Final Polls, Final Predictions, Final Rallies: Live Election Updates

Trump was late to his final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and didn’t take the stage until 12:16 a.m. Election Day. “This will be my last rally. Can you believe it?” Trump told the crowd. “It’s very sad, in a way, you know, because we’ve done all these, and this is the last one.”

He made it last, speaking for nearly nearly two hours. And Trump apparently decided to go out with a bang, showing far less restraint than at his other final rallies — at least since his ranting at one in Pennsylvania on Sunday morning reportedly triggered a panic among his campaign staff.

On Monday night, Trump just said whatever he wanted, frequently veering away from his prepared remarks and cycling through familiar tangents, complaints, and self-celebrations. At times he seemed to slur his speech, perhaps exhausted from the final stretch of ten rallies in three days across several states. The superstitious 78-year-old once again ended his campaign in Grand Rapids, just like he did in 2016 and 2020.

Trump claimed early in his speech that he was already leading the race by hundreds of thousands of votes in Michigan. “But just pretend we’re losing a little bit because we want to put on a display tomorrow of unity and everything,” he added. He once again cast doubt on the voting machines that are used to count ballots and demanded that the winner be declared on Election Night, suggesting that any other process would be tantamount to election fraud. “Something’s going on with this. What the hell are we doing? We don’t want to wait ten days or two days,” he said. “We want the answer tonight.”

And in addition to calling Nancy Pelosi a “bitch,” Trump said Harris and Democrats are “bad, sick,” and “evil people.” He once again launched into attacks on the “stupid,” “terrible” generals who once served in his administration but later spoke out against him. They are “real losers,” Trump said. He complained about being called “volatile,” then added that he “stopped the wars with my ‘being volatile’” — echoing what he recently said to The Wall Street Journal when he suggested that being thought of as “fucking crazy” was an effective deterrent for America’s adversaries. At one point while talking about food prices, he chewed on the word groceries like it was strange to him. He called it an “old term.” And referring to the assassination attempt he survived, he bragged to the crowd that “many people say that God saved me in order to save America.”

By the time he finished his speech a little after 2 a.m., as many as half of the rally attendees had already left. Trump danced himself offstage to “Y.M.C.A.” one last time.

“She’s a bad person. She’s an evil, sick, crazy bi— … Oh no. It starts with a B, but I won’t say it. I want to say it,” Trump told the crowd about the former Speaker of the House. He tried to leave out the T-C-H in bitch — mouthing it for laughs. People in the crowd shouted the word. Here’s the video:

Every election, tiny little Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, always votes first. Six people voted just after midnight. Three for Harris, and three for Trump.

It’s also worth noting that earlier this year, all six Dixville Notch voters backed Nikki Haley in the GOP primary.

So Kamala Harris won a stunning 50 percent of Haley voters. Does that mean the election is basically over? I’ll leave that call to the mathematicians.

She closed out her presidential campaign with one final rally in Philly.

“Tonight, then, we finish as we started, with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to shape our future and that we can confront any challenge we face when we do it together,” Harris told the crowd.

“This could be one of the closest races in history,” she said. “Every single vote matters.”

This is how she ended her speech:

Trump is really late.

Both campaigns are projecting confidence. RCP senior elections analyst Sean Trende isn’t:

I don’t know what else we can tell you. The modelers are effectively 50-50. Our tipping point state average has Trump up 0.3%, which is effectively 50-50. Everything beyond that is a vibe or, arguably worse, anecdata. No one should have any confidence. Sorry.

538’s almost final forecast:

The New York Times reports:

In a statement on Monday night, three major intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — said that Russia, and to a lesser extent Iran, would most likely flood social media with misinformation on Election Day and for weeks afterward.

“Russia is the most active threat,” the officials wrote, amplifying a warning issued last week.

They cited two new episodes of Moscow’s meddling: a false social-media post claiming that officials across swing states were orchestrating election fraud by stuffing ballots and launching cyberattacks, and a video that promoted a debunked claim that Democrats were falsifying ballots from Arizona voters living overseas to swing the state to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Appearing on CNN on Monday night, former Obama campaign manager and current senior Harris campaign adviser David Plouffe said that while the Harris team expects a close race, he believes she could win all seven battleground states:

There’s a better chance that we’re surprised tomorrow by Kamala Harris doing better — particularly with women voters — than what we saw in ’16 and ’20 where Trump overperformed. … History suggests that one of us — Trump or Harris — might have a hidden positive surprise, that we’ll do 10 points or three points better than the data suggests. But we certainly are planning for a race where that doesn’t happen.

David Freedlander spoke with a number of strategists and pollsters to get their take on how it all might go tomorrow. Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster with Blueprint, suggested well-educated white guys could make a real difference:

Roth Smith added there was another key demographic, one that has received far less attention that others this election season: college-educated white men. From 2016 to 2020, white college-educated men moved 11 points toward Democrats, with even more dramatic gains in critical swing states. They were the most-improved group for Democrats both nationally, trending 11 points more Democratic between 2016 and 2020, and in key swing states, including jumping eight points into the Democratic column in Nevada, 14 in Michigan, 15 in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and a whopping 43 points in Georgia.

“It is one of the craziest and least-discussed stories of what happened in 2020,” Roth Smith said. “Nearly half of the college-educated white men in Georgia switched their vote from Trump to Biden. If she can keep moving in that direction and not lose ground elsewhere, I think she will win. Actually, I take that back. Not ‘I think.’ She will win.”

Read what the others had to say here.

At Trump’s rally in Pittsburgh on Monday night, his third of four events on the final day of campaigning, he spoke for roughly an hour and 45 minutes. Across town at her own rally, her fourth of five events on Monday, Harris spoke for ten minutes.

Per the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Ms. Harris, buoyed by some polls showing that she is outpolling Donald Trump among late-deciding voters, displayed some optimism in her 10-minute enthusiastic call to action at Swissvale’s Carrie Blast Furnaces.

“Are we ready to do this? Are we ready to vote? Are we ready to win?” Ms. Harris said to a cheering crowd, eliciting a “yes” answer to each question. “But we’ve still got some work to do. The race is not over and we must finish strong. Let’s make no mistake: We will win.”

She urged the loud and boisterous crowd to make sure they vote on Tuesday, and make sure their friends, families, neighbors and coworkers do so.

“Tomorrow is Election Day and the momentum is on our side,” she said.

Reports Tim Alberta:

There are Trump staffers who no longer much care whether he wins or loses. Not exactly breaking news. Hard to overstate how terrible morale is inside of this campaign — and how much anger/resentment is felt toward the candidate.

The former Fox News host — whom Trump infamously insulted in 2015 after he didn’t like how she moderated a debate he was in, complaining that she was “asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions” and “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” — endorsed the former president onstage in Pittsburgh tonight:

He got mocked by the left for saying he would be a protector of women. He will be a protector of women, and it’s why I’m voting for him.

It’s his new big line on the last night of the campaign:

Platformer’s Casey Newton warns that Musk and his platform “will be a central clearinghouse for voter fraud election claims and other election misinformation”:

Musk has destroyed most of the financial value of the company once known as Twitter. But it remains the default destination for politics among social networks, and usage of the platform will undoubtedly surge tomorrow.

That gives Musk a potent weapon as he attempts to shape narratives about election results. Having manipulated the platform’s recommendation algorithm to show his posts to more users, he can single-handedly push election narratives to millions of people with the tap of a button. (Over the past day he has become obsessed with the euthanization of a TikTok-famous squirrel at the hands of the state, which he has presented as an example of government overreach.)

Musk and X generally will likely be powerful nodes for what scholars of misinformation call “participatory disinformation”: false and misleading stories shared by average people on social networks that are elevated by influencers to the attention of elites like Musk, who can then turbocharge their distribution. Eventually, the platforms Community Notes feature might offer pushback on false claims — but don’t count on it.

Podcaster Joe Rogan, while blasting out his new interview with Elon Musk, also announced that he was officially endorsing Trump. In the last ten days, Rogan has hosted Trump, J.D. Vance, and now the mega-MAGA-booster Musk on his popular podcast.

And it’s never too late for one last message of encouragement:

Photographic proof, it would seem:

Earlier today, The Bulwark reported that Trump’s campaign team was rattled by his off-message ranting at a morning rally on Sunday, then tried to wrangle him into having better discipline at later rallies that day.

At the second-to-last rally of his campaign on Monday night in Pittsburgh, Trump asked campaign manager Susie Wiles if he could talk about Harris’s 60 Minutes interview (which his campaign has filed a lawsuit over):

He also told the crowd that there was a 96.2 percent chance that he was going to win the election and reiterated his desire for there to be an MMA league where migrants fight each other. And he told the crowd that Kamala Harris’s Monday-night rally, also in Pittsburgh, was empty and “quite embarrassing.” This rally:

Amanda Moore reports for Politico Magazine:

A white nationalist worked for the Trump campaign in an important position in Pennsylvania for five months — until Friday, when the campaign fired him after learning about his views from my reporting. Last week, I confirmed that Luke Meyer, the Trump campaign’s 24-year-old regional field director for Western Pennsylvania, goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa. As Barbarossa, he co-hosts the Alexandria podcast with Richard Spencer, organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On his podcast and others, and in posts online, Barbarossa regularly shares white nationalist views.

“Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we clear out and reclaim Miami?” Barbarossa asked while guest hosting a different white nationalist podcast in June. …

After I presented Meyer with evidence that he was Barbarossa, he admitted the connection and said he has been hiding his online identity from his colleagues on Trump Force 47, the arm of the Trump campaign that runs volunteer organizers. “I am glad you pieced these little clues together like an antifa Nancy Drew,” he wrote in an email. “It made me realize how draining it has been having to conceal my true thoughts for as long as I have.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Aaron Zitner writes that one group comprises same-day registration voters:

Many pollsters build their surveys on interviews with registered voters—those whose names appear on the voter lists maintained by each state. But several battleground states allow people to register and vote on Election Day, among them Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. North Carolina allows same-day registration during the early-voting period. Pollsters have likely missed the chance to talk with these late-deciding voters, because they weren’t placed on the registered-voter list until the final day.

In 2020, some 68,000 people registered to vote in Wisconsin on Election Day, according to L2, a nonpartisan firm that collects the voter lists from each state. That number far exceeds President Biden’s winning margin in Wisconsin of about 20,700 votes. In Michigan, some 14,600 registered on Election Day in 2020. In Nevada, nearly 10,000 registered. Both states are considered tossups in this year’s election.

Zitner also highlights RFK Jr. voters and shy Harris voters as other wild cards. Read about those here.

At Harris’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Monday, rapper Fat Joe, citing the racist jokes at Trump MSG rally, called out any still-undecided Puerto Rican voters:

Irin Carmon tries to take account of the death and agony women have faced across the country since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade:

Through reporting and litigation, we are beginning to get a partial picture of the harm. Partial because there are lags in official reporting data, and partial because patients and doctors fear prosecution and stigma for sharing their stories. Partial as well because the greatest harms are likely falling on the least visible people in our society. But we know that at least four women have died, that dozens have suffered from severe physical harm, and that there are likely hundreds more.

Defenders of the bans say that the laws simply require that a doctor recognize “two patients”— the pregnant woman and the fetus — rather than one. In practice, however, pregnant women are being refused basic medical care, autonomy, and even, in some cases, freedom of movement. These laws have been forcing women to wait out their own physical decline even when there is no fetal heartbeat (as in the case of one of the women in Georgia) or no chance of a live birth.

Irin has collected the various reported instances in which pregnant women have either died or been given insufficient medical care as a result of the ruling. It’s a harrowing read.

Explain Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondrik, and J. Miles Coleman at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

After assessing all of the data and hearing from people we trust, we think that Harris retains the slightest of edges in the “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. So those states lean to her in our final ratings—as always, “leans” does not mean “safe.” If the election was a week ago, at least one of these three states would very likely be leaning toward Trump instead.

Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina lean to Trump.

Of all of these ratings, the lean in Georgia may be the shakiest—a week ago, we would not have envisioned having a serious internal discussion about potentially leaning Georgia to Harris, which may convey something more broadly about how we think the election’s closing days have gone. A Harris win in Georgia (or North Carolina) would likely be predicated on an especially strong Democratic Election Day vote.

Read the rest of their rationale and final ratings here.

CNN reports:

Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Angelo Foglietta rejected arguments from the city’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, who argued that the sweepstakes was an illegal lottery violating state law and must be halted immediately. …

Musk and his lawyers have called Krasner’s lawsuit a “publicity stunt” and accused him of bringing the case because he disagrees with Musk’s advocacy in support of Trump.

In court Monday, Musk’s lawayers said the super PAC isn’t picking winners “by chance.”

“There is no prize to be won,” Musk lawyer Chris Gober said, and the winners “are not chosen by chance.” Instead, Gober said the so-called “prize” is actually compensation for serving as a spokesperson for the super PAC – and the recipients of the $1 million “are selected based on their suitability to serve as spokesperson for America PAC.” They “earn” the million dollars as payment for their work.

The terminally online VP candidate is devoting part of his closing pitch to voters to a subject that has become a cause célèbre among the very online right: the recent controversial euthanization of an adopted squirrel named Peanut — who has since been turned into a kind of MAGA martyr “murdered” by Democrats’ government overreach.

House Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins called attention to Peanut’s plight at Sunday’s Trump rally as well.

Democratic strategist Tom Bonier, who has been a frequent TV pundit arguing the optimistic case for his party’s prospects in 2024, held a Zoom call on Monday afternoon to provide his spin on early-voting data.

While Bonier noted that, like 2020, the Election Day vote would skew more Republican and the early vote would skew more toward Democrats, it would not be as polarized as it was then when Democrats overwhelmingly voted early. He cited polling data from 2020 where 26 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans said they planned voting on Election Day. In contrast, those numbers in 2024 were 40 percent and 51 percent respectively.

Although Republicans have been turning out more early voters than they did last year, Bonier said there was virtually no difference in the electorate among early voters from 2020 to 2024.

Bonier also cited a “silver surge” of older voters supporting Democrats — a data point borne out by Ann Selzer’s shock Iowa poll showing Harris winning the Hawkeye State. He noted that while Republicans had a nearly 13-point advantage among voters over 75 in 2020, it was down to 6.6 points in 2024 according to his modeling.

The Democratic strategist also responded to the memo that the Trump campaign sent out earlier today, saying “there are some fallacies just on the surface levels … they talk about turnout among women being down; turnout among men is down, too.”

According to campaign insiders who spoke with The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo:

For 96 minutes, at his first of his three rallies that day, Trump barely looked at his teleprompter. He darkly obsessed about election fraud, railed against polls showing him down, and savaged the “bloodsuckers” in the news media, adding he wouldn’t mind if “the fake news” took an assassin’s bullet for him. The crowd laughed. Privately, campaign staffers groaned. Trump sounded as if he were losing. And this was no way to start the week or close out a presidential campaign with three days left until Election Day. “He knew after he got off stage,” said a confidant who spoke with Trump afterward about the Lititz, Pennsylvania rally Sunday morning and relayed the ex-president’s frame of mind to The Bulwark on condition of anonymity. The source would not disclose the contents of the conversation, but said Trump tacitly acknowledged he should’ve stuck more to the script.

After a talking to on the plane to his next rally, Caputo reports, Trump dialed it back in the last two speeches of the day. Nonetheless, “Sunday morning sucked,” a campaign insider told Caputo, thanks to a bunch of news stories that had set Trump off in the early morning:

Evidence of how much it sucked was visible in Trump’s speech that morning, which illustrated a candidate rattled by the news and, in turn, rattling his own campaign.  At one point, as Trump rambled on stage, Wiles deliberately walked into his line of sight and appeared to glower at him. Some observers assumed she was expressing her displeasure with his off-script comments about “the fake news” as human shields that were already starting to burn up social media. But a campaign adviser said she was just out there trying to make eye contact to let him know he needed to wrap up the speech because it stretched on too long. Either way, it didn’t work. He kept rambling.

Read the rest here.

On a Monday afternoon call with reporters, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that Harris-campaign officials are expecting that Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan will have reported close to their entire election returns by the end of Tuesday. As for other pivotal battleground states like Pennsylvania and Nevada, they’re anticipating those results to begin coming in from Wednesday on. “We may not know the results of this election for several days, but we are very focused on staying calm and confident throughout this period as the process goes through,” O’Malley Dillon said.

Jon Ralston, after his final analysis of Nevada’s early-vote data, thinks Harris will win the state by a fraction of a percent:

President: I have been calling this The Unicorn Election because of the unusual voting patterns. It’s really hard to know what will happen with mail ballots and Election Day turnout with so many Republicans voting early. But here’s what I do know: Both sides – at least people who understand the data on both sides – believe this will be close. That’s because, if past is prologue in the mail-ballot era (last two cycles), tens of thousands of mail ballots will come in between now and Friday (the deadline). It’s a simple question: Can the Democrats catch up? It’s really a coin flip, and I know people on both sides who have analyzed the data who can’t decide. I have gone back and forth in my own head for days, my eyes glazing over with numbers and models and extrapolations.

The key to this election has always been which way the non-major-party voters break because they have become the plurality in the state. They are going to make up 30 percent or so of the electorate and if they swing enough towards Harris, she will win Nevada. I think they will, and I’ll tell you why: Many people assume that with the GOP catching up to the Democrats in voter registration that the automatic voter registration plan pushed by Democrats that auto-registers people as nonpartisans (unless they choose a party) at the DMV had been a failure for the party. But I don’t think so. There are a lot of nonpartisans who are closet Democrats who were purposely registered by Democrat-aligned groups as nonpartisans. The machine knows who they are and will get them to vote. It will be just enough to overcome the Republican lead – along with women motivated by abortion and crossover votes that issue also will cause. I know some may think this reflects my well-known disdain for Trump, heart over data. But that is not so.

I have often predicted against my own preferences; history does not lie. I just have a feeling she will catch up here, but I also believe – and please remember this – it will not be clear who won on Election Night here, so block out the nattering nabobs of election denialism. It’s going to be very, very close. Prediction: Harris, 48.5 percent; Trump 48.2 percent; others and None of These Candidates, 3.3 percent.

Yes, he will.

Earlier this spring, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and is due to be sentenced following Election Day. Though many states place limits on voting for those with felony convictions, it’s unlikely that Trump will be impacted by these statutes.

According to the Florida Divisions of Elections, a Floridian who was convicted in another state would only be ineligible to vote if their conviction would bar them from voting in the state where they were convicted. In Trump’s case, he was convicted in New York State, which only bars a person from voting while they’re incarcerated for a felony. Since Trump is currently awaiting sentencing, he would be eligible to vote in Florida.

Pollster Europe Elects put together a look at how Europeans would vote in the American election if they could:

As has been the case in recent years, most of western and especially northern Europe would vote for candidate of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, with wide margins. At the other end of the scale are Russia, Serbia, Georgia and Hungary, who would vote for Donald Trump of the Republican Party if offered a chance. The numbers of [below] visualisation are from opinion polling on the question with standardisation done by Europe Elects, by considering only those who answered the question and hence removing those being undecided.

Illustration: Europe Elects

So Americans will end up somewhere between the Czech Republic and Slovenia, probably.

Kenneth Vogel went through the FEC data:

Elon Musk’s America PAC has spent $169M (and counting) on:

• Canvassing: $97M

• Direct mail: $30M

• Digital: $22M

• Phone: $14M

• Texting: $6M

If Trump wins, this model will be studied. If he loses, this will join the ranks of great political $ wastes.

NOTUS reports:

Professional liability insurance policies. “Jokes” about acquiring passports from different countries in front of foreign officials. Even insurrectionist disguises stashed in congressional offices. Democratic lawmakers are preparing for another Donald Trump win — or another Trump loss — in all sorts of ways.

One Democratic member told NOTUS that he and about a half dozen other lawmakers had taken out legal insurance to pay for lawyers in case Trump tried to sue or arrest them. This member also said he had heard Democrats make jokes about getting another passport in front of foreign officials, in only a sort of joking kind of way. Some members are also discussing hiring private security out of concern that their opposition to Trump could make them a target.

Yes, disguises:

But one of the most remarkable anecdotes about how Democrats were preparing themselves for the election was the member who told NOTUS they had put together an “insurrectionist getaway costume,” complete with tactical pants, tactical boots and one key part of the disguise that the lawmaker asked NOTUS not to disclose.

“I’ve really been trying to impress upon my staff that I’m not joking,” this lawmaker said. “This is very serious.”

Democratic staffers told NOTUS they are, in fact, taking the possibility of another attack on the Capitol seriously. One senior Democratic staffer said they are planning to stay home on Jan. 6, which is coincidentally the date that Congress is set to certify the election again.

Read the rest here.

Ben Jacobs wrote today about how Trump’s live events, which have defined his political career, have and have not changed over the past nine years:

When Trump started, he sneered at politicians who would use a teleprompter and his speeches were a form of free association; he would roam from topic to topic, taking long digressions and frequently settling into familiar riffs against a host of political adversaries. It made for irresistible television. It wasn’t just that the speeches were newsworthy — after all, any presidential candidate’s remarks inherently are — but they were also entertaining. “Is anything more fun than a Trump rally?” he often asks. The free publicity was worth millions.

After becoming the Republican nominee in 2016, he accepted the tyranny of the teleprompter in an effort to avoid the comments that excited cable-news producers but alienated swing voters. He has long since developed a method of riffing where he starts on message until he feels the urge to go off on a tangent — such as his recent aside about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis at a rally held in the golfer’s hometown — then riffs freely before eventually returning to his script. The result is a structured improvisation, like a Grateful Dead show, as he veers from reading off the teleprompters on each side of the stage and ad-libbing as he faces dead ahead.

Read the rest here.

A joint Marist College-NPR-PBS poll released Monday found Harris leading Trump 51 percent to 47 percent among likely voters, putting it just ahead of the survey’s 3.5 percent margin of error. From PBS’s breakdown:

Harris (63%) leads Trump (34%) by 29 points among non-white voters, up from the 21-point lead she had in early October. Trump (54%) is ahead of Harris (45%) by 9 points among white voters, similar to the 8-point lead he had last month.

Gen Z and Millennials (56%) and Baby Boomers (55%) break for Harris. Trump (53%) receives majority support among the Silent/Greatest Generation. Members of Gen X divide (51% for Trump to 48% for Harris).

The gender gap nationally has been cut by more than half. A 15-point gender gap now exists compared with 34 points in early October. Harris (47%) has carved into Trump’s advantage (51%) among men. Now, only 4 points separate the two among these voters. Trump previously had a 16-point advantage among men. While Harris (55%) maintains a double-digit lead over Trump (44%) among women, her lead has decreased from 18 points.

With less than 24 hours to go before Election Day, the two campaigns are making their final stops in familiar battleground territory. Trump began his day with a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, and will later head to Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His final rally will be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the Van Andel Arena, the location where Trump officially announced Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. Notably, this will be the third time that the generally superstitious Trump makes his final appearance on the campaign trail in Grand Rapids. (Though that didn’t, in reality, work out for him in 2020.)

As for Harris, she will be spending Monday in Pennsylvania, rallying in Allentown as well as making stops in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Her campaign has promoted the appearances of several high-profile celebrities for her last two stops including Katy Perry in Pittsburgh as well as Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey for the Philadelphia rally.

If only elections came with a seat buckle:

Last night, Semafor’s Ben Smith got a head start on the 2024 election-coverage postmortems:

The election will be followed inevitably by a round of handwringing on what journalists got wrong. Then the media will fervently adopt that narrative (last time it was all about misinformation) and march proudly out in 2028 to fight the last war. Here’s my early bid on what we missed: The media broadly has always been more interested in young urban men than older suburban women, and the balance of analysis this cycle was particularly out of whack. If the election breaks for Kamala Harris, we’ll be conducting internal investigations on why we spent so much time talking about Joe Rogan.

Responding to Smith’s point, The Media Today’s Jon Allsop worries that a lot of election coverage is now more astrology than astronomy:

[G]eneralizing about media coverage is perilous; there are still some excellent local journalists who have done excellent work about the election; various national reporters have themselves ventured out into the country to take its pulse; America is so vast and complicated that even an army of reporters couldn’t capture it in all its complexity. And yet, often, it’s been hard to escape the conclusion that our understanding of this race has been funneled less through actual voters’ mouths than what political elites—and the campaign consultant class, in particular—imagine those voters to be thinking. Last week, Astead W. Herndon, a reporter at the Times who has been speaking in depth with members of the electorate on his podcast, The Run-Up, took aim at one manifestation of this trend—an excessive flurry of stories about late nerves inside the Harris campaign—in an interview on The Ringer’s Press Box podcast. In the 2022 midterms, Herndon noted, there was a late “lurch” toward the narrative that “Republicans are gonna kick Democrats’ ass,” creating “wildly out of whack expectations” among the voting public. “Anything past you should be prepared for every form of result is irresponsible,” he added. 

Herndon attributed the prominence of this type of story, in particular, to an “instinct to try to make sure your coverage points to the correct results”; drop enough campaign insiders are feeling nervous articles about both sides, and you can hedge against the uncertainty of the outcome. This, too, points to a broader problem with coverage not just of this election, but of elections in general—the over-allocation of journalistic attention to figuring out what’s going to happen, and how an outlet might preempt it, as opposed to what’s already happening. 

Read the rest of Jon’s pre-postmortem at CJR here.

Reports Politico’s Meridith McGraw:

Per Trump campaign, how they are viewing the data so far:

• Harris in “real trouble” with male voters

• Trump performing “historically well” with Black voters

• Rural turnout is “through the roof”

The Guardian reports that more than 4,000 ballots from overseas voters have been challenged in multiple Pennsylvania counties. The challenges are based on claims that the voters are non-military and are not residents of Pennsylvania. The outlet reports that officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Centre, and Lycoming counties have all received challenges to overseas ballots:

“Pennsylvania law requires someone to be a resident of the state to vote. But the challenges are not valid, the ACLU says, because federal law allows American citizens to vote in federal elections in the last place in the US they lived if they are living overseas and are unsure if they will return to the US. The ACLU said the challenges appear to be a mass effort done through a mail-merge process. In 2020, 26,952 overseas voters from Pennsylvania successfully returned ballots that were counted.

It’s not clear that these challenges will ultimately be successful. Similar lawsuits against overseas ballots in Michigan and North Carolina have gone on to be rejected by state judges.

The Harris campaign reported that 90,000 volunteers knocked on more than 3 million doors across battleground states during the last weekend before Election Day.

While Trump and his camp typically boast about their chances of victory in public, the campaign is seemingly taking a different tone among insiders. Axios reports that an internal memo from co-campaign manager Susie Wiles frequently alluded to the possibility of Trump losing, a stark difference from his past campaigns that rarely entertained the idea. In the memo describing postelection plans to staffers, Wiles used the phrases “regardless of the outcome of the election” and “should we be victorious,” indicating an atypical lack of confidence for the campaign. It reflects a recent tone shift from Trump, who has begun to openly muse about the possibility of him losing.

When asked in an ABC interview Sunday if he could ultimately lose the election, Trump said, “Yeah, I guess, you know. I guess you could lose, can lose. I mean, that happens, right? But I think I have a pretty substantial lead, but, you could say, yeah, yeah, you could lose. Bad things could happen.”

Many of the people who will cast votes for Donald Trump in the Electoral College were involved in his effort to steal the 2020 election. Per Politico:

Of the 93 Republicans designated as prospective presidential electors for Trump from the seven battleground states, eight are facing felony charges for signing false Electoral College certificates in 2020, according to a POLITICO analysis. Another five signed similar certificates in 2020 but were not charged. And at least six others played notable roles in challenging the results of the 2020 election or promoting election conspiracy theories.

All told, at least 1 in 5 prospective Trump electors from battleground states this year had some connection to the scheme to overturn the 2020 election.

Politico adds: “There’s little reason to believe that Trump or his allies would attempt to reenact the false elector scheme.” So they probably won’t pull the same tricks, but feel free to worry about the general elevation of election denialism in the GOP.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports that in the aftermath of Saturday’s shocking Selzer poll, Trump “has been fuming privately over the numbers, arguing the highly anticipated poll should never have been released”:

Trump’s advisers have sought to assure him the survey is not accurate, blasting it as way off and telling him there’s always one poll that stands out. His long-standing pollster issued a memo Saturday night arguing it was a “clear outlier.” But the gender breakdown showing women are driving a shift toward Vice President Kamala Harris has privately concerned Trump’s allies, with a focus on the poll’s finding that Iowa women favor Harris over him, 56% to 36%.

Trump suggested the poll was a form of voter suppression during one of his rallies on Sunday. And as Collins notes, he fired off an angry Truth Social post on Sunday morning, too:

No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump. In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT. I LOVE THE FARMERS, AND THEY LOVE ME. THE JUST OUT EMERSON POLL HAS ME UP 10 POINTS IN IOWA. THANK YOU!

On Sunday night, near the end of his third rally speech of the day, and his final rally in Georgia before the election, Trump offered another variation of his closing argument for the 2024 campaign. Bouncing off his prepared marks, Trump looked ahead:

Two days. Two days. What a beautiful sound. What a beautiful sound. Two days. Ohhh please, please, please, help this country, please. After all we have been through together, we stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history. You watch. It’s going to be so good. It going to be so much fun. It’ll be nasty a bit at times — and maybe at the beginning in particular — but it’s going to be something. And we’re gonna go to heights that this country never has reached, and nobody ever thought it could. You’re gonna see things you’re not gonna believe.

There are only four (scheduled) Trump rallies left before Election Day.

Soon after Kamala Harris appeared late Saturday on Saturday Night Live, a chorus of complaints began from Trump World — and an FCC commissioner — that NBC was violating the FCC’s equal-time rule — which requires broadcast networks to give free equal airtime to candidates.

It worked.

On Sunday, NBC informed the FCC that Harris had appeared on the networks for 90 seconds “without charge,” and the Trump campaign then apparently requested that time. During the NASCAR postrace show on Sunday night, the network aired what was essentially a free, hastily recorded Trump ad. Per The Hollywood Reporter:

On Sunday, NBC broadcast a NASCAR playoff race, but some viewers noticed toward the end of the broadcast (technically right after the race ended but while coverage was still ongoing) that Trump appeared in an unusual ad, speaking directly to camera while wearing a Red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, and claiming that electing Harris would cause a “depression” and that viewers should “go and vote.”

A source familiar with the matter says that the spot during the NASCAR race was connected to NBC giving the Trump campaign equal time. It is not clear where else Trump’s campaign would seek time on NBC (the NASCAR spot was 60 seconds, implying that the campaign will get another 30 seconds elsewhere), or whether it was the Trump camp or NBC that suggested the NASCAR placement.

Status’ Oliver Darcy lists — but doesn’t rank — the 27 media figures who had the most consequential impact on the 2024 election. Among them:

Rachel Scott: It was without a doubt one of the most memorable moments of the campaign. When Trump appeared at the convention for the National Association of Black Journalists, Scott repeatedly pressed him on a host of issues, not backing down as Trump attempted to bully her onstage. The grilling session led to Trump questioning Harris’ racial background — one of the ugliest remarks of the campaign season.

Darcy also thinks the homepage is back:

The Drudge Report and HuffPost: With the fragmentation of social media, hand-curated homepages have become more important than ever. That has made both Drudge and HuffPost especially valuable. And while legacy newsrooms have at times struggled to cover Trump’s assault on democracy in clear-eyed terms, neither Drudge nor HuffPost has flinched.

Read the rest here.

The president has no public events scheduled on Monday, per the White House. Jill Biden is doing campaign events in North Carolina.

Speaking Sunday night at a impromptu rally in Derry (with a long line of would-be attendees), the VP candidate insisted he was in the Granite State for a 2024-related reason:

A couple of months ago, I wasn’t necessarily sure that the day before the last full day of the campaign, we’d be in the great state of New Hampshire, but I think it suggests that what we’re doing is expanding the map.

The former NFL running back (and failed 2022 Senate candidate) stumped for Trump at his rally in Macon, Georgia, on Sunday night. It’s worth noting that the voters Trump needs to attract in Georgia are the Warnock-Kemp voters from 2022 who were appalled by Walker.

Earlier today, I reported on how Georgia is one of the states where Never Trump Republicans are now making what may be their last stand:

[The Harris campaign’s outreach is] working with voters like Hilda Bishop and Susan Hicks. The two women were longtime Republicans who had switched over because of Trump. Hicks had never voted for Trump: “I just didn’t like his demeanor. I didn’t like the way he talked.” Bishop says she voted for him in 2016 but not in 2020 and cited “his handling of the pandemic and the way he treated Gretchen Whitmer,” alluding to a far-right plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor. “If I had still been on the fence, if I had voted for him in 2020, January 6 would have been enough,” she adds. She can’t imagine going back to the GOP either. “If Trump loses, who is going to lead the Republican party, who is it going to be? I mean, if it’s J.D. Vance, he’s worse.”

Though the pair had turned on the party years ago, the room also had professional Republicans who had not quite gone all the way (some of whom didn’t want to be identified because they were still involved in GOP politics). They loathed Trump and voted for Raphael Warnock over Herschel Walker. “Oh God. Yeah. Yeah. That was an easy one,” says one. The same year, they backed Kemp, who supports Trump’s re-election.

“I just want the Republican Party back,” says Andrew Ojeda, a former Republican operative who took out his phone to scroll through various pictures he had with GOP elected officials, such as Tom Emmer, the No. 3 House Republican, whom he had met while working in Minnesota politics. He voted Libertarian the first two times Trump ran for president, but not this year. “This is the first time I legitimately voted for a Democrat,” he says.

The Harris campaign needs more disaffected Republicans like Ojeda in places like suburban Atlanta, which has become the decisive political battleground in Georgia in the Trump era.

Read the rest here.

The new poll, conducted October 29 to November 3 among 400 registered Latino voters in Pennsylvania, suggests Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist joke about Puerto Rico, told last week at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, has made a significant negative impression. 64 percent of respondents indicated support for Harris, and 30 percent support for Trump. Per Univision:

The survey revealed that Pennsylvania Latino voters have significant awareness of specific remarks made at the rally. Sixty-nine percent of respondents found comments such as referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” to be “more racist than humorous.” Only 17% of respondents viewed the remarks as intended jokes rather than serious commentary …

Among Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania—a group particularly affected by the remarks made at the rally—71% reported that, even if intended as a joke, these comments suggest that there is racism within the Trump campaign. …

The rally remarks appear to have eroded trust among Latino voters regarding Trump’s commitment to the Latino community. According to the survey, over half of respondents (53%) feel that Trump is “very disrespectful” toward Latinos, with an additional 9% describing him as “somewhat disrespectful.” Only a small minority, 19%, view Trump as “very respectful.” …

Furthermore, over half of the Latino voters surveyed indicated that the rally remarks influenced their likelihood of supporting Trump, making them more likely to vote for Harris[.]

Last week, HuffPost’s Daniel Marans spoke to some voters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who felt similarly motivated:

HuffPost spoke with several Puerto Rican voters outside of a CTown Supermarket on Bethlehem’s south side, across the street from the Puerto Rican Beneficial Society. Nilsa Vega and Neidel Pacheco of Hellertown, a borough south of Bethlehem, both said they had never voted before, but Hinchcliffe’s remarks were the reason they planned to vote for Harris on Tuesday.

“That hit the spot right there,” Vega said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”

Pacheco saw Trump’s decision to pose in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin the following day as an additional insult. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” Pacheco asked.

On Monday, Harris is holding one of her final rallies in Allentown, which is home to one of the state’s largest Puerto Rican communities.

At the beginning of her speech at Michigan State University on Sunday night, Harris addressed the conflict, which is considered a vulnerability for her among Arab American voters in Michigan:

And I want to say, this year has been difficult, given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon. It is devastating. And as president, I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security and self-determination.

Or more nauseous optimism, as my colleague Gabe Debenedetti reported Friday. Per the Washington Post’s Matt Viser, some one on the Harris team deployed the word “fulsome”:

Harris camp still believes it’s poised to win close race:

• Late-deciders breaking for them

• Turnout among young and Black voters

• People voting Dem for first time

• Groundgame: “There’s no place in any battleground state where our organization isn’t as fulsome as it needs to be”

During his speech at a rally in Kinston, North Carolina, on Sunday afternoon, Trump for a moment seemed to forget he wasn’t in Pennsylvania — where he had held a rally on Sunday morning — and called out Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick, thinking he was there:

We have great Republicans running. And you have one of the best of all right here, David McCormick. You know, that. Where’s David, is he around someplace?”

Considering how exhausted Trump looks and sounds, and how he is bouncing back and forth between multiple East Coast swing states on these final days of his campaign, this wasn’t all that surprising. As another example of how out of it he now sounds, here’s what he tried to say at the same rally about genetics (which is a longtime obsession of his) while telling the crowd how smart he is:

I’m pretty smart. I have genetic— Do you believe in genetics? I do, you know. Fast racehorses produce fast racehorses, whether you like it or not. And uh, but I’m, uh, I’m a very, uh… I believe in it. And like, I’m smart.

During an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, he was asked about how Trump transition chair Howard Lutnick had seemed to laugh off the idea that Kennedy would become a top official, like HHS secretary, in the potential Trump White House. RFK Jr., who seemed annoyed, insisted he would get what whatever he wants:

I don’t think that’s right, and the campaign has walked back some of Howard’s statements. At this point, we are exploring a bunch of different structures. The Trump administration— the Trump team has been very very accommodating, to give me what I want. … I want to be in the White House, and he has assured me that I’m going to have that. … I’m confident that if I want to do HHS secretary, then the president would fight like hell to make that happen.

The Washington Post reports about a conservative “watch list” recently published online which names more than 50 people that the organization claims cannot be trusted to enact Trump’s immigration policies, should he win the election:

The “DHS Bureaucrat Watch List” — a website unveiled in the final weeks of a presidential campaign in which immigration is a key issue — names 51 federal policy experts and high-ranking leaders, the majority of whom are career civil servants at the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The group identified them largely using public social media comments, prior work experience and campaign finance records.

Among the employees’ actions cited by the group are posts celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage or lauding the contributions and successes of undocumented immigrants, as well as donations as little as $10 to Democratic candidates. One employee union likened the effort to unearth the private views of public employees to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s-era campaign to purge federal workers he accused of being communists.

The site’s founder, a former Republican congressional staffer named Tom Jones, told The Washington Post that he and his staff are seeking to add more names to the list and have sent emails to more than 500 federal employees asking for their help identifying colleagues who they believe are not committed to keeping undocumented immigrants out of the country.

More than 4.4 million ballots have already been cast in North Carolina.

The Atlantic’s David A. Graham reports on how the Harris and Trump campaigns’ ground games in the swing state couldn’t be more different and how appearances of effectiveness could be deceiving:

What’s happening in North Carolina is a microcosm of the way the Harris and Trump campaigns are approaching the race nationally, as well as the results they’re producing. Harris is running a huge, centralized, multifaceted campaign with lots of staff. Trump is running a much leaner campaign, appearing to rely more on high-profile visits than organizational infrastructure, and farming out some get-out-the-vote operations, a central function of any political campaign, to independent groups. And in North Carolina, as in the nation overall, the result is a deadlock in the polls.

He points out that though the Trump campaign’s ground game often seems invisible in the state, that doesn’t mean it isn’t working, as one GOP strategist explained:

Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, told me he thought the discrepancy I was witnessing was a result of more efficient targeting. He noted that he and several other longtime GOP voters he knows were seeing their mailboxes filled with attacks on a Republican candidate for the state supreme court—a sign of wasteful spending.

“I’m not gonna go into too much detail on this, because this is where I think Democrats have missed the mark, and I don’t want to help try to start educating them on how to quit missing the mark,” he said. “Other Republican voting efforts are more data driven and more strategic in who they talk to and how they talk to them. Democrats have not seemed to have dialed in on that.”

What Trump is doing is holding a lot of rallies in the state. These events are not cheap, but they are cheaper than running a large ground game, and they are powerful motivators for Trump voters.

Read the rest here.

On Saturday night in Arizona, Don Jr. co-headlined a campaign event with J.D. Vance and spoke about three times faster than his dad does, about stuff like the need for more Republican legislatures, school boards — and dog catchers, which he then linked back to the false claims about migrants eating dogs:

We need Republican, like, dog catchers because who knows what they’re going to do with those dogs. We’ve been seeing the videos, I don’t know. They’re like.. how dare you say that was a dog? Like it’s a dog, it’s a cat. It’s something with four legs and really small. I can tell you what it’s not, it’s not a rib eye, it’s not something any of you have ever barbecued before. I can assure you that.

The Harris campaign has released details for Harris’s final two events in Pennsylvania on Monday night — and Taylor Swift is not a listed performer.

That may be the end of the rumor. Though as a colleague has helpfully pointed out, if Swift was going to be at either event, announcing that ahead of time would probably trigger a logistical nightmare where young Swifties then showed up en masse. That alone may be a good reason to avoid bringing out the megastar, as there could be such a thing as too much enthusiasm outside a swing-state event on the eve of an election.

She was asked about that potential Election Night scenario when speaking with reporters in Detroit on Sunday. In her response, she suggested such comments would be a tactic to discourage people from voting and urged voters to have faith in the integrity of the election:

I would ask, in particular people who have not yet voted, to not fall for his tactic, which I think includes suggesting to people that if they vote their vote won’t matter, suggesting that somehow the integrity of our voting system is not intact, so that they don’t vote. And again, I think that it is a tactic, it is meant to distract from the fact that we have and support free and fair elections in our country. We did in 2020. He lost.

And the systems that are in place in 2024 have integrity. They are good systems. And the vote of the people will determine the outcome of this election, and everyone must know that their vote is their power to determine the outcome of the election, and their vote will count. It does matter.

The Arizona Republic reports on what is likely to be a confusing mess in the critical swing-state county come Election Day:

Tens of thousands of paper voter registration forms were dropped off damaged or incomplete at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office just before the sign-up deadline, which could leave some voters in limbo heading into Election Day.

Officials said up to 90,000 forms were submitted by third-party groups on the last day of voter registration before the upcoming election, far more than Recorder’s Office staff expected. Since then, about 50,000 forms have been processed, although some were incomplete and require voters to provide additional information. But the remainder — an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 forms — were entirely unusable because they were torn, wet or otherwise damaged.

That could lead to some voter confusion at the polls. Voters who didn’t completely fill out their registration form or who filled out a form that ended up damaged may have to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day.

The New York Times notes just some of the many digressions during his morning airport rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania:

The former president also described Democrats as a “demonic” party at the rally, at an airport in Lititz, Pa., his first of three swing-state stops planned for his second to last day on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump’s voice was audibly hoarse and his speech sluggish as he made unfounded claims about election interference. He praised himself for ditching his prepared remarks, saying it meant the “truth” could come out.

“We had the best border, the safest border,” Mr. Trump said of his time in the White House. He said that the economy had been in good shape, before mentioning the chart he had been pointing to featuring immigration statistics when he was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pa., in July.

“It said we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump continued. He added, “We did so well, we had such a great—” and then cut himself off. He then immediately noted “so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”

He also suggested the new Selzer poll showing him down three points to Harris in Iowa constituted voter suppression, and then joked that he wouldn’t mind if members of the press took a bullet for him.

It’s probably safe to say that no polls have had as much influence during the 2024 presidential cycle as those from the New York Times–Siena College partnership. That’s partly because Times-Siena has a very good reputation (it gets the top rating from both FiveThirtyEight and the Silver Bulletin), and partly because of the Times’ pervasive impact on opinion-leaders as sort of the national newspaper of record. Bad Times-Siena battleground state polling for Joe Biden during the spring contributed significantly to the Democratic anguish that in turn led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race after his terrible June debate performance.

So the final Times-Siena battleground state polls will draw a lot of eyeballs, and while they are consistent with the too-close-to-call take on the contest supported by almost all the data, there are some wrinkles that will cause hope and fear in both presidential camps:

Arizona: Trump +4

Georgia: Harris +1

Michigan: Trump +1

Nevada: Harris +3

North Carolina: Harris +3

Pennsylvania: Even

Wisconsin: Harris +3

While Trump’s lead in Arizona and Harris’s in Wisconsin is reasonably consistent with what other polls (including previous Times-Siena polls) have shown, Harris leading in Georgia and North Carolina is a surprise, as is Trump leading in Michigan. The numbers undercut the common assumption that Harris will carry the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan and Wisconsin while Trump will carry the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, leaving Pennsylvania to decide the election. More and more, there’s evidence all the battlegrounds, with the possible exception of Arizona, are fully in play, and could go either way. It will make for an extremely intense Election Night whether or not we know the actual winner for a while.

David Freedlander reports that the Trump team is largely happy with Musk’s opaque, chaotic foray into campaigning:

One Trump campaign official described Musk as being like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate who was a relentless promotor of Trump in 2020 — except that Musk is someone “with real money.”

“We just stand back and marvel. He is moving the needle for us with the young and unmotivated male vote that we need in a state like Pennsylvania.” said this official. “Politics is a game of inches. Elon brings a foot.”

Read the rest of David’s report here.

Trump’s response to NBC News regarding Kennedy’s massive, late policy proposal is basically a “sure, maybe”:

Asked Sunday whether banning certain vaccines would be an option during a second term, Trump didn’t rule it out. “Well, I’m going to talk to [Kennedy] and talk to other people, and I’ll make a decision, but he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” Trump said. …

On [Saturday], Kennedy tweeted that on its first day in office, a Trump administration would push to ban fluoride in water, claiming it is “industrial waste” that leads to problems like cancer and other diseases.

“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump said Sunday when he was asked about that plan. “You know, it’s possible.”

Wired reports that the Black canvassers in Michigan who alleged last week that they were mistreated by a GOTV subcontractor for Elon Musk’s America PAC were all fired and left stranded in the state:

“I have this eerie feeling that I need to get the hell up out of there,” says Muldrow, a 20-year-old Black woman from Florida. She was in Michigan as a door knocker, hired by a subcontractor for Elon Musk’s America PAC operation to turn out the vote for Donald Trump in the heavily contested working-class suburbs of Detroit.

Muldrow and the rest of her canvassing group of roughly a dozen people had just been fired en masse, after WIRED reported that they had been tricked and threatened as part of Musk’s get-out-the-vote effort. Speaking publicly for the first time about her ordeal, Muldrow says that the canvassers in her group were fired with little explanation beyond a complaint that someone had spoken with the press. Many, including her, were still owed money. Muldrow had to find her own way home; others are still stranded in Michigan.

The prospect of a second Trump presidency is a fearful one for many reasons, like mass deportations and additional abortion restrictions. Now a potential role for RFK Jr. is rising higher and higher on the list. On Saturday, the former presidential candidate announced on X that a Trump administration would “advise all U.S​. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” Kennedy went on to falsely claim that fluoridation causes bone fractures and neurodevelopmental disorders, among other conditions.

Fluoride has been a fixture of American public health since 1945, when the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, first added it to drinking water. The Washington Post reports that around 200 million Americans now live on fluoridated water systems, and scientific consensus links the practice to massive improvements in dental health. Though there’s bipartisan support for water fluoridation on the Hill, it has always had its critics — and Kennedy’s rise and close ties to Trump suggest that certain fringe views may be gaining traction on the Right. Trump has promised to cut funding for public schools that mandate vaccinations, and a 2023 poll from Politico–Morning Consult showed that “a narrow majority” of Republicans cared more about the risks of vaccination than the benefits, according to KFF Health News.

As Semafor reported in September, Trump has adopted Kennedy’s rhetoric:

The former president has since begun incorporating the “Make America healthy again” phrase (dubbed “MAHA” internally) into his rally speeches, looking to appeal to a certain outsider, wellness-focused cohort of voters that the campaign sees on the margins of party politics.

“We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our environment, and we’re going to get them out of our food supply,” Trump said at a Pennsylvania event last week. “We’re going to get them out of our bodies.”

Trump has also said Kennedy would have some kind of public-health role in a future administration, though he’s often muddled on the details. Most recently he’s pledged to put Kennedy in charge of “women’s health.” This weekend the campaign had little to say about Kennedy’s anti-fluoridation push, stating only that the ex-president is focused on Tuesday’s election. While it’s unclear how much authority Trump would actually give Kennedy, the former candidate’s apparent influence suggests there’s danger ahead if Trump returns to the White House.

GOP strategist David Kochel says it’s “totally broken”:

Looking through these numbers, I’m more convinced now than even last night that this poll will be regarded as a complete joke by Tuesday night at 10pm. It has massively over-sampled Dems. #IA01 and #IA03 are very competitive races. There is no world in which there is a Dem advantage of +16 and +7 respectively. This Iowa Poll is totally broken.

49 to 49 (among registered voters), NBC News reports:

[T]he poll shows Harris getting support from 49% of registered voters in a head-to-head matchup, while Trump gets an identical 49%. Just 2% of voters say they’re unsure about the choice.

Boosting Harris: rising Democratic enthusiasm, a 20-point lead over Trump on the issue of abortion, and an advantage for Harris on which candidate better looks out for the middle class.

Helping Trump: two-thirds of voters who believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, a favorable assessment of Trump’s presidency — especially compared with President Joe Biden’s current performance — and Trump’s double-digit advantage on the economy and the cost of living. …

The poll finds Harris with her biggest advantages over Trump among Black voters (87%-9%), younger voters under 30 years old (57%-41%) and white voters with college degrees (55%-43%).

Trump, meanwhile, leads among rural voters (75%-23%), white voters (56%-42%) and white voters without college degrees (64%-34%).

Yet what continues to stand out as one of the defining features of the election is the enormous gender gap between Harris and Trump, with women supporting Harris by a 16-point margin (57%-41%) and men backing Trump by 18 points (58%-40%).

Illustration: The New York Times

Some notable movement, but nothing too dramatic, and the polls indicate the race is still effectively tied. Nate Cohn’s summary of the final polls at the Times has plenty of caveats, but here’s the overview:

Usually, the final polls point toward a relatively clear favorite, even if that candidate doesn’t go on to win. This will not be one of those elections. While the overall poll result is largely unchanged since our previous wave of battleground polls, there were some notable shifts. Surprisingly, the longstanding gap between the Northern and Sun Belt battlegrounds narrowed considerably, with Ms. Harris faring better than before among young, Black and Hispanic voters, while Mr. Trump gained among white voters without a degree. Ms. Harris led Black voters, 84 percent to 11 percent, up from 80-14 in the last wave of Times/Siena state polls. Similarly, she led among Hispanic voters, 56-35, up from 55-41.

The overall effect of these swings is somewhat contradictory. On average, Ms. Harris fared modestly better than our last round of surveys of the same states, but her gains were concentrated in states where she was previously struggling. Meanwhile, the so-called Blue Wall (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) does not look quite as formidable of an obstacle to Mr. Trump as it once did. As a result, Ms Harris’s position in the Electoral College isn’t necessarily improved.

The survey does offer a clue that voters have been shifting down the stretch. We asked voters when they decided to support their candidate. Among those who said they decided over “the last few days,” Ms. Harris had a 58-42 lead — including leading, 66-34, among late deciders in the Sun Belt, while Mr. Trump led, 60-40, among late deciders in the North.

Read the rest of Nate’s thoughts here.

The Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter adds some context:

NYT/Siena swing state and Selzer IA polls give us a “choose your own adventure” ending to an unprecedented election. IA poll suggests Harris strength w/ white voters (esp. women, indies + seniors) can help her keep Blue Wall even if Sun Belt slips. BUT, NYT shows opposite. She’s slipping in Blue Wall w/ white voters, as Black voters come home in GA/NC and even as AZ slips away, NV comes back into play, suggesting muted loss among Latinos. At the end of the day, we don’t need a major party coalition realignment to have huge impact on the outcome. Move women, Latino, white college just a couple points one way or the other and the race tips.

Per ABC News:

Harris has 49% support among likely voters in this final-weekend ABC News/Ipsos poll, Trump 46%. Reflecting the country’s locked-in polarization, support for these candidates hasn’t changed significantly since Harris stepped in to replace Joe Biden last summer.

Harris was +2 in early October, +4 (a slight edge) last week and is +3 in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates with fieldwork by Ipsos. That scant 3-point difference with Trump matches the average Democratic-Republican gap in the last eight presidential elections, of which Democrats won the popular vote in seven. Regardless, the result leaves a wide-open field for the vagaries of the Electoral College.

Another takeaway:

With a race so tight, the campaigns’ closing get-out-the-vote efforts may well make the difference. Here Harris maintains an advantage: Among all adults, 37% say they’ve been contacted by her campaign asking for their vote, vs. 33% by Trump’s. Among likely voters, that goes to 45 vs. 40%; and among likely voters in the seven battleground states, a slight 67 vs. 61% – a massive level of contact.

Moreover, Harris’ GOTV efforts look better targeted. Nationally, among likely voters who support her, 56% say they’ve been contacted by her campaign. Fewer Trump supporters, 49%, say his campaign has contacted them.

She played a kind of mirror persona of Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris in the cold open. There was a bunch of back and forth with words ending with “amala”:

Senator and former VP candidate Tim Kaine had a cameo on the show, too. (They made fun of how forgettable he is and how similar he and Tim Walz are.)

According a campaign adviser who spoke with the Washington Post, the campaign’s GOTV operation:

• Knocked on 807,000 doors in Pennsylvania.

• Made 940,000 calls and knocked on 215,000 doors in Wisconsin.

• Made 721,000 phone calls and knocked on 256,000 doors in Michigan.

At the third stop on the third to last day of his campaign, Trump spoke to supporters at a more than half-full arena in Greensboro, North Carolina — and he was proudly all over the place with his remarks, which lasted about 85 minutes.

He talked about his rally crowd sizes multiple times and bragged that “foreign leaders watch our rallies.” He twice informed the crowd how many rallies he had left in the campaign, recalled how great his 2016 campaign was, and noted that after nine years, “You know this is coming to an end, these rallies are coming to an end.” But while he insisted “this will never happen again,” he also promised there would be more rallies that wouldn’t be called “rallies” after he wins the election.

At another point in between attacks on Elizabeth Warren and Chris Christie, while Trump was telling the crowd that Harris had lied about working at McDonalds, he laughed when a member of the audience yelled out “She worked on a corner for [inaudible]!”

“This place is amazing,” Trump responded after waiting for the laughter and cheers to die down.

He also briefly started campaigning against Joe Biden again, repeatedly asking “Where the hell is Biden? … Where is Biden?” while looking side to side. He said that Harris should “go in and give him back the presidency, let him finish out the run, because I actually think he’ll do just as good.”

Then he sort of joke bemoaned being at the rally while telling attendees to “please go and vote”:

If I don’t win this thing after all this talk, I’m in trouble. Will you please go and vote. I mean, I came here, whatever the hell time it is — who the hell knows? I’m giving you the full bore. You wouldn’t let me leave in half an hour. I could have run up here and done it, start screaming “Make America great again!” for five or six times, and then leave to the cheers of the crowd. I would have been home sleeping by now. I hope to hell that you’re going to get your asses out and vote.

Trump also warned the crowd: “If you don’t vote, then bad things could be happening, you’ll be very depressed. And we don’t want to have depression, right?”

That’s what a Trump campaign official told NBC News, which reports that the state — where Trump is spending parts of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday — is making the Trump team nervous. The campaign is still projecting confidence, but Democratic strategists have a different story to tell, per the report:

“Republicans are definitely turning out at a clip slightly better than Democrats. But … my read is that early vote is 55% female, and every single poll shows that women are supporting Democrats and posting their largest gender gap in North Carolina history,” said Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson.

Jackson added that suburban voters were voting at higher rates than their registration share by 2 points, and that in every competitive election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Democrats outperformed polling with women, unaffiliated voters, suburban voters and Republican women.

“That’s why I’m an optimist about this election,” Jackson said. “I think the fact that Trump is visiting North Carolina more than any state over the last few days says they are seeing the same thing in the early voting numbers that I am and they are concerned.”

Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller’s reaction, per NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, was: “Every cycle there’s one idiotic survey.”

Iowa GOP chair Jeff Kaufman, who was already spinning against the poll before it came out, called it “propaganda”:

The Des Moines Register and Ann Selzer just lost any shred of credibility they had left. This should be classified as spreading propaganda with polling like this. It’s sad to watch how far they’ve fallen. President Trump will win Iowa.

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds added:

Iowa Republicans are leading in early voting for the first time in decades, and have increased our voter registration advantage by 130,000+. President Trump will win Iowa if we vote and turnout our friends. Let’s prove the Des Moines Register wrong again!

There’s also an internal poll showing Trump up five in Iowa, which wouldn’t be good news, either, considering he won the state by 8 points in 2020. The Trump campaign sent out a “confidential” memo dismissing the Selzer poll and criticizing its lack of transparency.

But among some conservatives, Selzer & Co. is getting props for bravery, if nothing else. For instance, Dan McLaughlin wrote on X:

I don’t really believe Kamala Harris is up 3 in Iowa, and I suspect that J. Ann Selzer doesn’t either. But I respect her for publishing rather than burying a surprising poll finding that seems likely to embarrass. Every pollster should emulate her.

Below is some of the most interesting reaction and analysis of Saturday’s stunning Selzer poll. (We’ll keep updating this with more commentary as it comes out.)

Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweets:

Three options here:

1. Selzer is right and Harris wins in a massive landslide

2. This poll is just a bad poll (it happens, but it happens to Selzer less than others)

3. Harris isn’t really winning IA but the poll is capturing late stage momentum that bodes well for WI,MI,PA

Several analysts have pointed to other similar signs in recent polling.

The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman:

It’s worth noting we’ve been seeing great polls for Harris (though not as rosy as tonight’s Selzer) in places like Omaha and Des Moines for months. What do they have in common? Really high shares of white college grads and lower nonwhite shares than other metros.

Echelon Insights’ Kristen Soltis Anderson noted that a September AARP poll she worked on” showed Harris winning senior women by double digits — and now Ann Selzer finds this eye-popping margin in her poll putting Harris +3 over Trump in Iowa” She adds:

Two things are possible:

1) This Selzer poll is right and we are witnessing an absolutely wild inversion of the left-right generation gap; OR

2) Trump-favoring seniors are sitting out polls this year in extraordinary fashion and it is leading to some wild crosstabs.

RCP’s Sean Trende warns against interpreting the poll as far-reaching definitive evidence:

Don’t make me tap the sign again.

Selzer is a great pollster, and you’d be foolish to dismiss her poll. It adds real uncertainty to forecasts. At the same time, neither should you suddenly abandon all of your prior views about the state of the race.

Nate Silver notes that the Selzer poll doesn’t have much effect on his forecast, but that doesn’t mean its potential insight can be dismissed:

Before you get your hopes up too much, another Iowa poll today from Emerson College had Trump ahead by 9 points instead. Still, Harris’s chances in Iowa roughly doubled from 9 percent to 17 percent.

However, the poll had little effect on our topline Electoral College numbers because Iowa has only a 1 percent chance of being the tipping-point state. In the world where Harris wins Iowa, she is probably also cleaning up elsewhere in the Midwest, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin, in which case she’s already almost certain to win the Electoral College. So most of the time, it would be redundant.

Still, to have a prominent, high-quality pollster like this at a time when most other pollsters are herding toward the consensus suggests the possibility that other pollsters could be lowballing Harris.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich adds:

Selzer & Co. has earned a reputation for outliers that are later proven to be correct. Obama+7 in the 2008 Iowa caucuses. Trump+7 in the 2020 general. But it’s also had misses, like Hubbell+2 in #IAgov in 2018.

In general, you should trust polling averages over outliers, but be cognizant of the *possibility* that the outlier may be picking up on a late trend. I recommend doing the same in this case.

Split Ticket’s Max McCall and Lakshya Jain warn against Harris landslide dreams:

While no other poll has shown quite this monumental of a shift, if you squint, there are perhaps hints of something similar happening in polls of similar states. Harris has polled exceptionally well in Nebraska’s second congressional district, and some polls of Nebraska statewide show a shift toward her as well. There was also a recent poll of Kansas that only had Trump up 48-43, a seeming outlier, but one perhaps worth taking a second look at in the wake of this poll.

Does this poll imply a Harris landslide? That’s one interpretation we’re skeptical of — even setting aside the outlier nature of this poll, it is worth noting that even a perfectly accurate Iowa poll cannot say much about states like Georgia or Arizona, where the whites vote differently from the Midwest.

The state’s draconian abortion ban could be having an impact, too, as Steve Kornacki notes with a timeline:

June: DMR poll has Trump +18 vs. Biden in Iowa

July 29: Iowa’s six-week abortion ban goes into effect with intense controversy and news coverage

September 22: DMR poll shows 59-37% opposition to new abortion law — 69% among women. Also shows Trump lead over Harris at just 47-43%

All fall: Saturation ad spending and campaigning on abortion by Dem candidates in the state’s two toss-up House races

Now: Final DMR poll has massive gen der gap pushing Harris into 47-44% lead

At Semafor, Benjy Sarlin points out that maybe the campaigns should have been paying more attention to Iowa:

For the first cycle in recent memory, Iowa has definitively not been treated as a swing state by either presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the seven top battleground states have seen billions of dollars in ad spending, constant visits from candidates, and extensive canvassing operations. For that reason, it was my strong personal prior before the Selzer poll dropped to not assume it would be as predictive of other states this time.

That said, the Selzer result is so stunning that it raises an entirely different scenario that does have recent precedent: A presidential campaign failing to notice a state that once seemed safe falling into competition until it’s too late.

Members of the Trump team, meanwhile, are not impressed.

If there’s truly some sort of midwestern Heartland trend among white voters that could lift Kamala Harris to victory via the “Blue Wall” battleground states, a poll from an adjacent state might be an omen.

The final Des Moines Register–Mediacom Iowa Poll from legendary gold-standard pollster Ann Selzer shows Harris leading Donald Trump by three points (47 to 44 percent) among likely voters in the Hawkeye State, which Trump carried by 9.5 percent in 2016 and 8.2 percent in 2020.

Eyebrows were raised in September when Selzer showed Trump leading in Iowa by a mere 4 percent. But this could give Team Harris a psychological boost going into Election Day, even if the Democrat doesn’t win and turn Iowa back into a regularly competitive state. As Selzer herself said, “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming.”

But she also said: “The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.”

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” she added.

Analyzing the final “gold standard” Selzer poll of Iowa voters is a quadrennial obsession for polling analysts. But nobody could have possibly expected what this one says:

Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.   A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.  

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.  

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” 

Older and/or independent women were the primary force behind the swing:

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris. 

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.  

Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin. 

Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.  

The Selzer poll has as good a record of predicting actual results as any in existence.

It what will now probably not be a surprise appearance, Kamala Harris is reportedly set to appear in the cold open for the final episode of Saturday Night Live before the election. First came the news that Air Force 2 had been diverted to New York City from Detroit. Now the New York Post reports that according to a source, the diversion is indeed for SNL:

Harris will appear during the show’s traditional, politics-skewing cold open, the tipster said. “It’s all been hush-hush,” the source told The Post Saturday afternoon during the final weekend before Tuesday’s presidential election, adding that the “Secret Service is here.”

The Democrat turned independent turned leading Trump health adviser said Saturday that Trump will, as president, join his war against fluoride, which Kennedy has long claimed is responsible for a number of public health problems.

The debate over the benefits of using fluoride in the water supply has been raging for decades, including multiple baseless conspiracy theories dating back decades. For the uninitiated, our colleagues at Vox recently did a deep dive into the latest research about the benefits and potential dangers. It’s not all as simple as Kennedy makes it sound. His announcement does indicate, however, that Trump may indeed let Kennedy “go wild” and make public health decisions for the entire country — a prospect actual public-health experts are rightly terrified about.

The VP candidate has announced that he will be holding a rally in Derry, New Hampshire, on Sunday night — less than 36 hours before Election Day. Though New Hampshire was once considered a quadrennial swing state, it isn’t considered one now. This week, the latest poll from the Saint Anslem College Survey Center found Harris maintained a smaller but still “solid” five-point lead over Trump in the Granite State.

Does the Trump campaign really think it’s in play? Or is this Vance hedging his bet and getting a head start on 2028?

The film legend is featured in three new videos produced by the Harris Campaign which are all warnings about the dangers of Trump regaining the White House. Watch on of them here.

Said Trump at his rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, on Saturday, amid a “weaving” minute-plus aside about his favorite fictional cannibal:

You watch. These fake people, they’ll say, “Again, he brought up Hannibal Lecter…”

He also claimed it was the first time in 20 speeches that he had brought up Lecter. He may be right about that — and it may in fact be a rare undercount from the serial exaggerator.

According to a quick search of C-SPAN transcripts, the last time Trump mentioned Hannibal the Cannibal at a campaign event was 19 days ago at his now infamous town-hall music party in Oaks, Pennsylvania. He has surely given more than 20 speeches since then.

The real question, though, is how many more times will voters get to hear a major American politician use Hannibal Lecter as a talking point. If Trump loses the election, will Saturday be the last time — ever? Will we hear him bring Lecter up another six times in less than three days? If he wins, will we hear about Hannibal in the State of the Union address? Will Trump host monthly screenings of The Silence of the Lambs in the Oval Office? Will he dress up in Lecter’s famous face mask next Halloween on the White House lawn?

It’s true that the fate of the country is probably at stake on Tuesday. But so, too, is the rhetorical future of this incredibly bizarre aside which has barely ever made sense.

(Our own Margaret Hartmann has written arguably the world’s deepest explainer on the origins of Trump’s Lecter rant, if anyone wants a distraction from their pre-election anxiety.)

Update: He talked about Lecter again at his next rally in Virginia.

Harris and Trump’s planes just can’t quit each other today. They’re now parked almost side by side at the airport in Charlotte, hours after they sat next to each other on the tarmac in Milwaukee.

J.D. Vance and Tim Walz nearly crossed paths amid double-parked planes in Las Vegas on Saturday, as well.

He was in Pennsylvania on Friday and Saturday and has made no national news, which is undoubtedly what Democrats were hoping for. Reports Politico on Saturday’s event in old Joe’s hometown of Scranton:

Far removed from the blitz of major campaign rallies this weekend, President Joe Biden on Saturday made a final plea for Americans to support Vice President Kamala Harris, calling next week’s election the most important “any of us have ever voted in. “

“More is at stake for the direction of this country than ever before,” he told a crowd of union workers at a get-out-the-vote event here. “We need to elect Kamala.”

Biden used what will likely be his final extended remarks before Election Day to make an economic case for Harris in the city where he spent a chunk of his childhood, touting the progress of the last four years in bolstering union rights, expanding health care and reviving the economy.

The event wasn’t totally devoid of whacky Bidenism. Referencing Republicans who want to give tax cuts to the wealthy, he said “these are the kinds of guys you want to smack in the ass.”

Watch it here. She is still talking about him a lot on the trail, though, as ABC News’ Will McDuffie reports from her Saturday afternoon rally in Atlanta:

Minutes after releasing a closing ad that makes no mention of Donald Trump, Harris is all over the former president on stage in Atlanta, bringing him up almost immediately. “This is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance.”

Well over 4 million people have already cast ballots either by mail, or in person in the state’s early voting period, which ended Friday night. The Atlanta Journal Constitution offers some highlights from the data so far:

• More than 834,000 of this year’s early voters didn’t participate in the 2020 election, a group that includes new Georgia

residents and voters who turned 18 during the past four years.

• Women are outpacing men in Georgia, accounting for 56% of voters so far in the election.

• Older voters dominated early voting, accounting for 58% of overall turnout so far, a higher rate than their 45% of all registered voters in Georgia.

• White voters made up 58% of Georgia’s early turnout, more than their 51% share of the state’s registered voters. Black voters were 26% of early participants, lower than their 30% statewide share. But a significant number of the 10% of voters who listed their race as “other” are also likely voters of color.

Operatives from both sides seem to like what they’ve seen, so far:

Brandon Phillips, a veteran Republican consultant who was Trump’s top Georgia campaign aide in 2016, said his data modeling suggests a slight GOP edge. But he said more likely Democratic votes will trickle in through the weekend as mail-in ballots are processed.

A veteran operative close to the Harris campaign said there was Democrats were particularly optimistic about the turnout from Black voters, which ended early voting around the same in-person level it hit in 2020.

The agency put out this statement on Saturday:

Photo: Handout/FBI

In my new post, I collect the details of when the polls close — and estimates of when we may have definitive results — in all the battleground states. Here’s the story with Wisconsin:

When Polls Close in Wisconsin: 8:00 p.m. local time, or 9:00 p.m. ET.

Vote Counting Process: The Badger State was decided by less than one percent in four of the last six presidential elections. Like Michigan, Wisconsin (governed by a Republican legislature) doesn’t allow pre-processing of mail ballot until Election Day, but does allow counting them that morning. …

When Wisconsin Will Be Called: According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, we should not expect a call on Election Night[.]

Read the rest here.

Per their new analysis out Saturday:

The third and final release of YouGov’s model estimating every 2024 U.S. Senate election and U.S. House elections in each congressional district shows Republicans taking the Senate by a narrow margin, and Democrats gaining control of the House by an even smaller margin. Each outcome would be a reversal of the current Congress.

YouGov’s Senate model gives Republicans edges in 13 seats on the ballot, and they hold 38 seats not on the ballot, which would give them 51 seats. Democrats or Independents who caucus with Democrats have advantages in 20 seats on the ballot, and they hold 28 seats not on the ballot, for a total of 48. We rate one race as a tossup: the Ohio race between Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Republican Bernie Moreno.

It’s morning in America and you know where Trump is: calling in to Fox & Friends. On Saturday morning, the raspy-voiced candidate hit on a bunch of important pre-election topics, like why Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist joke about Puerto Rico — which Trump still says he hasn’t heard — wasn’t a big deal; how disappointed he is with Julia Roberts; how unimaginable it is that a woman would ever not tell their husband who they voted for; and why he won’t talk about the 2020 election being stolen so the hosts “can keep your jobs.”

Kamala Harris has a Saturday afternoon rally in Atlanta, then a 5 p.m. rally in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Donald Trump has a midday rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, and then he’s off to a late afternoon rally in Salem, Virginia, before heading back to North Carolina for his own 5 p.m. rally in Charlotte. (So there will be dueling rallies in Charlotte tonight.)

J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has a morning rally in Las Vegas, followed by an afternoon rally in Phoenix, Arizona.

Tim Walz is also in Vegas on Saturday morning, followed by two Arizona events, first in Flagstaff in the early afternoon, then in Tucson in the late afternoon.

All four candidates have somewhat mirroring events on Saturday.

Tim Alberta’s new Atlantic story on the tumultuous inner workings of the Trump campaign over the last five months is essentially the first big obituary for the campaign (if Trump loses). It also just so happens to double as a “don’t blame us” explanation, in the event of that outcome, for campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita:

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and is a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

Among a number of stories, Alberta reports on how Trump ‘16 vet Corey Lewandowski helped upset what had been the tentative balance of the campaign, how Vance went rogue with his lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets, how Trump apparently decided to ditch campaign pal Laura Loomer because he learned how much plastic surgery she’d had — and on the internal mess that caused (and was caused by) Tony Hinchcliffe’s offensive set at the MSG rally:

In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It didn’t take long to get to the answer: Alex Bruesewitz.

Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside of Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.

Now, with their grand celebration quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time; only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)

Read the rest here.

On the tarmac at Milwaukee’s airport this morning, two presidential candidates’ planes awaited, but only one would carry the next president.

There are plenty of good arguments for why what last night appeared to be a presidential candidate simulating a sex act, at a major campaign rally four days before the election, was really just a bizarre attempt to tell a story by a generally odd fellow. Tweets James Surowieki, after watching the clip:

Not that it really matters either way, but that’s not what Trump was pretending to do. This was part of a long rant about how terrible the microphone setup was at his rally, and he was saying that they had set up the mic so low that he had to lean down in order to be heard.

At the Bulwark, Sam Stein and Marc Caputo also debated the topic this morning, and speculated on why Trump might have done what it kind of looked like he did.

John Herrman explains:

What I’m talking about is digital ad spending. After Trump’s victory in 2016, the Republicans doubled down on social media, installing Facebook guru Brad Parscale as campaign manager and piling money into the platform (Parscale resigned before the election). As a result, in 2020, the Trump campaign (and affiliated entities) outspent the Biden campaign on Facebook and Google despite raising significantly less money overall. In 2024, the numbers look wildly different, according to an analysis published this month by the Brennan Center in partnership with OpenSecrets and the Wesleyan Media Project, which recorded more than $182 million in spending on Meta and Google by or on behalf of the Harris campaign. For the Trump campaign, that number was just $45 million. …

Meta and Google are by far the largest digital advertising companies that sell political ads (TikTok prohibits them, while spending on Snap and X is comparatively minuscule). The report’s findings are also consistent with other evidence of a massive shift. The Times reported in September that, after the debate, the Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign on Facebook and Instagram 20 to one; in Pennsylvania alone, Harris spent $1.3 million that week to Trump’s $22 thousand. From September 23 to October 6, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, the difference has shrunk but remains enormous: more than $48 million spent on Meta and Google by Harris, and over $15 million by Trump.

Read the rest here.

For our new cover story, Rachel Handler spoke to a variety of New Yorkers about how they’re handling — or recommend handling — the stress:

Considering the statistically high likelihood of things getting fucked up, I consulted my friends Viviana Olen and Matt Harkins of the THNK1994 Museum — the premier event planners of New York, who maintain a strong sense of whimsy even in the bleakest of situations — for their tips on how to throw an Election Night event that could carry on even as the country free-falls into abject chaos. “Get a weighted cloak,” said Viviana, noting that there was one currently for sale on TikTok for some reason. “No overhead lighting,” she added, and she proposed a soothing meal of bone broth, an assortment of teas, Diet Coke, and “bowls of Zyn.” I asked about serving alcohol, and both strongly discouraged it. To set overall vibes, they suggested putting Cher’s song “Ooga Boo” from the 2016 children’s show Home: Adventures With Tip & Oh “on loop.” “Just try to make it a nice evening,” concluded Viviana. “It’s the first night of your sobriety.”

Alison Roman advised making a heavy, involved meal and drinking wine. “I incidentally just published a chili recipe, which, if you make it the long way, will take you three and a half hours,” she said. Was it better to get drunk and eat chili or soberly sit under a cloak and drink tea? I asked my friend Dr. Danny Luger, an esteemed cardiologist whom I treat as if he were my personal on-call physician. He said that “people are smoking, drinking, and eating. We’re seeing spikes in blood pressure related to election anxiety.” He plans to smoke three packs of cigarettes in a row on the night of the election, but in a professional capacity, he “can’t support toxic-substance use to cope.” Instead he recommends doing anything that gets the heart rate up, like going for a run or “lashing yourself.”

Read the rest of Rachel’s report here.