Principals

1. Harris’ NH swing
2. Congress’ spending deadline
3. Crime data upgrade
4. Ceasefire talks
5. Trump assassination attempt fades
6. US conservatives in Berlin
7. UK’s split conservative vote

PDB: Trump’s support among veterans slips

Ukrainian foreign minister Kuleba resigns … Europe, Asia stock markets slide … Bloomberg: Intel’s money struggles threaten Biden chips strategy

Harris heads to N.H. for new small business push

Kamala Harris is in New Hampshire today to tout her latest economic policy plan, this one aimed at promoting small business development. The measure would supercharge an existing tax deduction that entrepreneurs can claim for early expenses incurred, hiking it to $50,000 from $5,000 in tandem with other new initiatives to simplify tax filing and reduce regulations for businesses expanding into other states. “This is core to her belief. She thinks small businesses are part of what creates a strong middle class and helps people build wealth in this country,” Rhett Buttle, an ex-Biden 2020 campaign advisor, told Semafor. Harris aims to get 25 million small business applications in a potential first term — an ambitious and expensive goal. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates the larger deduction could cost tens of billions of dollars over 10 years, throwing another item into the mix for the 2025 tax fight.

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Look for Congress to punt spending to lame duck

There’s lots of chatter on Capitol Hill about how to fund the government past the end of this month, but the smart money is betting on a stopgap bill that lasts beyond the election and into December. Conservatives are making their usual push to move the Sept. 30 spending deadline into the new year, hoping to dodge any attempt to jam through a deal when members are eager to leave for the holidays. Punting into next year, though, would saddle either party with a new shutdown deadline during the early days of either a Trump or Harris administration.

That deadline would join another problem that awaits lawmakers: the current debt limit extension expires in January, though the Treasury Department can use extraordinary measures to buy some additional time. Under comparable circumstances in 2020, Congress funded the government through Dec. 11. Several sources said a similar outcome is likely, though many senators want to wait and see what — if anything — the House can pass next week. “I think we can” get it done this year, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., told Semafor on Tuesday. Still, he added that figuring out a solution is “going to take us getting back here next week.”

— Burgess Everett

A new crime-tracking tool

Crime is one of the biggest national debates that we have the least timely data on. Official crime statistics from the FBI are notoriously slow, while outside efforts to track trends are often incomplete. A new project, the Real Time Crime Index, that launched today is looking to change the policy conversation by gathering representative data from over 300 state and local agencies and updating them on a six-week lag. It finds murder down 15.7% through, continuing a post-pandemic trend. “Crime data is traditionally slow, which leads to misperceptions about trends,” Jeff Asher, a co-founder of AH Datalytics who is overseeing the project, told Semafor. “I wanted to build a system that leverages vast quantities of available data on crime that allows anyone to see the numbers and trends in novel ways without having to wait for final estimates to be published months later.”

Netanyahu’s demand imperils ceasefire deal

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu’s demand to keep troops on a narrow strip of land along the Gaza border with Egypt is the main sticking point stopping a ceasefire and hostage-release deal with Hamas, The Washington Post says, quoting current and former officials from countries involved in the negotiations. President Biden and Vice President Harris talked Monday with advisers on moving ahead with a possible final “take it or leave it” proposal to Hamas and Israel this week. Biden told reporters Netanyahu wasn’t doing enough to reach a deal. Late Tuesday, two Israeli opposition politicians who resigned from Netanyahu’s war cabinet over the summer blamed the premier. “Netanyahu is focused on political survival, damaging relations with the U.S. while Iran edges closer to nuclear capability,” said Benny Gantz, a former defense minister. “The hostages must be brought back, even at a very high cost.” Current Defense Minister Yoav Gallant objected to continuing to occupy the Philadelphi Corridor, but was overruled by the Israeli Cabinet last week.

September 18, 2024 | Washington, D.C. | Request Invitation

As Speaker Emeria Nancy Pelosi comes off of yet another successful political maneuver – mounting a behind-the-scenes effort to replace President Joe Biden on the top of the Democratic ticket – Semafor’s Kadia Goba will sit down with her and discuss the state of the 2024 presidential race, how she learned to effectively wield power, and why, as she puts it, she’s willing to take a punch…for the children.

How the Butler shooting fell out of the election

Republicans are frustrated that the attempt on Donald Trump’s life has quickly faded from the national conversation, Semafor David Weigel reports. Trump himself has shared videos of the Butler shooting and its aftermath in recent days, complaining Monday that “they want you to forget” what happened. Even some Democrats thought that the incident, and the iconic image of Trump raising his fist and shouting “Fight,” was a campaign-ender for them at the time. But the shooter’s ambiguous motive, the swift resignation of the Secret Service director, and a bipartisan investigation has turned the story into a slow-moving procedural drama rather than a daily campaign story. In this, it has some historical precedent: Two failed attempts on Gerald Ford’s life in just over two weeks in 1975 had little impact on his overall political standing.

US conservatives to share strategies in Berlin

Right-wing operatives from Washington are sharing pointers with German conservatives in Berlin this week. Officials from the Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and Americans for Tax Reform are speaking at the “Berlin Campaign Conference,” which starts today and is hosted by local conservative groups with close ties to the Christian Democratic Union, the center-right party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel. The confab — which features sessions on American campaign trends and using TikTok to win votes — comes at a critical time for German conservatives, who are looking to take back the chancellery next year while trying to hold off the hard-right Alternative für Deutschland party. The latest flirtation with American politicos in Donald Trump’s orbit has caused some strain within the establishment German right: “It is frightening that we are opening the doors to Trumpists,” one anonymous top official said.

— J.D. Capelouto

Global Hot List: British right-off

UK politics is now framed by a competition between Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and the Conservatives, Brad Glasser writes in the latest Global Hot List, with each aiming to become the main opposition to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour. Labour has already seen some of its worst polling in years since Starmer took office, as he has faced early tests in far-right riots and backlash to government budget cuts. In one poll, Reform stands at 21% of the vote — slightly ahead of the Tories — compared to Labour with 33%. With the next election not required until 2029, however, there’s no telling how circumstances could unfold during this term.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has been focusing on fundraising for Republican candidates as he vies for the Senate GOP leadership position later this year. Cornyn will be in Ohio this week to fundraise for GOP Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno and a trip to Texas he did with JD Vance last month raised “well into the seven figures” for Donald Trump.

Playbook: Even staunch Republicans are secretly hoping for Trump to lose so the party can move on from his outsized influence, Politico senior political columnist Jonathan Martin writes. “GOP leaders won’t tell you that on the record,” he writes. “I just did.”

Axios: Trump’s proposal to end taxes on tips has been welcomed by service industry workers, a shift from his first administration when the Labor Department proposed rules that those workers opposed.

WaPo: The Democratic convention was largely devoid of talk about Kamala Harris’ history-making candidacy, and that wasn’t an accident. Harris has never put her identity in the forefront of her campaigns because she views it as “irrelevant,” her former chief of staff said. “What is relevant is how you do the work and how you perform for the people that you represent.”

White House

Seven GOP-led states sued to block President Biden’s new student debt forgiveness policy. — WaPo

Congress

• House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul subpoenaed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to provide more testimony over the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Sept. 19 or face contempt.
• Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., is on a California swing this week doing events for Reps. Young Kim, Michelle Steel, Mike Garcia, and candidates Scott Baugh and Matt Gunderson.

Outside the Beltway

• Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo, was charged with serving as an agent for the Chinese government. Her husband, Chris Hu, was named as a co-defendant.
• Pro-Palestinian protests resumed at Columbia University.

Courts

• Donald Trump said in a court filing he will plead not guilty to the criminal charges in a revised indictment that accuses him of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss. Meanwhile, a federal judge denied Trump’s push to have his adjudicated hush-money case moved to federal court.
• The Supreme Court, 6-3, rejected Oklahoma’s push to block the federal government from withholding Title X money in response to the state’s refusal to offer abortion counseling
• Federal prosecutors charged Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and five other senior members of the group for plotting and carrying out terrorist attacks over years in Israel, including the massacre on Oct. 7.

Polls

• A new poll, exclusively provided to Semafor, shows Donald Trump is leading Kamala Harris among veterans (51%-41%), active-duty service members (49%-44%), and their families (47%-45%), although his margin of support has been slipping since 2016. Change Research for Veterans for Responsible Leadership also asked the same groups to imagine being a team member in combat with the former president in a survey of 1,703 likely voters between Aug. 23-29. Fifty-five percent of participants agreed Trump would “only look out for himself,” while 54% of participants said “he’d talk a big game but not do much.”
• Harris leads Trump 48%-43%, according to a USA Today/Suffolk Poll of 1,000 likely voters between Aug. 25-28.

On the Trail

• Kamala Harris will hold her final days of debate prep in Pittsburgh, mixed with informal meetings with voters in the battleground state.
• The Harris camp hired Camila Thorndike, formerly of Rewiring America, as climate engagement director – POLITICO
• Republican Voters Against Trump launched an $11.5 million ad buy in Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
• New gun-rights group Secure Our Freedom Alliance is planning a six-figure ad buy in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as the NRA has drastically cut its political spending. — Axios
• A fundraiser for Jan. 6 defendants planned to take place at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club has been indefinitely postponed.

Endorsements and Non-Endorsements

• Jack McCain, son of the late Sen. John McCain, told CNN he would back Kamala Harris and change his registration to Democratic after the Trump campaign’s behavior at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying visit, including an alleged contretemps with a worker who tried to stop the campaign from filming.
• His sister Meghan McCain followed by clarifying that she is still a Republican but would support neither Harris nor Donald Trump.
• And former GOP Sen. Pat Toomey sounded a similar note in a separate CNBC interview, declaring himself for neither candidate.

Foreign Policy

• Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy said the country will indefinitely hold Russian territory it seized last month in a bid to force Moscow into negotiations. — NBC News
• Haitian Acting Prime Minister Garry Conille called for more foreign aid to help defeat gangs in the country. — WSJ

Technology

• The US Justice Department subpoenaed Nvidia and other companies as part of its antitrust probe into the dominant AI processor maker. — Bloomberg
• Elon Musk’s Starlink said it would comply with an order by the Brazilian Supreme Court to block access to X in the country. Meanwhile, social-media platform Bluesky, launched five years ago by X co-founder Jack Dorsey, added nearly 2 million new users in four days in Brazil following X’s suspension there.
• Politicians are increasingly trying to reach voters via video games — Barack Obama first ran in-game political ads in 2008 and Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign team built areas in online games. Donald Trump appeared with a game streamer last month, receiving half a million live views. “Recent US political successes were tied to specific technologies,” such as social media, the Financial Times reported. “Could video games be a key technology that shapes future elections?”

Media

Brian Stelter is returning to CNN to lead the network’s coverage of the media.

Big Read

Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif and Stephanie Lai trace how crypto exchange Coinbase has become one of the most influential spenders in the 2024 cycle by focusing its money on Congressional races: “The crypto industry has accounted for almost half of the nearly $250 million in corporate donations to political campaigns in 2024, the Public Citizen analysis shows. Coinbase alone is responsible for more than $52 million of that amount.”

Blindspot

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: California Democrats rejected a Republican plan to end the state tax on tips.

What the Right isn’t reading: Donald Trump said schools are offering sex-change operations to children.

Principals Team

Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Elana Schor, Morgan Chalfant

Reporters: Burgess Everett, Kadia Goba, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

Bill de Blasio is a Democrat and the former mayor of New York City. He is participating in an “Italian Sunday Dinner” to support Kamala Harris next Sunday.