Americana

1. Following canvassers in three states
2. The final rally blitz
3. Garbage-gate fallout hits both parties
4. Third party trolling
5. Americana mailbag

Also: Harris cuts into Trump’s polling lead on the economy.

I have news to report today. Are you sitting down? Here we go: The presidential election is very close, and there are historic implications to a one-point shift in either direction.

The final week of the Trump-Harris race, and of the closest down-ballot races, has unfolded with surprises but no momentum shift; controversies, but nothing that doesn’t fit into most voters’ preconceived notions of what’s happening. In polling first provided to America, conducted for the GOP firm OnMessage, the presidential contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona are effectively tied – 49-47 Trump, 48-48 Trump, 48-47 Trump, 50-47 Trump, all within the margin of error of 3.5%. The Senate races in each state are tied: 46-46 in Pennsylvania, 48-48 in Arizona, and with 1-point advantages for Elissa Slotkin in Michigan and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, both firmly inside that margin of error.

“This data clearly indicates that these senate races may well turn on Trump’s final number,” OnMessage chief pollster Wes Anderson said. “If the undecided, an increasingly small piece of the electorate, break Trump’s way, Republicans will likely be victorious in most or all of these four states.”

Democratic polls don’t show the same thing. Republicans haven’t been spending in Arizona like they think Kari Lake is going to win there. My own experience from the last few weeks, as you’ll read in this edition, has found Democratic and Republican energy in every targeted state, with well-staffed campaigns — nothing like the malaise that Democrats thought they could wish away in 2016, or the Republican overconfidence of 2022.

But there are not just two paths here. There is one scenario where Republicans don’t just win the election, but fall over the line in so many Senate races that Democrats don’t have a reasonable chance of taking the chamber back for years, and are irrelevant when Republicans replace more judges with reliable conservatives. There’s one where voters hand Donald Trump a Democratic House that blocks most of what he’s been running on, including massive deficit-financed tax cuts that they don’t support. It’s still at least possible that Harris takes office with a narrow Senate majority — or a “majority” decided by an independent in Nebraska who could be a wild card — and has a more significant agenda than expected. The one thing we do know, based on all the available data and evidence, is how much we don’t know.

The view from the swing states

The final scramble for votes has been underway for weeks in the battleground states. Democrats, liberal nonprofits, and labor unions all hit “go” on interlocking persuasion, get-out-the-vote, and ballot chase programs that they had tested in lower-turnout races. Republicans, who spent years warming up their voters to the idea of voting early after Donald Trump derided the practice in 2020, have built a lattice-work of local parties, political action committees, religious charities, and grassroots groups to find unlikely voters.

Over the past month, I followed a few different types of canvass operation in the key swing states. What I saw was an election in which Democrats and Republicans are connecting with intensely motivated voters, but face open questions that will only be resolved on election day: Can Harris overcome a residue of skepticism with some historically Democratic voters? And can Trump win converts and find supporters who didn’t participate in the last election?

For what I saw in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Philadelphia, keep reading…

Where Harris and Trump are making their last stand

Democrats are closing out the presidential race with rallies in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt targets, as Donald Trump makes a few attempts to expand beyond the seven key battlegrounds.

Harris wrapped up her western campaigning on Thursday, rallying voters in Arizona and Nevada before heading east to Wisconsin. She’ll make her final stops in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, her final Michigan appearances on Sunday, and conclude her campaign with a swing across Pennsylvania, from the LeHigh Valley to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.

Trump will spend some of the final hours outside those states; he held the first and only presidential campaign rally in New Mexico this cycle on Thursday, telling Albuquerque voters that the event was good for his “credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.” His final schedule includes a stop in Virginia, which the campaign had hoped to expand to this summer, when Joe Biden still led the Democratic ticket; JD Vance’s second stop as the vice presidential nominee was in Radford, a part of southwest Virginia that’s now solidly Republican.

Democrats saw hubris in the Trump schedule, which doesn’t offer obvious help to down-ballot candidates: Republicans hope to hold one Virginia House seat in the Tidewater region and flip the suburban seat being vacated by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, which shifted hard to the left during the Trump presidency. And Democratic PACs see a narrow Harris path to victory in the Midwest, with narrow losses in the sun belt, with no expected danger outside the battlegrounds.

‘Garbage’-gate is still flying around the election

The Trump campaign squeezed every moment it could out of a botched Joe Biden appearance on a liberal group’s Zoom call, where the president seemed to compare “his supporters” to garbage.

Democrats quickly saw the problem with Biden’s Voto Latino appearance — his second attempt, on Tuesday, to attack roast comic Tony Hinchcliffe over his insult of Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. On X, Biden’s White House account clarified that the president was referring just to the comic, not all Trump supporters. On Wednesday morning, Harris told reporters that Biden had cleaned up the comment, but she “strongly disagree[d] with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”

Republicans persisted, claiming that Harris hadn’t actually rebuked Biden, and attacking from multiple angles. House Oversight Chair James Comer demanded that the White House “preserve all documents and internal communications regarding President Biden’s statement,” pending an investigation into why the official transcript had him saying “supporter’s” and not “supporters.” Trump did a brief photo-op inside a garbage truck before his Wednesday rally in Green Bay, Wis., then wore a reflective work vest to his rally, where he claimed that Biden had insulted “250 million” Americans.

All of that pushed the storyline away from Hinchcliffe’s initial comment, but it didn’t halt the backlash. In addition to Bad Bunny coming out for Harris, Nicky Jam, a Reggaeton star with almost 44 million Instagram followers who endorsed Trump last month, rescinded his support and cited the MSG rally as the reason. Jennfier Lopez accused Trump and his allies of offending “every Latino in this country” at a Harris rally in Las Vegas on Thursday. And Harris added a scheduled visit on Monday in Allentown, a Pennsylvania city with a large Puerto Rican community that Trump, by coincidence, had visited right as the Hinchcliffe story was peaking in the news.

For the full story, keep reading …

The third party troll wars

Third party candidates are getting boosts from Democratic and Republican PACs that hope to siphon votes from their main rivals, while their own campaigns lose traction.

In some states, the new liberal super PAC Civic Truth Action is sending Republican voters information about Constitution Party candidate Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist who is running explicitly to run ads on TV, not to gain the presidency. In Wisconsin, Republican donors have stood up a Badger Values PAC to send mail to progressive voters urging them to support Green Party nominee Jill Stein — the “clear choice for peace,” illustrated by photos of the candidate wearing a keffiyeh and of Vice President Harris meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Stein’s own campaign has not hit the fundraising or polling marks of her 2016 candidacy, and Democrats have continued to run ads and opposition research to damage her; on Thursday, they shared videos of her running mate, Butch Ware, entertaining a national 16-week abortion ban and opposing transgender athletes in women’s sports. European Greens, which represents the third party in E.U. nations, urged Stein to quit the race altogether: “Europe needs Kamala Harris as President of the United States.”

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continued to roll up support from right-leaning Libertarians and supporters of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s. brief independent bid. At a Thursday rally in Glendale, Kennedy and former running mate Nicole Shanahan both campaigned with Trump; Shanahan, a California voter, filled out her ballot onstage, reminding voters that her name still appeared on it, and intimating that First Lady Jill Biden had endorsed a dark Qanon-spread conspiracy by dressing up as a Panda for Halloween.

Answering your election questions

Last week, I put out a call for questions, asking Americana readers what they needed to know before the election. I rounded up some more questions for this edition — the last one before Election Day! — with most seeming to come from people who want Harris to win the election.

That doesn’t make the questions any less interesting. Why isn’t Harris talking more about her promise to legalize marijuana, a policy that her administration is already working on? Would Trump declare victory even if he doesn’t win? Why isn’t the campaign saying more about Trump’s age? (It actually has said a lot.) And will we learn who the winner is on election night this time?

For the rundown, keep reading …

In a noisy election cycle, it’s hard to find signals—even of the mixed variety. Today on Mixed Signals from Semafor Media, Ben and Nayeema sit down with reporters David Weigel and Max Tani to parse what you’re not seeing, from the “insane” TV ads at a Pittsburgh Steelers game and the print ads in an Arizona nail salon to an unpublished Washington Post endorsement quashed by Jeff Bezos. One of these things may decide the election, and another could shape the blame game that follows.

Polls

Early voting last month had good news for both Harris and Trump. Both parties saw signs they were turning out voters who didn’t participate (or weren’t 18 yet) in 2020. Republicans had succeeded in convincing some of their reliable Election Day voters to show up early, or send in mail ballots, instead. There’s no evidence in Gallup’s latest polling of a fall-off in turnout for either party — something the Trump campaign has tried to claim for Harris, insisting that the “joy” is gone from her campaign and she struggles to build real crowds. Democrats now have their biggest enthusiasm advantage since 2008, and both parties’ voters feel better about their options than they have since 2012. The caveat for Democrats: That year, Republicans had a nine-point “enthusiasm gap” edge that did nothing for Mitt Romney.

The final wave of established swing state polls, everywhere, show statistical dead heats. There have been outliers — like a respected conservative pollster finding Trump with the biggest GOP lead in Pennsylvania since 1988, carrying the state even if Harris had picked Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. But the overall story has been tied statewide races, with hundreds of millions of dollars in PAC spending cutting away at the gap between Trump and GOP Senate nominees. The other story is Harris using her own policy-focused ads to chip away at Trump’s longtime advantage on which candidate could handle “the economy.” Trump has just a 2-point lead on that question now.

EPIC-MRA is one of the last “benchmark” pollsters, a state-based shop that, with a couple of exceptions, has a record of getting the general election right. One of those exceptions came in 2016, when its final polling found a 4-point Michigan lead for Hillary Clinton. After Trump won the state, pollster Bernie Porn told me that two problems emerged — they had left the field before the impact of the last-minute FBI probe of Clinton, and undecided or third party voters broke for Trump. (Clinton was at just 42% in that final poll, with a huge share of unhappy voters available for Trump to win.) The third party vote is smaller now, and Trump could still benefit from their second choices, because Kennedy has waged a high-profile, failed effort to pull himself off the ballot. But the rest of the data here shows how Harris could win the state, by regaining 2020-level support with Black voters, which would help mitigate any losses by Arab-American voters protesting the administration’s Gaza position.

Ads

• Osborn for Senate, “Swamp Creature.” For eight years, every Republican who called on Donald Trump to end his campaign over the “Access Hollywood” tape has been attacked for it in Republican ads. This spot for independent Nebraska Senate challenger Dan Osborn is a rarity — it attacks Sen. Deb Fischer for abandoning Trump, from the right, for a candidate largely running to her left. “Deb Fischer has more in common with Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump,” says one actor; another says she “stabbed Donald Trump in the back.”
• Senate Leadership Fund, “Too.” The last-minute GOP super PAC ad buy in Nevada needles Sen. Jacky Rosen over the same votes that have inspired GOP ads in every state. They include: The American Rescue Plan (“inflationary spending”), the Equality Act (“biological men in girls’ sports and bathrooms”) and immigration reform (“amnesty for 11 million illegals”). The through line is that Rosen opposes Trump, an attempt to close the gap between Senate nominee Sam Brown and the presidential candidate.
• Patriots for Perry, “Ex.” To fend off Democrat Janelle Stelson, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry makes three charges: She doesn’t live in the district, she used to be a reporter, and she made a “racist” comment on live TV. The ad never mentions what the comment was — a joke about cat bars in Asia serving “cat tacos.” Republicans now believe that Trump benefited from endorsing a conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants stealing pets to eat them, and Perry notably does not repeat what Stelson actually said, another example of the two-step candidates are doing about what sort of comments are and are not offensive.

Scooped!

Inside details on the Harris campaign, gossip from newsroom floors, scandals that no media outlet had confirmed — all framed as “breaking” news. Any X user who reads political news has seen these sorts of posts, from anonymous (but cash verified) accounts that never back up their claims, but get into the conversation anyway. I’d been wondering what the deal with these accounts was, and Sam Stein answers some of my questions in The Bulwark. The fake stories are getting monster traffic.

Next

• four days until the 2024 presidential election
• 46 days until the Electoral College votes
• 80 days until Inauguration Day

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Developing country leaders should temper their expectations ahead of next week’s COP29 summit in Azerbaijan, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell wrote. According to a former president of the climate conference, political agreement on developing nations’ financing target will be nearly impossible to get.

Subscribe to Net Zero, Tim’s bi-weekly climate newsletter.