Americana

1. Ruben Gallego’s Arizona formula
2. Tim Walz’s Michigan pitch
3. An overlooked ‘wild card’ vote
4. Gretchen Whitmer’s TikTok adventure
5. John Della Volpe on young voters

Also: The transgender air war between Ted Cruz and Colin Allred continues

For weeks, as soon as Kamala Harris inherited the Democratic nomination, Republicans worked the media refs and demanded she talk with reporters and voters. Sometimes their ask sounded desperate. (Remember when JD Vance demanded that Harris address a one-day dip in the stock market? No, you don’t.) Sometimes it clicked. This week, the Democratic ticket did more media hits, and took more voter questions, than at any other time in the race, even when Joe Biden was running.

So, how has it worked out? Republicans see a disaster unfolding, with Vance accusing Harris of “word salad” answers on policy questions, and Trump playing his rally crowds a clip of Harris telling The View that she would not have done anything differently than Biden. (The campaign has said it will cut ads on this, though none were airing on Friday.) They’ve gotten over their skis, too; the Trump campaign and several conservative media figures falsely accused Univision of giving Harris a teleprompter during her town hall on Thursday, even after the event’s producer denied that. (A quick cut showed “text written in Spanish” as “a support element for the town hall moderator,” not the answer Harris was giving a questioner.) And they tried to demand unedited transcripts of a 60 Minutes episode featuring Harris that opened with an extended explanation of Trump backtracking on his own agreement to appear.

Republicans got what they, and us in the media, wanted: A Democratic ticket fielding questions, even when they don’t advance the preferred message of the day. Democrats are getting, apart from that answer on The View, proof that Harris actually can think on her feet and a chance to draw more attention to their preferred topics when they can. Reporters wanted this because we want answers. Republicans wanted it because they believe that Harris and Tim Walz are intellectual featherweights who’ll be exposed and discredited. Meanwhile, you can ask them anything, except who won the 2020 election.

Why Ruben Gallego is outrunning Kamala Harris

PHOENIX — On Wednesday night, standing across a debate stage from Kari Lake, Rep. Ruben Gallego told Arizonans that he wanted to hire more ICE agents, expand the ranks of the border patrol, and keep funding “hundreds of miles” of border wall.

“A country doesn’t have a border it controls, it’s not a country,” said the Democratic nominee for Senate.

Twenty-four hours later, Gallego walked into a campaign cook-out with a case of Tecate beer. He grilled carne asada, rolled corn tortillas — “I’m half Colombian,” he explained when one broke in his hands — and joined a mariachi band to sing “El Rey.” And no one questioned how he’d talked about immigration.

“Some people — the consultants, the staff that are in these offices — have border security immigration viewpoints that are largely to the left of where most working class Latinos are,” Gallego told Semafor. “It’s helpful for me, coming from a working class Latino background, to be able to understand that, and feel comfortable going out and having that conversation.”

Gallego, who entered the Senate race after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema abandoned the Democratic Party, has built a consistent lead over Lake, out-fundraising her and getting more support from outside groups. He’s run consistently ahead of Kamala Harris, who has tried to do in a few weeks what he did over two years: Walk away from some progressive stances and rhetoric, especially on border security, without alienating his party’s left and while keeping the Latino voters polls show drifting toward Trump.

“Gallego is a perfect example of a super well-coached, well-funded, operative-driven campaign doing what’s necessary to win a state that’s increasingly center right,” said Charlie Kirk, the Arizona-based president of Turning Point Action, and a longtime supporter of Lake. “I hope people will wake up to it.”

The Michigan job wars

Tim Walz made the case that Donald Trump would undo the manufacturing gains of the last four years on Friday in Michigan. He also hit back at Trump for his warning that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” under a Harris presidency — while speaking in Detroit.

“City’s growing, crime’s down, factories are opening up,” Walz said in Warren. “But those guys, all they know about manufacturing is manufacturing bullshit every time they show up.”

It comes amid a fierce, multi-front partisan fight over labor, the auto industry, and industrial jobs in the state that’s prompted some chest-thumping from Republicans and anxiety among Democrats. Trump’s campaign is hopeful that they’ve made inroads with union voters, in part by putting Harris and Democrats on defense over their support for tax breaks and mileage standards to encourage the transition to electric vehicles, which polls show voters are skeptical towards. Trump visited the state and promised a quirky new tax deduction for car payments to spur demand (because most taxpayers take the standard deduction, many likely would not see a benefit).

But Democrats think they have an opening on this issue too, especially by highlighting how Republicans might take away the Inflation Reduction Act provisions that are designed to boost investment in the state. The Harris campaign has gone after JD Vance for criticizing a $500 million grant to retool an auto factory for electric vehicles — and keep 650 jobs in the state — as “table scraps.” They held a press call with UAW head Shawn Fain this week to warn that Trump would cause factory closures by taking them away. And they mocked Trump over a Vance event that featured attendees with “Auto workers for Trump” t-shirts who the Detroit News reported were not auto workers.

— Benjy Sarlin

The forgotten woman

The gender wars may be the simplest frame for the 2024 election — and older women are especially critical to whether Harris can win. AARP’s polling of the race in January and September with an oversample of women over 50 found the group was a “wild card” with one of the largest swings in Harris’ favor of any demographic, 9 points, to make the race newly competitive. And with Trump aggressively trying to run up the score with men, the margins could be especially critical: Public polling in swing states shows a potentially historic gender gap that either side could end up winning. Women over 50 are also a high-turnout group, which could be critical to offsetting Trump’s gains with younger men in some polls, whose participation is harder to predict.

“I think it will be fascinating if in this election where we feel like our country is so polarized, that we actually see the divides in how people vote by race shrink, and by age shrink, but by gender grow massively,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights, who conducted the surveys with Democratic pollster Margie Omero of GBAO Strategies, told reporters at a briefing on Thursday.

So what do women want? Contrary to popular belief, abortion was not the prime driver for their votes: Economic issues weighed heavily, with Trump holding an advantage on “the economy” but Harris beating him on managing specific issues like health care, taxes, and child care. While short-term expenses like groceries matter, the bigger anxieties are often more long-term issues like retirement savings and caregiving. Harris’ new plan for Medicare homecare benefits — and her choice to roll it out on The View — spoke to the campaign’s interest on winning over women who are in the “sandwich generation” and caring for kids and parents, or who are the recipients of such care themselves. Meanwhile, Trump’s longtime pledge to lay off Social Security and Medicare has helped Republicans manage one of their weakest points, Soltis Anderson said. He’s doing an all-women town hall on Fox News that airs Oct. 16.

— Benjy Sarlin

Gretchen Whitmer’s TikTok challenge

Republicans went to war Thursday over a progressive influencer’s interview with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, suggesting that she’d insulted Catholics by participating in an unrelated TikTok food trend.

Liz Plank, an originator of the “Hotties for Harris” influencer network, sat down with Whitmer for an interview that touched on the CHIPS Act; it included a gag, of Plank kneeling down and the governor feeding her a Dorito, as the Nelly song “Dilemma” played in the background. To their surprise, the conservative group Catholic Vote and multiple Republicans claimed that the video mocked the Eucharist.

“As a Catholic you see so much of this BS you can get numb to it but a Governor of a state openly mocking the sacrament of Holy Communion really is over the top,” Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt posted on X. Whitmer and Plank denied this completely. In a statement, a Whitmer aide said that “this popular trend has been used by countless people, including Billie Eilish, Kylie Jenner, and Stephen Colbert,” and that the video was a hit.

Plank explained her side in a statement to Semafor: “The ‘Feeding a Friend’ challenge has been used hundreds of thousands of times on TikTok by people of all different backgrounds and beliefs. It is a non-controversial trend on social media that has been used by some of the biggest names and celebrities to build engagement and promote things like ‘Chip Chat.’”

Q&A: John Della Volpe on the youth vote

Late last month, Harvard’s Institute of Politics released its Youth Poll — the 48th survey of 18 to 29-year-old voters, and the first to test Kamala Harris against Donald Trump. The result was spectacular for the Democratic nominee, a 31-point lead when minor candidates were included. It was a dramatic example of how the vice president had fixed some of the Democratic problems left behind by Joe Biden.

It was also not a clear indicator that she was the favorite. “Trump is doing better with men than he did four years ago,” said John Della Volpe, the IOP’s polling director. “Today’s 20 year olds were 11 when he came down the escalator. They were 12 or 13 when he hired Bannon, when he pulled out of the Paris accords, when he tried to get rid of the ACA. These kids didn’t see him as a villain. They saw him as an anti-hero.”

What’s in store for the advanced manufacturing workforce in the US?

Join Colorado Governor Jared Polis, Neera Tanden, Domestic Policy Advisor to President Biden, and other industry leaders in Washington, DC, on Oct. 21 to discuss how the United States looks to maintain a competitive edge.

Oct. 21, 2024 | Washington, DC | Request Invitation

Polls

Sen. Jon Tester has won three statewide races in his career, only once when a Democratic presidential candidate shared the ballot. In 2012, while Barack Obama was losing his state with 42% of the vote, Tester got 49%, enough for a clear win thanks to a strong Libertarian candidate running third. Democrats held onto the governor’s office, too. That’s all changed. Tester is still running stronger than his ticket, but there are more Republican votes in Montana now, and less ticket splitting, even though Busse has run a Tester-like, pro-gun, populist campaign for governor. The senator wins just 6% of Republicans, worse than his prior races. He benefited in previous cycles from splinter votes for a Libertarian nominee, and the lack of Green Party candidate on the ballot; this year, the votes for both are minimal, and it doesn’t matter.

Ads

• Restoration PAC, “Harrisnomics is Destroying the Economy.” Back in July, before Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign, a Philadelphia mother named Kimberley Burrell participated in an MSNBC panel about swing state Black voters. Her top concern, she said, was inflation; the government was “killing us without killing us” by not controlling prices. Burrell would eventually decide to vote for Kamala Harris, but to her shock, her answer showed up in this super PAC spot, putting her answer next to Harris saying “that’s Bidenomics.” The PAC has refused to change the ad.
• WinSenate, “Dishonest.” It’s one of the great ironies of Pennsylvania’s Senate race — Bob Casey, who for a long time called himself a “pro-life Democrat,” attacking Dave McCormick’s old pro-life language. The Democratic Senate defense PAC zooms in on the website McCormick used for his 2022 primary bid, which ended before the Dobbs decision, and which didn’t support any exceptions on an abortion ban. “Erasing his website, so you won’t know his views.” Casey, whose father was the most prominent anti-abortion Democrat, made a slower move to the left.
• Truth and Courage PAC, “Letter.” The pro-Ted Cruz super PAC is now running three ads about transgender issues, after spending millions on a spot about Democrat Colin Allred not stopping “men from competing in women’s sports.” In this one, a disabled veteran reacts to Allred’s signature on a letter urging senators to remove anti-LGBTQ riders from the defense appropriations package. That, he warns, could mean that taxpayers suddenly “pay for sex change operations in the military, even on kids.” Allred told Semafor this week that he didn’t “think that we should be telling our military commanders how to run their units.” He’s also up with a response ad of his own, in which he says he doesn’t favor “boys playing girls’ sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff Ted Cruz is saying.”

Scooped!

I wrote last month that the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania had faded quicker than expected from the discourse. And it had. But I’d underrated one factor: Elon Musk, who was already boosting Trump messaging on X and elevating or restoring anti-liberal accounts, fully endorsed Trump after the shooting. The four-byline New York Times story about how Musk is actually helping is rich with detail, including favors that Musk has done for the campaign that are ironic after four years of complaints about “Big Tech” helping out Joe Biden by suppressing news about his son’s hard drive in 2020.

Next

• 25 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 66 days until the Electoral College votes

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