Americana

1. Closing message faceoff
2. MSG rally fallout
3. Ralph Reed’s turnout machine
4. Election changes on the ballot
5. RFK’s ballot adventure

Also: Dan Osborn’s independent bid refuses to go away.

Right outside my office, supporters of Kamala Harris are lining up to attend her “closing argument” — a rare campaign speech by a Democrat in the electorate’s bluest dot. It will take place at the White House Ellipse, which used to be known for the president’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and is now known as the place where Donald Trump rallied supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. Among the remarks previewed to reporters today: “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

Republicans disagreed with that. On Tuesday morning, Steve Bannon was released from prison after completing his sentence for refusing to cooperate with the House’s Jan. 6 select committee. “They want to put you in prison and they will put you in prison,” Bannon told reporters — “they” were the Democrats, who couldn’t be trusted when they warned of danger under Trump.

One of this election’s paradoxes, likely to outlast the vote itself, is that Trump’s legal troubles helped him with Republican voters — they viewed them all as political interference, to the point that someone like Bannon who essentially volunteered himself for prison by defying a subpoena is greeted as a conquering hero. And there’s still little sign that Democrats think it’s a fruitful topic with swing voters either.

Eight years ago this week, Trump got the welcome news that the FBI was reopening a probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails after an unrelated investigation found some on an employee’s laptop. Her “criminal and illegal conduct,” he told voters in New Hampshire, threatened the whole country. Clinton is convinced that the story helped him win the presidency, after a campaign where he promised (incorrectly, it turned out) to “lock her up.” Today, Harris is delivering her closing arguments against a president who’s been convicted of felonies and faces numerous other indictments, including a currently dismissed series of charges over classified documents, and it’s an open question whether they’ll come up.

So what is she talking about instead? That’s the topic of our lead story today.

On Friday, I’ll answer some more late-breaking questions about the election. If you have them, send them to dweigel@semafor.com, and put “finale” somewhere in the subject.

Trump and Harris’ closing arguments

You might not know it reading the news or following X, but Kamala Harris has firmed up her closing message. So has Donald Trump. And they are hammering swing state voters with simple, direct arguments even as the media cycle spins out of control.

“On issue after issue, Kamala broke it, but I will fix it,” Trump said at his Madison Square Garden rally, a line that now runs through his campaign’s final paid ads.

“It’s either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemy’s list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list,” Harris said the night before, in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Neither of those messages led the news coverage from their latest mega-rallies. Trump’s rally, the largest of his 2024 campaign, was overwhelmed by roast comic Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokes about Puerto Rico, immigrants, and Jews; most reporting on the Kalamazoo rally covered Michelle Obama’s speech, which urged the “fellas” to get on the “right side of history.”

But when they’re on script — Harris more frequently than Trump — the major party nominees are amplifying messages that the campaigns have spent a billion dollars to put on TV and streaming channels. And the topics they’re focused on most might not be what you think they are. Trump’s New York rally on Sunday, and Harris’ rally in DC tonight, were both built to clarify what they’re running on for a national audience that may not be tuned in yet.

Garbage-gate roils the campaign

Democrats stepped up their outreach to Latino voters after outraged reactions to Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, where roast comic Tony Hinchcliffe joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating pile of garbage” and that Latinos “love making babies,” a comment he finished with a crude remark about sex.

The backlash started before the rally was over, with rapper Bad Bunny repeatedly posting an endorsement video for Kamala Harris to his 45 million Instagram followers. The next day, San Juan’s Archbishop Roberto O. González Nieves published an open letter to Trump, asking the GOP nominee to apologize: “Puerto Rico is a beautiful country inhabited by a beautiful and noble people.” Reggaeton superstar Don Omar announced his own Harris endorsement on Instagram and cited the “racist and disdainful words” as a motivator.

Trump’s campaign did respond to questions about the routine on Sunday night, with an emailed statement to reporters saying that the jokes did “not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” But neither Trump nor JD Vance fully condemned it.

On Monday, Vance told reporters in southeast Wisconsin that he hadn’t seen the joke, it may or may not have been racist, and “I think that we have to stop getting offended at every little thing in the United States of America.” (Eight days earlier, at a different Wisconsin stop around 43 miles away, Vance had condemned Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for a video in which she fed a Dorito chip to an Instagram influencer, calling it an insult to Catholics.) On Tuesday, Trump told ABC News that he “didn’t know” Hinchcliffe and hadn’t heard the joke. Puerto Rican protesters were on hand at his Allentown, Pa. rally later in the day.

Ralph Reed’s turnout machine

Christian conservatives are closing out an extensive pro-Trump campaign this week, with Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition spending at least $62 million on voter contact. “It’s the largest and most ambitious and far-reaching ground game project by an organization outside the Republican Party in history,” Reed told Semafor.

Reed had set an ambitious goal for the cycle, of activists knocking on 10 million doors for Trump, supplementing the work that members were already doing to keep religious voters voting Republican. In targeted states, they hand palm cards to lower-propensity voters, informing them that both Kamala Harris and their local Democratic candidates favor a “federal abortion on demand law” and “boys competing in girls’ sports.”

Trump spent part of Monday doing more outreach to FFC’s membership, appearing at an event outside Atlanta where he promised to lift restrictions on how churches could involve themselves in electoral politics. “I shouldn’t scold anyone, but Christians aren’t known for being very solid voters,” Trump said. “We have to save religion in this country. No, honestly. Religion is under threat.”

The election about elections

Colorado is no longer a presidential battleground. Its ballot this year will still say a lot about US politics, Semafor’s Burgess Everett reports.

The state’s voters will decide on a sweeping proposal to reshape its elections, backed by big business and opposed by the state parties, that would have a huge impact on congressional races, replacing traditional partisan primaries with a new nonpartisan system.

Colorado is one of seven states considering dramatic changes to the way their citizens vote, though the responses to voters’ — and big donors’ — anger at the system vary widely. Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and Oregon, as well as Washington, DC are considering options ranging from new top-two systems in Arizona and South Dakota to open primaries and ranked-choice general elections in Colorado, Nevada and Idaho. Then there’s Alaska, which will vote this fall on whether to roll back its own unpredictable open primary and ranked-choice arrangement, which ironically has inspired other states’ forays into election changes.

Phil Izon, a strategist working to repeal Alaska’s law, told Semafor that Republican candidates and surrogates — including ex-Gov. Sarah Palin — had helped them push the message that the system was both overly complicated and helped non-conservatives win elections that they might otherwise lose. “Our early voting turnout has been overwhelmingly conservative and Republican,” he said. “We have the enthusiasm going into this election, so I don’t believe that ranked choice voting is going to be able to survive.”

Around the courts, one week before election day

Republicans — and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — faced defeat in a series of election lawsuits this week. In Pennsylvania, a district court rejected the complaint brought by six House Republicans who wanted tighter scrutiny of ballots cast by Americans living overseas; Judge Christopher Conner said that “phantom fears” of election fraud didn’t validate a suit that they had waited too long to bring.

At the same time, the Supreme Court rejected Kennedy’s requests for injunctions in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states where courts and state election officials refused to remove him from the presidential ballot after he missed local deadlines. (One month earlier, the court rebuffed Kennedy’s effort to get reinstated on the New York ballot, which he was removed from after losing a challenge to his residency in the state.) The split decisions are the result of Kennedy’s somewhat confusing decision to endorse Trump, but only try to drop out of states that were competitive in the presidential election in order to preserve ballot access in future elections.

The court didn’t explain its rationale in the Kennedy suit, and Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had argued that it was far too late to change ballots in an election that had been underway for weeks; Kennedy’s only major legal victory as he removed himself from the election came in North Carolina, before ballots were sent out, forcing hundreds of thousands of them to be reprinted.

But the Kennedy cases weren’t crucial to the GOP’s overall legal strategy, of filing early challenges to ballot count procedures before the election, and defending efforts to remove voters flagged as non-citizens from the rolls. Every elected Republican attorney general has sided with Virginia in an effort to remove the “non-citizens” before next week’s election, though the effort had entangled some natural-born citizens. In Mississippi, Republicans convinced the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to rule against state law allowing mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrived later. That ruling won’t have an effect on this election, right now — but the GOP hopes to set a precedent that prevents the counting of late-arriving ballots.

Polls

Split-ticket voting is dead; long live split-ticket voting. Republican worries about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson dragging down Donald Trump, based on old posts CNN discovered from the Nude Africa forum, have not borne out in polling. Support for Robinson has collapsed, with one-in-five independents and one-in-10 Republican voters now saying they’re undecided on the race. Support for Trump has remained stable, and a slight plurality of independents disapprove of the federal response to Hurricane Helene. The question raised by these numbers is whether Republicans vote the full ballot after skipping Robinson. In every statewide race polled, Democrats now hold a lead — but the same was true in most 2020 polling of the state, when Republicans over-performed here.

The first and last Suffolk poll of Wisconsin finds two tied races, with a twist: Democrats overperforming in Door County, a bellwether that numerous reporters have trekked through for clues about what’s going to happen. Statewide, both Trump and Hovde have dragged down the Democrats’ favorable ratings, erasing the advantage that other pollsters have found here for Harris and Baldwin. In Door County, growing more quickly than other rural Wisconsin counties — thanks to its popularity as a retirement hub — the Democrats are far more personally popular. It’s a small sample, but an indication that the uneven shifts in partisan support from 2020 will mean fewer Election Night tea leaves.

As bullish as Republicans feel right now, as they talk about a landslide that could sweep Democrats out of Minnesota and New Mexico, most polling still finds a big Democratic advantage in the suburbs that trended left after 2016. Omaha is ground zero. Harris now leads by 12 points in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District, comparable to her advantage in New Jersey. Osborn, whose independent campaign is backed by Democrats, leads there by 18 points, and leads in the 1st District (which includes the state capital and the University of Nebraska) by 9 points; Harris trails narrowly there, two years after the Dobbs backlash shrank the GOP’s margin in a special House election. Republicans lead because of their overwhelming strength in the rural 3rd District, where Trumps leads by a 3-1 margin. 

Ads

• Harris for President, “Your Family.” Here’s an example of the economy-first ads that Democrats are closing with, with few ads rebutting Republican attacks directly. Harris speaks straight into camera about her most popular and well-known plans — against price gouging, for “middle class tax cuts” and cheaper health care — and admits that the viewer “may not always agree with me.” That encapsulates the Democratic strategy, to keep mentioning the party’s basic plans and wave all the negativity off as trivia.
• Donald J. Trump for President 2024, “Four More.” The Trump campaign has run a series of closing spots, at different lengths, with the same basic message: “Kamala broke it” and only he can be trusted to fix it. Each tells the story with headlines pulled off of legacy news sites, sometimes out of context. (A CBS News story cited here as “Harris would raise taxes” actually says “Harris would raise taxes on high-income earners.”) The glue is Harris’ interview on The View and refusal to name a Biden decision she wouldn’t have made.
• Don Bacon for Congress, “Don and Ann.” Even in districts won by Joe Biden, few Republican members of Congress have done more to advertise a bipartisan mindset than Bacon. In 2020, he got the endorsement of Brad Ashford, the Democrat he beat in 2016, over a progressive who stopped Ashford in their party’s primary. This time, he has the support of Ann Ashford, the ex-congressman’s widow, who also ran and lost to Bacon in 2020. “Character matters more than party,” says Bacon. “Don’s no extremist,” says Ashford, joined by a mini-army of women. Their appearance underscores his strength and how Trump — and the unsuccessful effort to stop giving Omaha an electoral vote, which Bacon supported — has undercut it.

Scooped!

Daniel Nichanian’s Bolts is always publishing smart, ground-level stories about political developments that might get lost in the news cycle. I’d been wondering if any Ohio voters were befuddled by how Republicans wrote the ballot language for an anti-gerrymandering amendment, describing a non-partisan redistricting commission as “gerrymandering.” Sure enough, Bolts found a voter thrown by the ballot description, which claimed that Ohio would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and voted “no” on something he supported.

Next

• seven days until the 2024 presidential election
• 49 days until the Electoral College votes
• 83 days until Inauguration Day

David Recommends

There’s a line in the film “Conclave,” a thriller about cardinals choosing a new pope, that landed like a daisy cutter at my screening in DC. The intrigue over the election keeps getting twistier; another front-running candidate is poleaxed by some unexpected problem; Ralph Fiennes, playing the dean of the College of Cardinals, bemoans how the whole thing’s become some “kind of American political convention.” The real joke is that it’s far more competitive than any US equivalent, run on pure intrigue and rumor, the participants quarantined in a few luxurious rooms, secrets locked in a room locked by a dead pope’s seal. It’s a great political story — see it before someone ruins the ending for you.

The Kamala Harris campaign has assembled a 25-strong team to devise a comprehensive US-Africa policy if she wins the White House next month, Semafor’s Yinka Adegoke scooped.

People close to the Harris-Walz campaign say US-Africa policy, which is usually low down on US foreign policy priorities, “will get a lot more attention under Harris” if they win the White House and build on the Biden Administration’s attempts to upgrade the status of US-Africa policy.