Americana

1. The Muslim mayor supporting Trump
2. Omaha’s electoral vote survives
3. Mark Robinson turns radioactive
4. The Democratic fence-sitters
5. Harris and the filibuster

Also: Democrats look to turn Kelly Ayotte’s “Never Trump” moment against her.

When Donald Trump addressed the Israeli American Council this weekend, he mentioned “peace” twice — he’d brought it to the Middle East, he said — and “Gaza” zero times. “Chuck Schumer is a Palestinian,” Trump said, and he meant that as an insult. One day later, Trump was endorsed by the first-ever Muslim mayor of Michigan’s majority-Muslim city, Hamtramck, on the premise that he could bring an end to a war he rarely talks about in detail. How and why did that happen? It’s a story that says a lot about this entire campaign, from the rosier view voters now have of the Trump presidency to the GOP nominee’s ever-escalating promises to people he wants endorsements from.

How Trump scored a key Muslim mayor’s endorsement

How did the mayor of America’s only majority-Muslim city end up endorsing Donald Trump for president? It took weeks of outreach, a 20-minute meeting with the GOP nominee, a boost from Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, and an ad-libbed comment from Kamala Harris.

On Aug. 7, Harris’ rally on a Detroit-area airfield was interrupted by Arab-American protesters, demanding an “arms embargo and a free Palestine.” Harris shut them down instantly: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.” Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, a Democrat still serving his first term, couldn’t believe it.

“Let Kamala Harris finish her speech, so Netanyahu can finish his massacre and genocide!” he posted on his personal Facebook page. “Let those opportunists fall like the autumn leaves, one after another, to endorse her administration’s crimes.”

Later that month, the mayor attended a small gathering for the Arab-American community, organized by the Michigan GOP’s Lebanese-American outreach director, Rola Makki. Weeks later, he joined Trump in Flint before a rally, and the former president promised that he’d forge peace in the Middle East.

“Did I leave with promises that he will deliver on our requests? Of course not,” Ghalib wrote on Facebook; his post was published in Arabic, and translated to English by Semafor. “Trump showed that he understood the issue, and [showed] respect for us.”

On Sunday, Ghalib made his support official, backing a “man of principle” for president. Trump had won just 13% of the 2020 vote in his city; earlier this year, Hamtramck became the first city to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which Trump opposes. Still, as Democrats agonized over how to meet the demands of anti-war voters without a backlash from another part of the electorate, Trump pulled it off.

“This is kind of a f***-you endorsement for the Democrats,” said James Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute and an influential party activist. “It’s not so much that people have forgotten how bad Trump is. For some people, it’s about punishment.”

In the coming days, said Zogby, his organization will come out with polling that shows Arab-American voters split evenly between Trump and Harris, a steep Democratic decline since 2020 — despite a lack of detail, from Trump, about how he’d end the conflict in Gaza.

Trump’s push for a Nebraska electoral vote fizzles out

Nebraska Republicans halted their drive to change how the state awards electoral votes, after Sen. Mike McDonnell said that he would not support changing to a winner-take-all system before the November election.

McDonnell, a former Democrat who quit the party this year after a censure over his anti-abortion and LGBTQ-critical votes, had been the focus of GOP lobbying over the last week. To change the electoral vote process, Republicans needed votes from 33 senators in the unicameral legislature — enough to mark the change as emergency legislation, and break a promised Democratic filibuster. McDonnell balked, urging Republicans to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot if they wanted to alter the system, because “43 days from Election Day is not the moment to make this change.”

That halted, for now, a months-long campaign to take Omaha’s sole electoral vote off the map, which would have made it harder for Harris to win the presidency. Without it, if she were to win the Great Lakes swing states but lose Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada from the 2020 Biden map, she’d fall one vote short of an electoral majority. “Just another ‘Grandstander!’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Who knows, perhaps one of the others [sic] two Republicans that were a ‘NO’ Vote will change their minds.”

Republicans back away from Mark Robinson

Republicans started cutting their nominee for North Carolina governor loose this week, after it became clear that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson wouldn’t end his own campaign. Donald Trump didn’t mention Robinson at all during a Saturday rally in Wilmington, and JD Vance urged the media to move on to other topics, while avoiding any clear take on the stories surrounding the candidate. “A sex scandal in North Carolina is between the lieutenant governor and the people of North Carolina,” Vance told reporters at Central Piedmont Community College on Monday — just as the Republican Governors Association ended its ad spending.

Robinson, who canceled several events last week to deal with the impact of CNN reporting into his sexually explicit and Hitler-curious posts on the Nude Africa forum, returned to the trail with fresh attacks on the press. Echoing Vance, he picked up the argument he’d been making when Democrats went after sexist or offensive Facebook posts he’d made before seeking office in 2020.

“Make no mistake about it, we are not going to let CNN throw us off of our mission,” Robinson told reporters on Monday, after a retail stop in Boone. “Our mission is to win this race. I am coming after CNN full throttle.” Robinson confirmed that he’d lost multiple campaign staffers since the CNN report, and maintained that he didn’t write the posts, though the email associated with them had appeared on other explicit websites.

The red-state Democrats who haven’t endorsed Harris

Some Democrats in red or swing districts are still declining to endorse Kamala Harris for president — or even clarify whether they’ll vote against Donald Trump. Maine Rep. Jared Golden has said that he won’t endorse Harris, but will remain a Democrat; Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola didn’t support Harris at the DNC, and has said she’s keeping an “open mind” about the election.

In Missouri, Democratic US Senate nominee Lucas Kunce punted on two chances to endorse Harris — at a weekend debate with Sen. Josh Hawley, and in an interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker. “I didn’t get into the race to decide how other people vote for president,” Kunce told Welker, asked if he had ruled out voting for Trump. The Democrat had previously called Trump a “danger to the American people.”

On Tuesday, Hawley’s campaign began running a radio ad, in which two actors, excited about supporting Harris, marveled over the Democrat’s refusal to take a position: “Kunce comes into our community asking us for our vote, but he won’t tell us about his vote.” In a statement, Kunce campaign manager Caleb Cavarretta defended the position: “Josh Hawley might wish he was Donald Trump or that he was the one running for president, but he isn’t. Lucas Kunce has been clear that this race is about who will better deliver for Missourians and protect their freedom in the U.S. Senate: Him or Hawley.”

Harris kicks off a filibuster debate

Kamala Harris reiterated on Tuesday that she would end the filibuster to restore Roe v. Wade protections — and senators who opposed that idea two years ago came out again to criticize her.

Harris, who endorsed the idea of a filibuster carve-out in June 2022 along with President Biden, told Wisconsin Public Radio that she still wanted to “eliminate the filibuster for Roe.” West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who left the Democratic Party this year and will retire as an independent, told CNN that Harris was threatening “the Holy Grail of democracy,” and that he had now ruled out endorsing the vice president. “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology.”

Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema both opposed their party on a 2022 effort to break the filibuster for another carve-out — at that time, for elections and voting rights reforms. Montana Sen. Jon Tester, the most endangered Democrat seeking re-election this year, voted with his party in that instance. But on Tuesday, he told Semafor that the Senate needed to not eliminate the filibuster on specific legislation, but “to change the filibuster into a talking filibuster.” If Democrats have a shot at the Senate majority next year, it starts with re-electing Tester, as the party has essentially conceded Manchin’s seat.

Polls

On Monday morning, the Times/Siena polling operation released a trio of “sun belt” state polls that found a post-debate fall-off in Kamala Harris’ numbers. Republicans rejoiced; Democrats recalled why so many DNC speeches urged them not to panic about polls. The surveys explained how Trump could win swing states in the south and southwest, thanks to better favorable ratings than he enjoyed four years ago and his strength on the issues voters worried most about. By a 9-point margin, more voters remember Trump’s economy making it easier for them to live, and Trump has a 13-point lead on handling the economy going forward, nearly twice his lead on immigration.

One unsolved campaign mystery, especially in swing states: What are all the negative ads against Harris actually achieving? Multiple polls have found the vice president’s approval and favorable ratings jumping since the DNC, but NBC’s poll finds the most dramatic movement — not since 9/11, when millions of Americans suddenly swung behind George W. Bush, has a national figure’s image changed so drastically for the better. Democratic PACs have spent far more on positive ads about Harris than on negative ads about Trump, and one result is that the swing state voter’s TV and YouTube preroll diet includes attacks on the Democratic nominee, followed by sepia-toned spots about her life story.

Harris got a modest bump in support after the Sept. 10 debate, but a bigger boost in expectations. By a 10-point margin, Michigan voters say that they now expect Harris to win the election; by a 10-point margin, the same voters say that they’re worse off than they were in 2020. The Harris-Walz ticket is more personally popular than the Trump-Vance ticket, and Slotkin’s viewed more favorably than Rogers. But the same voters underrate how high Trump’s floor of support is amongst their neighbors, so long as a plurality of them (32% here) say the economy is their top issue.

Ads

• Osborn for Senate, “What’s on My Jacket.” It was an old Robin Williams joke: Politicians should wear patches, like NASCAR drivers, to make it clear who owns them. Dan Osborn, the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska, has spun that bit into a TV spot, pointing at an actor portraying Sen. Deb Fischer as she shows off the corporate logos on her jacket. “You’re gonna hear a lot about me from Deb’s donors,” says Osborn, bracketing some of the ads now airing in Nebraska, after a few polls showed Fischer under-performing Donald Trump in the state.
• Donald J. Trump for President, “Nonsense.” The Harris campaign has recanted some of the most progressive policies from her 2020 presidential bid, mostly through spokespeople. It’s never reversed her support of gender-related healthcare for transgender prisoners, a promise that the ACLU urged each Democrat to make that cycle. “Kamala’s for they/them,” groans a narrator, as the pledge is illustrated by footage of Harris with a drag queen and a photo of Sam Brinton, a nonbinary former Biden DOE official who resigned after stealing luggage. Neither Brinton nor the drag queen is transgender; the message is that Harris prioritizes LGBTQ people over “us.”
• New Hampshire Democratic Party, “Flip.” Eight years ago, Sen. Kelly Ayotte lost re-election by 1,017 votes, right after denouncing Donald Trump and saying she wanted “my daughter to know” that she’d done the hard thing. That comment dogged her in the long gubernatorial primary, even though she won easily. Democrats want to make it hurt in the general election, playing the clip of her 2016 decision next to a 2024 clip of the nominee joylessly confirming that she’ll vote for Trump: “You just can’t trust anything she says.”

Scooped!

While I was working on today’s story about Trump in Michigan, Democrats were going through it — Rep. Rashida Tlaib had attacked Attorney Gen. Dana Nessel over prosecutions of student protesters, and Nessel said that Tlaib’s attack had been antisemitic. The Anti-Defamation League piled on Tlaib, and in a CNN interview, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was asked about Tlaib accusing Nessel of acting on the protests “because she’s Jewish.” Tlaib had never said that and both CNN and the ADL issued clarifications later. In Zeteo, Prem Thakker broke down exactly what happened, a rigorous look at an issue ripping swing state Democrats apart.

Next

• seven days until the CBS News vice presidential debate
• 42 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 84 days until the Electoral College votes

David recommends

Andrew Callaghan’s on-the-ground interviews are fearless and nonjudgmental. News happens. He travels there with a crew. He talks to people. That’s it. “Aurora Migrant Gang ‘Takeover’” follows Callaghan to the Denver suburbs, where one short security camera video of armed men apparently extorting renters drove weeks of national news. Some traditional reporting uncovers the reason: A venal landlord, hiring a PR firm to create an irresistible distraction.

• “Murder boards” and a full mock debate: JD Vance is taking a different approach to the debates than Donald Trump.
• US ‘needs to get comfortable’ with exporting AI chips: Microsoft’s Brad Smith.
• Trump hack continued into last week.