Americana

1. The Kamala coalition
2. Political threat assessment
3. Harris at NABJ
4. Ballot boxing
5. New IVF votes

Also: Are voters buying Trump’s Haitian pet claims?

The first votes in the 2024 presidential election will be cast this week. In three states — Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia — voters can drop off ballots as soon as Sep. 20. Across the country, voters who applied for mail ballots will start getting their envelopes. It’s all happening at one of the better moments for the Harris-Walz campaign, after a debate that most people think Donald Trump lost.

So what would a winning Harris coalition look like? That’s a question we start to tackle today.

What a Kamala Harris victory looks like

For the next seven weeks, Kamala Harris will try to rebuild Joe Biden’s 2020 coalition, adding where she can and compensating where she must.

Most of what Harris needs is already in place. In national and swing state polling, she leads massively among college-educated white liberals, barely gets what she needs with white adults who didn’t finish college, and wins the majority of all non-white voters.

But some of Biden’s supporters from the last election aren’t coming back, and new voters poised to participate in this year’s race appear more friendly to Trump. One question, with only partial answers in the wave of post-debate polling, is who in the 2024 electorate will make up for that.

“If exactly the same voters from 2020 came out and voted in this election, Harris would be up by a larger margin,” said Patrick Murray, the polling director at Monmouth University. Its latest national poll, released Tuesday morning, found Harris leading Trump by 5 points with the 2020 electorate. Among voters who were “extremely motivated” to turn out this year, her lead shrank, to 3 points.

In what’s currently the closest race in decades in the decisive battleground states, Democrats and pollsters see a few key groups that could potentially put Harris over the finish line.

Another assassination attempt

Secret Service agents apprehended a would-be presidential assassin on Sunday, seizing an armed man with a long criminal record after spotting him in bushes near Mar-a-Lago. Ryan Routh never got close enough to target Trump, and the incident didn’t pause the presidential campaign, as a failed attack on Trump did in July. But the GOP nominee and his allies quickly blamed Democratic campaigning for the incident.

“He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” Trump told Fox News Digital on Monday. While Routh claimed to have voted for Trump in 2016, his social media posts and self-published book accused Trump of attacking democracy. In remarks to the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Georgia, Vance went after Democrats who’d talked about “eliminating” Trump: “I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out.”

The Trump campaign and down-ballot Republicans pointed to years of anti-Trump comments by Democrats, some of it from Jan. 6 and its aftermath, which accused their candidate of endangering democracy. “Look at their dangerous words after another assassination attempt!” read a text from Trump to donors on Monday night, ending with a link to a special fundraising page.

Both Biden and Harris condemned Routh and phoned Trump to express their sympathy, but Democrats made no significant changes to their campaigns. Trump didn’t exactly make it easy for Republicans to win a civility argument — he called Democrats “the enemy from within” and “people that want to destroy our country” in the same Fox News interview decrying their rhetoric. Vance also stumbled by drawing a line in Georgia at Democrats who call Trump “fascist” — a term Trump had used against Harris at least twice in the prior week.

Kamala Harris weighs in on Springfield

Kamala Harris condemned the Trump-Vance ticket on Tuesday for spreading rumors about Haitian migrants in Ohio, calling it a “crying shame, literally.” Harris spoke on the story for the first time in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, albeit with a different group of reporters than the one that quizzed Donald Trump in Chicago last month.

“When you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to understand how much your words have meaning,” said Harris. She described children having to miss picture day at their school due to the threats (which have been attributed partly to foreign actors) that shut down various institutions and planned events this week.

Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung responded in the terms the Republicans have used since Sunday, saying that Harris had deployed “disgusting rhetoric that continues to stoke the flames of violence against President Trump.” But the campaign was still getting questions about migrants in Springfield, after Gov. Mike DeWine said that the sudden media attention was harmful, and after a Sunday interview in which Vance seemed to suggest even an unsupported story he said was derived from “firsthand” constituent complaints might have political merit.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” said Vance, “because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

Ohio voters get a perplexing ballot initiative

Ohio’s conservative Supreme Court upheld ballot language written to weaken an anti-gerrymandering amendment on Monday, angering its supporters. In a 4-3 decision, the majority approved GOP-written descriptions of Issue 1, which would create a nonpartisan redistricting commission, that labeled it as a vote to “establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts.”

Citizens Not Politicians, which brought the amendment to the ballot, condemned the decision: “Redistricting” is a politically neutral term, whereas “gerrymandering” takes its name from a 19th century scheme to protect the governing party’s seats in Massachusetts. (It’s also attacked by name in their ads.) Michael Donnelly, an Ohio Supreme Court Justice facing re-election this year, compared the decision to a high-profile case that added boned wings to a definition of “boneless” chicken wings.

“Given that the four members of this court in the majority today apparently think that the word ‘boneless’ means ‘you should expect bones,’ I’m sure it comes as no great surprise that they think that a constitutional amendment to ‘ban partisan gerrymandering’ means to ‘require gerrymander[ing],’” he wrote.

It was the latest in a string of last-minute battles over ballot language across the country; last week, a Utah judge allowed a Republican-backed change to the initiative process to stay on the ballot, while ruling that if passed, it couldn’t be implemented.

Another vote-off on IVF access

Senate Democrats forced and lost a vote to protect IVF access on Tuesday, drawing attention to a Trump campaign promise that isn’t backed up by his party in Congress. Just two Republicans, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, voted for the Right to IVF Act; JD Vance missed the vote to make previously-scheduled campaign stops, and other Republican senators voted against it.

Democrats also blocked Republicans from bringing up an alternative IVF bill by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, which would bar Medicaid funds for states that prohibit in vitro fertilization. Neither proposal mirrored Trump’s sudden promise to expand IVF access by having the government pay for it, or mandating that private insurers cover all of its costs. Senate Republicans have given no indication that they’d support this, and criticized Democrats for scheduling the IVF vote at all. “This is simply an attempt by Democrats to try and create a political issue where there isn’t one,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune told reporters.

Polls

The first high-quality Pennsylvania poll after the Harris-Trump debate revealed a narrow but recognizable path for both nominees. Harris leads thanks to a gender gap in her favor; Trump’s 12-point advantage with men is smaller than her 17-point advantage with women. Harris’s favorable rating is in positive territory, by 2 points; even President Biden’s numbers have recovered, and he’s underwater by single digits. The Trump/Vance ticket is personally unpopular, but it’s resilient. “More people are voting for him than like him,” explained polling director David Paleologos. (The Green and Libertarian tickets are on the Pennsylvania ballot, neither hit 1% in this poll.)

Pollster Ann Selzer had served bad news to Democrats for the entirety of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign. In each of her surveys, Biden was cooked in Iowa; in her February poll, Biden came in at 32%, worse than any Democratic presidential candidate had fared in the state in a century. Harris is running 10 points ahead of where Biden ended up; Trump is down just 2 points since then; the support for “someone else,” which was in double digits this summer, has collapsed as Democratic-leaning third party voters go to Harris. (The remainder like Kennedy, who has not removed his name from the ballot.) Just don’t expect Democrats to invest in the state, beyond the two House races in single-digit Trump districts. Four years ago, at the same point in the Trump-Biden race, Selzer found a dead heat, and both campaigns treated Iowa like a swing state until late October. Her final poll that month gave Trump a 7-point lead, just shy of his final win margin.

Why were Democrats so confident when they pushed back on the unproven Trump/Vance claim that Haitian migrants ate pets? Because few people outside of the GOP base believed it. Trust in the media has plunged, and some of Trump’s claims on the trail are invulnerable to fact-checks. Seventy-five percent of Republicans, and 44% of independents, agree with the false analysis of inflation offered in this poll, and just 35% of independents disagree. But Trump’s other wild claims are only impactful for voters who already support him. While 72% of Republicans say that the Venezuela story is true, just 46% say the Haitian story is true, despite efforts by some pro-Trump commentators last week to retroactively prove it.

Ads

• Mondaire for Congress, “Control.” Just weeks after the Dobbs decision, Democrats won a House race in upstate New York by warning that Republicans could pull back abortion rights. Every swing seat Democrat in New York is using that playbook against Republicans who have worked to refute them. Rep. Mike Lawler has promised, in his ads, not to limit abortion rights; Mondaire Jones, a Democrat who represented a different version of the seat in 2021 and 2022, appears here with a group of local female voters, explaining that Lawler won’t save their rights. “Lawler empowers the worst people in Washington,” he says; cue a photo of Lawler with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Lawler has said he opposes a national ban, but Jones told Semafor that “because he never stands up to Donald Trump, and is supporting him for the third time, he would be a reliable vote for a national abortion ban.”
• Josh Stein for North Carolina, “War.” North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general built an early lead in polls by smothering Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor, with videos of his old quotes. Why change course? Stein’s new compilation, released before Sunday’s arrest of a man who wanted to shoot Donald Trump, focuses on moments when Robinson talked about “killing” enemies and shooting gun-grabbers: “I got them AR-15s in case the government gets too big for its britches.” Robinson has asked voters to ignore the “old Facebook posts” highlighted in some Democratic ads, but the videos have done far more damage to him.
• The Committee to Elect Jared Golden, “Generations.” Maine Rep. Jared Golden is one of very few Democrats who hasn’t endorsed Harris yet, running for re-election in a rural district Trump’s won twice. It’s one of the party’s least suburban seats, and there’s nothing about abortion or IVF here. The topic: Golden’s long-running dispute with the White House over environmental rules that lobstermen don’t want, seeing a threat to their livelihoods. Golden “stood up to Joe Biden and his own party to protect our way of life,” says one supporter, as the congressman rides a lobster boat.

Scooped!

I was very online in 2012. So was JD Vance – and so was Andrew Kaczynski. CNN’s great internet document-diver found the sort of punditry that the younger Vance was writing before his turn to MAGA nationalism, stretching much further back than the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy.” In a piece he got a professor to take offline, Vance was skeptical of the deportation strategy now at the center of the Trump-Vance campaign: “We conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens.”

Next

• 14 days until the CBS News vice presidential debate
• 49 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 91 days until the Electoral College votes

David recommends

Crowded caravans of reporters headed to southwest Ohio after its senator elevated “reports” of migrants eating pets there. None found evidence of what JD Vance was talking about, but all of them produced what he later said he wanted: In-person analysis of how Springfield, Ohio was adapting to an influx of 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians. Kevin Williamson’s story for The Dispatch conveys what’s happening, and condemns Vance for how he talked about the refugees who’d integrated into the city’s economy. “The real issue is that by working overtime and investing in the community, they have made life more challenging for a reliable Trump-voting constituency: marginally employed white people on the dole.”

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