J.D. Vance Wows Crowd in Michigan

Happy Thursday! Election Day is 40 days away. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former presidential candidate who may have a role to play in a future Trump administration, posted a video this week about “toxins” found in some popular snacks. We wonder how junk-food aficionado Donald Trump feels about Yellow 5.

Up to Speed

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a federal grand jury, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The charges, NBC News reported this morning, include wire fraud, solicitation of campaign contributions by a foreign national, bribery, and conspiracy—all stemming from connections Adams has with Turkish nationals. The public first became aware of the nature of the probe when federal investigators raided the home of a top fundraiser for Adams last November. Adams, a Democrat who has been planning to run for a second term as mayor next year, said in a statement Wednesday night he is innocent. Because of the number of investigations surrounding Adams, some Democrats were already calling for him to resign before news of the indictment, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Federal prosecutors in New York are holding a press conference today at 11:30 a.m.
• Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview Wednesday with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle following the Democrat’s economic speech in Pittsburgh. The interview covered multiple topics, including taxes, housing, and immigration. Harris promised not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 a year, talked up cutting red tape to allow for more new home construction, and reiterated her claim that she would sign into law this year’s failed immigration enforcement bill. Ruhle pressed Harris on several subjects, including whether the Democrat’s pledge to fight “price gouging” would simply mean instituting federal price controls. Harris failed to answer the question directly, saying instead that she would “never apologize” for addressing price gouging. “Those few companies that would take advantage of the desperation of people and jack up prices, yeah, I’m going to go after them,” she said.
• The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill to keep the government funded when the new fiscal year begins next week. The stopgap measure passed with the majority of Republicans joining up with every Democrat to support it, though Speaker Mike Johnson lost 82 Republican votes. The Senate approved the bill hours later, which, when signed by President Joe Biden, will fund the government through December 20, long after Election Day but expire just in time to, potentially, intrude on the Christmas holiday.
• Democrats have won a victory in Georgia, where the state Supreme Court has ruled that two left-wing independent candidates for president are disqualified from the ballot. Cornel West and Claudia De la Cruz will still be listed on ballots, which have already been printed, but votes for them will not be counted according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Republicans had backed these candidates’ legal fight, but Georgia’s highest court affirmed the rulings of two superior court judges that neither West nor De la Cruz qualified under the state’s ballot-access law.
• Top members of Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson’s staff in the lieutenant governor’s office have resigned, WRAL reports. The departures mark the second exodus of staff from Robinson’s campaign following last week’s revelation that, years before entering politics, Robinson had posted bizarre and offensive comments on a forum on a pornographic website.

Michigan Crowd Eats Up Vance’s Pitch

TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan—On paper, Sen. J.D. Vance is quite different from most of the people who attended his Wednesday night rally here. The Republican vice presidential nominee is a Yale Law School graduate, a former Washington lawyer and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and 40 years old. Not to mention, he’s a Buckeye.

By contrast, many in the over-capacity crowd Vance drew to the fairgrounds just south of town were blue-collar retirees from a relatively remote part of Michigan’s rural north. But the Ohio senator wowed the crowd, endearing himself to them with his working-class upbringing, military service, and populist politics.

“I think he’s fantastic,” Dave Wilks, a retired machinist, police officer, and fireman, told Dispatch Politics. “As far as hearing his views on things, it sounds a lot like he’s with Trump on a lot of issues. He’s for the working person, and he’s ex-military.”

Those who came to the “Cherry Capital of the World” to see Vance had many hallmarks of a traditional Republican base. But the crowd, after cheering when Vance took the stage to Merle Haggard’s anti-Iraq War song “America First,” nodded along approvingly as he espoused a populist agenda that would have been foreign to a rising Republican star a generation ago.

“Here’s the Donald Trump tax plan. We’re going to cut taxes on American workers, and we’re going to penalize companies that are shipping jobs overseas, not write them a big fat check,” Vance told the crowd.

He also connected these economic issues to illegal immigration. “We need common sense tax and economic policy, we need to bring back some good American manufacturing jobs to the state of Michigan,” Vance said. “But if we want to allow American citizens to afford a home again, we’ve got to start by deporting the millions of illegal aliens that Kamala Harris let come into this country.”

When Vance took questions from the press after his remarks, one reporter asked the senator to respond to Volodymyr Zelensky’s comments in a recent interview in which the Ukrainian president called him “too radical.”

“I don’t appreciate Zelensky coming to this country and telling the American taxpayers what they ought to do. He ought to say, ‘Thank you,’ to the American taxpayers,” Vance replied.

The crowd ate all of it up. They were especially attuned to Vance’s message on the economy. “The economy sucks,” said Greg Techel, another retiree. And Wilks lamented that “it cost me $26 to fill my Harley up with gas.”

Asked about the issues that will motivate them to vote in November, multiple attendees mentioned immigration. Ed Rice, a retired electrical engineer, said the country needed deportations to “get our population back in check.”

And while attendees did not mention the war in Ukraine as a major motivation for their vote, they seemed to appreciate the way Vance conducts himself with the media. “When somebody’s interviewing him … he doesn’t play their games. He tells them like it is,” Techel told Dispatch Politics.

During the Q&A session, members of the crowd did not hesitate to voice their opinions of some of the media gallery’s questions. When a reporter from the local Traverse City Record-Eagle introduced himself, people began to boo, and Vance played off of it.

“That’s okay. We’re having fun,” he laughed. “You’re allowed to ask your question. They’re allowed to tell you how they think about it, right? That’s okay. This is America.”

Vance left the stage to the same Merle Haggard song, and the crowd left buzzing with excitement. “I think it was all great. He was well-spoken and said exactly what I was hoping to hear,” Cheryl Olson, who works in medical transport, told Dispatch Politics.

And Martha Cosens, yet another retiree, said afterward she sees big things in Vance’s future. “He’s going to be president one of these days,” she said.

Harris’ Filibuster Comments Roil the Senate

Vice President Kamala Harris faced a backlash this week from Republicans—and two outgoing Democratic-turned-independent senators—over comments calling for changes to the Senate filibuster. 

“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio, “and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

The Biden-Harris administration embraced ending the filibuster on the issue of abortion way way back in July 2022, but in Harris’ Etch A Sketch campaign, every restatement of policy counts as news. And this news prompted a swift condemnation from the last two defenders of the filibuster in the Democratic Senate caucus.

“To state the supremely obvious, eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe v Wade also enables a future Congress to ban all abortion nationwide. What an absolutely terrible, shortsighted idea,” tweeted retiring Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. 

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was the only Senate Democrat to vote against the party’s federal abortion bill—on the grounds that it would actually go far beyond Roe—but his withering criticism of Harris focused solely on the procedural issue. “I think that basically can destroy our country, and my country is more important to me than any one person or any one person’s ideology. … I think it’s the most horrible thing,” Manchin said while announcing he would not endorse Harris due to her filibuster stance.

The two Democratic senators who may have been placed in the most uncomfortable spot by Harris’ filibuster comments are red-staters Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. “We need to change the filibuster into a talking filibuster,” Tester told Semafor last week. “We should not eliminate the filibuster.” 

The difference between Tester’s comments and Harris’ stance is largely one of semantics. Both Democrats favor a simple-majority threshold, rather than 60 votes, on abortion and other legislative issues. But Tester wants to frame the issue as a mere “change” to a talking filibuster—whereby each senator is allotted at least one opportunity to speak until he can no longer hold the Senate floor—rather than “eliminating” the filibuster altogether. The latter message could spook centrists worried about unchecked Democratic governance on a wide variety of issues, not just abortion.

Would Democrats actually change the filibuster if they take the White House, House of Representatives, and have at least 50 Democratic senators with Vice President Tim Walz as tiebreaker? At the Democratic National Convention, Schumer told reporters that he would have the votes to do so on at least one issue: voting rights. Schumer noted that the Senate has already voted on effectively scrapping the 60-vote rule for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the only two Democrats who opposed the rules change—Sinema and Manchin—will be gone in 2025. “Sinema and Manchin voted no; that’s why we couldn’t change the rules. Well, they’re both gone,” Schumer told reporters while previewing a legislative agenda for 2025. But would they change the filibuster for abortion? “It’s something our caucus will discuss in the next session of Congress,” Schumer said this week in the Capitol.

Bypassing the 60-vote rule for legislation on voting and abortion could very well lead to simple-majority rule in the Senate for all legislation. At the DNC, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said Democrats would be “virtually certain” to pass an omnibus bill to evade the current 60-vote requirement for legislation.

“To get around the filibuster, we’re going to have to have a process that allows very substantial debate from the Senate minority,” Whitehouse said. “We are not going to want to give the Republicans multiple stalls, multiple filibusters on this, so the bill that gets around the filibuster will be virtually certain to include permanent reproductive rights, permanent restored voting rights, getting rid of corrupting billionaire dark money, and Supreme Court reform. If you’ve got a bill like that moving, that’s going to have spectacular tailwinds behind it.”

Eyes on the Trail

• Former President Donald Trump will be in New York today, with his campaign announcing he will be speaking to the press this afternoon at Trump Tower.
• Vice President Kamala Harris will be off the trail and at the White House today for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Harris will also deliver remarks along with President Joe Biden about gun violence.
• Hurricane Helene is expected to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle later today, and “due to severe weather forecasts,” the Trump campaign has postponed two events in neighboring Georgia, where Sen. J.D. Vance had been scheduled to appear. 
• Gwen Walz, the wife of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will be in Wisconsin today, campaigning in the suburbs of Milwaukee, including planned appearances in Grafton and Waukesha.
• The Trump campaign announced the former president will return to Butler, Pennsylvania, on October 5 for an event. It will be Trump’s first visit to the town since July, when a gunman opened fire during a rally. Trump was struck in the ear, while rally attendee Corey Comperatore was killed and two others were wounded.

Notable and Quotable

“I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target — and a target I became.” 
—New York Mayor Eric Adams in a statement to the New York Post in response to his indictment as part of a federal corruption probe, September 25, 2024