GOP Jewish Group to Spend Big on Swing-State Turnout Effort

Happy Monday! Election Day is 57 days away. And just in time for tomorrow night’s presidential debate, the Harris campaign added an “issues” page to its website. We feel metaphysical absolute certitude that the vice president will tell viewers to check that page out at some point during the debate.

Up to Speed

• A New York Times and Siena College poll released Sunday finds former President Donald Trump with 48 percent support among likely voters and Vice President Kamala Harris with 47 percent. Harris has led in national polling averages since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, but Sunday’s poll is perhaps Trump’s best performance since that shakeup, although well within the survey’s 2.8-percentage point margin of error.
• On Friday, courts in both Michigan and North Carolina separately ruled that authorities must take the name of former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off of their state’s ballots. Kennedy had attempted to remove his name after he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump last month to avoid drawing votes away from him, but election officials in the two states had refused. The ruling resulted in North Carolina temporarily holding off on sending out mail-in ballots, which were set to go out on Friday. Both state elections offices are appealing the decisions.
• The Harris campaign is running three new ads hitting Trump and the Republican Party on abortion and in vitro fertilization. The ads are part of its $370 million investment in advertising between Labor Day and Election Day. In one of the 30-second spots, a voice-over proclaims that Trump “told us” in 2016 he would seek to punish women who seek illegal abortions and that he “showed us” by appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. “Now Donald Trump wants to go further, with plans to restrict birth control, ban abortion nationwide, even monitor women’s pregnancies,” the voiceover continues, citing proposals in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” (though those claims are false or misleading). Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025.
• Greg Abbott is gearing up to run for a fourth term in 2026, the Texas governor told Dispatch Politics late last week while attending the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual fall conference in Las Vegas. The 66-year-old Republican also gave us the origin story of how he arguably altered the national conversation around border security when, in the spring of 2022, he took the unprecedented step of transporting illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C., and later New York City. The politically shrewd move led the Democratic mayors of those cities to complain to Biden and request relief. Abbott’s gambit was the result of a discussion he had a few years ago with local officials in Eagle Pass, a Texas border community, who informed him of their plan to bus migrants to San Antonio to alleviate the strain on local resources. That gave Abbott an idea. “I said: ‘Why don’t you let me take care of the busing program,’” Abbott recalled. “My thought process is: If Biden and Harris will not come to Texas and see the crisis they have caused, I will take the border to them.” 

Republican Jewish Group Casts GOP as the ‘Only Pro-Israel Party’

LAS VEGAS—Republican strategists focused on the Jewish vote predict shifts in support toward the GOP motivated by anxiety about Israel’s security and antisemitism in the United States, pushing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in November.

It’s a heady prediction. Jewish voters historically support Democratic candidates by wide margins. In 2020, President Joe Biden won this cohort with 68 percent. In midterm elections two years later, the Democrats captured 65 percent of Jewish voters. But the Republican Jewish Coalition believes Trump is on track to attract 50 percent of the vote with this bloc in five key battleground states where the group is spending $15 million to persuade Jews to get to the polls and support the GOP nominee. 

“It’s a clear choice for the Jewish community,” Matt Brooks, the RJC’s CEO, told reporters Thursday during the group’s annual fall conference in Las Vegas. “We will highlight and draw the sharp distinctions that exist between the Republican Party, which is the true and only pro-Israel party, and the Democrat Party.”

The RJC has boots on the ground in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The organization picked these states as a beachhead for its 2024 effort because they feature “sizable” Jewish communities and are closely contested such that the movement of even a few thousand votes might alter the outcome. Surveys show the race between Harris and Trump is essentially tied in each of these crucial battlegrounds, all of which narrowly backed Biden four years ago.

The RJC’s persuasion and voter turnout program relies on television, radio, direct mail, and digital advertising; text messaging; phone banking; and door-knocking. It will focus on persuading Jewish voters open to supporting Trump and turning out those classified as “lean Trump” and “committed” to his reelection. Operatives are using a proprietary voter file of American Jews the group describes as its “secret sauce” and “the only real viable voter file of Jewish voters in the country.”

“Those are the tactics. But when it comes to why things will be different this cycle, American Jewry is changing,” Ari Fleischer, an RJC board member and White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, told reporters. “What’s changed in this [election] cycle is this palpable sense of fear because of what’s happening in America, because of what’s happening on campuses, because of what happened in Israel on October 7 and every day since.”

Given the broadly liberal tendencies of Jewish voters, it’s unclear if the RJC’s $15 million investment—a 50 percent increase over its 2020 budget—will yield results. But the group argues a sea change in Jewish voters’ sentiment is underway due to events of the past 11 months: Hamas’ October 7 invasion of Southern Israel that left 1,200 people, mostly civilians, dead, with more taken hostage; pro-Hamas protests on college campuses across the U.S.; and a spike in domestic antisemitism that has left many Jews fearing for their physical safety. 

Additionally, Democrats have balanced their “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security with periodic condemnation of the Jewish state’s prosecution of a war in Gaza that has left thousands of Palestinian civilians dead, in part a response to outspoken elements of the party’s base that accuse Israel of excessive force, if not question its right to exist in the first place. Compare that to Trump and Republicans broadly, who are nearly unequivocal in their support for Jerusalem.

It’s that factor, at least, that has led many Jewish Republicans hoping to move on from Trump after the 2020 election to make peace with his renomination and back him wholeheartedly.

Sunday Show Rewind

• On This Week, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney gave her first interview since endorsing Kamala Harris on Friday. Cheney told ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl that she’s “never voted for a Democrat” since first voting for Ronald Reagan in 1984 but that Donald Trump poses a unique threat to the future of the country. “We have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not reelected,” she said. “You have many Republicans out there who are saying, ‘Well, you know, we’re not going to vote for him, but we will write [in] someone else.’ And I think that this time around, that’s not enough, that it’s important to actually cast a vote for Vice President Harris.”
• Appearing on Face the Nation, former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was damning the presidential nominee of her party with faint praise. “I have always said, look, if I thought Biden or Trump were great candidates, I wouldn’t have run for president. I ran because I thought I could do a better job,” Haley said. CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan interrupted to ask if Haley was saying Trump, whom she has endorsed, is not a good candidate. “I think he is the Republican nominee, and I think, put him against Kamala Harris, who’s the Democrat nominee. For me, it’s not a question,” Haley said.
• Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat, gave his debate prediction to anchor Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union, saying of Harris: “She’s going to do great, of course, but Donald Trump will be good, too. I mean, we can all remember he wrecked all of the Republicans. He’s a good debater.”
• On NBC’s Meet the Press, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he would “go higher” than Harris’ proposal for a 28-percent tax rate on capital gains for high earners, with the socialist senator having proposed a nearly 60 percent rate on the highest earners during his presidential runs. Sanders did praise the “economic gains” made by the country under the Biden-Harris administration but argued that more needed to be done to address wealth inequality. Meanwhile, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut was much more positive about the vice president’s tax proposals, telling Fox News Sunday that “people want tax fairness in this country. They are sick and tired of these massive American companies paying zero percent tax rates.”

Eyes on the Trail

• Donald Trump is at Mar-a-Lago today, a spokesman confirms to Dispatch Politics. The Republican nominee will fly to Philadelphia tomorrow to attend the presidential debate.
• Sen. J.D. Vance is in Los Angeles today to tape an episode of All In, a podcast co-hosted by David Sacks and other Silicon Valley investors, a person familiar with his schedule tells Dispatch Politics. He will fly back to Washington later today, but the same person told us Vance will be in Philadelphia on Tuesday for the debate and plans to appear in the post-debate “spin room” to speak with reporters.
• Today is the beginning of what the Harris campaign is calling Gov. Tim Walz’s “Sun Belt State tour.” The Minnesota governor is in Dallas today for a midday fundraiser, followed by a rally in Reno, Nevada, tonight. Walz will end the day in Las Vegas, where he has another fundraiser on Tuesday. He’ll wrap up Tuesday in the Phoenix area, where Walz will attend multiple “political engagements,” according to the campaign, before settling in to watch the debate from Arizona.
• Harris remains in Pittsburgh preparing for tomorrow’s debate in Philadelphia, but her campaign has already outlined the post-debate swing of events for both Harris and Walz. According to the campaign, Harris will be campaigning in both Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday and returning to Pennsylvania on Friday, where she will hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre. Walz, meanwhile, will be in Michigan on Thursday and Friday, with additional events later on Friday and on Saturday in Wisconsin.
• The spouses of the members of the Democratic ticket are in North Carolina today to draw attention to Harris’ agenda on “reproductive freedom.” Second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz will appear in Raleigh at a rally to emphasize what the campaign characterizes as Trump’s threat to access to abortion, birth control, and fertility treatments. Emhoff also will speak to volunteers at a campaign phone bank in Raleigh this evening. 

Notable and Quotable

“No boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed to stand on during my upcoming debate with Comrade Kamala Harris. We had this out previously with former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he was in a debate, and he was not allowed a ‘lift.’ It would be a form of cheating, and the Democrats cheat enough. ‘You are who you are,’ it was determined!”

—Former President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post, September 7, 2024