Is the Harris-Cheney teamup unnerving the Trump campaign?
Former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin wonders if the Kamala Harris / Liz Cheney teamup is working against Donald Trump. Griffin reminds CNN viewers that as many as 20 percent of voters voted for Nikki Haley in Republican primaries even after she dropped out. The fact that Trump is still insulting her instead of reaching out to Haley voters is not the way to win them over. Team Trump is going after Cheney as well.
But that’s because “Donald Trump is going to do Donald Trump,” says Republican stragetgist Erin Perrine. Whatever comes out of his mind (mouth) is his strategy. That is, if it’s not to simply flood the zone with crazy, Griffin adds. Anything to distract from his claims about using the U.S. military against U.S. citizens.
Many voters are shrugging it off as Trump being Trump. But deploying the military against Americans is also the crazy coming out of Trump’s mouth. So if crazy is a distraction strategy, Trump lacks the self-discipline to adhere to it.
Cheney, meanwhile, gets to say things Harris the candidate cannot, and from the same stage in joint events with Harris. That strategy may be working (The Guardian):
“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” said the former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who – as the vice-president said, in some cases have died – who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”
The current situation is “untenable”, Cheney said, and America needs a president “who understands how important compassion is, who understands that these shouldn’t be political issues, that we ought to be able to have these discussions and say, ‘You know what? Even if you are pro-life, as I am, I do not believe, for example, that the state of Texas ought to have the right, as they’re currently suing to do, to get access to women’s medical records.’
“There are some very fundamental and fundamentally dangerous things that have happened and so I think that it’s crucially important for us to find ways to have the federal government play a role and protect women from some of the worst harms that we’re seeing.”
The women’s vote will be crucial. Trump will be a hard sell for many. Cheney’s making it harder.
I've been saying for several days now that the early vote looks strong for Dems in MI. A huge driver for that is turnout among modeled Dem women. At this point in '20 GOP women were turning out at a higher rate than Dem women (3.6 pts), right now Dem women have a 5.7 pt advantage pic.twitter.com/wK9ENRhlQv
Two weeks from now, Election Day polls will be open. Vanity Fair‘s Bess Levin summarizes what Donald Trump’s been doing with his last days to build a winning coalition.
Policy? Did he finally lay out his health care plan after over eight years of promises? Perhaps explain his plan for resurrecting an America he claims Democrats “destroyed”? Did he explain [timestamp 1:05:00] how he’ll “cut your taxes, end inflation, slash your prices, raise your wages,” etc.? (More on raising wages in a moment.) If Trump promised everyone in Greenville, N.C. a pony yesterday, I missed it.
“Donald Trump’s closing message to voters appears to be: I’m insane,” read the tweet from Vanity Fair promoting Levin’s take:
Instead, he talked about the size a famous golfer’s penis, pretended to be a fast-food worker at a closed McDonald’s, and claimed every single goose in Springfield, Ohio, has has gone missing.
Yes, that’s correct: On Saturday, the Republican nominee for president of the United States told rallygoers in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, that golf legend Arnold Palmer had a huge schlong. “Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women—and I love women. But this guy, this guy…this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ’Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
The following day, Trump pretended to be a fast-food worker at a McDonald’s that—to be clear—was closed to the public. There, while serving pretend customers, he baselessly claimed that Harris is lying when she says she worked at a McDonald’s during college, telling reporters: “Now I’ve worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Asked why she would fabricate having held such a job, he responded: “Because she’s Lyin’ Kamala.” Note: In case it was not clear, Trump was born with several silver spoons in his mouth; in 2018, The New York Timesreported that “By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire” and was “a millionaire by age eight.” While being born wealthy does not preclude a person from caring about the working class, there is a laundry list of reasonssupporting the notion that Trump does not actually give a crap about such people. In fact, while “working” at the McDonald’s on Sunday, he declined to give an actual answer re: increasing the minimum wage.
But pandering? He’s hell at pandering.
Q: You call Americans who don’t support you ‘the enemy within.’ That’s a pretty ominous phrase to use about other Americans
Over the weekend, Trump declared all the geese in Springfield, Ohio, had gone missing (cooked and eaten by Haitian immigrants is implied). He confirmed his belief that America’s real enemies reside within the U.S. The “enemy from within” is you, Dear Reader. And he believes he should use the military against people like you who don’t support him.
On his way to the Greenville, N.C. rally on Monday, Trump blew through here to visit devastated Swannanoa so fast that I missed it while the internet was down again. He stopped adjacent the exit, stepped out of his limousine, and walked a few steps to reach a makeshift podium.
Asked by a Politico reporter if he still urged his voters to support Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson for governor, Trump pretended not to know the man he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids” and who once called himself a “Black Nazi.”
“I’m not familiar with the state of the race right now,” Trump said amidst the dust and wreckage. “I haven’t seen it.”
No Trump stop would be complete without him repeating debunked lies. Swannanoa was no different.
And he repeated several false claims that FEMA is running out of money because funds were being diverted to help “illegal migrants” enter the country with the possible intention of illegally voting for Democrats in the election.
“It’s all gone,” Trump said. “They [FEMA] spent it on illegal migrants. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are drug dealers. Many of them come out of mental institutions and insane asylums, and many of them are terrorists.
“And they spent money to bring these people into our country and they don’t have money to take care of the people of North Carolina and the other states.”
“Is it helping the recovery effort in North Carolina to keep making these claims that FEMA isn’t doing their job well?” asked a reporter, referencing a supporter arrested for threatening FEMA workers. William Jacob Parsons, Fiedler writes, “said the threats were needed to prevent the FEMA workers from taking the actions Trump falsely claimed they were engaged in.”
Trump evaded:
“I think you have to let people know how they’re doing,” he replied, apparently referring to his false statements. “. … But, you know, [there are] very bad statements coming out about the job that FEMA and this administration has done.”
Incumbent NC-11 Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards issued a statement debunking the lies on October 8. He stood by silently on Monday. Except:
Edwards, however, told Trump that by “getting dust on your shoes,” he had done more to view the devastation than the president or vice president.
The fawning and kowtowing Trump cult members exhibit over this obvious (emotionally stunted) career con man in visible mental decline is beyond comprehension. I sat at my parents dinner table in early 2016 and declared him mentally unstable. Nothing he’s done since has undermined that assessment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans dead because of his incompetence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic are beyond commenting.
When you surrender to the MAGA media bubble, you don’t get to choose which items confirm your prejudices, which ones hurt you in service of making you mad at people Trump wants you to be mad at. Some may wake up to the cruel manipulation. Others will be victims to the end.
Witness the difference in the photos at the top.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney framed the choice facing voters in this presidential election as succinctly as anyone. It’s a matter of trust: “If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn’t make that guy the President of the United States.”
.@Liz_Cheney: If you wouldn't hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn't make that guy the President of the United States pic.twitter.com/lN6XXbFHmF
Kamala Harris: We cannot despair. We cannot despair. The nature of a democracy is such that I think there's a duality. On the one hand, there's an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its… pic.twitter.com/kpLsnbWq4v
Kamala Harris held some Q&As with Liz Cheney today in an attempt to persuade Republican women to vote for Harris. When asked how she deals with the despair so many are feeling she said this:
Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people.
Oh there’s great strength in that.
And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be.
And so let’s not feel powerless.
Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated. We rise to a moment. And we stand on broad shoulders of people who have fought this fight before for our country. And in many ways then, let us look at the challenge that we have been presented and not be overwhelmed by it.
The baton is now in our hands, to fight for, not against, but for this country that we love. That’s what we have the power to do.
So let’s own that? Dare I say be joyful in what we will do in the process of owning that which is knowing that we can and will build community and coalitions and remind people that we’re all in this together.
Let’s not let the overwhelming nature of this strip us of our strength.
In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.
“If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal. It just means they’re suspicious.”
Womack is the president and founder of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group of self-described patriots dedicated to investigating the election for what they perceive as incidents of fraud in the pivotal presidential battleground state — where polls put the contest at a statistical tie between the Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
Womack describes his organization as comprised mostly of retirees working remotely from their computers to analyze public records related to voting. He says the group has a list of multiple factors they are using to flag suspicious voters, a task he believes is necessary because of flaws in how voter information has been collected in recent years. […]
Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told CBS News it defies logic to expect undocumented immigrants would take the risk of crossing the border and then place themselves in legal jeopardy by registering to vote and actually voting in an election.
“It’s very much a myth,” said Proaño,” but the campaigns have essentially used it as rhetoric, again, to try and suppress and intimidate the Latino vote.”
It’s absurd. The last thing an undocumnted migrant wants to do is get involved in some highly regulated American legal ritual. Fergawdsakes.
But this is really about intimidating Hispanic voters because they have traditionally been a Democratic constitutency. With all the talk ab out Trump making huge headway with that group you’d think thay’d contemplate whether this is so smart but then these are Republicans we’re talking about.
I keep hearing that there are Democratic lawyers in place in all the battlegrounds to defend the vote. I hope that’s true because the Republican yahoos have been trained to challenge anyone they see as “an enemy within” whether it’s Latinos. Black voters, college students whatever. We’re already seeing signs of it:
A junior at Franklin & Marshall College was wrongfully turned away from the Lancaster County elections office on Tuesday, told he was ineligible to vote in Pennsylvania unless he could prove he was not registered in his home state, Connecticut.
The student was already a registered voter in Pennsylvania and had voted by mail in Lancaster County in 2022, according to records obtained by LancasterOnline last year from the Department of State.
The student went to the county elections office in downtown Lancaster last week to apply for a mail-in ballot. His plan was to fill it out immediately and submit it in person.
It turns out it was illegal:
Marian Schneider, an attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the removal of the student’s voter registration violated federal law, which prohibits removing people from the voter rolls in the final 90 days before a national election.
She said Pennsylvania law is also clear about the right of out-of-state college students to register and vote in the county where their college campus is, so long as they meet all the other criteria for voting. The F&M student met all of those criteria.
“They should restore that registration. They had no business removing it,” Schneider said.
How many people are going to go to the trouble to contest these petty disqualifications? Not all of them, I can guarantee.
Trump: "I'm the greatest president there's ever been. I said, what about George Washington? No, you're better. What about Lincoln? What about Abraham Lincoln? Nope, you're better." pic.twitter.com/0GYCJAHiyz
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 21, 2024
Trump: "I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18, no of 1798. Think of that, 1798. That's when we had real politicians that said we're not going to play games. We have to go back to 1798." pic.twitter.com/yuozQTVfoB
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 21, 2024
Trump: "All these idiots back there will say 'he's cognitively impaired…Oh, I heard a word that wasn't exactly proper. He's cognitive.' They're sick people. I'll tell you what, they are really…Not all of them, I'd say about 92%." pic.twitter.com/BkVeqGXOVy
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 21, 2024
Trump: "I'd love to have God to come down and be the vote counter just for one day and see how well we do in California."
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 20, 2024
“You called [Jan. 6] a day of love…given that many police officers were attacked and…Can you understand why many would view it as a dark and tragic day?”
Trump: “This was a protest against a rigged election…there was a beauty to it.”pic.twitter.com/0isPpkCwe1
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) October 20, 2024
His closing argument is: Vote for me. I’m batshit insane!
This should be devastating for Donald Trump but since his cult has been trained not to believe anything bad about him, it probably won’t have much of an impact. Still, it’s pretty shocking for a man who depends on older people to vote for him:
Trump’s agenda would make the popular government program, relied upon by millions of American seniors, insolvent in six years — shrinking the current timeline by a third, the group found.
The Republican nominee’s proposals would also expand Social Security’s cash shortfall by trillions of dollars and lead to even steeper benefit cuts in the coming years, said US Budget Watch 2024, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
“We find President Trump’s campaign proposals would dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances,” the CRFB budget group said in a blog post.
They didn’t find that Harris’s polities would do the same. The reasons Trump is draining the system include his tariffs, of course, but also his proposal to ends all taxes on Social Security, tips and overtime and lowering taxes on corporations.
When asked about it the campaign said that deporting migrants would restore social security solvency.
They are very, very confused because it’s obvious that Trump is just randomly pandering like crazy without any serious contemplation of the consequences of his policies. I cetainly hope no one is counting on his actually enacting any of these plans with the exception of tax cuts for corporations and rich people. But be advised that if he does it won’t be pretty.
Yeah, I know he entertained his crowd over the weekend with talk about Arnold Palmer’s allegedly huge male member and then shut down a McDonalds so he could pretend to work there for 15 minutes to somehow prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. But I think this is yet another low point:
Wow – Trump is asked about armed gunman threatening FEMA workers and refuses to condemn
“I think you have to let people know how they’re doing. If they’re not doing, if they’re doing a poor job, we’re supposed to not say it?
I hope he didn’t mean that FEMA would do a better job if they knew that armed gunman would shoot them if they didn’t. But you never know. I think he meant that it was important that people tell them when they’re not doing their jobs but in reality he’s saying that they should be able to lie with impunity during a disaster for political purposes. It never ends…
Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them.
In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The right has always been pretty pro-slavery but I didn’t think they wanted to be slaves themselves.
Here he is giving Trump a big wet kiss:
Edwards: I also own McDonald's restaurants and I know that you perfected your skills behind the counter a day or so ago and it was my honor to present president trump with the french fry certification pin pic.twitter.com/s7Up4ghaIG
The 2024 election is just a little over two weeks away now and most Democrats are down to their last nerve with worry. This is nothing new, of course. That’s just the way they roll. Republicans meanwhile are already cracking the champagne strutting around saying they have it in the bag no need to worry. That’s how they roll. Both of these phenomenons are indicative of a certain kind of temperament but they are also real political strategies and it’s worth taking a look at them.
I’ve written before about the Republicans’ love of the bandwagon effect which really just holds that if you act like Donald Trump and pretend that you know you’ve got it won, some people will naturally follow because they want to go with the winner. They’ve actually been doing that long before Trump came along but nobody in politics has ever been more naturally adept at deploying it than he is. And we’ve discussed ad nauseum how the Democrats are suffering from post-2016 PTSD and are just more likely to believe the sky is falling, mainly because these races have been so close for so long and they are rationally worried that it will fall the wrong way.
Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer explained why these two behaviors may just be counterproductive this time, particularly on the GOP side. The political strategy behind the bandwagon effect was specifically targeted at the high propensity voters to whom Republicans have traditionally appealed: older and mostly college educated people who always turn out. That is why they would win the lower interest mid-term elections while the Democrats would win big popular vote victories with their lower propensity voters (those who vote only sporadically or not at all) attenuating the GOP base of regular voters in the presidential years.
Therefore, Democratic strategists turned up the hand wringing at the end of a campaign to ensure their base knows their vote matters (otherwise they might just say “why bother?”) and the Republicans pushed the illusion of momentum to motivate any stragglers to go with the perceived winner. But Pfeiffer points out that the coalitions have changed rather dramatically since 2016 and the strategies that worked with the older configurations may not make as much sense today.
Our final poll finds Harris leading 51%-47% among high-engagement voters — a remarkably stable four-point lead the same as the previous two polls — only this time with just 2% remaining undecided. But Trump has bounced back to a seven-point lead with low/mid-engagement voters, 52%-45% — smack dab in between his 10-point lead over Biden among those voters in May and his three-point lead over Harris in August. The likely explanation? Since August, Trump has consolidated more Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters and other third-party voters to his column, allowing him to increase his low/mid-engagement vote share from 48% to 52%, while Harris’s share among that group has remained stagnant at 45%.
The GOP’s bandwagon strategy may not work with Trump’s low/mid propensity voters who figure they don’t need to turn out if he already has it won. They can just keep playing Call of Duty or scrolling through pornhub without having to worry that their “gangsta” leader won’t win. Without the hardcore high propensity voters they used to count on, the Republicans may be making a mistake by acting overconfident. Of course, they really have no choice. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about.
The Democrats don’t have the same worries. They don’t lose any of the college educated types by being nervous nellies. In fact, it may get them out to vote early. And they’re still working hard trying to get out their own low propensity types, the young progressives, various ethnic and racial minorities who tend to have very busy lives and need to be contacted and persuaded. They’re even working in the rural areas to try to cut Trump’s margins even a little which can make a difference in the close swing states. Those voters will know that the Harris campaign needs their votes.
The big question for both campaigns at this point, with the race so close, is whether their field operations are up to the task. Early voting appears to be robust in the swing states so far, but comparisons with 2020 are useless because that was such an unusual circumstance. And who knows what Republicans are thinking about Trump’s inconsistent directives about early voting or constant carping about the elections being rigged?
When Trump engineered the ouster of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and brought in his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and N. Carolina operative Michael Whatley to run it, he made it clear that he didn’t think they needed a get out the vote operation. He instructed them to focus on “election integrity” by which he means vote suppression, poll watching, contesting results, that sort of thing. He believed that his presence alone is enough to get out the GOP vote.
But after an FEC ruling last March that allowed more coordination between the campaigns and outside Super PACs, the Republicans ddid decide to try an experiment and outsource their field operations to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s Save America PAC (previously Ron DeSantis’s very grifty primary PAC) who are focusing all their energies on those low propensity voters. Nobody knows whether it will work and the signs are that having gotten a very late start and being run by people with no experience it’s pretty disorganized.
The AP reports that people on the ground aren’t seeing much activity and the technology that was supposed to revolutionize their new approach doesn’t work half the time. They were firing some of their vendors and subcontractors and replacing them as recently as this month.
Meanwhile Elon Musk has taken matters into his own hands and is camped in Pennsylvania until election where he’s holding rallies and paying people a hundred dollars to sign a petition ostensibly supporting the 1st and 2nd Amendments which is obviously a thinly disguised list building exercise. He’s now giving away a million dollars to a random signer every day, creating a sort of electoral lottery. This is of very dubious legality but Musk doesn’t care. He believes he is operating with impunity and he’s probably right. The real question is why he needs this list at this late date? And why shouldn’t Harris voters rush to sign these petitions and get in on the action? It’s just more weirdness from the Trump camp.
The Democrats have been building their ground game for many months, prepared as they were for the fact that Joe Biden’s unpopularity was going to require them to work extra hard to get out their own voters. Harris’s entrance into the race changed that dynamic with massive new enthusiasm and fundraising and that operation has only grown. Whether that’s enough to turn out their own low propensity voters and cut into Trump margins in those battleground states remains to be seen.
But considering the GOP’s new coalition, Trump bragging that he’s already got it won may be a big mistake and when you combine it with the fact that his ground operation is run by grifters and megalomaniacs I can understand why just about every Democratic strategist you hear from says, “it’s too close for comfort, but I’d rather be us than them.”
So Mike Johnson textd with is erstwhile friend Liz Cheney after her appearance on Meet the Press last week. He told Axios they “agreed to disagree.” Liz says, not so much:
Cheney disputed Johnson’s characterization of the exchange, telling Axios that she and the speaker “used to be friends, but we did not ‘agree to disagree.'”
Johnson said he had not spoken to Cheney in a “very long time,” but decided to text her after “she said some very uncharitable things.”“I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations,” Cheney told NBC on Oct. 13.
Johnson told Axios he shared “how disappointed I was in that, to make things personal, because I’ve not done that. … We had a little debate in conversation, on text message, back and forth and agreed to disagree.”
Cheney stood by her accusations against Johnson, taking issue with his comments that he will commit to certifying if “the election is free and fair and legal.” […]
In a further statement she said:
“Mike knows this is a conscious choice between right and wrong and can’t honestly rationalize supporting Trump on this.”
Cheney is critical of Johnson for his lead role in the bogus amicus brief challenging the results and she’s right about that. Of course we should all be suspicious thathe will do something similar this time if hegets the chance.
Johnson whines:
“You know the idea that President Trump is somehow a danger to the Republic, and that any of us who support him are a danger or would not fulfill our constitutional obligations, all these things that have been said are it’s just nonsense,” Johnson told Axios in an interview.
“She knows, she knows me. She used to know me well and knows that I’m a constitutional conservative, and I take all matters at this level very seriously, and I will fulfill my constitutional oath. And to say otherwise is just dishonest,” he continued.
Bullshit. Donald Trump is an existensial danger to the Republic and these GOP enablers are helping him do it. If he really believes that helping that monster attempt another coup is fulfilling his constitutional oath he’s eityher delusional or he’s lying. I think it’s the latter.
Cheney told Axios she has repeatedly told Johnson “there was never any good faith basis for the stolen election allegations,” and alleged “Mike knows Trump is dangerously unstable.”
“Had Mike been acting as a lawyer representing Trump, he would have been sanctioned, disbarred or indicted for taking those positions — just as several Trump lawyers were. The courts, including several conservative judges appointed by Trump, rejected each legal argument Mike makes,” she told Axios.
“Mike does not have constitutional authority to overrule the courts. Ignoring those rulings is tyranny Trump’s own White House lawyers testified against him. Trump’s campaign lawyers testified against him. Trump’s Justice Department officials testified against him. So did his VP,” she added.
“If Trump is somehow elected, neither Mike nor anyone else will be able to control him.”
Of course not. And I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t want to control him. I think they are all very much on board the Project 2025 agenda and Trump will let them do whatever they want as long as he can exact revenge on his enemies, lick Putin’s boots, enact tariffs and terrorize immigrants. And I’m not even sure he really cares about the latter two that much unless it’s to pay off a pal or punish someone for looking at him sideways.
Mike Johnson sees the theocratic autocracy he’s always dreamed of within his grasp. He’ll do whatever it takes to get it. Others want the police state and others still see the financial benefits. Trump is their instrument.
Among these key-state voters, Harris runs strongest in Georgia, where she has an advantage of six percentage points among registered voters and four points among likely voters, which is within the margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Harris also is slightly stronger than Trump in the three most contested northern states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but by percentages within the margin of error.
The seventh battleground state, Nevada, is tied among likely voters though Harris is three points stronger than Trump among registered voters.
Naturally, the polling from North Carolina has me concerned. I’ve repeatedly made my pitch for turning out more neglected independents in heavily blue urban precincts where they underperform Democrats. But shaving GOP margins in rural areas is also part of a winning equation. Democrats’ state chair Anderson Clayton and friends at groups like Down Home North Carolina are on it. So is North Carolina’s Kate Barr. The Washington Post headline spelled out her mission: “She’s running with all she’s got for a seat she can’t win. That’s the point.“
Rural Organizing is also working to narrow rural margins. Kamala Harris hired executive director Matt Hildreth as her rural engagement director. Director of Organizing Shawn Sebastian writes at their substack:
In one of the biggest developments this week, the Harris/Walz campaign unveiled their Plan for Rural Communities. As the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, the plan “marks a concerted effort by the Democratic campaign to make a dent in the historically Trump-leaning voting bloc in the closing three weeks before Election Day. Trump carried rural voters by a nearly two-to-one margin in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. In the closely contested race, both Democrats and Republicans are reaching out beyond their historic bases in hopes of winning over a sliver of voters that could ultimately prove decisive.”
Governor Walz spoke about it at an event in Pennsylvania where he said, “When people think rural America, farm policy matters … crop insurance matters. Trade matters, tariffs matter. But you’re bigger than that. Your families, your health care matters, your education matters, your roads matter, your retirement matters, all those things matter.”
Rural America is more diverse than the MAGA stereotype, and shaving GOP margins there can be margins of victory both for local and statewide candidates. “We are bigger than just agriculture issues,” writes Sebastian.
It’s been our mission to make sure Democrats focus on turning out their small-town and rural bases — which do exist! — and to demonstrate their commitment to investing in rural America. Harris and Walz are showing rural voters that their concerns have been heard. This really is the plan we’ve been waiting for and we look forward to making it a reality.
They are also showing how life can improve when elected officials deal with real issues instead of just trying to divide us. The top of the ticket is committed and that’s great to see, but we are also seeing amazing engagement in rural downballot races. For too long, national Democrats have ignored state legislative races, but that’s where so much of the action is. Gerrymandering and voter suppression have been toxic in states.
Sebastian adds:
“Reverse coattails” or “closing the margins” or “lose less:” However it’s described, it’s an important strategy that we’ve been pushing for a long time.
It’s an electoral version of “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
So get out and vote, willya? Knock some doors. (Brian Beutler did yesterday for the first time!) Make come calls if MAGAland is not the America in which you care to live.
