The Fight to Define the Last Days of the Campaign

Happy Thursday! And happy Halloween! Shout out to TMD reader Denise M. for the great, last-minute costume idea for political junkies in yesterday’s comment section: Biden’s Missing Apostrophe. (Another strong contender: Garbage Man Trump.)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Supreme Court on Wednesday—in a brief, unsigned order, as is typical for such decisions—allowed Virginia to proceed with a limited purge of the state’s voter rolls before the election, removing some 1,600 people unable to provide evidence of U.S. citizenship. The order, which also gave no reasoning for the decision, did point out that Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan would have denied the state’s request to reinstate its initiative. The Justice Department sued the state of Virginia to block the voter roll operation—announced in early August—for violating federal voting rights law, which bars such actions within 90 days of an election. Virginia has same-day voter registration, so any citizen wrongly removed from the rolls could register whenever they go to vote. 
• Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday disavowed President Joe Biden’s “garbage” comments made the night before during a Zoom event with Voto Latino, a campaign organization. “First of all, he clarified his comments,” she said at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday. “But let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” Biden appeared to refer to Trump supporters as “garbage” in his remarks, though the White House—and Biden himself—scrambled to claim he was referring only to Tony Hinchcliffe, the raunchy comedian who made several racial jokes at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
• Officials in Clark County, Washington, said on Wednesday that nearly 500 damaged ballots were retrieved from a ballot drop-box that was set on fire on Monday in Vancouver, Washington. An unknown number of ballots were destroyed entirely in the blaze. Law enforcement officials told the New York Times that the words “Free Gaza” were written on the incendiary devices found at the drop-box in Washington state and another nearby in Oregon on the same day, though it’s unclear whether the perpetrator—who has not yet been apprehended—was an anti-Israel activist or simply using the slogan as a lightning rod. According to Clark County election officials, voters who deposited ballots in the drop-box between 11 a.m. on Saturday and 4 a.m. on Monday can request a replacement ballot.
• The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that early estimates show real U.S. gross domestic product—adjusted for inflation—grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the third quarter of 2024, down from 3 percent annual growth in the second quarter of the year. Consumer spending increased 3.7 percent from Q2 to Q3, according to the estimate, accounting for much of the GDP growth.
• The U.S. Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments on Wednesday applied new sanctions and restrictions to almost 400 entities and people the Biden administration accused of helping Russian actors evade sanctions. The sanctioned people and entities are located in China, India, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia, and Switzerland, among other countries. Russian defense companies were also targeted in the move.
• Spanish officials said Wednesday that at least 95 people have reportedly died after flash flooding struck the southern and eastern regions of Spain. Heavy rainfall on Tuesday and Wednesday sent cars careening down streets on torrents of water and washed out bridges, with an unknown number of people still missing. The Spanish government declared three days of mourning beginning Thursday.
• The Los Angeles Dodgers secured a come-from-behind victory over the New York Yankees on Wednesday night to win the 2024 World Series four games to one. After sweeping the first three games, the Dodgers struggled in Game 4—losing 11-4—and watched the Yankees score five unanswered runs on Wednesday before responding with five runs with two outs in the fifth inning to tie the game, ultimately winning 7-6. It’s the Dodgers’ eighth World Series win in franchise history. 

Freedom, Fascism, and Garbage 

On January 5, 2024, President Joe Biden kicked his reelection campaign into gear with a rally in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. “Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it,” Biden said in remarks that focused on the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. “It’s what the 2024 election is all about.”

Nearly eight months later, on Tuesday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris stood at the Ellipse—the park just south of the White House where Trump rallied his supporters on that fateful day. “This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” she told a large rally audience. “It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.” 

After two presidential debates, a historic ticket shakeup, and two assassination attempts, the Democratic pitch to voters sounds a lot like it did at the beginning of the campaign. Or does it? 

With less than a week to Election Day, both campaigns appear to be going back to basics. After losing much of her lead in national polling, Harris is leaning into a negative message she’d largely sidelined, including deploying the “f-word”—“fascism,” that is. The Trump campaign, meanwhile—which had once done its best to keep the former president talking about the economy and the cost of living at every turn—is on the defensive once again following the former president’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) rally. But beneath the national hubbub, both campaign operations are delivering pitches tightly focused on the economy, abortion, and immigration to battleground state constituencies. 

When Harris launched her lightning campaign in July, pundits and supporters alike gushed about what quickly became known as “the vibe shift.” The gloomier, largely negative Biden campaign message about Trump’s threat to democracy was out—as was the beleaguered and tired candidate—replaced by a more positive (dare we say, brat?), future-oriented message focused on “joy” and freedom. The selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—the guy who popularized the “weird” descriptor of MAGA world—as Harris’ running mate fit with a campaign emphasizing a happy warrior ethic that dared to dismiss some of Trump and co.’s antics as fundamentally unserious.

After riding the initial joy wave through the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Harris campaign started putting some policy substance on the bone, particularly when it came to cost of living—including some dubious plans to combat “price gouging.” The “threat to democracy” message was still there, but reformatted and more focused on the contrast of Trump, the convicted felon, with Harris, the former prosecutor. 

But Trump has gained two points nationally over the last month, and the Harris team has jumped at any opportunity to put their opponent on the defensive—including reverting to some of the harrowing warnings about Trump that characterized Biden’s early pitch. Last week, John Kelly, a Marine general and Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist.” In an interview with The Atlantic, Kelly also reiterated his account of Trump’s admiration for Hitler’s generals. 

Harris held a press conference last Wednesday from her official residence in Washington, D.C., solely to draw attention to the new reporting. “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans,” she said. In a CNN town hall the next day, she said explicitly that she believes Trump is a fascist. 

Trump disputed the characterization. “They accuse me of being a Hitler-type guy or a Hitler lover, and I’m not; I’m the opposite,” he told Fox News on Tuesday. 

Jonah—who literally wrote the book on the politicization of the fascism label—argued that “Trump’s relationship with the truth is wholly fascistic, but also wholly detached from the intellectual roots of fascism.” We’ve for months covered Trump’s openly authoritarian promises and rhetoric as part of a campaign explicitly premised on retribution, including statements that have uncomfortably close historical echoes—warning that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” using the military to fight “the enemy from within.” 

The Trump team has not spent much time on the back foot in the last few weeks, gaining slowly in the polls and sounding increasingly triumphant about their chances next week—so much so that the campaign held a rally in the middle of deep blue Manhattan, apparently just because they could. The marathon event featured more than two dozen speakers delivering plenty of conspiratorial and racially charged comments. Tucker Carlson called Harris a “Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor”—though she’s actually of Jamaican and Indian descent. Another speaker said she was “the devil” and the “antichrist.” 

But it was comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” that has touched off a firestorm, offending some Puerto Rican voters. The Harris campaign quickly cut an ad capitalizing on the blowback.

The condemnation was sufficiently voracious that Trump felt the need to distance himself from Hinchcliffe, claiming he didn’t know him. With the election this close, any kind of disaffected voter could potentially tip the scales—particularly somewhere like Allentown, Pennsylvania, a Hispanic-majority area that boasts a significant Puerto Rican population. Trump campaigned there on Tuesday, bringing surrogate Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida—who delivered remarks in Spanish and English—with him for a rally in the evening. On Wednesday, Trump posted a music video for a Latin-style song with the lyrics, “Oh my God, I will vote—I will vote for Donald Trump.”

Even amidst all the damage control, he couldn’t resist calling the MSG rally “the greatest evening anyone’s seen, politically” and an “absolute love fest.”

Last night’s speech at the Ellipse reflected Harris’ attempt to sew together a warning about Trump with her own vision for the country. “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other,” she said. “That is who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say that is not who we are.” 

But it didn’t help that her current boss, who pioneered the “threat to democracy” pitch, dropped his own personal “deplorables” comment on Tuesday. “Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage,’” Biden said during a Zoom event with Voto Latino, stumbling over his words. “Well let me tell you something: I don’t—I don’t know the Puerto Rican that I know—or the Puerto Rico where I’m—in my home state of Delaware. They’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His—his—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American and totally contrary to everything we’ve done.” Biden and the White House tried to clarify his comments, claiming he meant that ‘his supporter’s demonization’ is garbage—not his supporters. Regardless, Harris distanced herself from the comments Wednesday morning.

Trump’s messaging discipline is effectively non-existent, especially relative to Harris. But if you live in a swing state, you’ve no doubt been inundated with ads, mailers, and door knockers pushing an argument about the economic and immigration failures of the Biden-Harris administration—which could be more meaningful than the national noise, David Weigel argued for Semafor. The former president is the only candidate who can secure the border from violent criminal gangs and bring back the lower prices and economic prosperity of yesteryear, so the argument goes. 

The campaign has also added a late-breaking prong to its argument in recent weeks, pouring millions into ads that attack Harris’ past support for providing gender reassignment surgery to inmates and illegal immigrants. “Kamala is for They/Them, President Trump is for you,” said one ad. The spot still ended on Trump’s economic message, highlighting his tax cuts. 

But that doesn’t mean Trump can’t try to capitalize on a national moment: On Wednesday, he donned a high-vis vest over his signature red tie and got into a MAGA-branded garbage truck. 

Worth Your Time

• Elon Musk’s PAC launched a massive door-knocking campaign for Trump in recent weeks, and in Wired, Jake Lahut reported on how it’s going. “In Michigan, canvassers and paid door knockers for the former president, contracted by a firm associated with America PAC, have been subjected to poor working conditions,” he wrote. “A number of them have been driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, according to video obtained by WIRED, and threatened that their lodging at a local motel wouldn’t be paid for if they didn’t meet canvassing quotas. One door knocker alleges that they didn’t even know they were signing up for anything having to do with Musk or Trump.”
• In a three-part series for the Wall Street Journal’s podcast “The Journal,” Kate Linebaugh and Lingling Wei reported on the disappearance of China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang. “The last day that Qin Gang, China’s then-foreign minister was seen in public, was on June 25 of last year,” Linebaugh said. “It was a hot humid day in Beijing and according to his official schedule, Qin spent some of that day carrying out his foreign minister duties as usual. Mostly, this meant meeting other foreign ministers. … Qin was foreign minister, the country’s top diplomat. He was a member of the upper echelon of the political elite. And he had the backing of China’s powerful leader, Xi Jinping. Qin had risen high and was expected to keep rising. But instead, after that day in June, Qin disappeared.”

Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Elon Musk Asks Voters to Brace for Economic ‘Hardship,’ Deep Spending Cuts in Potential Trump Cabinet Role 

In the Zeitgeist

There’s no better day than Halloween to re-up one of the best Saturday Night Live skits of recent memory. Any questions?

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew reported on the Harris campaign’s outreach to black voters in Georgia, Scott wrote (🔒) in defense of the U.S. economy, Jonah longed (🔒) for the days when politics was about policy instead of people, and Nick explored (🔒) whether right-wing anger at Biden for his “garbage” comment is in good faith. 
• On the podcasts: Chris joins Jonah on The Remnant for some rank punditry, David and Sarah talk election law on Advisory Opinions, and Hugh Hewitt made the case for Trump to Jamie on the Dispatch Podcast.
• On the site: Daniel Gullotta looks at the history of witchcraft in Colonial America, Brian Riedl argues the best electoral outcome for fiscal conservatives would be a Harris victory paired with a Republican Congress, and Matthew Maughan explains how policymakers can save Medicare Advantage from itself.

Let Us Know

What is the best Halloween costume you’ve ever put together? What are you or your kids dressing up as this year?