Americana

1. Ted Cruz’s closing message
2. Kamala’s interview spree
3. Hurricane finger-pointing
4. A polling trend to watch
5. Trouble for Dems in NY

If I can borrow from Dr. Manhattan: It is 2019, and I am writing about whether anti-trans messaging can swing an election. It is 2022, and I am writing about whether anti-trans messaging can swing an election. It is 2024, and you get the point. Over the last few weeks, I heard from voters in swing states that, suddenly, their airwaves and YouTube pre-rolls were full of ads about sex-reassignment surgery and “biological males” in womens’ sports. These voters were observant. The Trump campaign has bought two high-profile ads to highlight Vice President Kamala Harris’s advocacy for state-funded gender medicine in California, and the Senate GOP’s chief super PAC is running ads that accuse swing state senators of putting children at risk. This hasn’t been part of the daily campaign discourse, or an “October surprise” that neither campaign was ready for. But it’s a shift in Republican thinking and strategy that says a lot about how voters got information five years ago, and how they get it now.

Ted Cruz and the GOP bet big on anti-trans messaging

ALLEN, Tex. – An actor playing Democratic Rep. Colin Allred smashes into a female football player, dramatizing how he wouldn’t “stop men from competing in women’s sports.” A narrator warns what would happen if the Allred-backed Equality Act passed: “Boys in girls’ bathrooms! Boys in girls’ locker rooms!”

And at campaign stops, with his “KEEP TEXAS, TEXAS” bus parked outside, Sen. Ted Cruz tells supporters of the gender madness coming if Allred beats him and Democrats stay in power.

“Do our daughters have any rights?” Cruz asked the crowd at a Tex-Mex restaurant here on Monday, where some supporters waved WOMEN FOR CRUZ signs. “Does a teenage girl have any right not to have a fully naked grown man right next to her in the changing room?”

Republicans are running more ads than ever about transgender rights — an issue that hasn’t previously worked for GOP candidates in swing states. In Michigan and Ohio, attempts to link abortion rights amendments to “sex changes for minors” fell flat. In deep red Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear won two tight campaigns despite ads that linked him to “the transgender industry,” and his veto of LGBTQ-related legislation passed by Republicans.

But Republicans see an issue that can break through, especially with Trump voters who’ve been supporting Democratic candidates for Senate. Last month, the Trump campaign ran the first-ever presidential campaign ad on the topic, highlighting Harris’s support of gender surgeries for prisoners and migrants in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire: “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

The Kamala media blitz

Kamala Harris used a round of interviews to roll out a new Medicare policy on Tuesday: Coverage for at-home care. “They want to stay in their home,” Harris told panelists on “The View,” describing the seniors who could benefit, in a plan paid for by making Medicare cap more drug prices. “Plus, for the family to send them to a residential care facility, to hire somebody, is so expensive.”

That interview was part of a multi-hour media blitz across TV networks and podcasts: Tim Walz on Fox News Sunday and the Smartless podcast, Harris on the podcast Call Her Daddy and the quadrennial “60 Minutes” election special. Republicans highlighted the moments where Harris evaded a question or answered in a way that might be attackable — telling “The View” hosts that there was “not a thing” she would have done differently than Biden, bulldozing past a question on Biden’s immigration record on “60 Minutes.” Democrats found plenty to like as well, including her responding to a Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comment about her lack of biological children on “Call Her Daddy” and attacking Trump in a Howard Stern interview for reportedly sending COVID tests to Vladimir Putin for personal use.

The Trump campaign, which goaded Harris into doing more interviews and quickly clipped her most tangled answers, has kept its own candidate more guarded lately. Trump pulled out of the “60 Minutes” interview, after truncating his 2020 appearance on the special, and has prioritized conservative media — telling Hugh Hewitt on Monday that some migrants brought “bad genes” into the country — while JD Vance does more traditional hits and press conferences. “The Interview on 60 Minutes with Comrade Kamala Harris is considered by many of those who reviewed it, the WORST Interview they have ever seen,” Trump posted on Truth Social, after the episode aired without his participation.

More hurricanes, more politics

President Biden canceled a scheduled visit to Africa on Friday as Hurricane Milton approached Florida, and as Gov. Ron DeSantis and the vice president sparred over accusations of politicizing the disaster.

Last week, Democrats were taken aback by rumors that the administration didn’t respond quickly to Hurricane Helene, or that money that might have helped was redirected to help process migrants. FEMA officials pushed back on the record, as did Republican leaders in the states affected by Helene, who praised the administration.

That praise didn’t extend to Harris, who they accused of exploiting the crisis. After the Harris campaign re-shared a quote from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, criticizing “political posturing” around the recovery, Tillis shot back that he “was talking about politicians like YOU using this disaster for political posturing,” falsely accusing her of not plugging in her headphones for an officially released photo.

Harris also got into the mix with DeSantis. After NBC News reported that DeSantis was deliberately avoiding a call from Harris to check in ahead of the disaster, Harris told reporters at Joint Base Andrews that the non-response was “about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do.” DeSantis, on Fox News, said that he hadn’t been made aware of any effort to reach him, and didn’t take it seriously: “She has never called on any of the storms we’ve had since she’s been vice president, until apparently now.”

A polling theory to watch

The New York Times released polls on Tuesday showing Kamala Harris up 4 points nationally — and down 13 points in Florida.

The individual results of the NYT/Siena polls are interesting, but may be less interesting than the Times’ election analyst Nate Cohn’s commentary on them. Rather than dismiss the Florida results as an outlier, Cohn suggested it’s the latest evidence for a running theory of his that pollsters are missing potentially significant changes in the electorate by using an unproven technique this cycle that he’s decided not to adopt. After once again undercounting Trump supporters in key states in 2020, most public pollsters started weighting polls to “recalled vote” — i.e., making sure that their result reflects a mix of voters who say they voted for Biden and Trump in the last election in similar proportions to what actually happened.

This typically has the effect of boosting Trump’s numbers, but Cohn argues it has a poor track record in the past and could lead pollsters to constantly produce results that look more like 2020 than reality in both directions. In Florida, for example, the electorate might be rapidly shifting red thanks to a wave of conservative-leaning young voters and new arrivals. In other states, it may miss changes that favor Harris: The NYT/Siena poll has found her holding a 4-point lead in Pennsylvania, for example, but a “recalled vote” weight would move the same numbers toward an effective tie, with Trump up one.

Who’s right? It could be Nate, it could be the other pollsters, it could be neither of them and there’s a different systemic issue skewing the results again. But in a cycle where the polls are too close to call, it’s yet another reason to suspect we might be flying blind into election day.

—Benjy Sarlin

New York Democrats see trouble downballot

A red shift in New York’s suburbs could be helping Republicans retain control of the House, shoring them up in areas that Democrats won easily four years ago. In public polls, Kamala Harris is winning the state handily, but falling well short of Biden’s 23-point win margin. In half a dozen seats, Republicans see no coattail effect for her, and an opening for Republican incumbents.

“Kamala Harris is polling worse than where Joe Biden was in 2020. So we think this is a real opportunity, not only to hold those seats but to pick up additional seats,” said Stefanik, a member of GOP leadership.

Multiple factors are hurting the party, including the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams and unpopularity of Gov. Kathy Hochul. On Long Island, where in February Rep. Tom Suozzi won back the seat of ex-Rep. George Santos, two sources told Semafor’s Kadia Goba that Suozzi now leads by 5 points, and Harris is trailing. Biden won the seat, slightly re-drawn by Democrats this year, by 10 points in 2020. He did worse in other parts of Long Island, and in Hudson Valley districts that have been part of the Democratic strategy to win back the House.

Polls

Asking voters who they think will win an election: It’s enlightening, but it doesn’t always mean much. According to CBS News’s polling, most voters spent 2016 expecting Hillary Clinton to win. According to Monmouth’s polling, a slight plurality of voters expected a Trump victory in September 2020 even as the same respondents gave Joe Biden a solid lead in the horse race numbers. Harris has held an advantage every time the question gets asked this year — in this case, in a poll that finds a small single-digit lead for her in the popular vote. But more voters think their neighbors will vote for Trump. What explains it? For the first time, the Democratic nominee against Trump is drawing huge crowds, which Clinton couldn’t in 2016, and Biden didn’t try to in 2020. The perception that Harris will win is annoying enough to some Trump allies that they’ve urged people to watch betting markets, where Elon Musk’s encouragement led to more people buying Trump, putting him ahead.

Here’s the short story of modern Democratic ambitions in Texas. In 2016, Hillary Clinton outperformed a generation of Democrats in the state’s biggest cities and suburbs and lost by single digits. In 2020, Joe Biden did even better in Texas’s population centers, but declined with Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley. In 2024, the most ambitious Democrats just want a result close enough to ease Colin Allred’s path in the Senate race. Harris is looking more like Biden than Clinton, running 10 points ahead of her with white voters and dominating among college-educated voters. She runs out of road because she barely wins Latino voters, by 6 points, a 21-point decline from Clinton.

JD Vance’s 2022 Senate race gave Republicans an expensive but effective playbook for this year. Vance trailed all summer and moved ahead after Labor Day, once a messy primary was forgotten and Republican groups began outspending Democrats. Moreno, who sailed through his primary, has got more allies making more ad reservations than Vance ever did, including $30 million in spending from the pro-Moreno crypto industry super PAC Fairshake. But Moreno continues to underperform with independents. (One possible factor here: The generic Fairshake ads about jobs aren’t very memorable.) The Democrat-backed redistricting initiative is succeeding because those same independents support it, and because Republicans haven’t broken hard against it.

Ads

• Harris for President, “Big Family.” The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that temporarily halted IVF treatments spurred a Republican panic — a quickly-passed state bill to clarify IVF’s legality, a surprise Trump promise for government-backed free IVF at the national level. Democrats didn’t stop talking about the topic, and recruited Latorya Beasley, one of the Alabamian women blocked from an IVF appointment after the decision. She joined Democrats at this year’s State of the Union, and she blames the GOP squarely for what happened to her: “Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade stopped us from getting the family we wanted.” Democratic ads about abortion rights tend to star women who want families, and the IVF topic has given them the strongest material.
• Donald Trump for President 2024, “Unbelievable.” Last month, Trump became the first major party presidential nominee to run an ad attacking his opponent on trans rights. This is the second ad on that theme, recapping the story of Shiloh Heavenly Quine, a convicted murder in California who, shortly before Trump took office, became the first American inmate to get state-funded sex-reassignment surgery. “The power that I had — I used it in a way that was about pushing forward the movement, frankly,” Harris says in a clip from a 2019 candidate sit-down hosted by the National Center for Transgender Equality.
• Randy Niemeyer for Congress, “Fight for Working People.” Northwest Indiana has been trending right for years, but Republicans failed to dislodge Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan two years ago; Donald Trump got 45% of the vote in Mrvan’s 1st Congressional District, and their nominee only improved on that by two points. This year’s GOP nominee leaves the party out of this spot, promising to “lower costs” and “protect workers” from “bad trade deals” against a “career politician” who’s “never worked a real job.” (Mrvan started his political career as a township trustee in 2005; Niemeyer won his first race in 2010.)

Scooped

The world needed a comprehensive story about Fairshake, the super PAC funded by the cryptocurrency industry to help potential friends and beat potential enemies. Charles Duhigg’s profile in the New Yorker beat everyone to it, with the sort of reporting details that you need to show up for. During Donald Trump’s speech to the Bitcoin Conference, completing his 180 spin from crypto critic to crusader: “A man standing near me FaceTimed his wife and insisted that she watch the speech, even though she was in the delivery room where their grandchild was being born.”

Next

• 28 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 70 days until the Electoral College votes

David recommends

I haven’t found a copy of Bob Woodward’s “War” yet, and encourage any booksellers who do have it to “accidentally” leave one out. But the details about how the president reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Bibi Netanyahu’s refusal to end his military operations in Gaza and the broader Middle East, add to Franklin Foer’s great reporting in “The War That Would Not End.” For the president’s advisors, “there was no magical act of diplomacy, no brilliant flourish of creative statecraft that they could suddenly deploy.” Worth reading, on a day when Harris has angered the anti-war left by not naming a specific Biden decision she wouldn’t have made.

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