Americana

1. Ultra-wealthy make their pitch
2. Harris’ Texas visit
3. A religious dispute
4. Jan. 6-proofing Congress
5. Liz Cheney’s mission

Also: What Americans really think about immigration.

I’ve been coming to Wisconsin to cover close elections for 14 glorious years. Wisconsinites have lived through these elections, probably enjoying it less, for even longer — go check the 2004 Bush-Kerry results. So it was an interesting place to be during an old-fashioned Democratic worry about whether the party is about to do everything wrong and lose again. There was no one cause of this angst. Some of it was the ongoing disbelief that a man with Trump’s liabilities and persona is still so appealing to 49% of their neighbors. Deb Lewis, a voter I talked with on the way out of Barack Obama’s rally with Tim Walz today, told me that she didn’t know anyone voting for Trump. Did she in 2016? She mimed a phone, punching invisible buttons, to explain that they got “deleted.”

Some of the worry was rooted in a media diet with coverage that makes liberals nervous. The new Washington Post/Schar School’s swing state data included a look at which outlets were followed by which partisans. Trump voters were more likely to watch conservative media, where their candidate is constantly winning the day, or X, where Elon Musk has been touting betting markets that show a massive pro-Trump surge this month, bigger than anything in public polls, which tend to show a tied race overall.

What’s going on? There are some answers in this issue, but I’d like to get more feedback. For the next two weeks, I’ll occasionally answer questions here about the election, on any topic. Send them to dweigel@semafor.com and put “finale” somewhere in the subject. (The election is ending, not the newsletter!)

Rise of the Republican rich guys

SUN PRAIRIE, Wis. — Republican candidate Eric Hovde stood in front of his campaign bus on Tuesday and argued that being a successful banker would make him a better senator than Tammy Baldwin. “How would she ever know how to fix our healthcare system when she’s never bought herself healthcare?” Hovde said of the Democratic incumbent he’s trying to unseat. “The difference between the two of us? I actually know things.”

In the campaign’s closing weeks, from the presidential race on down the ballot, Republicans are confidently selling a case that doesn’t always work with voters: People who’ve gotten rich in the private sector are more qualified to fix the government than almost anybody else.

It’s a standard theme for Donald Trump’s third White House bid, a resilient one in congressional races and a dominant one in Elon Musk’s pro-Trump campaign. Even by the standards of American politics long dominated by wealthy men, a Republican Party of billionaires, self-proclaimed billionaires, and mere multi-millionaires is pouring vast financial resources into its argument about who has earned the right to lead. “I understand these issues and the importance of how to govern our finances, and we’ve got to get the US balance sheet back in order,” Hovde told Semafor.

In Wisconsin and other states, wealthy GOP nominees have kept marketing themselves as doers running against useless “career politicians” amid months of attacks on their business ties. At his own stops, Trump promised to install Musk atop a “government efficiency commission,” an idea that thrills crowds at the Tesla CEO’s own Pennsylvania town halls.

“Would he create a new role for you, to help save our nation?” asked Chandy Thomas, a pastor at the Life Center church that hosted Musk’s Harrisburg town hall this week. “I’ve had many conversations with President Trump, who is very much aligned in thinking that we need significant government reform,” Musk replied.

Democrats are still grappling with the impact of Musk, who at the same event delivered the first of multiple daily $1 million checks he’s promised to give to random registered Pennsylvania voters who signed a petition from his America PAC. It’s easier to push back against wealthy down-ballot candidates; Democrats spent the summer portraying those rich men as self-serving and out-of-touch.

Why Kamala Harris is going to Houston

Kamala Harris… to Texas? The Democrats’ announcement of a Houston event Friday turned some heads given that there’s no indication either campaign sees the state as competitive at the presidential level this year. But that’s not what they’re going for: All indications are that the point is to highlight abortion, one of the best topics for Democrats in polls, but one which has been tougher to keep in front of news consumers on a daily basis. In that sense, it’s a mirror of Trump’s recent visit to non-competitive Aurora, Colorado in order to draw Democrats and the press into a national debate over how seriously to take reports of transnational gangs operating in apartment complexes.

Trump and Vance have both been relatively careful to not take the bait on the abortion fights that Democrats want to have and tack to the center when absolutely forced. That gives the Harris campaign motive to find additional Republicans whom they can make the face of the most far-reaching state restrictions and perhaps draw into newsy conflicts. Texas, where Trump-friendly Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to prosecute doctors if they provided an emergency abortion to a woman with a non-viable fetus, seems like one obvious target.

Some local Democrats saw a broader validation of their work, though. Luke Warford, the founder of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, said that the Harris visit “speaks to the increasing importance of the state” and the “relatively close polling” in the races for president and Senate.

Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley told Semafor that the trip was probably a mistake for Harris. “They’re more than welcome to come down to Texas,” he said, adding that he liked how Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz were positioned in the race’s final weeks. “Any day that they’re not working in battleground states is probably not the way I’d be setting it up.”

The Trump campaign push to brand Harris ‘anti-Christian’

WAUKESHA, Wis. — Kamala Harris was 17 minutes into her speech at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse when the protesters heard their cue. “Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the Supreme Court, with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade,” said the vice president. “And they did as he intended.”Two juniors at the college began to interrupt her, calling abortion a “sacrament of Satan.” As they were ushered out, Harris joked that they were “at the wrong rally” and should go to the “smaller one down the street.” They shouted “Jesus is Lord” and “Christ is King,” which Harris couldn’t hear. But some in the crowd could, and over the next few days, their video of the encounter went viral among conservatives.

By this week, both Donald Trump and JD Vance were accusing Harris, and the party they led, of hostility toward Christians and all religious people. At a Sunday rally in Waukesha, billed as a response to Harris “as she continues to spit in the face of Catholic voters,” Vance accused the campaign of embracing “anti-Christian rhetoric.” A shout of “Jesus is King!” came from the crowd. “That’s right,” said Vance. “Jesus is King.”

White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi will join the Sustainability session at the Fall Edition of Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Oct. 25. The discussion will focus on the challenges posed by climate change and what they mean for the future of climate finance, decarbonization, and food security.

RSVP to this session and the World Economy Summit here.

Why this election will be harder to stop on Jan. 6, 2025

The US — and the rest of the world — are bracing for post-election chaos in Washington on Jan. 6, 2025, as Congress prepares to formally name a presidential winner. The reality is another story. Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Elana Schor report: It will be much harder to stop the certification this time around.

Lawmakers believe that their approval of the electoral count is far more likely to go smoothly this time, despite former President Donald Trump’s celebration of the rioters who disrupted the certification of his loss four years ago. Thanks to an under-the-radar 2022 bipartisan law that significantly narrowed members’ abilities to challenge presidential election results, Hill denizens are breathing a little easier as Election Day approaches.

One key change: Previously, only one senator and House member could join forces to object to any state’s presidential results and force a vote. That objection threshold is now orders of magnitude higher — 20 senators and 87 House members, one-fifth of each chamber.

“I fully expect that there will be some attempts to have baseless objections. But I do not believe they will be able to meet the 20 percent threshold in each body,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, one of the law’s chief sponsors, told Semafor. “The reforms we enacted will go a long way toward preventing another January 6.”

On the trail with Liz Cheney

BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Kamala Harris made a second campaign swing with Liz Cheney on Monday, stopping in three swing state suburbs — outside Philadelphia, outside Detroit, and in one of Milwaukee’s conservative suburbs. In an arts center here, nestled in the Harris Theater, former conservative radio host and current writer for The Bulwark Charlie Sykes asked Harris why frustrated Republicans should “cross over” and support her.

“Well, I start from the belief based on the lived experience that the vast majority of us have more in common than what separates us,” said Harris. “I believe that when we think about who we are as the American people, there is more we have in common than what separates us.”Harris didn’t mention some of the bipartisan promises she’d made in recent weeks, like a Republican in her cabinet or a two-party advisory committee. Apart from Cheney’s criticism of some new post-Dobbs abortion laws, which the former House GOP conference chair said had made her “deeply troubled,” there was not much new in the Harris/Cheney “Country over Party” roundtables.

The surprise in Waukesha County: A protester who started shouting something about Gaza ended it and left before actually disrupting the event. Not a surprise, in Michigan: On Truth Social, Trump wrote said that Harris was campaigning with a “war hawk,” and if she won “the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames” And there was some new liberal grumbling at how frequently the Democrats were teaming up with Cheney.“The Cheney thing — do we really have to do that?” Jon Stewart asked Tim Walz in a Monday interview on “The Daily Show.” Trump was having his own issues with a quasi-bipartisan validator: For the second time, the Republican campaign canceled a “Make America Healthy Again” virtual town hall with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Polls

This is a good sample for Harris overall, with a 10-point gap between her favorable rating and Trump’s, narrower than some other national polling this month. Among these voters, Harris has chipped away at Trump’s lead on a few basic economic questions. The Republican pivot away from tax cut debates — paid ads more often focus on immigration and LGBTQ issues — happened while the Harris campaign and Future Forward rained “middle class tax cut” ads on swing states, and voter sentiment about the economy ticked up. Other polling has found an advantage for Trump, but it has shrunk since the summer.

The dramatic rightward shift in how voters see immigration is a defining story of the election. It’s made Donald Trump’s long-held positions more popular; it’s turned old Democratic positions, which they confidently took during his presidency, into political liabilities. That’s frustrated immigrant rights’ groups, whose leaders believe that Democrats are not telling a positive story about their position or separating Trump’s plans to deport recently arrived asylum-seekers from his record of reducing legal immigration. Pew’s polling finds some evidence for that position, and reasons why Trump hasn’t suffered for it. One-quarter of Black adults say that illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans want, and 43% say that about legal immigrants. That’s who Trump was pitching at the Atlanta debate with Joe Biden, when he warned of “Black jobs” being taken — a line that Democrats treated as obviously ridiculous and offensive.

These results, from polling that shows a tied race in swing states and most voters retrospectively approving of the Trump years, find upside-down views of the economy’s strength. The macro economy has been strong for years, wages rose faster than inflation this year, and the unemployment rate (4.1%) is the lowest it’s been heading into an election in 24 years. Voters aren’t buying that rosy big-picture view, but they are more confident in their own economic security. The same thing happened in polls right before the 2022 midterms, when inflation was significantly higher but the job market had largely recovered from the pandemic.

Ads

• Bob Casey for Senate, “Bliss.” Every swing state Senate Democrat has run ahead of their presidential nominee, all year. The late wave of Republican ads against them are designed to change that, convincing Trump voters not to split their ballots. Casey, who’s highlighted his bipartisan bills throughout the campaign, dramatizes them here with a bipartisan family, a Democrat and Republican who agree on supporting their senator after he “sided with Trump to support NAFTA and put tariffs on China.”
• Engel for Arizona, “All Gone Up.” Non-incumbent Democrats weren’t around for the spending votes that Republicans (and economists) blame for higher inflation after 2020. That’s freed them up to blame Republicans for the cost of living, like Democrat Kirsten Engel does here. She doesn’t name spending supported by Rep. Juan Ciscomani; instead, she names (without citations) Republican legislation that could raise costs by restricting Social Security benefits or repealing the ACA.
• Vote No On 4 Florida, “Fix.” To beat Florida’s abortion rights amendment, which would guarantee a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy in the state, opponents need to keep it from getting more than 60% of the vote. This spot’s aimed at supporters of abortion rights who favor restrictions, such as retaining parental consent for minors to have abortions. It’s a tactic Republican candidates have used in Senate and House races all year: Highlighting an unpopular implication of putting the right in the constitution. An unnamed “mother” warns that Amendment 4 would wipe out the state’s 48-year-old parental consent law: “I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I also believe in a mother’s right to parent.”

Scooped!

Last week, I noticed an obviously specious video spreading quickly on X — a man who called himself “Matthew Metro” describing the abuse that his former teacher, Tim Walz, had inflicted on him. The fakery wasn’t very good, and the alleged graduate of Mankato West couldn’t even pronounce the southeast Minnesota city’s name correctly. I noted the fake and moved on, but was glad to see a few reporters dig up the backstory. In Wired, David Gilbert identified the Russian propaganda outlet that produced the video and a similarly slanderous fake that accused Kamala Harris of a hit-and-run; in The Washington Post, a power trio of reporters found the real Matthew Metro, shaken after “my privacy and my personal life” were exploited by bad actors.

Next

• 14 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 56 days until the Electoral College votes

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