By MATT BROWN and LINLEY SANDERS

WASHINGTON (AP) — Black registered voters have an overwhelmingly positive view of Vice President Kamala Harris, but they’re less sure that she would change the country for the better, according to a recent poll from the   AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The poll, which was conducted in mid-September, found about 7 in 10 Black voters have a somewhat or very favorable view of Harris, with few differences between Black men and women voters on how they view the Democratic candidate. Younger and older Black voters also had similar views of the vice president.

Black voters’ opinions of former President Donald Trump, by contrast, were overwhelmingly negative, underscoring the challenges that the Republican candidate faces as he seeks to erode Harris’ support among Black men. Black voters are an important Democratic constituency, and few are aligned with the Republican Party. According to the survey, two-thirds of Black voters identify as Democrats, about 2 in 10 identify as independents and about 1 in 10 identify as Republicans.

But the poll also found that despite this dramatic gap in views of the candidates, Black voters are less certain of whether Harris would set the country on a better trajectory, or make a substantial difference in their own lives. Only about half of Black voters say “would change the country for the better” describes Harris very or extremely well, while about 3 in 10 say it describes her “somewhat well” and about 2 in 10 say it describes her “not very well” or “not well at all.” And only about half believe the outcome of this presidential election will have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of impact on them personally, an assessment that’s in line with Americans overall.

“The Democratic Party is not strong enough for me,” said Raina Johnson, 53, a safety case manager in Chicago. Johnson predicted that Harris would “try to do something for the people” but she felt that Harris would be limited as it was “with (Barack) Obama, because the Republican Party shut him down.”

While Johnson felt that the stakes of the election were extremely high, she did not think it would have a large personal impact on her.

“Because I’ll still live my life. I’ll just have to roll with the punches,” she said.

Most Black voters think Harris is better on the issues

When asked which candidate would do a better job handling their top issues, including the economy, health care and crime, Black voters had the same answer: Harris.

Like voters overall, about 8 in 10 Black voters said the economy is one of the most important issues to their vote. But about three-quarters of Black voters said health care was one of their most important issues, compared to slightly more than half of registered voters, and they were also more likely than the electorate as a whole to say gun policy and crime were top issues.

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In all of those areas, as well as on other topics like abortion and climate change, Harris held a commanding advantage over Trump among Black voters. But the size of that edge was bigger on some issues than others. About 6 in 10 Black voters said Harris was better positioned to handle the economy, while about 2 in 10 said this about Trump, giving Harris about a 40-point advantage. On abortion policy, she had around a 60-point advantage over Trump.

The Trump campaign has stepped up with some outreach to Black communities this year. The former president’s campaign believes that his message on the economy, immigration and traditional values can make notable inroads into the Democrats’ traditional base of support among Black voters, especially younger Black men.

Rod Wettlin, a retired Air Force veteran in Surprise, Arizona, who wants greater action on issues like health care and immigration, said he was deeply opposed to Trump and was concerned about the implications of the election for American democracy.

“What’s going on now is the culmination of a lot of stuff that’s been in our face for years,” said Wettlin. “Hopefully after the election it is civil, but these cats out here are already calling for bedlam. And that’s their right, I fought for them to have that right. But don’t infringe on mine.”

There are signs that some groups of Black voters see Harris as a stronger figure, though. Black women voters and older Black voters were especially likely to describe Harris as someone who would “fight for people like you,” compared to Black men and younger Black voters.

FILE – A supporter holds up a sign as Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Trump National Doral Miami, July 9, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

Black voters view Trump negatively, and some are skeptical about Biden

Relatively few Black voters have a positive view of Trump, or see him as a candidate who has important qualities for the presidency. The poll found that about 8 in 10 Black voters have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Trump, while just 15% have a somewhat or very favorable view. About 1 in 10 said “would change the country for the better” or “would fight for people like you” describes Trump at least very well, and a similarly low share of Black voters said that Trump would make a good president.

“I think we’re headed in the right direction if Kamala Harris gets it,” said Roslyn Coble, 63, and a resident of Oakboro, North Carolina. “But if Donald Trump gets it, it’s going to be bad. He already told us what he’s going to do. He’s going to be a dictator.”

About 7 in 10 Black voters say the phrase “will say anything to win the election” describes Trump at least very well.

In a sign of how former President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw as the Democratic candidate in July may have altered the race, only 55% of Black men voters have a favorable view of Biden, compared to 7 in 10 Black women voters.

“He did his best,” said Wettlin. He said that Biden should have bowed out of the presidential race far sooner and was skeptical of some of his achievements.

Black voter engagement organizations say they have also seen a burst of energy from voters and advocates since Harris’ entrance into the race, and both the Harris and Trump campaigns are continuing to focus on this group.

The Trump campaign has been conducting listening sessions and community events in Black neighborhoods in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. The campaign has also coordinated a “Black Voices for Trump” bus tour across cities in September. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign has held a number of events geared toward Black voters, especially Black men, and has deployed a number of high-profile surrogates, including lawmakers, celebrities and civil rights leaders, to Black communities in recent weeks.

The poll of 1,771 registered voters was conducted Sept. 12-16, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for registered voters is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

By John T. Bennett, CQ-Roll Call

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris expressed confidence in an interview that aired Monday night that she could get her agenda through Congress, though she signaled a fight with lawmakers over how to pay for it.

Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, was interviewed by “60 Minutes” on CBS as some polls showed a close race getting even tighter with less than a month until Election Day. That included the seven key battleground states expected to decide the contest.

Harris was questioned by correspondent Bill Whitaker for the first half of the show. The second half initially was intended for Scott Pelley to interview former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, but Trump backed out. Asked about her opponent no-showing the program, the vice president encouraged viewers to tune in to his campaign events.

“Watch his rallies. You’re going to hear conversations about himself and all of his personal grievances,” Harris said. “And what you will not hear is anything about you, the listener. You will not hear about how he’s going to try and bring the country together, find common ground. That’s why I believe … the American people are ready to turn the page.”

In Pennsylvania, an Emerson College poll had Harris and Trump tied. A RealClearPolitics average of several recent surveys showed the same. The same Emerson poll gave Trump a 1 percentage point advantage in North Carolina, a state he carried in 2016 and 2020.

Whitaker pressed the vice president on a range of issues. Here are four takeaways.

Pay-fors?

Harris was pushed on how she, if elected, would pay for what would be a pricey agenda.

She has proposed tax breaks and other federal aid for first-time homebuyers, would-be small-business owners and parents, accompanied by revenue from a proposal to raise corporate tax rates.

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“My plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses you invest in the middle class, and you strengthen America’s economy,” she said before Whitaker interjected: “Pardon me, Madam Vice President, the question was, ‘How are you going to pay for it?’”

“Well, one of the things I’m going to make sure that the richest among us — who can afford it — pay their fair share in taxes,” Harris said. “It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations. And I plan on making that fair.”

Harris almost certainly would face an uphill fight on Capitol Hill to pass any tax hikes, though myriad Trump-era tax reductions are scheduled to expire at the end of 2025.

‘A capitalist’

Harris suggested she is banking on pressure from voters to help her get that economic plan through what analysts expect will be a narrowly divided Congress, no matter which party wins control of the House and Senate.

“When we talk quietly with a lot of people in Congress, they know exactly what I’m talking about because their constituents know what I’m talking about. Their constituents are those firefighters and teachers and nurses … middle-class, hard-working folks,” she told Whitaker.

“I disagree with you,” Harris replied when the correspondent noted there is scant evidence that many lawmakers want to pass her plans. “There are plenty of leaders in Congress who understand and know that the Trump tax cuts blew up our federal deficit. … I’m also a capitalist. … I know the limitations of government.”

Harris’ best bet to get some of her proposals through Congress likely would be Democratic majorities in both chambers, allowing the party to use the reconciliation process. A number of Democratic congressional candidates are polling ahead of Harris.

‘Netanyahu is not listening’

Perhaps Whitaker’s most pointed questions came about Israel’s conduct of its war against Hamas in Gaza and military strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Whitaker noted that the U.S. sends Israel hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not heeded the Biden administration’s warnings about how it has executed the conflict. “Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?” he asked.

“Now, the work that we do diplomatically, with the leadership of Israel, is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done, which would release the hostages and create a cease-fire,” Harris replied. “And we’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders.”

The Biden administration has little to show for its diplomatic outreach to other Arab countries, and no Arab peacekeeping force has emerged to patrol Gaza, should the conflict end or be paused.

Whitaker shot back that “it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.”

“Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris replied.

But some pro-Palestinian groups have said the Biden administration has not done enough and been too ineffective at restraining Netanyahu. As Harris spoke at an Oct. 7 remembrance event in Washington on Monday, protesters could be heard outside her residence at the Naval Observatory chanting and banging drums.

Notably, she declined to answer in the affirmative when asked if Netanyahu is a true “close ally.”

‘It’s about surrender’

Harris also took several jabs at Trump, saying she believes she will win next month because her campaign is about helping voters, “not trying to divide us.”

She is betting that voters will side with her vision of leadership, which she described as being “not based on who you beat down, it’s based on who you lift up.”

Harris also criticized Trump’s foreign policy proposals, including his statements about ending the Ukraine-Russia war as quickly as possible, if he is elected again.

“Donald Trump, if he were president, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now,” she said. “He talks about, oh, he can end it on day one. You know what that is? It’s about surrender.”

Earlier Monday, Trump told a conservative radio host that undocument immigrants have brought “bad genes” into the United States, prompting a rebuke from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

“That type of language is hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate,” she told reporters during a briefing. “It has no place in our country.”

©2024 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MATTHEW DALY and MICHAEL PHILLIS

WASHINGTON (AP) — A decade after the Flint, Michigan, water crisis raised alarms about the continuing dangers of lead in tap water, President Joe Biden is setting a 10-year deadline for cities across the nation to replace their lead pipes, finalizing an aggressive approach aimed at ensuring that drinking water is safe for all Americans.

Biden is expected to announce the final Environmental Protection Agency rule Tuesday in the swing state of Wisconsin during the final month of a tight presidential campaign. The announcement highlights an issue — safe drinking water — that Kamala Harris has prioritized as vice president and during her presidential campaign. The new rule supplants a looser standard set by former President Donald Trump’s administration that did not include a universal requirement to replace lead pipes.

Biden and Harris believe it’s “a moral imperative” to ensure that everyone has access to clean drinking water, EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters Monday. “We know that over 9 million legacy lead pipes continue to deliver water to homes across our country. But the science has been clear for decades: There is no safe level of lead in our drinking water.”

The rule is the strongest overhaul of lead-in-water standards in roughly three decades. Lead, a heavy metal used in pipes, paints, ammunition and many other products, is a neurotoxin that can cause a range of disorders from behavioral problems to brain damage. Lead lowers IQ scores in children, stunts their development and increases blood pressure in adults.

The EPA estimates the stricter standard will prevent up to 900,000 infants from having low birthweight and avoid up to 1,500 premature deaths a year from heart disease.

The new regulation is stricter than one proposed last fall and requires water systems to ensure that lead concentrations do not exceed an “action level” of 10 parts per billion, down from 15 parts per billion under the current standard. If high lead levels are found, water systems must inform the public about ways to protect their health, including the use of water filters, and take action to reduce lead exposure while concurrently working to replace all lead pipes.

Lead pipes often impact low-income urban areas the most. They are most commonly found in older, industrial parts of the country, including major cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Detroit and Milwaukee, where Biden and Regan will announce the standards on Tuesday.

The new rule also revises the way lead amounts are measured, which could significantly expand the number of cities and water systems that are found to have excessive levels of lead, the EPA said.

To help communities comply, the agency is making available an additional $2.6 billion for drinking water infrastructure through the bipartisan infrastructure law. The agency also is awarding $35 million in competitive grants for programs to reduce lead in drinking water.

The 10-year timeframe won’t start for three years, giving water utilities time to prepare. A limited number of cities with large volumes of lead pipes may be given a longer timeframe to meet the new standard.

Biden will make the announcement in Milwaukee, a city with the fifth-highest number of lead pipes in the nation, according to the EPA. Officials there are using money from the federal infrastructure law to accelerate lead-pipe replacement work and meet a goal to remove all lead pipes within 10 years, down from an initial 60-year timeframe.

Lead pipes can corrode and contaminate drinking water; removing them sharply reduces the chance of a crisis. In Flint, a change in the source of the city’s drinking water source more than a decade ago made it more corrosive, spiking lead levels in tap water. Flint was the highest-profile example among numerous cities that have struggled with stubbornly high levels of lead, including Newark, New Jersey, Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Washington, D.C.

The original lead and copper rule for drinking water was enacted by the EPA more than 30 years ago. The rules have significantly reduced lead in tap water but have included loopholes that allowed cities to take little action when lead levels rose too high.

“I think there is very broad support for doing this. Nobody wants to be drinking lead-contaminated tap water or basically sipping their water out of a lead straw, which is what millions of people are doing today,” said Erik Olson, a health and food expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, speaking generally about the EPA’s efforts to replace lead pipes ahead of the official announcement.

Actually getting the lead pipes out of the ground will be an enormous challenge. The infrastructure law approved in 2021 provided $15 billion to help cities replace their lead pipes, but the total cost will be several times higher. The requirement also comes as the Biden administration proposes strict new drinking water standards for forever chemicals called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. These standards will also improve public health although at a cost of billions of dollars.

The American Water Works Association, an industry group, said when the proposed rule was announced that it supports EPA’s goals, but warned that costs could be prohibitive.

Another hurdle is finding the lead pipes. Many cities do not have accurate records detailing where they are. Initial pipe inventories are due this month, and many cities have said they don’t know what substances their pipes are made of.

Phillis reported from St. Louis.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/environment

By DANIEL NIEMANN, SETH BORENSTEIN and MIKE CORDER

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats for humanity.

Hinton, who is known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“These two gentlemen were really the pioneers,” said Nobel physics committee member Mark Pearce. “They … did the fundamental work, based on physical understanding which has led to the revolution we see today in machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

The artificial neural networks — interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain — the researchers pioneered are used throughout science and medicine and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation,” said Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Hopfield, whose 1982 work laid the groundwork for Hinton’s, told The Associated Press Tuesday, “I continue to be amazed by the impact it has had.”

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in an open call with reporters and officials of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said.

“But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Warning of AI risks

The Nobel committee also mentioned fears about the possible flipside.

Moons said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Hinton said.

For his part, Hopfield, who signed early petitions by researchers calling for strong control of the technology, compared the risks and benefits of machine learning to work on viruses and nuclear energy, capable of helping and harming society.

Neither winner was home to get the call

Neither winner was home when they received the news. Hopfield, who was staying with his wife at a cottage in Hampshire, England, said that after grabbing coffee and getting his flu shot, he opened his computer to a flurry of activity.

“I’ve never seen that many emails in my life,” he said. A bottle of champagne and bowl of soup were waiting on his desk for him, he added, but he doubted there were any fellow physicists in town to join the celebration.

Hinton said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone. He said he was at a cheap hotel with no internet.

Hinton’s work considered ‘the birth’ of AI

Hinton, 76, helped develop a technique in the 1980s known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn” by fine-tuning errors until they disappear. It’s similar to the way a student learns from a teacher, with an initial solution graded and flaws identified and returned to be fixed and repaired. This process continues until the answer matches the network’s version of reality.

His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats and was “a very, very significant moment in hindsight and in the course of AI history,” said Stanford University computer scientist and ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li.

“Many people consider that the birth of modern AI,” she said.

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won computer science’s top prize, the Turing Award, in 2019.

“For a long time, people thought what the three of us were doing was nonsense,” Hinton told told the AP in 2019. “They thought we were very misguided and what we were doing was a very surprising thing for apparently intelligent people to waste their time on.”

“My message to young researchers is, don’t be put off if everyone tells you what are doing is silly.”

And Hinton himself uses machine learning in his daily life, he said.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement. “I don’t totally trust it because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything it’s a not-very-good expert. And that’s very useful.”

Hopfield’s work was foundation for Hinton’s

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

“What fascinates me most is still this question of how mind comes from machine,” Hopfield said in a video posted online by The Franklin Institute after it awarded him a physics prize in 2019.

Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.

Bengio, who was mentored by Hinton and “profoundly shaped” by Hopfield’s thinking, told the AP that the winners both “saw something that was not obvious: Connections between physics and learning in neural networks, which has been the basis of modern AI.”

He said he was “really delighted” that they won the prize. “It’s great for the field. It’s great for recognizing that history.”

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands and Borenstein reported from Washington. AP reporters Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York, Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, and Kelvin Chan in London contributed.