Americana

1. The great debate
2. Trump’s disaster play
3. Longshoremen strike
4. RFK’s botched ballots
5. Happy Birthday, Jimmy Carter!

Also: A deepfaked ad in Indiana gets a warning label

If tonight really marks the end of debate season, as Donald Trump says, it’ll be the earliest conclusion to the tradition in decades. These events can freeze the campaign in place, giving the candidates time to solve image or issue problems in front of tens of millions of viewers. And it’s been helpful, for candidates, to do this right as voting wraps up. That’s why the Harris campaign is agitating for one more session with Trump before November 5.

Republicans are clear about what they want, too: Vance to get the final word. In public polls, Tim Walz is the most popular member of either presidential ticket; on Saturday Night Live, he was just portrayed as a loveable Midwest dad. But in conservative media, Walz is a collection of scandals in an off-the-rack suit. How many voters know that Walz has exaggerated his visits to China — or that the House GOP is using its subpoena power to probe whether he has Communist ties? How many people have heard the gripes from some of Walz’s peers in the National Guard, who are still angry that he retired before being deployed to a war zone?

If the version of Vance that Trump voters see in their preferred outlets walks offstage at 10:30 pm eastern, Republicans will have won this debate. If not, if it’s the scowling and browbeating know-it-all Vance that voters find so off-putting in polls, then maybe — maybe! — we get a Harris-Trump sequel.

Sizing up the JD Vance/Tim Walz debate

NEW YORK – JD Vance was debating in Youngstown, where Tim Ryan lived, and where Democrats always voted for him. The question was on one of the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee’s strongest issues: Abortion, and the impact of the Dobbs decision. And Ryan closed his answer with the story of a 10-year old girl who traveled to Indiana for abortion, a high-profile case that Republicans first struggled to believe, then struggled to talk about.

Vance didn’t struggle.

“Obviously, an incredibly tragic situation,” said Vance. But the real abortion issues, he explained, were Ryan’s resistance to late-term limits and support for loose immigration laws. “That little girl was raped by an illegal immigrant, and both Tim Ryan and the media need to be honest about the fact that she would never have been raped in the first place if Tim Ryan had done his job on border security.”

The only scheduled showdown between the Democratic and Republican vice presidential candidates — the last scheduled debate of 2024 — will pit a confident and sharp-edged man who wrote his way into national politics against an avuncular but cautious governor who hasn’t thrived in this format. Walz is a defender of pluralism who’s proud of his long connections to China. Vance is an economic nationalist who’s warned that migrants should “pack their bags” ahead of a Trump victory, and is comfortable accusing his opponent of enabling economic destruction, crime, and infanticide.

The politicization of Hurricane Helene

Donald Trump picked a fight with President Biden over the response to Hurricane Helene, visiting a storm-affected corner of Georgia on Monday and falsely claiming that his successor hadn’t talked to Gov. Brian Kemp about recovery. 

The Trump campaign, which has repeatedly accused the White House of being slow to respond to crises in rural America, seized on remarks Biden made on Sept. 29 when asked if there were “more resources” coming to the damaged region. “No, we’ve given them — we have pre-planned a significant amount of it, even though they didn’t ask for it yet,” said Biden. That fed speculation, much of it driven by out-dated videos of flooding in Appalachia, that the White House wasn’t helping.

“Don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” Trump posted on Truth Social, referring to North Carolina. In Valdosta, Trump gestured at news that Biden had been managing the response from his beach home to say he had been “sleeping,” and said Gov. Kemp “hasn’t been able to get him,” which Kemp had already refuted.

“He is lying. Let me get this straight — he is lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said on Monday evening, after reporters in the Oval Office asked him to respond to Trump, and after Vice President Harris visited FEMA’s headquarters. “I don’t care what he says about me. I care what he communicates to the people that are in need.”

The Republican campaign plowed ahead, with Trump mocking a photo of Harris on a call, which didn’t show her headphones connected to her phone. “Maybe if North Carolina identified as Ukraine some of its incredible people would actually get some attention, resources, and much needed funding for themselves in their time of need,” Donald Trump, Jr. posted on X.

Longshoremen hand Biden an October surprise

Dockworkers across the east coast walked out on Monday, starting a strike that the president has said he won’t break. At 36 ports, from the coast of Maine to the Gulf Coast, 45,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association are demanding a new contract that will prohibit automation and protect their jobs.“We want them to pay back,” one local’s leader told the Associated Press, explaining that tensions over pay, and the threat of automation, grew as the COVID pandemic ended and profits surged. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups urged Biden to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to force workers to return, as did Republicans in Congress. Biden told reporters on Monday that he wouldn’t do it.

“There’s collective bargaining, and I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley,” he said. Donald Trump hadn’t weighed in on the strike as of Tuesday morning, but over the summer, he met with ILA President Harold Daggett, who said afterwards that Trump opposed automating the ports. That policy has protected union jobs, while allowing ports in China and other countries with automation to process shipments far quicker.

The confusing RFK ballot saga continues

It can be difficult to follow the winding Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ballot saga, where he’s faced court defeats both in battleground states where he wanted to get off ballots to help Donald Trump — and in other non-competitive states where he was trying to stay on the ballot, to set a precedent for future access.

On Friday, the Supreme Court declined to take up Kennedy’s challenge to being removed from the New York ballot, affirming Democratic Party-backed victories in lower courts. The very same day, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected Kennedy’s request to be removed from that state’s ballot. One conservative judge sided with the court’s four liberals, and two other conservatives concurred — though Justice Rebecca Bradley fretted that “ballots listing a non-candidate mislead voters and may skew a presidential election.”

Kennedy’s problem: He’d missed the regular deadline for removal, and laws affecting candidates who died before an election didn’t affect him, keeping him on the ballot in Wisconsin and 32 other states. On Sunday, Kennedy kept up his personal campaigning for Trump, appearing with conservative influencers and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson at the “Rescue the Republic” rally in D.C. “Don’t you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again, and who’s going to make America free again?” Kennedy asked the crowd. “Get Donald Trump and me into Washington, D.C.”

Jimmy Carter at 100 years old

Former President Jimmy Carter turned 100 years old on Tuesday, becoming the first holder of that office to hit the milestone, more than a year after beginning hospice care.

Carter, who has not been seen in public since his late wife’s funeral last year, has confounded expectations about his longevity. In 2015, after he announced that he was being treated for brain cancer, large groups of well-wishers traveled to Plains, Ga. to see him at a church service. Later that year, the former president revealed that treatments had worked, and he was cancer-free.

He weighed in on the 2016 presidential campaign, later saying that he’d voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and stayed in touch with his successors and would-be successors. Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson and the board chair of the Carter Center, told the New York Times last month that Vice President Harris continued to check in on him: “I think my grandfather is obviously compelled by her story as a real example of the American dream.”

Polls

No swing state has been polled as frequently as Pennsylvania, with a pile of numbers pointing in the same direction: It’s close. AARP’s bipartisan polling team hadn’t surveyed the state since April, when Democrats were still committed to the Biden nomination, and Harris has improved on him with most of the electorate. Biden was losing to Trump; Harris runs 16 points better than the president had with women, and runs just 1 point behind him with men. That’s what most pollsters have seen for a month, a Harris coalition that overperforms with women and makes up for its losses with other electoral sub-groups. Her only weakness, relative to Biden: Fewer voters over age 65 are undecided now, and that group broke toward Trump.

The Democratic nominee’s lead here is the worst put up by any Democratic nominee in the 12-year history of this poll — and the voters driving that weren’t part of the electorate back then. Harris leads by just 10 points among voters younger than 35, and ties with Trump among all Latino men. But there’s decline in every part of that electorate, driven by Trump’s advantage when voters were asked who could better the economy (a 4-point lead), the cost of living (9 points), and immigration (13 points). Even if Trump loses, the collapse of the Democratic advantage on immigration has changed how they run on it, maybe for good.

All year, but especially last week, Democrats have hoped that Mark Robinson’s gubernatorial campaign was such a disaster that it would drag the entire Republican Party down with him. There’s no evidence of that in what will probably be the final North Carolina poll before Hurricane Helene battered the western part of the state. A critical share of Trump voters just aren’t supporting Robinson, who runs 22 points behind Trump among white voters and 15 points among all men. Those demographics still support Robinson, but only narrowly; the voters who’ve deserted him are largely undecided, not suddenly supporting Stein.

Ads

• Monica Tranel for Montana, “Not for Sale.” China-based conglomerates own less than 1% of private farmland in Montana and for every congressional candidate running this year, that’s too much. Banning those entities from owning land has been an issue in the state’s U.S. Senate race all year, and Sen. Jon Tester voted for a ban this summer. Tranel, the Democrat in the state’s competitive 1st Congressional District, builds this ad on a story about a $2,500 donation from Syngenta AG to Rep. Ryan Zinke, enough to say he’s “taking their money” and won’t fight China like her. She shoots down a “spy balloon,” continuing the tradition of Montana candidates blowing objects out of the sky.
• Mike Braun for Indiana, “Hopelessly Liberal.” Former Indiana education chief Jennifer McCormick, a Republican-turned-Democrat, never spoke at a rally to ban gas stoves. This spot creates one for her, taking a photo from her 2023 announcement event and superimposing “No Gas Stoves” rally signs and green coats on her supporters. The target is her promise of “an office of environmental justice” if she wins, warning that she would “ban gas stoves,” too. Democrats in New York passed a phased-in ban on gas stoves in new buildings, but McCormick doesn’t support that, and the Braun campaign later added a disclaimer about the fake picture after reporters highlighted Indiana’s new ban on altered images in advertising.
• Caroleene Dobson, “All My Best.” Thanks to a redistricting lawsuit, Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District is among the most competitive in the South, drawn that way after a safe GOP seat was broken up. Other Alabama Republicans run to the base; Dobson is running as a pragmatist with no hard ideological edge. This ad consists of a letter from Gov. Kay Ivey, who’s popular in the district, which mentions no particular political topics at all: “You’re standing tall for the issues that matter most to families, and fighting to make their lives better.”

Scooped!

The other day, I shared one of the many New York Post covers that urged Democratic primary voters to support Eric Adams for mayor. Noah Schachtman didn’t like that, because he was wrapping up his reporting about the tabloid’s crucial role in electing Adams three years ago, as effective as a media endorsement can be during the print apocalypse. He crawls inside a crucial editorial meeting, and recaps the forgotten, fluffy Adams human interest stories: “The tips weren’t necessarily bad. But they were never bad for Adams.”

Next

• 35 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 77 days until the Electoral College votes

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