AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the race for the White House. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump continues to escalate his rhetoric on the campaign trail ahead of Election Day.

DONALD TRUMP: And my people told me about four weeks ago — I was saying, “No, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women.” “Sir, please don’t say that.” “Why?” They said, “We think it’s — we think it’s very inappropriate for you to say.” I said, “Why? I’m president. I want to protect the women of our country.” They said — they said, “Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.” I pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it? I said, “Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not.” I’ve got to protect them. I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Donald Trump speaking in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris shared Trump’s comments on X and wrote, quote, “Donald Trump thinks he should get to make decisions about what you do with your body. Whether you like it or not.” Harris also spoke about Trump’s record as president at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: He hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention — with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. They did as he intended. And now in America, one in three women lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban, many with no exceptions even for rape and incest, which is immoral. Immoral. And look, Donald Trump is not done. He would ban abortion nationwide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Constitutional amendments to expand or protect abortion access are on the ballot in 10 states, including the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada and Florida. This week, a group of 82 U.S. Nobel Prize winners signed an open letter endorsing Harris, arguing a Trump presidency would, quote, “jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living, slow the progress of science and technology and impede our responses to climate change.” Also this week, more than a thousand religious leaders endorsed Harris.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by one of those religious leaders. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Bishop William Barber is the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! Thank you so much, Bishop Barber, for joining us. I know that your mom’s health is challenged right now, so thank you again.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering if you can start off by talking about your decision in the last few days to endorse Vice President Harris as president of the United States, and talk about the reasons for it, what you think she’s addressed and what you think she hasn’t addressed and needs to.

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, you know, Amy, I’m an — first of all, thank you for having me on, and thank you for your prayers.

I’m an independent. And I’m endorsing in my personal private capacity the law allows, not with any of the organizations that were mentioned. Those were just for defining purposes.

But as a moral leader and a biblicist, the Scriptures are very clear, when there are moments you have to be focused and you cannot in any way be misunderstood. When I look at, for instance, in the Bible, in the Book of Proverbs, Hebrew Bible, Book of Proverbs, verse, chapter 6, and you look at what it says, six things that God hates, even seven. And you read those seven things, and you see a candidate committing them almost every day, that include a lying tongue, a proud look, running to mischief and sowing division among the people. When you go to the Gospels of Jesus, Jesus was clear about nations. He said that every nation will be judged by how we treat the least of these — the poor, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned and, interestingly, the immigrants. The immigrants. And when you see a campaign that’s not violating that sometimes, but all the time, you have to make a clear moral stand. I’ve been out here for a long time. But when you see a fascist-leaning, lying, constitutional-breaking, rule of law-denying, misogynist, racist, mean spirit, women health-taking and health-stealing, union-busting candidacy, there can be no middle ground, not in this moment. And that’s why I’ve decided and that many other moral leaders, Jews, Muslims and Christians, have decided, as well.

When we look at the campaign, actually, we see Harris trying to unify. No person, even myself — we all have our personal flaws. None of us are perfect. But when we see clearly Harris trying to unify, Trump making more division, when we see Harris trying to say, “I’m going to raise the minimum wage to a living wage,” and Trump saying, “The minimum wage is already too high,” promising more tax cuts to the greedy, saying that $7.25 is too high, when you see Harris saying, “I want to expand healthcare,” and you hear Trump saying he wants to undermine healthcare, and when you see Harris saying, “I want to expand voting rights and voter protections,” but you hear Trump talking about undermining voter rights, undermining the 15th Amendment, and then hear him talking about undermining the 14th Amendment, giving equal protection under the law for all persons that are in this country, those are very dangerous steps, which we have to challenge and which we have to be clear and which we have to have no middle ground.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Bishop Barber, we’re speaking to you in North Carolina. Could you talk about the significance of the state in this election and the fact that in 2016, as well as in 2020, Trump won the state?

BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: He did. But one of the things that we’ve pointed out in all of these so-called battleground states, and even in the South, that many of these states are not red or blue as much as they are untapped and unorganized. Trump won by 74,000 votes in the last election. But there were over 1 million poor and low-wage voters that did not vote. In Michigan, he won by some — in 2016, I think, 10,000. Over a million poor and low-wage voters didn’t vote. In Pennsylvania, he won by 40,000. Over 1.3 million poor and low-wage voters didn’t work.

In 2008, Obama won North Carolina, and he only won 33 counties in North Carolina. He lost on Election Day, but he won through same-day registration and early voting, which our movement helped to fight for and put in place. And since that time, extremist Republicans have fought and tried to undermine same-day registration and early voting. We fought them in court and beat them. They were successful in getting a — what we believe is an unconstitutional voter ID on the laws, and we’re still fighting that now.

But this state, if in fact a candidate fully reaches poor and low-wage voters and also campaigns in the east, beyond Raleigh, over in Rocky Mount and Greenville and Pasquotank County and Wilmington, it is a state in which you can build a kind of coalition for more progressive candidates to win. We’ve said that clearly to the campaign. And early on, we challenged them, when we saw them going to Charlotte and Winston-Salem and Greensboro and not going to the east. We said, “You have to go out east. You have to go in what’s called the Black Belt, the Farm Belt, the place, interestingly, where many Black and white people are joined together, particularly around issues of healthcare and issues of living wages. Thirty-nine percent of the North Carolinian workforce doesn’t make a living wage of $15 an hour. So, you have to speak directly to them and let them know, if in fact you win, this is what’s going to happen in their lives.

So we believe, in fact, North Carolina is very much in this race. You’ve had a candidate for governor in the Republican arena who has really imploded and shown that the people that he was so vitriolic against, actually, he himself was doing many of the things he was claiming is wrong. But even before that, his policies were just wrong. He was running for governor. He wanted to put women in jail if they had an abortion. He was not promoting voting rights. He was supporting voter suppression. He was not supporting a living wage. He was not supporting fully funding public education. So, even before the more personal things, his policies were bad.

But we’ve got work to do. We’ve got a lot of work to do. But North Carolina is always in the mix. It’s a strange thing. North Carolina is the only state in the last, say, 30 years or so that elected a Democrat for president, Jimmy Carter and Obama. And it’s the only Southern state that has consistently elected a Democrat for governor and a Democrat for AG, even when we had the fiasco of an extreme Republican takeover in 2012 due to voter suppression.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bishop William Barber, we’ll see what happens in the next few days, if in fact it is decided then, both at the local, state and federal level. Bishop William Barber, co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign, director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, speaking to us from Raleigh, North Carolina.