Turnout in 2024

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book -- titled TBD -- looks at the 2024 election.

G. Elliott Morris, Amina Brown and Katie Marriner at FiveThirtyEight:

Exacerbating Democrats’ vote share losses among key groups was a decline in turnout among those formerly their most fervent supporters. Cities saw a large decline in turnout in 2024. By our calculations, turnout in the most urban counties in the U.S. fell from 53 percent of the voting-age population in 2020 to just 45 percent in 2024. On the other hand, turnout was steady at 71-72 percent of the voting-age population in the most rural areas.


Turnout also seemed to drop in other counties that voted strongly for Biden in 2020, regardless of how urban they were. In Jefferson County, Mississippi, where Biden won 85 percent of the vote, turnout fell from 71 percent in 2020 to 58 percent in 2024, despite remaining high in counties that voted strongly for Trump in the last presidential election. Turnout fell by 6 points in Taos County, New Mexico — popular with both avid skiers and liberals (Biden won 76 percent of the vote there in 2020) — while rising by 7 points in Haralson County, Georgia — a rural county on the border with Alabama where Biden garnered just 13 percent in 2020. This story is repeated over and over again nationwide; turnout went up in the whitest, most rural and most Trump-friendly areas of the country, and it dropped in cities, Democratic strongholds and counties with high percentages of minorities — especially in the Southern Black Belt.

Nate Cohn, however, says that turnout was not the main reason she lost.

For one, the story doesn’t apply to the battlegrounds, where turnout was much higher. In all seven battleground states, Trump won more votes than Biden did in 2020.

More important, it is wrong to assume that the voters who stayed home would have backed Harris. Even if they had been dragged to the polls, it might not have meaningfully helped her...[In] a presidential election, turnout and persuasion often go hand in hand. The voters who may or may not show up are different from the rest of the electorate. They’re less ideological. They’re less likely to be partisans, even if they’re registered with a party. They’re less likely to have deep views on the issues. They don’t get their news from traditional media.

Throughout the race, polls found that Trump’s strength was concentrated among these voters. Many were registered Democrats or Biden voters four years ago. But they weren’t acting like Democrats in 2024. They were more concerned by pocketbook issues than democracy or abortion rights. If they decided to vote, many said they would back Trump.

 

How Dems Lost Ground in Atlanta and Wayne County

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 election. 

 Robert Gebeloff, Eli Murray, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart and Christine Zhang  at NYT:

In Atlanta and its suburbs, both candidates found new voters, but Ms. Harris’s gains in precincts where white voters were the largest racial or ethnic group were canceled out by losses elsewhere. Mr. Trump’s uptick in support from voters of color across Atlanta, along with improved performance in the state’s rural areas, was enough for him to win Georgia — a swing state he narrowly lost to Mr. Biden in 2020.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Ms. Harris struggled to capture the support of Arab-American voters, many of whom had been turned off by the Biden administration’s Middle East policies. In a swath of voting precincts spanning Dearborn and Hamtramck, which have the nation’s highest concentration of people of Arab ancestry, Mr. Trump picked up thousands of votes compared with 2020, while the Democratic Party lost an even bigger number. Countywide, precincts with high shares of Arab residents made up just 6 percent of the electorate but accounted for more than 40 percent of the decline in Democratic votes.

The wins keep mounting for Deaborn in Trump's personnel choices: "In one video last year, he provided advice to Israeli leaders on how to prosecute their conflict with the militant group...“Kill every single one of them,” Gorka said. https://t.co/enGxSUTxSA

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) November 23, 2024

Suburbs 2024

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. 

Elena Schneider at Politico:

Kamala Harris is counting on suburban voters to do what they’ve done since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016: reject him.

It may be the single most important piece of her electoral math. While Donald Trump has made inroads with Black and Latino men, polls in the late stage of the election show the suburbs could still power her to victory. The latest Wall Street Journal poll found Harris leading among suburban voters by 7 percentage points, while a Reuters/Ipsos analysis showed the vice president winning suburban households by 6 points.

Nicholas Fandos and Grace Ashford at NYT:

New York may not be a presidential swing state. But there is perhaps no more important battleground in this year’s race for the House of Representatives than the Empire State.

From the tip of Long Island to Syracuse, the two major parties are fighting over a half-dozen suburban swing districts — five held by Republicans — that helped decide the House majority in 2022 and are expected to again in November. While Democrats hold voter registration advantages in almost all of them, polls show that the Republicans’ focus on the southern border is resonating, along with other issues.

Dark Money Disinformation

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Anna Massoglia at Open Secrets:

An initiative called Progress 2028 that purports to be Kamala Harris’ liberal counter to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is actually run by a dark money network supporting former President Donald Trump.

Building America’s Future, the dark money group at the helm of the network, has steered money to a constellation of groups and initiatives boosting Trump’s agenda and spreading messaging aimed at chipping away voters from Harris. The dark money group reportedly received over $100 million in funding from billionaire Elon Musk, along with other donors, the New York Times recently reported.

The newest effort to benefit from their largesse is Progress 2028. Building America’s Future registered to use Progress 2028 as a fictitious name on Sept. 23 and the website was created three days later, OpenSecrets’ analysis of corporate filings and DNS records found.

The Progress 2028 site appears to be created by IMGE LLC, a firm run by Republican political operatives that the New York Times described as the “hidden hand” behind Building America’s Future, and a page on the Progress 2028 site includes the firm’s sizzle reel.

IMGE LLC has also done work for Elon Musk’s America PAC and several other Republican political committees, including a super PAC funded by America’s Future Fund named Future Coalition PAC, as first pointed out by Brendan Fischer, Deputy Executive Director of Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project.

The Progress 2028 manifesto draws clear parallels to Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for restructuring the executive branch under the next Republican administration. The Project 2025 blueprint was developed by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with Trump’s administration. Project 2025 has drawn intense criticism, and the former president has said it does not reflect his own priorities should he return to the White House.

Some of the policies listed in Progress 2028 highlight disproven and misleading claims about Harris’ positions. Policies listed include “Empowering Undocumented Immigrants, Building Our Future” and “Expanding Medicaid to Undocumented Immigrants.”

Harris: Woman, Asian, Black, Christian

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. 

Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sara Sadhwani

Recent data released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote) indicate that gender representation plays a stronger role than racial representation in shaping voter support for her candidacy. The survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago in September asked respondents, “Thinking specifically about Kamala Harris, how important to you are the following aspects of her identity?” providing choices that included “her identity as an African American,” “her identity as an Asian Indian or South Asian,” “her identity as a woman,” and “her age.”

Given the amount of news coverage and social media engagement around Harris’s racial identity as both Indian and Black, Asian American voters would be expected to give the highest importance to her Indian and South Asian heritage and her African American identities, with gender and age identities far behind. The survey results showed the opposite (see figure below).

The figure above, from the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey, reveals a significant gender gap among AAPI voters in regard to the importance of Harris’ gender identity

Well over a third of Asian American voters (38%) say that Harris’ identity as a woman is “extremely important” or “very important” to them, with significantly smaller proportions indicating the same about her racial identities as Indian/South Asian (25%) and as an African American (24%) or about her age (25%). The findings were not statistically different among Indian American voters, who arguably share even closer ethnic affinity to Harris.

Notably, the “gender boost” in identity representation was driven entirely by the opinions of Asian American women. About a half (49%) of Asian American women said that Harris’s gender was important to them, nearly double the proportion among Asian American men (25%). This gender gap was also noticeable in questions about the importance of having more elected representatives who are women (56% of Asian American women said that this was extremely important or very important to them, when compared to 36% of Asian American men), and about their intention to vote for Harris (72% among Asian American women and 59% among Asian American men).

Kamala Harris: “I grew up in the Black church. I grew up attending 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, California.”

Rev. Solomon Kinloch, Jr: “That’s church.”

Harris: “My pastor is Amos C. Brown of Third Baptist Church.”

Charlamagne: “God is good.”

Harris: “All the time.” pic.twitter.com/t1X71KId9f

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) October 15, 2024

Whether they're religious or not, I believe people want a leader who is driven by compassion not cruelty, one whose values are rooted in hope and not fear, whose moral convictions yield inclusion and not separation.https://t.co/sj872MkZKo pic.twitter.com/IixEWa3EDv

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) October 16, 2024

Game of Slivers: Trump's Band Bros, Harris's Republicans, and Losing By Less

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020.ections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Political scientists tend to downplay the role of campaign organization in presidential races, saying that it only matters at the margins.

But in a tight race, the margins are everything.

 Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

Donald Trump is betting that support from young men will help propel him to the White House. And he’s getting an assist from a crew of pro-Trump millennial pranksters who are capitalizing on college football tailgates, Tinder and even the “Hawk Tuah Girl” podcast.

The Nelk Boys, digital content creators and hosts of the popular “Full Send” podcast, are mounting a multi-million-dollar voter registration push aimed at turning out young men. They plan to sign up voters at a “Send the Vote” music festival later this month that will feature a performance by pro-Trump rapper Waka Flocka Flame, and at a pair of Penn State football games.

James Rickerton at Newsweek:

The proportion of self-identified Republicans who say they plan to vote for Kamala Harris in November has nearly doubled over the past month according to a major new survey from The New York Times/Siena College.

It found nine percent of likely voters who describe themselves as Republican plan to back the Democratic candidate in November, up from five percent in the last New York Times/Siena College poll a month earlier. By contrast just three percent of Democratic identifying voters said they will vote for Donald Trump, while 96 percent said they support Harris.

A number of prominent Republicans have said they will vote for Harris over Trump, including former vice president Dick Cheney, who in September said: "As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for vice president Kamala Harris."

Ari Shapiro et al. at NPR:

In many ways, “lose by less” has become the key term in the presidential campaign, according to Anthony Chergosky, who teaches political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

“Because Wisconsin elections are so competitive and so closely decided, the parties understand that any little gain anywhere could make the difference,” he said.

In Walworth County, Holly said the Wisconsin Democrats have a specific goal.

“I think the state figured out if we can pull 42%, then the state is good … everything we do here helps,” she said.

In 2020, President Biden won Wisconsin by just over 20,000 votes. Holly said that’s because of the work of places like the Elkhorn Democrats’ office.

  Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell at WP:

Vice President Kamala Harris is not going to win Somerset County, Pa.

She’s not even going to come close.

Former president Donald Trump carried this rural county about 60 miles southeast of Pittsburgh by 55 points in 2016, when he won Pennsylvania. He did even better there in 2020, despite losing the state to Joe Biden.

But Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) traveled to Somerset County anyway late last month to rally local Democrats. It’s one of more than a half-dozen events Fetterman has headlined across Pennsylvania in recent weeks in counties that Trump won by at least 20 points in 2020, including a stop last week in York County with Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

The stops align with the Harris campaign’s strategy to win Pennsylvania in part by running a little stronger in rural Republican strongholds than Biden in 2020 — a message that Fetterman echoed at a Somerset County Democratic Party fundraising dinner.

“It’s not about the color on the map,” Fetterman told more than 120 Democrats gathered in a century-old red barn on a Saturday evening a few miles from the field where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. “It’s about the margins in these counties.”

Harris’s strategy for cutting into Trump’s margins is built around out-organizing his campaign

The Harris campaign says it has 50 offices across Pennsylvania, including 16 in counties that Trump won by double-digits in 2020.

 

 

Election Forecasts

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy

🇺🇸 The Fiscal Impact of the Harris and Trump Campaign Plans 🇺🇸

Our comprehensive analysis breaks down the presidential candidates' tax and spending plans and what they would mean for the #NationalDebt.

Under our central estimate, we find:

➡️ Vice President Harris would add… pic.twitter.com/bhnZEbwiPJ

— CRFB.org (@BudgetHawks) October 7, 2024

Simon Kuper at The Financial Times

In 2016, I was one of the fools who thought people wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. As I explained to readers before the Republican primaries, “The electorate generally just wants a leader who appears sane, which is why Republicans almost certainly won’t nominate Trump.” I was taking my lead from so-called experts. “If you want to know the future,” I wrote in May that year, “the best forecasters are betting markets . . . The Oddschecker website, which compares odds offered by different bookmakers, indicates a chance of just over one in four that Brits will opt for Brexit. The chances of Trump becoming American president or Marine Le Pen French president are judged a tad smaller.” This time, I won’t be making election forecasts. When you are wrong, you need to ask why — especially when you face a similar situation again. Perhaps I’m an out-of-touch elitist who doesn’t understand the suffering of ordinary people, but I’ve come to a different conclusion. In 2016, I still mistakenly believed that most voters were economically motivated, self-interested rationalists. The “rational actor” turns out to be a rare beast.

Justin Grimmer at Politico:

Are these calculated probabilities any good? Right now, we simply don’t know. In a new paper I’ve co-authored with the University of Pennsylvania’s Dean Knox and Dartmouth College’s Sean Westwood, we show that even under assumptions very favorable to forecasters, we wouldn’t know the answer for decades, centuries, or maybe even millenia.

...

The reason it takes so long to evaluate forecasts of presidential elections is obvious: There is only one presidential election every four years. In fact, we are now having only our 60th presidential election in U.S. history.

Compare the information available when forecasting presidential elections to the amount of information used when predicting stock prices, forecasting the weather or targeting online advertising. In those settings, forecasters commonly use millions of observations, which might be collected almost continuously. Given the difference, it isn’t surprising that forecasters in other settings are more easily able to identify the best performing model.

The paucity of outcome data means that election forecasters have to make educated guesses about how to build their statistical models.

 

Game of Slivers

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.  Trump is outsourcing his ground game.

Lisa Lerer, Reid J. Epstein and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Mr. Trump, a presidential and vice-presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Ms. Harris temporary bumps in support, but no enduring shifts in public opinion.

The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.

Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.

“In the battleground states, it is like trench warfare during the First World War,” he said. “Everybody is dug in. Everybody is throwing artillery and machine gun fire, and it’s just a no man’s land.”

Direct mail was cutting edge in 1976.

Mintt, a mail tracking firm, found that in September, 81 percent of all direct mail sent was promoting Mr. Trump or attacking Ms. Harris. In August, the imbalance had been even more severe: 96 percent of all direct mail relating to the presidential race was sent by Republican groups, the firm found.

...

[Republicans] focused their ground game, much of which has included a untraditional reliance on third-party organizations, entirely on motivating their lowest-propensity supporters, with a particular focus on younger Black men in particular and young men in general.

Despite their sweeping field operation, some Democrats worry that the Harris campaign isn’t doing enough to reach those voters and other small subsets of their base.

Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who publicly and repeatedly warned her party that they were going to lose her state in 2016, said Michigan remained a tossup both because of Israel’s war in Gaza and a lack of enthusiasm with the party’s core constituencies.

“I cannot describe to you the anger in all of our communities,” she said. “It’s really bad. The Jewish and the Arab American communities are concerned, and many are not there. African American young men express their frustration at being taken for granted. And it’s not clear that young people will turn out.”

Who Will Win? Shrug Emoji

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy. 

I'm not being too revolutionary here... The true margin of error is wider than I fear a lot of folks think it is... It's much wider than the reported MOE given that only covers certain types of error.

Anything from a very clear Trump to a very clear Harris win is on the table.

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) October 5, 2024

Alan Abramowitz:

Plugging in President Biden’s net approval rating of -18% in late June and the estimated second quarter growth rate of 2.8% in real GDP along with the fact that Kamala Harris will be defending the White House after a single Democratic term in office, the Time for Change model predicts narrow Democratic victories in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The predictions are a Democratic margin of 2.6 percentage points in the national popular vote and 281 electoral votes, only 11 more than the minimum of 270 needed to win an Electoral College majority.

Based on these results, clearly the safest prediction that we can make about the 2024 presidential election is that it is likely to be very close. Both the predicted popular vote margin of 2.6 percentage points and the predicted electoral vote margin of 24 votes are much smaller than the standard errors of the two regression equations. Adding to the uncertainty of the predictions are the highly unusual circumstances of the 2024 election, especially the replacement of the incumbent president at the top of the Democratic ticket by the incumbent vice president. These results are based on the assumption that Kamala Harris will enjoy the normal advantage that goes to the candidate seeking just a second-straight party term in the White House (typically this person is an incumbent who was elected to the party’s first term in the previous election, but Harris is not).

Harris Campaign Organization

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Michael Scherer at WP:

Shortly after Kamala Harris took control of Joe Biden’s campaign, her top advisers began holding senior staff meetings unlike any that had happened before.

New strategists appeared on Zoom calls with the Wilmington brass, and a transformed decision-making process took over. The competing power centers that had defined Biden’s world — a headquarters staff, a White House operation and a coterie of Biden loyalists who operated with one foot outside both structures — had been flattened into a single high council, reporting to a single boss, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who spoke most days with the candidate.

Harris blessed the unified structure, giving O’Malley Dillon the power to hire and direct a new layer of top talent from Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns for president. The vice president also gave marching orders: I don’t care where you are coming from, she told the new team, according to a person familiar with the statements. We don’t have time for drama. We will just do what we need to do.

Tyler Pager at WP:

As former congresswoman Liz Cheney repeatedly and publicly spoke out over the last year about the dangers of a potential return to the White House by former president Donald Trump, Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the then-Biden campaign, quietly reached out to her.

Over multiple phone calls, she conveyed to Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and staunch conservative, how much the Biden campaign appreciated her comments and tried to gauge whether she would be open to publicly supporting the Democratic nominee. Then Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the ticket and the campaign leadership felt an endorsement was within reach, so Harris called Cheney herself.

As former congresswoman Liz Cheney repeatedly and publicly spoke out over the last year about the dangers of a potential return to the White House by former president Donald Trump, Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the then-Biden campaign, quietly reached out to her.

Over multiple phone calls, she conveyed to Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and staunch conservative, how much the Biden campaign appreciated her comments and tried to gauge whether she would be open to publicly supporting the Democratic nominee. Then Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the ticket and the campaign leadership felt an endorsement was within reach, so Harris called Cheney herself.

And there was a bonus for the Harris team: Two days later, Cheney announced that her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, would also be voting for Harris.

...

O’Malley Dillon has worked to cultivate relationships with Republicans like former congressman Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), a vocal Trump critic who has endorsed Harris. The Harris campaign has hired Austin Weatherford, Kinzinger’s former chief of staff, as its national director for Republican engagement, tasked with coordinating outreach and engagement with conservatives.

“The Harris-Walz campaign has been putting Republicans front and center in our GOP outreach to explain, in their own words, why they are putting country first and supporting Vice President Harris,” Weatherford said in a statement. “Those Republican voices are critical to create a permission structure that allows conservative-leaning voters to feel more comfortable voting for a Democrat for president.”

 

Trump's Dark Speech

Our books have discussed Trump's low character, which was on display this month At times, his crudeness and weirdness have helped him appear transgressive.  Lately, they have hurt him.

Mike Allen at Axios:

Former President Trump, in a self-described "dark speech," told a rally in Wisconsin yesterday that his opponent, Vice President Harris, is "mentally impaired" and "mentally disabled.""Joe Biden became mentally impaired," Trump said during a riff about immigration. "Kamala [mispronounces name] was born that way. [Laughter.] She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country." (Video)

Why it matters: Even for Trump, it was weird, nasty and nonsensical — when he needed to be swaying "national security moms" and other undecideds, 38 days out from Election Day.Trump told the rally in Prairie du Chien (prairie of the dog): "This is a dark speech."

...

Other comments by Trump during the hour-plus remarks at the rally, which was moved inside at the last minute because of security concerns:He clarified that in addition to his plans to prosecute any 2024 election cheaters if he wins, "and if we can, we'll go back to the last one [2020], too, if we're allowed. But we're gonna prosecute people." (Video)


There's no evidence of widespread fraud during the 2020 election. And Trump continues to claim that the only way he'll lose in November is if Democrats cheat.

On Harris and the border: "She's letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door and they'll do anything they want, they'll do anything they want. These people are animals. ... These are stone-cold killers. ... It's also the fact that they're taking all of our Black population's jobs and our Hispanic population's jobs." (Video ... Fact check)

On his debate performance: "All the stupid people — the anchors, back there — no, they say: "He fell into a trap' — her trap. She can't set a mental trap." (Video)

VPOTUS at the Border

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of immigration .

Sahil Kapur at NBC:

Kamala Harris highlighted her tough-on-migration stance during a long-anticipated trip Friday to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, aiming to cover off a political vulnerability and rebut Donald Trump’s core campaign message that Democrats are soft on immigration enforcement.

"The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them, and I take that responsibility very seriously," Harris said in Douglas, Arizona, Friday evening after visiting the border.

...

Harris’ pitch completes a turnaround from 2019, when she took more left-leaning positions as a presidential candidate including by backing a call to reduce illegal border crossings to a civil — not criminal — violation and by objecting to Obama-era deportations.

On Friday, Harris highlighted a different side of herself: the tough prosecutor who took on international gangs and organized crime as the top law enforcement officer of California.

"The issue of border security is not a new issue to me. I was attorney general of a border state for two terms. I saw the violence and chaos that transnational criminal organizations cause and the heartbreak and loss from the spread of their illicit drugs," Harris said, adding that going after such gangs would be a priority if she is elected president.

Surest sign Kamala Harris speech hit the bullseye on the border security speech is MAGA trolls are losing their minds.

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) September 28, 2024

The Candidates and Ukraine

  Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses foreign influence and Trump's attack on democracy.  Russia helped Trump through 2020.  As Russia began its latest invasion of Ukraine, Trump lavished praise on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. 

Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at NYT:

Vice President Kamala Harris met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday at the White House, a sign that President Biden’s administration is positioning her to take over a politically fraught diplomatic relationship if she wins the election in November.

The meeting, held shortly after Mr. Biden announced $8 billion worth of military support to the war-torn country, was Ms. Harris’s second this week with a key world leader — even as she runs a presidential campaign focused on domestic issues.

Ms. Harris, who has met with Mr. Zelensky a half-dozen times since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, said at the White House on Thursday that she would “ensure Ukraine prevails in this war,” adding that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “could end the war tomorrow.”

Ms. Harris said that those who would have Ukraine trade territory for peace were supporting “proposals of surrender” — a dig at former President Donald J. Trump, her Republican opponent, and his skepticism of aid for Kyiv.

She added that the fight in Ukraine “matters to the people of America,” and framed the conflict as one that the American people should recognize as highly consequential.

“The most important moments in our history have come when we stood up to aggressors like Putin,” Ms. Harris said, warning that the Russian leader would not stop with Ukraine, and would possibly even look into encroaching on NATO territory, if he succeeds in his campaign.

“History is so clear in reminding us,” Ms. Harris said, “the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”

Jonathan J. Cooper at AP:

Former President Donald Trump described Ukraine in bleak and mournful terms Wednesday, referring to its people as “dead” and the country itself as “demolished,” and further raising questions about how much the former president would be willing if elected again to concede in a negotiation over the country’s future.

Trump argued Ukraine should have made concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the months before Russia’s February 2022 attack, declaring that even “the worst deal would’ve been better than what we have now.”

Trump, who has long been critical of U.S. aid to Ukraine, frequently claims that Russia never would have invaded if he was president and that he would put an end to the war if he returned to the White House. But rarely has he discussed the conflict in such detail.

His remarks, at a North Carolina event billed as an economic speech, come on the heels of a debate this month in which he pointedly refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war. On Tuesday, Trump touted the prowess of Russia and its predecessor Soviet Union, saying that wars are “what they do.”

 

Trump claims "Ukraine is gone" and suggests Ukrainians could have avoided death by surrendering. He also echoes Putin's belief that Ukraine isn’t a sovereign state, which the Kremlin will no doubt appreciate. @KyivPost pic.twitter.com/dcEdrObemy

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) September 26, 2024

Harris and Hispanics

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. 

At Politico, Megan Messerly and Daniella Diaz report that Harris is downplaying identity politics.

But after Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos over the last decade, Harris is attempting to chart a path away from identity politics, including in the way she’s courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

In those battlegrounds, Harris campaign ads targeted at both English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos talk about the economy, high drug prices and crime. Harris, in a Spanish-language radio interview that aired earlier this week, stressed her support for stationing more immigration agents at the border and cracking down on the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.

“The Harris campaign understands what we’ve been saying about Latinos for a long time, which is that we’re not a monolith,” said Matt Tuerk, the first Latino mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly Latino community that was a recent stop on the campaign’s bus tour highlighting abortion rights. “We’re all Americans, too. We have a lot of the same basic values that every American has.”

Latino strategists on both sides of the aisle said the strategy reflects the diversity of Harris’ staff, which includes campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who is the granddaughter of the labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chávez. They say it also reflects a candidate who has a first-hand understanding of what it means to be defined by others on the basis of race or gender. And then there’s the politics: Immigration is one of Democrats’ weak points, and Harris has adopted tough-on-the-border rhetoric as a counter to the immigration-focused attacks that Donald Trump has made a hallmark of his political campaigns since his first run for president in 2016.

The Meltable Ethnics

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  Our next book will carry the story through 2024.

Charlie Mahtesian at Politico:

In an election likely to be decided by a razor-thin margin, across a landscape that consists of a small group of battleground states, both campaigns are leaving no rock unturned in the hunt for every vote.

The recent fixation on the Polish American vote is a prime example. As she made her case for the defense of Ukraine in the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Kamala Harris made an explicit nod to “the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania” who should be worried about the threat to Poland and Europe posed by Trump’s opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Trump’s campaign responded a week later by scheduling a visit to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a Polish-American Catholic holy place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where Trump is expected to meet Sunday with Polish President Andrzej Duda.

There’s just one problem: The Polish American voting bloc both campaigns are targeting is a mirage. It’s a phantom battleground constituency that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Many Polish Americans continue to have an affinity for the old country, and take great pride in their heritage. Poland’s rich cultural traditions continue to be venerated in America. Polish fraternal organizations and other cultural institutions are still going strong. They’re just no longer a discrete voting group that is likely to be responsive to election appeals.

It’s a familiar American story.

More than a century of assimilation, intermarriage, economic success and the fraying of ties with the ancestral homeland over time have made the idea of a cohesive bloc of Polish American votes as outmoded as the idea that there is a cohesive bloc of votes from the other big white ethnic groups — English, German, Irish and Italian. Even in Chicago, once said to contain more Poles than any city outside Warsaw, the Polish American vote isn’t what it used to be.

Harris Outreach to Republicans and Middle America

Our most recent book is Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Less than 48 hours after Biden's withdrawal, Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee.

The last night of the Democratic convention features flags, veterans, and Adam Kinzinger.

Parts of Harris's acceptance speech sounded like ... Reagan.

Steve Benen at MSNBC:

When the “Republicans for Harris” rollout began in earnest a month ago, the effort featured some fairly prominent names, including former GOP governors, members of Congress and even Republicans who served on Donald Trump’s White House team. In the days and weeks that followed, the list of Republicans backing the Democratic vice president has continued to grow.

SEE Reagan, Bush, McCain & Romney Alumni for Harris

Neal Rothschild at Axios:

At this month's debate, Harris surprised many by saying that she is a gun owner, and in an interview with Oprah this week said, "If somebody breaks into my house, they're getting shot."Even as she advocates for gun control measures, she used the comments to signal not only that she didn't support confiscating guns, but that she has a personal stake in the Second Amendment.

Zoom out: The comments follow a pattern of Harris and Walz claiming rhetorical turf that has long been held by Republicans.Harris' campaign launch video was centered around "freedom," a pervasive conservative rallying cry for resisting liberal policies on taxation, gun control and government regulation. [ALSO NOTE "THE OPPORTUNITY AGENDA," A CLOSE COUSIN TO GINGRICH'S OPPORTUNITY SOCIETY.]

Harris and Walz are using it to advocate for abortion rights and fight interventionist policies like school book bans and curriculum directives.

Tim Walz's biography — his rural Nebraska upbringing, football coaching experience and everyday dad persona — serve to build up the ticket's Middle America credentials. And his "mind your own damn business" refrain taps into a libertarian sensibility.

...

"Patriotism" was a common refrain at the DNC in August, and "USA" chants rang out from the audience throughout the week.
...

What to watch: Harris is trying to steer Democrats' fortunes amid a political realignment that has seen the party losing favor with working class communities of color and gaining ground among wealthier suburbanites.

Harris Spending and Online Ads

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance. 

Jason Lange at Reuters:

Kamala Harris' election campaign spent nearly three times as much money as her rival Donald Trump did in August, pressing the Democrat's financial advantage ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election, according to financial disclosures filed on Friday.

 The two campaigns are entering the final stretch of an extremely tight presidential contest. Harris, the U.S. Vice President who launched her campaign in July when President Joe Biden ended his own re-election bid and endorsed her, disclosed to the Federal Election Commission spending of $174 million last month. Former Republican President Trump's campaign separately reported outlays of $61 million.

Shane Goldmacher and Nicholas Nehamas at NYT:

Vice President Kamala Harris outspent former President Donald J. Trump by 20 to 1 on Facebook and Instagram in the week surrounding their debate, capitalizing on the moment to plaster battleground states with ads and to hunt for new donors nationwide.

The lopsided spending — $12.2 million to $611,228 on Meta’s platforms, according to company records — was hardly an outlier. Ever since Ms. Harris entered the race, her campaign has overwhelmed the Trump operation with an avalanche of digital advertising, outspending his by tens of millions of dollars and setting off alarm among some Republicans.

Four years ago Mr. Trump, then holding the White House, drastically outspent Democrats online early in the election cycle in hopes of gaining an advantage. Now Mr. Trump, facing a cash shortfall, is making a very different bet that emphasizes the unique appeal of his online brand, the durability of a donor list built over nearly a decade and his belief in the power of television.

The difference was especially stark on screens across the most contested battlegrounds in the week surrounding the debate. In Pennsylvania, Ms. Harris spent $1.3 million on Meta’s platforms, compared with $22,465 by Mr. Trump. In Michigan, she laid out $1.5 million, while he spent only $34,790.

...

Mr. Trump is also being outspent on television — but by smaller margins. Part of that spending emphasis reflects Mr. Trump’s own worldview. Mr. Trump, who starred in the network television show “The Apprentice,” has said privately that he thinks digital spending is a waste and has urged his campaign to spend more on TV, according to a person who has heard him make such remarks and insisted on anonymity to discuss his private comments.

The 78-year-old Trump hasn't gotten the word that Americans are turning away from linear TV. 

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The Economy, September ed.

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of economic policy.  Objective indicators are doing great. Perceptions may be catching up.

Emily Peck at Axios:

When it comes to the economy, Kamala Harris appears to have closed the "trust gap."

Why it matters: In polling throughout this election cycle, President Biden had been losing on the issue, with voters consistently saying they preferred Donald Trump on the economy.Harris seems to have shaken off some of that baggage.

The big picture: The economy is typically an important issue for voters in an election, but it's been especially significant this cycle — as the high cost of living is weighing on people's wallets.

Zoom in: 46% of voters said they trust Harris to handle the economy — the same share as former President Trump, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted in late August and released Thursday morning.A separate survey from FT-Michigan Ross, taken after the debate and released on Sunday, shows Harris with a slight edge over Trump when it comes to the economy. Voters who watched the debate were even more apt to go for Harris.

Between the lines: This isn't about voters preferring Harris over Trump so much as it is about voters preferring Harris over Biden.Her entry in the race has reshaped the way we talk about the economy in this election, says Sofia Baig, an economist at Morning Consult.
Not many folks are out there throwing around the term Bidenomics anymore.

Ben Werschkul at Yahoo Finance:

The Federal Reserve's decision to opt for a bigger half-percentage-point cut opened a new area of disagreement between GOP nominee Donald Trump and Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

What Trump said this week is that the cuts are a sign of one thing: a weak economy that he claims was brought on by the Biden/Harris administration.

"I guess it shows the economy is very bad to cut it by that much assuming that they are not just playing politics," Trump said at a Manhattan bitcoin bar Wednesday.

"One or the other," the GOP nominee added "but it was a big cut."

Powell — who was elevated to Fed chair by then-President Trump but has found himself often at odds with him in recent years — offered an opposite analysis Wednesday afternoon.

"Our economy is strong overall," Powell told reporters, arguing the move to cut the Fed's benchmark rate by 50 basis points was instead a way to try to ensure "strength in the labor market can be maintained" alongside economic growth.

Rumors, Lies, DIsformation

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book will discuss the 2024 election, including the role of lies and disinformation.

 Kris Maher, Valerie Bauerlein, Tawnell D. Hobbs at WSJ:

City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.

“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.

That night, former President Donald Trump stood on a Philadelphia debate stage and shot the rumor into the stratosphere. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said to 67 million viewers. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country.”

...

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

Clint Watts at Microsoft:

Russia and Iran have both undertaken cyber influence operations headed into the 2024 presidential election. In our last report, published on August 8, we detailed how Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations sought to undermine the Republican campaign through targeted hack-and-leak operations, covert social media personas, and imposter US news sites. In the past two months, Microsoft has observed a notable shift in Russian influence operations tactics reflecting the changing U.S. political environment. Specifically, we have observed Russia pivot towards targeting the Harris-Walz campaign, with actors disseminating fabricated videos designed to sow discord and spread disinformation about the new Democratic nominee Vice President Harris.

We discuss this activity in a new report by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) released today. This update follows other reports we have released around activity by actors advancing the geopolitical goals of Iran and China.

The shift to focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign reflects a strategic move by Russian actors aimed at exploiting any perceived vulnerabilities in the new candidates. Initially, Russian influence operations struggled to evolve their efforts following President Biden’s departure from the 2024 US presidential race. However, in late August and September, we observed two Russian actors MTAC tracks closely — previously reported as Storm-1516 and Storm-1679 — using videos designed to discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign. Specifically: Storm-1516, identified by news reports as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm, produced and disseminated two inauthentic videos, each generating millions of views. One video depicted an attack by alleged Harris supporters on a supposed Trump rally attendee, while another used an on-screen actor to fabricate false claims about Harris’s involvement in a hit-and-run accident. This second video was laundered through a website masquerading as a local San Francisco media outlet — which was only created days beforehand. Storm-1679, a newer group reportedly aligned with the Kremlin, pivoted its focus from producing content about the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to publishing false videos discrediting Vice President Harris. One of the videos, which was shared on X shortly after it was published to Telegram, depicted a fake New York City billboard advancing false claims about Harris’ policies. The X post received more than 100,000 views in the four hours after it was published on Telegram
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