There are only four (!) days left before the 2024 election (presumably) comes to an end, and the only guarantee we can make about the outcome at this point is that nobody actually knows what that outcome will be. In the meantime, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending their final days on the campaign trail, the early votes are piling up, and a new Taylor Swift rumor is afoot. If you’re having trouble keeping track of all the election news, we’re here to help. Below are updates, commentary, and analysis on what happened, as it happened, on Friday and Thursday.
For the latest election updates, head over to our weekend liveblog here.
“The only thing I ask for a good mic,” Trump told the crowd, while joking that he would fire someone or “knock the hell out of” them.
Then he very oddly pantomimed what he indicated were earlier mic problems he’d had. I say very oddly, because it also sort of looked like he was pretending to perform oral sex. That doesn’t make any sense, of course.
Watch the whole clip:
Trump also warned the crowd they would die if Harris won and questioned how Greek Giannis Antetokounmpo was
“You’re gonna die,” Trump said to the crowd at the Fiserv Forum, warning that Harris becoming president would lead to millions of deaths:
He also launched into a riff about Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo, whom Trump calls “the Greek” — except Trump doesn’t think he’s really Greek, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
“I would say ‘The Greek’ is a seriously good player.”
Trump previously referred to Giannis Antetokounmpo as “The Greek” while discussing the Republican National Convention held this summer at the arena.
“He may be the best player in the NBA, actually,” Trump said. “He’s supposed to be a very good guy, too.”
Antetokounmpo, a two-time MVP, was born in Athens, Greece to Nigerian parents.
“Tell me, who has more Greek in him? ‘The Greek’ or me?” Trump asked.
“I think we have about the same.”
And he insulted Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker over his weight, calling him “disgusting”:
Canvassers in California filed a class-action lawsuit against Musk super-PAC and a congressional campaign
This is separate from the other alleged fraud involving canvassers for America PAC’s Trump GOTV efforts in Michigan. Wired reports:
Elon Musk’s America PAC and several other defendants, including the reelection campaign for Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican from California, are accused of violating California labor law in a class action lawsuit filed in Orange County on October 30, according to court documents obtained by WIRED.
The named plaintiffs, Tamiko Anderson and Patricia Kelly, were canvassers for Steel in October of this year, according to the suit, which alleges that they weren’t paid agreed-upon wages. America PAC is named because it provided campaigning services for Steel.
The plaintiffs are also suing over an alleged failure to reimburse business expenses and for allegedly being provided inaccurate wage statements.
Washington governor Jay Inslee announced Friday that he is temporarily activating some members of the National Guard, on standby, amid concerns there could be violence around the election. ”Based upon general and specific information and concerns regarding the potential for violence or other unlawful activity related to the 2024 general election, I want to ensure we are fully prepared to respond,” Inslee said. The activation will last from November 4 to November 7. On Monday, a still-unidentified suspect set off incendiary devices in mail-in ballot drop boxes in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon.
Nevada governor Joe Lombardo also announced this week that he planned to activate the National Guard on Election Day “to ensure a smooth, secure, and safe election.” The 60 activated National Guard members will be on standby in Carson City and Las Vegas.
NBC News reports:
The Supreme Court on Friday handed a loss to Republicans by allowing Pennsylvania voters who sent mail-in ballots that were flagged as being potentially defective to submit a separate provisional in-person ballot. The justices rejected, with no noted dissents, a Republican request to put on hold a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling from last week. …
Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote a brief statement saying that, although it is an issue of “considerable importance,” there were several reasons for the court not to get involved at this stage. His statement was joined by two other conservatives, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Early voting ended Friday night in the state. Per NPR’s Stephen Fowler, at least 3,995,938 Georgians voted early, which is more than 55 percent of the total expected election turnout:
We won’t know full details until tomorrow morning’s absentee update, but looks like there will be 4 million+ votes before Election Day in Georgia. Nearly half of Georgia’s 2.17 million Black voters have already cast a ballot, and urban counties went gangbusters in final EV days.
The AJC’s Greg Bluestein noted that there’s also “especially high turnout in key GOP strongholds in north GA.”
The Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale told parents on Thursday that students will not be assigned homework on Election Day, that kids who feel “too emotionally distressed” in the aftermath will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be offering counseling to anyone who needs it. The New York Times reports:
In a section of an email to members of the school’s community headed “Election Day support,” Stacey Bobo, principal of the upper school at the institution, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, said that it “acknowledges that this may be a high-stakes and emotional time for our community.”
“No matter the election outcome,” she wrote, the school “will create space to provide students with the support they may need.”
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld is not happy about the policy, he told the Times:
Seinfeld, whose two sons attended Fieldston, said decisions like this one exasperated his family and led his younger son to transfer in the eighth grade to Riverdale Country School, another elite school in the Bronx.
“This is why the kids hated it,” Mr. Seinfeld said in a phone interview on Thursday night. “What kind of lives have these people led that makes them think that this is the right way to handle young people? To encourage them to buckle. This is the lesson they are providing, for ungodly sums of money.”
In a later phone call, Mr. Seinfeld clarified that his children did not hate the school, but hated the coddling that would happen at times.
Multiple reporters attending the Macomb County rally have noted that it was poorly attended:
The Detroit News’ Craig Mauger adds:
Two things on this crowd size. 1) Trump held an event at the same place 5 weeks ago, so that could impact attendance. 2) However, this was one of the smaller Trump rally crowds I recall seeing in Michigan this late in an election cycle.
Also worth noting: So far the turnout at Trump’s subsequent rally in Milwaukee seems more normal.
He’ll bring peace to the Middle East, he said during his visit to the Great Commoner coffee shop in Dearborn, Michigan, on Friday. He didn’t say how, NPR points out:
“We have a great feeling for Lebanon and I know so many people from Lebanon, Lebanese people and the Muslim population, they’re liking Trump and they’ve had a good relationship with him,” he said. “This is it, this is where they are, Dearborn. We want their votes and we’re looking for their votes and I think we’ll get their votes.” …
When asked about conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu about ending conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, Trump criticized current U.S. leadership and said, without offering any details, that he would bring peace to the region.
“We’re gonna bring peace, you’re gonna have peace in the Middle East, but not with the clowns you have running the U.S. right now,” he said. “You have people in the Middle East that aren’t doing their job, and you have people in the U.S. that aren’t doing their job, and when they get it together, when they get it right, you’re gonna have peace in the Middle East.”
That’s one of the five big unanswered questions about the election that Rogé Karma highlights in a post at The Atlantic:
[T]he ground game has been a remarkably poor predictor of success in recent elections. In 2016, Trump’s field operation was almost nonexistent, whereas the Hillary Clinton campaign oversaw a voter-outreach juggernaut. Trump won. In 2020, the Trump campaign boasted that its massive field operation knocked on a million doors every week, while the Biden campaign conducted almost no in-person canvassing because of worries about spreading COVID. Biden won.
Still, political-science research has consistently found—and common sense strongly suggests—that nudging potential voters to vote does, in fact, increase turnout. According to estimates by the political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green, a canvassing effort that gets a response at 1,000 doors generates about 40 new voters, and a phone bank that reaches 1,000 people produces approximately 28 new voters. Given that the 2024 presidential race could very well be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a few key states, these kinds of numbers could be enough to swing the outcome.
So who has the better ground game this time around? By just about every conventional indicator, the answer is Kamala Harris.
Karma also asks whether the youth gender gap found by polls will hold up and how much of a factor the economy will ultimately be. You can read the rest here.
It’s entirely possible that Trump’s loud and proud celebration of Kennedy’s supposed expertise about health, food, and medicines is little more than a cynical attempt to secure votes from the longtime activist’s fans, but it’s still making some farming trade groups anxious, Politico reports:
Banning pesticides — not to mention food additives, seed oils or ultra-processed foods, as Kennedy has also advocated — would completely upend the existing U.S. food system. And if Trump truly lets Kennedy “go wild” on food and health, as he promised in remarks at a recent campaign rally, it would represent a 180 degree reversal from the agriculture agenda during his first term, which included rolling back pesticide restrictions and other food-related regulations. …
[Kennedy’s] broad critique of the American food system is shared by many on the left as well as the right. But Kennedy has gone further, embracing scientifically dubious theories about vitamins, chemicals and seed oils, which come on top of his notorious role fueling debunked anti-vaccine conspiracies.
While most in the agriculture and pharmaceutical industries remain skeptical that Trump would ultimately put Kennedy in a position of real power, conversations with more than half a dozen industry lobbyists and more than a dozen lawmakers and Hill aides indicate many are starting to prepare for that reality.
The Justice Department announced on Friday that it will be sending election monitors to 86 jurisdictions in 27 states in order to ensure compliance with federal election law for the general election. According to the Washington Post, this marks the most expansive amount of monitoring by the agency in 20 years. The Justice Department personnel will be sent to places like Dekalb and Fulton counties in Georgia, Milwaukee, and Wausau in Wisconsin, as well as Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia, Luzerne, and Allegheny counties. In addition to in those battleground states, the agency will have a presence in multiple counties in Texas, Kentucky, and Virginia as well as several cities in Massachusetts.
In his New York Times newsletter, Nate Cohn makes his case for why the polls may be accurate this time:
First, the pandemic is over. There’s serious evidence suggesting the pandemic was a major factor in the polling error in 2020, as many Democrats stayed at home — and responded to polls — while Republicans went about their lives. It would explain why the fixes that pollsters made after the 2016 election proved so ineffective four years later. If so, many polls might be accurate even without any major changes at all.
Second, pollsters have made major methodological changes with the potential to address what went wrong four years ago. Many of the worst-performing pollsters of 2020 have either adopted wholesale methodological changes or dropped off the map.
But also, pollsters may be skeptical of pro-Harris results:
[T]he 2016 and 2020 polling misfires shattered many pollsters’ confidence in their own methods and data. When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results.
And here’s why Cohn says polls may not be accurate:
The case for pessimism on accuracy is straightforward: There’s no reason to believe that pollsters can reach enough less engaged and less educated voters, and there’s every reason to believe Mr. Trump still excels among them. …
As a consequence, a decades-old inevitable bias in polling now endangers political polling — and during an era of close elections when errors that would have been routine in the 1970s and ’80s can leave egg all over the faces of pollsters.
It’s hard to see how the pollsters can get out of this one. They can give more weight to the less educated and lower-turnout respondents they do get, but consider: These respondents agreed to take a poll, which in itself may be a sign of a higher level of engagement.
Times subscribers can read the rest of Nate’s pre-election advisory here.
Elsewhere, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini at Echelon Insights warns on X that the election results probably won’t be as close as polls suggest:
Right now, you are anchored in a poll-driven reality that it’s going to be within a point in 3-4 states. But mentally prepare yourself for the fact that it’s highly likely to be something else.
RCP’s Sean Trende says he agrees:
This is true, and I do worry about people taking this interpretation away. If polls are off more than a point either direction – hardly unusual – it could be an early night. When we say “it’s close” what we really mean is “the publicly available data say it’s close.”
Ed Kilgore — who says “it’s hard to see this as anything other than an incredibly close race where late turnout trends and polling errors wind up telling us what we cannot know right now” — is continuing to update his look at the final polls here.
Speaking with reporters on Friday, Trump was asked about the Kennedy’s responsibilities in his potential administration, and asked if he was “comfortable with his views on vaccines.”
“He’s going to have a big role in health care. A very big role,” Trump responded. “He knows it better than anybody. He’s got some views that I happen to agree with very strongly, and I have for a long time.”
On Friday, a federal judge rejected Musk’s attempt to have Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner’s lawsuit against him moved out of state court, remanding it back to the city’s Common Pleas Court. On Monday, Krasner sued Musk, alleging that his super-PAC’s daily $1 million giveaways to registered voters constituted an illegal lottery that was in violation of Pennsylvania law. Though Krasner’s lawsuit is the first legal challenge Musk has faced for his promotion, he had previously received a warning from the Justice Department about his giveaways’ possible illegality.
In 2020, Philadelphia was the center of numerous fraudulent claims of election fraud pushed in an attempt to challenge its results. Now, Larry Krasner, the city’s Democratic district attorney, tells NBC News that he and his team are ready for whatever might come their way this cycle. “If people think they’re going to erase votes in Philly or terrorize people who are here to protect those votes, we’ve got some handcuffs, we’ve got some jail cells, and we’ve got some Philadelphia juries who want to hear why, exactly, it is that somebody thought they could erase our votes or terrorize our elections workers,” he said.
To those who might try to negatively influence the election, Krasner put it bluntly. “As they say in Philly, if somebody wants to come and do that, they can F around and find out,” he said.
While speculation continues as to whether Harris will be joined at her Philadelphia rally by Pennsylvania native Taylor Swift, the vice-president’s Pittsburgh stop is also receiving increased attention. Harris is set to hold a rally and concert with supporters at the city’s Point State Park with the campaign advising of a currently unnamed “special guest” for the concert. The event listing has not gone unnoticed on social media with rumors mounting about whether this might be the ideal campaign stop for Swift to make. Though Swift will be on break from her tour, it’s still currently unknown if she’ll be in Missouri to watch her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Monday night. To add fuel to the fire, the Pittsburgh rally has an earlier start and end time than the Philadelphia event, which could help for a potentially busy schedule.
The former president took to Truth Social to say his comments on Cheney, which seemed to suggest she should be shot or at least aimed at, were intended as a knock on her foreign-policy beliefs:
All I’m saying about Liz Cheney is that she is a War Hawk, and a dumb one at that, but she wouldn’t have “the guts” to fight herself. It’s easy for her to talk, sitting far from where the death scenes take place, but put a gun in her hand, and let her go fight, and she’ll say, “No thanks!” Her father decimated the Middle East, and other places, and got rich by doing so. He’s caused plenty of DEATH, and probably never even gave it a thought. That’s not what we want running our Country!
CNN confirms that Trump received an offer to appear on Alex Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy but declined, as he has many opportunities to reach women over the course of his campaign:
Trump’s campaign had received an offer to join the show, according to sources close to the former president, but ultimately decided to pass. Instead, Trump doubled down on a strategy of speaking directly to America’s young men through appearances on right-leaning, male-dominated online shows. He will end his campaign Tuesday having largely avoided podcasts, YouTube channels and daytime TV shows tailored toward female audiences …
Behind the scenes and on the phone with close allies, Trump will ask why women don’t like him, three sources familiar with the conversations said. “He thinks women want someone who will keep them safe. Keep their children safe,” one of the sources said.
In North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump polled the women in his audience on whether they wanted him to protect them. He appeared pleased at the cheers he received.
Dave Wasserman, the senior editor of Cook Political Report, joined C-SPAN Friday and discussed which districts he will be tracking as potential bellwethers for presidential results. Wasserman said he’ll have eyes on Baldwin County, Georgia, which could potentially indicate whether Harris has lost any ground with rural voters.
“Baldwin County voted for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden by about a point. But if Trump were to carry it this time, that would indicate that Harris is experiencing some erosion in either Black turnout or support among young and minority voters. If Harris does keep that county in her column, then that would be a good sign for her chances of Metro Atlanta overpowering the Republican rural reaches of the state.”
Wasserman also named Cabarrus County in North Carolina, a region outside Charlotte that Trump has won twice but by decreased numbers in 2020. “I think Harris has to keep Trump’s margin under five points in Cabarrus County to have a good chance of flipping North Carolina,” he said.
Matt Stieb spoke with everyone’s favorite on-air Election Night expert about how he’s prepping for next week and whether or not he enters a “flow state” when everything gets nuts:
For food on Election Night, is your stomach just turned off by the time the results are coming in?
It is just an overload of activity, and I lose track of being either hungry or thirsty. And honestly, I always wonder sometimes when I think about it, it’s like I don’t have to use the restroom much, either. It’s almost like my body kind of recognizes I need six hours just to be there.
Would you call it a flow state?
I’m not familiar with the term.
It’s something athletes often talk about when they’re just completely in the zone and are able to rely on training and perform at a really high level.
I wouldn’t compare myself to an athlete or anything, but yeah, something like that.
Do you get to shower during the broadcast, or is that not a problem?
No, I don’t. The studio tends to be very cold. I remember even in 2022, the most recent one, I was actually like, “Geez, can I wear a layer underneath this?” It was so cold.
Read the rest here.
Michigan has been a top target for those looking to push election-fraud claims. CNN reports that rigged-election influencers have locked onto several incidents including a sole case of a Chinese college student voting despite not being a citizen and an internal vote-count issue:
On Wednesday morning, confusion over the number of ballots cast in the state was sparked because of a formatting error that has since been corrected, with no extra votes counted, according to the Michigan secretary of state’s office.
Some of the confusion appears to have originated from a post on X by Matthew DePerno, one of the more high-profile election deniers in Michigan. A former GOP nominee for attorney general in Michigan, DePerno was charged last year in connection with efforts in 2020 to illegally access and tamper with voting machines in hopes of proving that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. DePerno has pleaded not guilty in the voting machines case.
DePerno’s post, which has been viewed more than six million times, said his review of Michigan’s Qualified Voter File — a voter records database that tracks ballot submissions — showed one voter ID had recorded a vote dozens of times at various addresses. DePerno added that the data in the spreadsheet showed over 160,000 excess ballots cast.
The Washington Post’s Matt Viser reports that Harris campaign insiders believe Trump’s MSG rally is in fact a factor in their favor:
Senior Harris campaign officials say campaign’s internal data show them winning by double digits among battleground state voters who made up their mind in the last week. Focus groups, officials say, show damage to Trump from [the] Madison Square Garden rally and Puerto Rico comments.
[The] Harris campaign clearly views [the] Madison Square Garden rally as a turning point among late-breaking undecided voters, in ways that’s giving them confidence in the final days. “It really broke through,” senior campaign official says. “It’s helped gel their feeling about this race.”
In my new interview with Real Clear Politics analyst Sean Trende, I ask him about the potential herding phenomenon:
There’s also been some talk of pollster “herding” recently, the idea that all these surveys come out and they show nearly exactly the same thing. Do you see any evidence that that’s happening? Are people worried that they’re going to get it so wrong again that they’re not revealing their true numbers?
There’s some of that. It’s a one-way attitude because the biggest penalty of the four outcomes is saying “Trump’s going to win,” and he loses. If you say Harris is going to win, and she loses, you’ve told a lot of people in media circles what they wanted to hear, and so they’re mad you’re wrong. But if you say Trump’s going to win and he loses, you’re a laughingstock.
Read the rest here.
From my new report on how Democrats and the Harris campaign are currently feeling:
That feeling is largely based on the campaign’s close monitoring of early voting data from the seven battleground states, and its evolving understanding of who has already cast ballots and who’s left to convince. The posture is driven both by reports from the field, especially from canvassers in competitive suburbs, and by senior advisers staring at the analytics in Wilmington. It’s far from a prediction of a win. Instead, it’s a belief that Harris maintains achievable paths to winning a majority or plurality of the vote in the tightly contested states — each of which they see as effectively tied, and almost all of which they see as home to a Democratic advantage in get-out-the-vote operations.
And as multiple high-ranking Harris staffers said this week, they’ll take the queasy confidence to power them through their physical and emotional exhaustion. …
The campaign and its allies believe that Harris will have to win by a smaller margin than she and Biden got four years ago. In Pennsylvania, the biggest of the three “blue wall” states that can deliver her victory, strategists and activists have been quietly chattering about a likely margin of victory in the range of 20-to-25,000 votes — about a quarter of the size of Biden’s win. In Nevada, the contest will be “very close, it will be razor thin,” predicts the influential Culinary Union leader Ted Pappageorge. “We think it’s going to be like 2020,” when Biden won by around 140,000 votes, “just closer.” And when the Democratic super-PAC Priorities crunched its numbers at one point last week and projected them to Election Day, it foresaw a Harris win, but that the states would be perilously tight. The group’s leaders cautioned that the numbers were just a projection based on a snapshot of data, and not a prediction. But they showed Harris taking Nevada by fewer than 6,000 votes and losing Georgia by fewer than 1,000. In that analysis, not one battleground would be decided by more than 100,000: It had Trump winning both Arizona and North Carolina by around 40,000 and Harris taking Wisconsin by 52,000, Pennsylvania by 63,000, and Michigan by just over 90,000.
Read the rest here.
ABC News reports that Kennedy, who has repeatedly promoted falsehoods about vaccines, is recommending a known vaccine skeptic to serve in a future Trump administration:
Kennedy, who has spent years fueling mistrust around safe vaccines, has recommended Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to Trump’s transition team as a candidate for the position of United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, multiple sources told ABC News.
Sources close to Trump’s transition operation say the recommendation is being taken seriously and the team working on the transition is expected to vet Ladapo, who was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, for the position.
Ladapo, who has led Florida’s Health Department since 2021, was accused of promoting misinformation earlier this year when he called for a halt of the use of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. He’s also previously warned against receiving booster shots of those vaccines.
LOL:
J.D. Vance broached a variety of topics during his more than three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan released Thursday.
On the subject of transgender rights, Vance was strongly against the idea of athletes competing on teams matching their gender identity, saying that he worried about his own daughter one day being “bludgeoned to death because we’re allowing a six-foot-one male to compete with her in sports.”
Vance also suggested that parents might allow their kids to transition for the chance of better college prospects:
“If you are a, you know, middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like, obviously, that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids,” Mr. Vance told Mr. Rogan. “But the one way that those people can participate in the D.E.I. bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.”
The senator also indicated that he might hold some anti-vaccine tendencies, a growing trend in conservative spaces:
“The moment where I really started to get redpilled on the whole vax thing was, the sickest I had been in the last 15 years, by far, was when I took the vaccine,” Vance said. “I’ve had Covid at this point five times, I was in bed for two days, my heart was racing.”
He added, “The fact that I was as sick as I had ever been was two days, and the worst COVID experience I had was like a sinus infection. I’m not really willing to trade that.”
At one point, Vance sought to draw a connection between one’s politics and one’s testosterone level:
“Well, have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics? So, maybe that’s what’s going on…Maybe that’s why the Democrats want us all to be, you know, poor health and overweight, because that means you’re going to be – no, it means we’re going to be more liberal, right? If you make people less healthy, they apparently become more politically liberal.”
Vance also joked that he wanted to hang out with Hunter Biden, saying that he would bet money that Hunter and Joe Biden both voted for Trump:
“The one thing that Republicans, man, that I think we got really wrong in the last few years is the anti-Hunter Biden stuff. I want to go hang out with Hunter Biden! I mean, I may be the only Republican. That dude knows how to have a good time.”
Politico notes that the president has more campaign events planned today and tomorrow in Pennsylvania:
The official event will focus on Biden’s “historic support for unions,” leaning on the president’s deep ties to Pennsylvania to help bolster working-class turnout for Vice President Kamala Harris in a state she likely needs to win to have a shot at the presidency.
But it will also mark Biden’s first extended public remarks since the ill-fated Voto Latino call where he made his “garbage” remark, sparking days of debate over whether he was talking about all of Trump’s supporters or just one supporter — comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who had previously insulted Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage.” …
After Philadelphia, Biden is instead scheduled for an appearance in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. But that’s expected to be a smaller event — and one that Harris officials are hopeful won’t pull any more focus away from the vice president’s closing sprint through the battleground states.
She and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro are in a new 30-second television ad, sitting side by side. “I’ve known her for two decades. She’s practical, and she gets stuff done,” Shapiro says.
North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, who is said to be a close friend of Harris’s, cut his own solo ad for his home state. “She’ll lower costs, fix the broken border, and help North Carolina rebuild from the storm. I trust Kamala to fight for us,” Cooper says.
It shouldn’t be hard. Interesting, super-detailed chart, however:
The final Detroit Free Press poll of likely Michigan voters has Harris leading Trump by 3 percent, though that figure does fall within the margin of error. The survey features some positive signs for her performance with Black voters in the state:
A series of new polls from Marist College show three pivotal battleground states currently leaning in Harris’s favor. In Pennsylvania, Harris leads Trump 50 percent to 48 percent. In Michigan, the margin slightly increases with Harris ahead of Trump 51 percent to 48 percent. And finally, in Wisconsin, Harris holds 50 percent to Trump’s 48 percent.
The Musk-backed America PAC is running a significant number of the Trump campaign’s canvassing efforts in states like Arizona and Nevada. However, questions continue to emerge about the quality of the group’s ground game and whether some of the door-knockers actually submitted fraudulent entries. NBC News spoke to nine Republican operatives with ties to America PAC who described some of the internal issues:
In particular, they raised concerns about canvassers’ submitting an inordinate amount of suspect data. That data, some of which NBC News has reviewed, includes entries submitted far from the home or while canvassers are logged into Wi-Fi networks — telltale signs that a door was not knocked on, sources said. In addition, a video explaining how to “spoof” one’s location while submitting data drew attention in Nevada and Arizona, raising further concerns.
“I know it’s been flagged for America PAC that this has been transpiring,” an operative formerly on the effort said.
During an appearance with Tucker Carlson Thursday night, Trump said of Cheney, “She’s a radical war hawk — let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?” Trump said. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump’s words were quickly seen by many as a veiled threat against Cheney, who voted for his conviction following January 6 and has continued to voice her opposition to his candidacy. Harris spokesman Ian Sims condemned the former president’s words. “Think about the contrast between these two candidates: You have Trump talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad — and you have VP Harris talking about sending one to her Cabinet. This is the difference in this race,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Cheney herself also weighed in:
This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.
Trump is scheduled to hold two rallies in the Midwest on Friday: one in Warren, Michigan, and the other in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Harris is also due to hold a rally in Milwaukee featuring musical performances from GloRilla, Flo Milli, MC Lyte, and the Isley Brothers as well as remarks from Cardi B. She’ll also be holding a smaller event in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Tim Walz will be crisscrossing Michigan, making stops in Detroit, Flint, and Traverse City.
J.D. Vance will stump for the Trump campaign at a rally in Portage, Michigan, as well as another in Selma, North Carolina.
The AP reports that the official White House stenographers objected to the White House press office inserting an apostrophe to Biden’s “only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters” line so it said “supporter’s”:
The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”
The president’s comment, which he quickly sought to clarify, has caused a big stink. At Trump’s rally in Henderson, Nevada, on Thursday night, a number of attendees came dressed in neon-yellow safety vests like the one Trump wore Wednesday during a garbage-truck photo op prompted by Biden’s remark.
A video that purportedly shows a Haitian man admitting to voting in multiple Georgia counties is fake, Brad Raffensperger says, and he’s calling for X and other platforms to help counter it:
At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein lays out how white voters could make the difference:
[T]he pattern of differences among white, Black, and Latino voters found in most of those national surveys show how Harris could still potentially capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory—even if she wins the nationwide popular vote by much less than Biden did in 2020, and possibly by only about the same margin that Clinton got in 2016.
The principal reason is that these recent polls show Trump making most of his gains in national support by performing better among Black and, especially, Latino voters than he did in either of those previous elections. Even the most favorable surveys for Trump consistently find Harris polling very close to Biden’s level of support in 2020 among white voters, which had improved over Clinton’s performance with that group by several points. In other words, Harris will likely rely a bit more on white voters than her party’s past two nominees did.
That subtle shift is the crucial distinction from the earlier contests. It could allow Harris to scrape a win by sweeping the predominantly white, former “Blue Wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, even if Trump improves over his prior popular-vote results by gaining among Black and Latino voters (and Black and Latino men in particular).
Read the rest here.
First off, the latest update from the super-stressed-out Jon Ralston in Nevada, where more than 876,000 people have already voted, and Republicans currently have a 42,000-ballot lead:
This year is different in many ways, but most obviously in that for the first time in The Reid Machine Era (2008 and forward), the Republicans are the ones banking votes in a presidential year, establishing a firewall to try to fend off a Democratic comeback and put themselves in the best position since W won the state in 2004. So the analysis is the opposite of what it usually is: Can the Dems overcome the deficit and what would that look like in the models?
The Dems held their own, even won Clark County for the first time by a little Wednesday. But can they, as they traditionally do, fare well in the last two days of early voting and will the postman, who has been running twice every day, have an overflowing satchel of mail? The share of the vote held by indies also keeps increasing, which should help the Dems, but is it enough?
My gut and the data/history tell me it could be close. But I tend to agree with GOP operative Jeremy Hughes, who posits that if the final GOP ballot lead gets much over 25,000, big trouble for Dems in trying to turn around this battleship[.]
The Harris campaign thinks it can still win the state, USA Today’s Joey Garrison reports on X:
Harris campaign remains confident the spike in Rs voting early is simply cannibalizing Rs’ Election Day vote. Per campaign officials: In NV, the # of R early voters who previously voted on Election Day is nearly 3X the # of D early voters who previously voted Election Day.
Politico reports that in Pennsylvania, early vote data indicates Trump is behind Harris with seniors (a demographic he won in 2020):
In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans. That’s despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older.
The partisan gap is narrower than it was in 2020, when views of early voting were more partisan, and Republicans take that as a good sign. But the GOP still is counting on more of its older voters to show up on Election Day, while Democrats have more votes in the bank.
The data is in line with polling in the state that has shown Trump shedding support among older voters.
The AP reports:
Donald Trump is set to visit Dearborn – the nation’s largest Arab-majority city – on Friday, according to a local business owner who first insisted the former president call for peace in Lebanon before hosting him. Metro Detroit is home to nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans, with a large chunk of them living in Dearborn. The city – which President Joe Biden won by a 3-to-1 margin – has been roiled by political turmoil, with many upset with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
In his new interview with Joe Rogan, J.D. Vance expressed his fear that Muslims would, as Rogan put it, “outbreed” non-Muslims and put Sharia in place:
Where you see actual, real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you’ve had a large influx of
immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into western values, but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level.
And the battleground polling averages, as of this evening:
The Washington Post reports that Kennedy “is poised to have significant control over health and food safety in a potential Trump administration, with discussions about some Cabinet and agency officials reporting to him, according to four people familiar with the planning process.”
It’s not “firmly decided” yet, the Post’s sources say, but it certainly seems to be on track, and in such a way that Kennedy could avoid Senate confirmation:
Kennedy has been privately meeting with Trump transition officials to help draw up an agenda for a new administration, which could involve the longtime anti-vaccine activist taking a role as a White House czar rather than attempting to win Senate confirmation to lead an agency, the people said. Kennedy and his advisers have also been drafting 30-, 60- and 90-day plans for what they would like to accomplish after Trump is inaugurated, according to one person familiar with the planning process.
At his MSG rally on Sunday, Trump said he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health, food, and medicines.
Have some sympathy for everyone who lives in one of the seven swing states. Per AdImpact, there is still $484 million in reserved space for political ads between today and Election Day. The Wall Street Journal’s John McCormick adds that GOP’s battleground spots have been the more negative ones:
Roughly 38% of all broadcast TV ads run in those seven states by the presidential campaigns and their allies were negative in tone in October, according to ratings assigned by AdImpact. Republicans were more likely to be negative than Democrats, 46% to 31%. Less than 2% of GOP-aligned ads were positive in tone, compared with 19% for Democrats. The rest of the spots were rated as contrast ads, which are a sort of mix of negative and positive.
Trump held a rally in the non-swing state today. It’s also not a state Trump has won before, but he told the crowd in Albuquerque he believed he was undefeated there, ABC News reports:
Trump claimed he won New Mexico in both of his previous presidential runs and that votes from New Mexico were “rigged” – despite Hillary Clinton winning by more than 8 points in 2016 and President Joe Biden winning the state by more than 10 points in 2020.
“I’m only here for one reason. They all said, ‘Don’t come.’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘You can’t win.’ I said, ‘Look, your votes are rigged.’ We can win New Mexico. We can win New Mexico,” Trump said. …
“So, you know, we almost won it twice. And let me tell you, I believe we won it twice. Okay?” he said
He also said he was there because “I love the Hispanics”:
New Mexico, look, don’t make me waste a whole damn half a day here. Look, I came here. We can be nice to each other or we can talk turkey. I’m here for one simple reason: I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community. … I love the Hispanics. I love them. I love Hispanics.
The NBA star, who also backed Biden in 2020, posted a video on his social-media channels:
“Donald Trump, you never see him around strong, intelligent women ever,” the billionaire Harris backer said Thursday during an appearance on The View. The Trump campaign quickly seized on the gaffe, suggesting he was saying no such women support Trump. Trump-campaign adviser Susie Wiles tweeted back at Cuban, “Here we are! I’ve been proud to lead this campaign.”
Cuban later posted on X that he was only referring to the absence of Nikki Haley from Trump’s campaign events:
I’m happy to clarify that
1. I know many strong, intelligent women voting for Trump. Including in my extended family. I’m certainly not saying female voters are not smart , strong and intelligent.
2. I know he has worked with strong intelligent women, like Elaine Chao, Kelly Anne [sic], Ivanka and many others
Chief Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, citing the Real Clear Politics polling average, says that Trump is way better off now than he was four years ago. Per Axios:
The memo, addressed to “TEAM TRUMP,” has the subject line: “PRESIDENT TRUMP IS ON THE VERGE.”
Fabrizio draws on Real Clear Politics polling averages to argue that Trump’s “position nationally and in every single Battleground State is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was 4 years ago.”
“I point this out NOT to stoke overconfidence or complacency, but to illustrate just how close this election is and that victory is within our reach,” the pollster adds. “But the fact remains that we still have a great deal of work to do. While the analysis of early and absentee vote returns in each state [is] promising, we know that the bulk of President Trump voters will vote on Election Day.”
Note: This is spin meant for public consumption.
Per the CNN-SSRS polls released midday Thursday:
Likely voters in Georgia divide 48% for Trump to 47% for Harris, and in North Carolina, Harris stands at 48% to Trump’s 47%. Results are within the margin of error in both states, suggesting no clear leader in either contest.
The results suggest little movement since CNN’s late-August poll of Georgia and late-September poll of North Carolina, both of which also found no clear leader in the race. An overwhelming 95% of likely voters in each state now say they’ve made up their minds about their vote, leaving a dwindling pool of potentially movable voters, although one that’s still large enough to swing the race either way. More than half of the likely electorate in both Georgia (59%) and North Carolina (52%) say they’ve already cast their ballots, with those voters splitting narrowly toward Harris by a 7-point margin in Georgia and by 6 points in North Carolina.
The polls also found that solid majorities of people were voting to support their candidate, rather than to oppose the other one:
In both states, roughly two-thirds of Harris backers – 69% in Georgia and 67% in North Carolina – say they’re mostly voting to support her, rather than to oppose Trump. That’s a higher share than in CNN’s latest polling in the other five battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where the average share hovers closer to 60%. Much of the difference is due to Harris’ Black supporters in Georgia and North Carolina, about 8 in 10 of whom say their vote is largely an endorsement of the vice president. That’s the case even as Black registered voters are less likely than White registered voters in both states to describe themselves as “extremely motivated” to vote.
Broad majorities of Trump backers in both states – 81% in Georgia and 75% in North Carolina – say their vote is primarily about support for the former president, rather than opposition to Harris. That’s similar to the share of Trump backers saying the same in other battleground states.
In a Washington Post column, Philip Bump argues that Trump’s comment on Thursday night — “Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them” — inadvertently “distilled the wide gender gap that’s defining the 2024 presidential contest”:
We can summarize the decision that led to the reversal of Roe using Trump’s pithy framework: In some states, women are unable to end their pregnancies, whether they like it or not. Whether it poses a risk to their own health or not. …
Probably in part because women — particularly women of color and college-educated suburban women — have long been skeptical of him, Trump’s campaign has been acutely focused on appealing to men, particularly young men who might generally be indifferent to the political process. This has sparked some concern from Republican women, such as former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who responded to Trump’s New York City rally by lamenting the “bromance” that Trump is fostering and calling it “overly masculine.”
But others have leaned into a paternalistic and chauvinistic approach to getting Trump elected. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently promised a cheering Trump audience that Trump would return to the White House like an abusive father, ready to dispense corporal punishment to get his children — that is, Americans who deviate from how Trumpworld thinks they should act — back in line. Jesse Watters, the Fox host who filled Carlson’s slot, said on a different show that he would view his wife voting for Harris as an act of marital infidelity. …
This is an admittedly odd thing to be discussing in 2024, more than a century after women gained the right to vote. But the overlap of a robust, well-established base of support for Trump that’s centered on stoking the grievances of (mostly) White (mostly) men with the candidacy of a Black woman in the post-Roe world has revived some arguments that not too long ago would have seemed laughably archaic.
Read the rest here.
Once the polls close on Tuesday evening, the two campaigns will be taking in the election returns in locations very dear to the candidates. Harris will spend Election Night at Howard University in Washington, D.C., her alma mater. As for Trump, his campaign is expected to hold an election watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida, not far from his residence at Mar-a-Lago.
I spoke with Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, who has long covered politics in the state, about how things look for Harris there. She says so far there’s not much for Democrats to like in early vote data:
Obviously that could change. But given the registration advantage that Republicans have and just the vibe and the economy, I’m not convinced that Harris has closed the deal with these voters. They don’t seem to be as fired up as her campaign and national Democrats would have liked. They are definitely panicking. No one can figure out what’s going on. Most people think that Democrats are holding onto their ballots because the ballots are longer than they’ve been in about 20 years — we have two pages front and back. It is a daunting, time-consuming task. But all that’s to say, Republicans are getting theirs back — they’re doing the job — and Democrats aren’t.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Vance on Rogan: ‘Fight or flight’ after Trump assassination attempt, ‘normal gay guy’ vote, and Emily in Paris
J.D. Vance’s sit-down with podcaster Joe Rogan is out, and parts of the more than three-hour-long conversation quickly made the rounds on social media.
In one section, Vance revealed that Trump had considered announcing his vice-presidential decision on July 13 during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, but ultimately decided against it. Instead, Vance, his eventual pick, was spending that day with his family in Ohio when he learned that there had been an attempt on Trump’s life. According to the senator, he initially thought Trump had been killed.
“At first, I was so pissed. But then I go into fight-or-flight mode with my kids. I’m like, ‘All right, kids.’ We were at a mini-golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grab my kids up, throw them in the car, go home, and load all my guns and basically stand like a sentry at my front door,” he said. “That was sort of my reaction to it.”
In another moment, Vance made a play for what he called the “normal gay guy vote,” a remark that has already been shared by the Harris campaign’s social accounts. “I think that, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won the normal gay guy vote because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone and now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it.
Vance also reportedly expressed an affinity for the Netflix TV show Emily in Paris.
At Curbed, Nick Fraccaro investigates the feral-cat colony that has taken up residence at Trump’s childhood home in Jamaica Estates, Queens:
The former president’s Rosebud, a warm childhood memory, is now more like Grey Gardens. On a visit earlier this week, a sign that reads “DO NOT TAKE KITTENS FROM THIS PROPERTY” hid a scraggly gray tabby that scowled, then darted away. Neighbors say the address is now a refuge for an estimated 20 to 30 feral cats, fed by a volunteer. (Nobody is eating the cats or the pets of the people that live there.) The pungent smell in the front yard is now as off-putting as the creaky gothic metaphor the place has become; the mailbox is stuffed with overdue bills, the doorknob is smashed, and cobwebs have taken over the windows.
The lawn has grown haggard — after neighbors called the city to complain, someone who called himself an employee of the owner has come out occasionally to mow. Bagged dog feces tossed by passersby sit on the front doorstep, and long-faded notices from the Department of Buildings and utilities companies, tacked to the entryway, flutter in the wind. The shrubs are overgrown.
Read the rest of Nick’s report, including what frustrated neighbors are trying to do about the problem, here.
Harris is set to hold a Monday rally at the Philadelphia Art Museum — spending the last night before Election Day in the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania. And speculation is already growing about whether the vice-president might be joined by one of her most high-profile supporters: Taylor Swift.
Swift, who is a Pennsylvania native, is scheduled to perform in Indianapolis November 1 through 3 but notably has a break in her tour schedule until she plays in Toronto on November 14. The pop superstar announced her endorsement of Harris in September in an Instagram post that currently holds 11.4 million likes on the platform.
For now, there’s no word as to who, if anyone, will be appearing at the scheduled rally. Though Swift’s tour schedule could allow for an appearance, she could potentially have another stop on the docket. Swift is a frequent attendee of home games for the Kansas City Chiefs, the team her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays for — and the reigning Super Bowl champs are scheduled to play Monday night at home.
The 2020 election became defined by the furious push to overturn its result. Now, with less than a week to go before Election Day, conspiracy theories and debunked claims are already playing a role in the 2024 presidential race. Election officials told CNN that they have struggled to combat the deluge of misinformation about the general election and the voting process in their respective states coming from Elon Musk and his social-media platform, X:
Election officials in pivotal battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona have all tried — and largely failed — to fact-check Musk in real time. At least one has tried passing along personal notes asking he stop spreading baseless claims likely to mislead voters.
“I’ve had my friends hand-deliver stuff to him,” said Stephen Richer, a top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, a Republican who has faced violent threats for saying the 2020 election was secure.
“We’ve pulled out more stops than most people have available to try to put accurate information in front of (Musk),” Richer added. “It has been unsuccessful.”
In light of the holiday, the Harris campaign released a Halloween-themed digital ad aimed at Trump. Titled “The Creature From the Orange Lagoon,” the minute-long clip is stylized like a classic horror-film trailer, with the narrator describing Trump as “a creature with orange leathery skin” that admires dictators and spreads racist lies.
This seems like overkill, but at least plywood purveyors will get some extra cash:
On Monday, Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, filed a lawsuit through Pennsylvania state court challenging the legality of Musk awarding random battleground-state voters with $1 million through his super-PAC. But for now, that matter has been placed on hold. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Krasner’s claim will be paused as Musk’s legal team seeks to move the case to federal court, an action the district attorney called “frivolous.” Musk himself was not present at the Thursday-morning hearing held at Philadelphia City Hall, despite being ordered to attend.
It was earlier this month that Musk announced that he would be giving away $1 million a day until Election Day to a registered voter in a battleground state who signed his PAC’s petition pledging support for the First and Second Amendments.
The Harris campaign is looking to keep comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s Trump rally joke calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” on voters’ minds up through Election Day. The Washington Post reports that the campaign will be airing a new Spanish-language ad centered on the remark and linking it to Trump, backing it with a six-figure ad buy. The ad will air in battleground states and is slated to run on Univision and Telemundo as well as Snapchat and YouTube.
While Harris and her allies have homed in on the remark since Sunday, Trump has attempted to grab onto a gaffe made by President Joe Biden in response to Hinchcliffe, where he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.” Biden has disputed this interpretation, while Harris distanced herself from the comments. On Wednesday, Trump put on a neon-orange vest and rode around in a garbage truck during a campaign stop in Wisconsin in an attempt to highlight Biden’s words.
The unearthing of the Access Hollywood tape in 2016 was an October surprise like no other, sending shockwaves through the political world and briefly made most pundits write Trump’s campaign off for dead. But as Vox reports, many young voters who are casting their ballots this year and are having to make a choice between Trump and Harris are discovering the clip for the first time:
Now, Gen Z’s new voters are rediscovering the infamous Access Hollywood tape, with some hearing it in full for the first time. Young TikTokers are making videos reacting with somber faces to the audio of Trump’s tape, grimacing as he gets to the infamous line, “Grab ’em by the pussy.” The most popular one has nearly 1 million views.
“This is actually soooo crazyyy,” a commenter marvels on one such video. Another adds, “why is this not blown up more?!” Another: “I can’t even process this.” Dozens and dozens of them say: “Boost.” You can tell that the legions of new viewers and commenters think the tape is important and they want more people to see it, because it’s one of those Trump things the rest of us have mostly stopped talking about.
Both presidential candidates are going west on Thursday.
Harris will be making stops in Phoenix as well as Reno and Las Vegas. She’ll will be joined at her Vegas stop by Jennifer Lopez, and the event will feature a performance from the band Maná.
Trump is set to hold rallies in Albuquerque and Henderson, New Mexico, as well as a hurricane benefit event with Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona.
As for their running mates, they’re sticking to the East Coast this Halloween. Tim Walz is rallying in Bucks County and Erie in Pennsylvania. J.D. Vance will be taking part in a Turning Point USA town-hall event at High Point University in North Carolina.
This post has been updated a lot.
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