Americana

1. Harris courts the anti-Trump right
2. Jack Smith enters the chat
3. Obama’s campaign blitz
4. Hurricane misinformation
5. GOP mail vote push

Also: Inside a new poll of Arab-American voters

Kamala Harris has far more labor endorsements than Donald Trump, but fewer than the campaign would like — or that Democrats think they deserve. On Thursday, the International Association of Fire Fighters narrowly voted against making a presidential endorsement, two weeks after the International Brotherhood of Teamsters sat out the race. In both cases, union leaders who had been adamantly pro-Biden four years ago had been replaced during his presidency, while Donald Trump courted their members, and made gains.

That’s prompted a question that Democrats may have to answer after the election. What’s wrong with “deliverism,” the theory that voters who don’t like the party now can be swayed if the party actually gives them something? In the Obama years, Democrats learned that conservative voters who were getting Medicaid or affordable care for the first time didn’t thank them for it; in the Biden years they’ve learned that supporting labor unions and their demands (like funding pensions and infrastructure) can’t stop the migration of working class voters from an increasingly college-educated, culturally progressive party. And they may have to look elsewhere for their win margins.

Harris courts the disaffected Republican vote

Before Kamala Harris shared a Wisconsin stage with Liz Cheney, a group of former Nikki Haley supporters told her presidential campaign how she could close the deal with frustrated Republicans.

Harris could “emphasize ironclad support for Israel’s security.” She might “commit to appointing at least one reasonable Republican to a high-level Cabinet position.” And why not talk about “energy dominance,” after picking a “moderate” running mate?

The Haley Voters Working Group didn’t get everything on the list; Harris bypassed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, picking the more progressive Tim Walz as her running mate. But this week, Harris campaigned with Cheney, and Walz told a debate audience that she’d have an “an all [of the] above energy policy” and keep “producing more natural gas and more oil.” Harris said in her first major interview in August that she’d include a Republican in her cabinet.

Mission accomplished. To the frustration of progressive Democrats, most of them biting their tongues until the election, the Harris-Walz campaign entered the election’s final stretch with the party’s most conservative messaging in years on multiple fronts.

Jack Smith shows his hand

New details about Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election were revealed on Wednesday, after Judge Tanya Chutkan released much of special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page brief.

For the first time, prosecutors revealed what Trump had been doing when he tweeted that Vice President Mike Pence lacked the “courage” to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory; he was in a White House dining room, watching a Fox News interview with a supporter near the Capitol who was furious with Pence.

“When he learned that Vice President Pence was not going to abandon his oath and help Trump seize power, Trump sent out a tweet attacking and further inflaming the mob,” Liz Cheney said at her Thursday rally with Harris — the only time the Democratic campaign commented on the filing this week.

More of the document focused on what Trump’s allies and campaign staff attempted to do, encouraging grassroots Republicans to disrupt a vote count that was going against him. “Make them riot!” Trump election day operations director Mike Roman told one colleague, who worried that sending Republican activists to the vote count in Detroit would get out of hand.

The Trump campaign was less hesitant to discuss Smith’s work than Democrats were. In an interview with NewsNation, Trump denounced the release as “election interference” and “weaponization of the government,” carried out by a “deranged” prosecutor. The same day, former Mesa County, Col. election clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison for meddling with voting machines, in an effort to prove that the election had been stolen.

Barack Obama returns to the fray

Barack Obama plunged into the general election on Friday, announcing a coming campaign stop in Pittsburgh and cutting ads for three Senate candidates.

The first straight-to-camera Obama videos went up in Maryland, Michigan, and Florida – one state he won by a landslide, and two he never lost. In the Maryland spot, the former president praised nominee Angela Alsobrooks and warned that ex-Gov. Larry Hogan could lock in a GOP majority, amplifying the party’s messaging as a pro-Hogan super PAC steps up its ad buys. In a video for Florida voters, Obama calls nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell “a woman who can make your life better.”

Republicans were dismissive. “A Democrat president endorsed a bunch of Democrats,” said NRSC spokesperson Mike Berg. “It is truly shocking.” But Democrats have strategically deployed the popular former president in key races ever since he left office, a source of irritation to Trump, who sometimes compares his endorsement win record to Obama’s. On Saturday, Trump will return to Butler, Pa., the site of a failed assassination attempt on him this summer, joined by JD Vance and Elon Musk. The following Thursday, Obama will campaign less than an hour away, in Pittsburgh, for the Democratic ticket.

October surprise watch

Trump and Republican allies looked for political advantage in two crises this week — the ongoing aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and a strike by port workers that was suspended until January.

The strike paused before it could roil the 2024 campaign, and before Trump had much to say about it. On Wednesday, Harris issued a statement supporting the strikers and criticizing Trump’s labor record; by Thursday, the Biden administration had helped negotiate the delay. But on Fox News, where the strike was covered as a potential election-swinging crisis, the resolution was covered more darkly. “We should never have been here in the first place, and the Biden-Harris economy helped get us here,” prime time host Laura Ingraham told viewers on Thursday night.

The network spent more time covering the hurricane’s aftermath, and Trump’s insistence that the Biden administration was sabotaging the recovery to hurt rural Americans. “They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants who they want to have vote for them,” Trump told a crowd in Saginaw, Mich. Elon Musk advanced that theory in an X post: “FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.” Both were incorrect, but Trump, as president, had actually moved some FEMA resources to immigration enforcement, during the congressional impasse over border security and wall funding.

The White House and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper — the only Democratic governor of a hurricane-affected state — saw a wave of misformation growing online. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has been abandoned by national Republicans in the wake of a CNN investigation into his online posts, claimed that the state wasn’t using aircraft to help residents and that Cooper hadn’t mobilized resources because he was at a fundraiser. Neither claim was true. The most brazen example, though, came from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was already notorious for weather-based conspiracy theories: “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Q&A: Cliff Maloney wants Republicans to vote by mail

“We’re finally catching up to the Democrats,” says Cliff Maloney. “This is straight out of their playbook, right?” Maloney, CEO of the conservative campaign group Citizens Alliance, set out last year to fix the Republicans’ mail vote problem. He launched the Pennsylvania Chase, hiring door-to-door canvassers to nudge the nearly 400,000 Republican voters who requested absentee ballots but hadn’t turned them in yet.

“You can use 501c4 money, based on the FEC’s ruling, to do these types of ballot chases,” Maloney said. Anonymous donors had funded his campaign “to crush commies,” and he was implementing it, confident that he could make a Harris win impossible if he did it right.

“Nobody targeted them,” Maloney said of the potential voters he was chasing. “Democrats go to the doors of people that have a ballot, and they have a message for that type of voter. We had none of that. But I’ve knocked 6 million doors for our programs, and these are the simplest doors I’ve ever had to knock.”

Polls

One year after the Hamas attack on Israel, and the start of the Gaza conflict, Donald Trump is doing better than ever with Arab-American voters — but Kamala Harris is doing better than Joe Biden. A previous edition of “Yalla Poll,” conducted for the Arab-American Institute, found Biden collapsing from 59% with those voters to just 13% after the war began. Support for a third party option surged; the number of undecided voters jumped from 4% to 25%. Harris has recovered the undecided voters and sliced into third party support, despite not suggesting any change from Biden’s policy on Israel. Trump’s support barely budged, from 40% to 42%. That’s still better than he’s ever done with this electorate, and pollster John Zogby warned on a Wednesday call that “if something’s not done rather decisively, Democrats could kiss Michigan goodbye.” Still: Stein and West have campaigned aggressively for this vote, both rallying with Michigan-based “Abandon Biden” activists at the DNC, and gained little for it.

The days of Democrats putting away Wisconsin elections in the summer — Barack Obama in 2008, Tammy Baldwin in 2018 — may be over. Republican PACs have put fresh resources into the Senate race, encouraged by how Hovde survived a summer ad barrage. But the state’s benchmark pollster continues to find a narrow Democratic lead based on two trends: A narrowing Trump advantage on who’d best handle the economy, and a slight Democratic advantage on which candidate seems more concerned about them. Trump’s economy lead, which hit 21 points when Biden led the Democratic ticket, is down to 7 points. Fifty-one percent of voters now say Harris shares their values, compared to 45% who say that of Trump. By a 10-point margin, more voters say that Baldwin “cares about people like me.”

Republicans haven’t been spending in New Hampshire; most ads that hit the state run in the expensive Boston media market, and there’s no sign that Trump can be competitive there. That makes for a decent test of how the parties are doing without top-of-the-ballot persuasion. The result looks identical to what’s happening in states where both campaigns are advertising heavily. Harris is most popular with women and people with post-high-school education, Trump’s biggest lead is on immigration, and the gap on who can better handle the economy has narrowed. New Hampshire voted to the left of the nation in 2020 and 2022, and Harris actually has a margin-of-error lead on the economy here, with no super PACs explaining why she does or doesn’t deserve to.

Ads

• Harris for President, “Matt McCaffrey.” Most paid ads by anti-Trump Republican super PACs use voter testimonials, not political speakers, to make their arguments. This is the Harris campaign’s version, featuring a yinzer with a thick accent who says he voted for Trump, went to his first inauguration, and decided that none of it worked. “All these billionaires are comin’ out of the woodwork to support Trump; well no shit, all they want are their tax breaks,” he says. It’s one of two McCaffrey ads now being cycled into Harris’s mostly-positive Pennsylvania buy.
• Protect Our Rights, “Two Votes.” Nebraska voters will see two abortion-related amendments on their November ballots. One would write the current 12-week ban into the state constitution; one, supported by abortion rights groups, would create a right to abortion until an unborn baby could survive outside the womb, typically after 24 weeks. Supporters of the second measure are worried about voter confusion, because the 12-week ban appears first on the ballot, and their main spot talks voters through it, with a red bubble for the first measure and a green for the second: “This combination ends the current government ban.”
• Congressional Leadership Fund, “Radical.” There are discs of enriched uranium with shorter half-lives than “defund the police.” Some Democrats are accused of supporting the idea because they endorsed it, some because their endorsers endorsed it. In this spot from the House GOP’s super PAC, Democrat Lanon Baccam’s appearance at a 2018 Netroots Nation panel called “Rural ≠ White,” about immigrants in rural America, is connected to a separate 2020 Netroots Nation panel, at which Movement for Black Lives organizer Karissa Lewis talked about defunding police. “These radicals have conventions,” explains a narrator — even though the 2018 convention was in New Orleans, the 2020 convention was held online, and there is no evidence of Baccam joining the latter.

Scooped!

One area where the Democrats’ working class pitch — that Joe Biden did what Trump only said he’d do — may be yielding more fruit is the auto industry. The UAW could not be not doing any more for Harris, and Trump’s attempt to hold a “union workers” rally in Michigan last year backfired, when reporters noticed how few attendees were actually organized. Trump’s best argument has been that Democrats over-indexed on electric vehicles, and Gavin Bade’s story in Politico about this is the one I wanted to read: “Many of those people Democrats are trying to woo are workers in an industry that still predominantly produces gas-powered vehicles, and they hold a deep affinity for the cars and trucks they drive.”

Next

• 32 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 74 days until the Electoral College votes

David recommends

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