fixture on Fox News, played a similar role for Kamala Harris in 2020, acting as Vice President Mike Pence in her mock debate sessions. Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is now trying to channel another fellow Midwesterner in Vance.

Buttigieg has won acclaim from Democrats for his deft performances on Fox News, parrying hosts and delivering the administration’s message behind enemy lines. He had been helping Walz’s debate team via videoconference, but joined the preparations in person Wednesday in Minnesota. So far the sessions have been informal — no lights, stage sets or dress rehearsals — but Walz is expected to do a more intensive debate camp before the matchup in New York City.

Trump seeks to undo Neb. election system

Former President Donald Trump’s allies are resurrecting efforts to change how Nebraska awards its five electoral votes, a hybrid system that could deliver a single but decisive vote to Vice President Kamala Harris from a reliable red state in one tiebreaking scenario.

With less than seven weeks until the election, all five Republicans who represent the state in Congress are pushing for Nebraska to return to a winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes that had been used before 1992 and was based on the statewide popular vote.

Under the state’s the current hybrid system, its electoral votes are split: Two go to the winner of the statewide popular vote, and the other three are based on who wins the popular vote in each of Nebraska’s three U.S. House districts. Maine also has a hybrid system.

In 2016, Trump secured all five of Nebraska’s electoral votes, but he was denied a sweep in 2020 when Joe Biden won the popular vote in the 2nd District, which includes Omaha, the state’s most populous city. The area, which has become known in Nebraska as the “blue dot,” is near where Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’ running mate, was born.

Biden welcomes Fed’s interest rates cut

President Joe Biden said Thursday the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates was “an important signal” that inflation has eased as he poked at Donald Trump’s economic policies as a failure in the past and sure to “fail again” if revived.

“Lowering interest rates isn’t a declaration of victory,” Biden told the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. “It’s a declaration of progress, to signal we’ve entered a new phase of our economy and our recovery.”

The Democratic president emphasized that there was more work left to do, but he used his speech to burnish his economic legacy even as he criticized Trump, his Republican predecessor who is running for another term.

“Trickle down down economics failed,” Biden said. “He’s promising again trickle down economics. It will fail again.”

Biden said Trump wants to extend tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, costing an estimated $5 trillion, and implement tariffs that could raise prices by nearly $4,000 per family, something that Biden described as a “new sales tax.”

Ohio city braces for possible Trump visit

Residents of the Ohio city where former President Donald Trump has baselessly insisted that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets expressed concern on Thursday after Trump publicly promised to visit in two weeks.

The city, Springfield, has become a focus of unwanted national attention after Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, began sharing since-debunked claims that Haitian residents had been taking and eating people’s pets. Trump amplified that claim in his debate last week against Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Wednesday night at a rally on Long Island in New York, Trump said he planned “to go there in the next two weeks.”

The former president has a long history of saying he’ll do something — and do it in two weeks — only to move on and never mention it again.

— News service reports