Americana

1. The missing tax fight
2. Democrats’ fundraising spree
3. Elon Musk on the trail
4. New ads target retirees
5. Randall Terry’s anti-abortion crusade

Also: The inverted state and national response to the hurricanes.

Republicans have now spent tens of millions of dollars on ads about transgender rights, most of them landing on Kamala Harris. For years, social conservatives and influencers said that there was a winning issue here for Republicans, even when election results didn’t prove it. This month, Republicans bought more ads on the topic than ever before, and Democrats started to respond — first, in ways that seemed to validate the GOP strategy. After Texas Rep. Colin Allred cut an ad saying he didn’t favor “boys in girls sports,” LGBTQ groups and organizers said that he’d sold them out and looked weak doing it.

Democrats changed their strategy this week. On Wednesday, the New York Times published a story that the party wanted told: During Trump’s presidency, the federal bureau of prisons “provided an array of gender-affirming treatments, including hormone therapy, for a small group of inmates who requested it.” There was another backlash on the left when the Harris campaign highlighted the story, but it faded after the candidate sat for her first-ever Fox News interview. Pressed on why she’d supported taxpayer-funded access to gender surgery for prisoners, she pointed to the Times story to argue both administrations had to follow settled law, then said Trump was being exploitative by bringing the issue up: “$20 million on that ad, on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, it’s really quite remote.”

This was new. It didn’t stop the questions to Democrats about why they supported “boys in girls sports,” or the ads warning that abortion and equal rights amendments would kick open the door to more gender surgeries. But Democrats stopped closing their eyes and waiting for the attacks to stop, and that’s going to keep happening over the next 18 days.

The $5 trillion policy fight that’s gone missing from the campaign

It’s the best kept secret of the 2024 presidential campaign: When this election’s over, Washington will be dragged into a massive battle over the fate of the 2017 Republican tax law and its expiring provisions mostly affecting individuals.

Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump is campaigning on the coming “tax cliff,” which is rarely mentioned in their paid messaging or stump speeches. In their only debate, Harris talked about taxes far more than Trump, who only mentioned them twice — once to deny that his tariffs amounted to a “tax” on consumers, and once to promise future tax cuts, without much detail.

“Everybody knows what I’m going to do: Cut taxes very substantially, and create a great economy like I did before,” Trump said. The issue was only lightly discussed at the vice presidential debate; after Tim Walz attacked the 2017 law as benefiting mostly “the top caste,” JD Vance responded that his opponent “admits that they want to undo the Trump tax cuts,” but did not mention the coming vote over which cuts to continue.

The lack of attention from the top of the ticket has turned a battle over trillions of dollars in revenue into a sleeper issue, surprising some Republicans. Last week, as Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso campaigned in Arizona for Senate candidate Kari Lake, he told Semafor that the tax stakes of the Trump/Harris choice were underrated.

“It’s a $6 trillion difference from a tax standpoint,” Barasso said. “What Republicans will do if we have President Trump in the White House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House is continue with the 2017 tax cuts that have been out there, as well as the additional things that President Trump is talking about — no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, all of those components.”

But there are also some clear reasons why Trump might want to avoid talking about the looming expiration date for his tax cuts and why Harris is hesitant to highlight the upcoming cliff in much detail. 

Democrats are on a fundraising tear

Democratic candidates massively out-raised Republicans in the third quarter of 2024, in every federal contest: President, Senate, and House. Harris’s campaign and joint fundraising committee raised $652 million, nearly doubling the $340 million raised for Trump’s two main operations. In every contested Senate race, Democrats outraised Republicans, sometimes massively; Montana Sen. Jon Tester ($32.2 million) and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown ($30.7 million) smashed through the three-month fundraising records in their states.

It was the same story in House races, with nearly every Democrat in a targeted race out-raising the GOP nominee. Leading the field: Eugene Vindman, a pivotal figure in the first Trump impeachment, who raised $6.5 million to the $1.1 million raised by Republican Derrick Anderson. National Republicans heavily favored Anderson in his primary, and the nominee has narrowed the race by pointing to questions about Vindman’s military service; Vindman got material to push back with this month, after the New York Times covered the unmarried Anderson’s habit of taking family-style official campaign photos with a friend’s family.

Republicans cut into the Democratic advantage with big hauls for their super PACs — though Democrats weren’t bereft there. The GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund raised $114.5 million for the quarter, and candidate-specific super PACs in Pennsylvania and Ohio helped the GOP nominees in those states run more TV ads than Sen. Bob Casey and Sen. Sherrod Brown. According to Rob Pyers, who tracks campaign spending, Republicans have outspent Democrats in five Senate race states where the Democratic candidates had raised more money: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Montana, Michigan, and Maryland.

Elon Musk’s increasing campaign role

Elon Musk stepped up his campaigning for Donald Trump on Thursday, holding a rally for him in Pennsylvania as his America PAC doubled its cash offer for pro-Trump registered voters to sign his group’s petition. The town hall-style event in Folsom, a suburb of Philadelphia, included a sincere pitch for Trump as the candidate who could save the First Amendment and innovation, setting the conditions to “make Starfleet real.”

It also included some Muskian conspiracy digressions. “It would be interesting to see the overlap between Epstein’s client list and Kamala’s puppeteers,” said Musk, campaigning for a candidate who had been photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and, responding to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s indictment as president, said “I wish her well” while noting they had met “numerous times.” At another point, Musk suggested that electronic voting machines had the power to rig the election, a false claim that had cost Fox News a whole lot of money to entertain.

“There’s some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely,” Musk said. “So, there’s always a question of, like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they’re used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” Philadelphia County does not use Dominion voting machines, which process paper ballots.

Earlier in the week, new FEC filings revealed how much money Musk was spending to elect Trump — at least $75 million, most of it to his America PAC, which is now offering $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a petition that will help the PAC identify them and turn them out. Musk also helped fund Building America’s Future, whose spinoff PAC has run divergent ads in Michigan: Some targeted to Arab-American voters that thank Kamala Harris for supporting Israel, some targeted to Jewish voters that accuse her of being too pro-Palestine.

It’s time to scare the seniors

This year’s October surprise might be fairly predictable: A bunch of late competing ads about Social Security and Medicare. It’s one of those issues that’s extremely important to voters, but hard to keep in the news, so Democrats often use paid media in the closing weeks of campaigns to make it more front-of-mind for seniors, a high-turnout group that some polls suggest might move toward Harris this cycle.

It’s also a fact-checking minefield: A pro-Harris Future Forward ad features a woman who says Trump has gone “crazy” talking about cutting Social Security, with no citation or clip: “Cutting Social Security is like giving the middle finger to the middle class.” It’s not wholly clear what the ad is referring to: Trump’s occasionally stumbled around questions on the topic when asked about cuts, but in general has pledged not to touch retirement benefits since 2016, though he did propose cuts to Social Security’s disability benefits as president. A new Harris ad also ties Trump to “cuts to Social Security and Medicare” through Project 2025, again without citation. The conservative umbrella group plan mostly follows Trump’s lead by not proposing major changes to Social Security and its main Medicare proposal is enrolling seniors into private Medicare Advantage plans by default. It does call for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened up negotiations to lower drug costs and capped out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare recipients.

A new Trump campaign ad, seemingly anticipating the barrage, uses a blizzard of hand-waving headlines and statistics to accuse Democrats of raising Medicare premiums (which rose in 2021 due to the pandemic and an expensive potential Alzheimer’s drug), inflating away Social Security checks (which rose automatically to match cost-of-living changes) and draining retirement programs through illegal immigrants (who often pay taxes, but don’t receive benefits, improving the programs’ long-term finances). Both parties have a history of portraying cost-saving moves that don’t affect benefits — like the Biden-Harris prescription drug negotiations, or proposed Medicare savings in Trump budgets — as cuts.

Interestingly enough, there is one potential attack that isn’t in the Democratic ads I’ve seen so far: Trump has long been in love with tax cuts that also lower dedicated revenue for entitlement programs, the latest one being a proposed end to taxes on benefits. If he got his way, the tax changes would speed up a looming insolvency crisis for Social Security and Medicare. Trump mentions his tax cuts in his ad; Democrats may be wary of trying to explain it to seniors this quickly via 30-second spots.

—Benjy Sarlin

Randall Terry’s anti-abortion presidential campaign

Randall Terry is running for president with no expectation, and no intention, of winning the election. For the second time, the 65-year old anti-abortion activist is waging a campaign as a way to get grisly ads on TV, taking advantage of FCC rules that allow candidates to air messages that networks might otherwise refuse to take.

After securing the nomination of the Constitution Party, Terry assured conservatives that he was not running to spoil anything for Trump — Democrats in several states tried to get him on the ballot, with that goal – and began recording ads that mocked “stupid celebrities,” displayed images of aborted fetuses, and compared defenders of legal abortion to Nazis. And while Terry isn’t entirely happy with Trump’s abortion position, he’s made it abundantly clear his goal is to help Trump defeat Harris by firing up some wavering social conservative voters with his own ads.

“I’ve got people who refuse to give us money because they say you’re gonna hurt Trump,” Terry told Americana. “Are you out of your freaking mind?”

Terry’s now expanding the campaign to Wisconsin, where his goal is putting ads in every single local media market. We spoke to him about his TV strategy, the feedback he’s gotten on the right, and what he sees as his role in the election.

Polls

We don’t look at many national horse race polls in this newsletters, because there’s no national horse race, and very little movement over the last month. But there are differences among frequent voters and infrequent voters, and Harris consistently does better with the former. Among just registered voters, she has a 3-point lead; she has higher overall favorable ratings than Trump, but he runs better with independents. Harris leads overall because she’s up 29 points among white college graduates, who are the most likely sub-group to turn out, and because she wins more Republicans than Trump wins Democrats.

Four years ago, Democrats correctly saw Georgia as more winnable than North Carolina, and prioritized ads and campaign stops there. (It didn’t hurt that there were two competitive Senate races that ended up securing their majority.) They are more bullish on North Carolina now, because Harris is polling stronger with college-educated white voters than Biden was, and a little weaker with non-white voters. In North Carolina, a slight majority of voters say that Harris would do a better job in crises than Trump, and in Georgia, a larger majority say Trump would do better.

There are plenty of theories as to why Donald Trump gained some ground in polling over the last two weeks. Somewhat underrated: Unified conservative messaging around Hurricane Helene, which elevated horror stories about the response, claimed that needed resources were being diverted to migrants, and credited the former president with a better response than the current one. Republicans uniformly panned the disaster response, but so did a majority of independents. What’s striking: North Carolina voters don’t share this opinion, and according to the network, its polling of the battleground states (held from this release) show a lead for Harris. Coverage of the disaster angered more voters outside the affected states.

Ads

• Fischer Victory Fund, “President Trump.” The theme of Dan Osborn’s surprisingly competitive Senate bid in Nebraska is that he’s a union worker, off to do battle with billionaires. One of Sen. Deb Fischer’s response ads, her second to feature Trump, runs a clip of the GOP nominee on his plane, calling Osborn a “radical left person” who’d be a “Bernie Sanders Democrat” if he wins. Osborn wants voters to know that private jet owners don’t like him. Just not this one.
• Senate Leadership Fund, “Extreme.” Democrats in Texas and Ohio have responded to GOP attack ads about their support for trans-inclusive policies. Sen. Tammy Baldwin hasn’t. One repercussion: Mitch McConnell’s super PAC is running its second ad on Baldwin’s support for the Equality Act and opposition to a ban on gender medicine for minors, described once again as “sex change surgeries for minor children.” Baldwin, the only openly gay member of the Senate, has never faced this many attacks about LGBTQ issues in a statewide race.
• Donald J. Trump for President, “Global Chaos.” As the vice president prepared to sit down with Fox News, the Trump campaign released its cut of her interview with “The View.” Trump allies had said, instantly, that they would cut a spot out of her refusal to name any Biden decision she’d have handled differently. The Trump campaign names some examples, from the Afghanistan withdrawal to inflation — though its citation about rising prices comes from a May news story about inflation falling off ahead of a Fed rate cut.

Scooped!

Future Forward splashed into presidential politics four years ago as the biggest-spending Biden ally without anyone taking a good look under its hood. Teddy Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher put together the first comprehensive look at what the Silicon Valley-based group is doing, “animated by the idea that a blend of data science, political science and testing can usher in a new era of rigor in advertising,” in ways that some Democrats don’t like.

Next

• 18 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 60 days until the Electoral College votes

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