Harris’ Best Bet For a Closing Pitch: Positive First, Then Negative

Happy Monday! Election Day is eight days away. We’ve officially entered the period where our style guide mandates that we spell out the number of days until Election Day, rather than use numerals. It’s coming up, people.

Up to Speed

• Donald Trump’s rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan was an hours-long event with at least 30 speakers taking the stage, but one of those speakers managed to get more attention than the former president himself. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who specializes in roast and insult comedy, spoke just before 3 p.m. and delivered this line: “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The joke prompted wide condemnation from even many of Trump’s Republican allies, including Rep. María Elvira Salazar and Sen. Rick Scott, both of Florida. The Trump campaign, which is heavily courting Hispanic voters, tried to distance itself from Hinchcliffe, with a spokeswoman saying the joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
• The Washington Post drew the ire of many subscribers after Publisher William Lewis announced in a Friday column that the paper would not make an endorsement in the upcoming presidential election. “We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects,” Lewis wrote of the decision. He noted that the Post did not begin making endorsements regularly until it endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976. The paper later reported that owner Jeff Bezos, whose company Amazon has billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government, made the decision.
• X owner and avid Trump supporter Elon Musk has been in contact regularly with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin since late 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The two have discussed such topics as business, geopolitics, and their personal lives, and Putin at one point reportedly asked Musk not to activate his Starlink internet service over Taiwan, as a favor to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. The conversations have continued into this year as Musk has become involved in Trump’s quest for a second term in the White House and become more critical of American aid to Ukraine.
• Republican challenger Tim Sheehy leads Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana 50 percent to 46 percent in an Emerson College poll released Sunday, expanding his lead by 2 points from a survey the institution put out last month. The deep-red state’s Senate race is one of the GOP’s best opportunities to flip a Democratic seat on its path to taking the majority. Republicans are likely to keep all the seats they hold at the moment and almost certain to pick up West Virginia’s. That leaves just one win to take Congress’ upper chamber, and Sheehy has consistently led in polling the past few months. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the battle between Tester and Sheehy  as “lean Republican.”

Will Kamala Harris’ Messaging Still Reach Independents? 

A Democratic polling firm is urging Kamala Harris to pair positive messaging focused on the economy and border security with attacks on Donald Trump centered around the critical comments from veterans of the former president’s administration who say he is unfit for office.

Blueprint Strategies has been testing closing arguments for the vice president to determine the most effective messaging versus Trump in the closing days of a neck-and-neck White House campaign. In an interview with Dispatch Politics, Blueprint’s Evan Roth Smith emphasized Harris should lead with an affirmative case for herself, specifically her plans to reduce the high cost of household goods and secure the U.S.-Mexico border. But messaging critical of Trump is also necessary, and Smith has a recommendation that tested quite well with voters, especially independents. 

Persuadable independents, Smith said, “expect Democrats to say nasty things about Trump.” So when Harris or other Democrats warn voters about the former president’s behavior or rhetoric or raise his refusal to concede defeat to President Joe Biden four years ago and his culpability in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, it often falls on deaf ears. But when the vice president and her supporters point out that it’s Republicans and former Trump administration officials who are raising these concerns, gettable independents pay attention and can be converted.

“When Trump’s fellow Republicans are saying things about him and his fitness for office, that’s interesting to independents,” Smith said. Among Blueprint’s message-testing findings: “The best-testing closing arguments against Trump are those that emphasize his lack of support from his former cabinet and numerous Republicans.” Arguing Trump’s “responsibility for the overturning of Roe v. Wade” and claiming he intends “to gut Social Security and Medicare and the Affordable Care Act” were also persuasive with independents, according to the firm’s findings.

With the campaign in its final days, there appears to be no consensus about the most effective way to convince Americans to vote against the former president. There is plenty of anxiety among Democrats and other Trump opponents about the exceedingly narrow margins in polls of the key battleground states. Although Harris and her allies have a monetary advantage, the time to spend that money on targeted and productive messaging is running out. Blueprint Strategies’s advice represents just one part of the ongoing debate in Democratic circles over the Harris campaign’s messaging strategy.

The New York Times has reported that a pro-Harris super PAC is recommending her campaign deemphasize messaging that paints Trump, 78, as a “fascist” who threatens American democracy, or too old and feeble to serve a second term. Both Harris and her surrogates have stepped up this line of attack in the wake of former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, a decorated retired Army general, saying the 45th president is essentially a fascist who would be a danger to the U.S. if returned to the Oval Office.

“Purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans,” an email from Future Forward read, according to Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher. According to the Times story, the Future Forward memo contained additional warnings, including: “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive” and “Trump is exhausted isn’t working.”

Harris campaign pollster David Binder said the vice president has to do both. “You cannot do one or the other,” he said in a podcast interview with Pod Save America, run by Democratic operatives who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “Both messages need to get out.” The vice president appears to agree, saying as much to reporters Friday in response to a direct question on the matter during a news conference.

“That is a balance that must be struck. There’s no question about that. And I invite everyone who’s watching to go to KamalaHarris.com where you will see 80 pages of our policies,” she said. “I will continue to talk about—also what we must do to understand the threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy and our future and our security.”

Over at Blueprint Strategies, Smith agrees that the “the best thing for Kamala Harris to talk about is Kamala Harris,” saying “the economy and the border are the ballgame. There’s not much else other than that that’s really worth talking about. And when I say economy, it’s prices and inflation.” But Smith added that it’s both unrealistic and strategically unsound for Harris to lay off attacking Trump—as long as she frames her critique as what is being said by Republicans and others who served in his administration. 

“It’s delusional to think she would ignore Donald Trump,” Smith said. “You can’t just ignore Donald Trump and only talk about yourself.”

Sunday Show Rewind

• Republicans attempted to discredit former members of Donald Trump’s administration who have called him a fascist or have otherwise argued he is unfit to serve another term as president of the United States. They appeared on multiple Sunday shows to characterize the likes of former chief of staff John Kelly, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley (both of whom are retired generals) and former Vice President Mike Pence as foreign policy hawks who were upset about Trump’s purported aversion to war or people looking for financial gain.
• “If you actually look at John Kelly, at folks like Liz Cheney, the fundamental disagreement they have with Donald Trump is, even though they say that they’re conservative, they’re conservative in the sense that they want America to get involved in a ton of ridiculous military conflicts,” Sen. J.D. Vance told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union. Later in the interview, Vance affirmed Tapper when he asked if Vance believed Pence shared such a world view. The junior senator from Ohio also said Pence thought he could “control Donald Trump” in office. In another interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance described Kelly and Milley as “disgruntled former employees.”
• During Vance’s CNN appearance, Tapper pressed the Republican nominee for vice president on a number of his running mate’s statements and positions. The conversation was intense at times, including when Tapper tried to pin Vance down on Trump’s words regarding the “enemy from within” and “radical left lunatics,” terms the former president has used in recent weeks to refer to a number of his political opponents. As Tapper asked Vance about Trump’s stated desire to use the military to go after the “enemy from within”—something Kelly has mentioned as motivating his decision to speak out against his one-time boss—Vance began arguing with the premise of the question. Vance claimed that when Trump said he wanted to use the military, he was referring only to “radical left lunatics” who might riot after an election, and not elected officials. When Tapper pointed out that Trump has used the phrase “enemy within” to refer to people like Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff of California, Vance responded that Trump’s use of that phrase was in a different context. “He said that he wanted to use the military to go after far-left lunatics who were rioting, and he also called them the ‘enemy within.’ He separately, in a totally different context, in a totally different conversation, said that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were threats to this country,” Vance said. But Tapper broke in to clarify repeatedly that Trump had used the phrase “the enemy within” to describe the two Democrats. A frustrated Vance hit back: “So every time he uses the exact same phrase, we assume that he uses the military?” Vance later said that what Trump believes, and what he supports, is using the military to fight back against “people who riot, who burn down our cities.”
• On Fox News Sunday, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio named Milley and Kelly specifically when he accused some former Trump officials of having financial incentives to bash the former president. “These are people that worked in the administration or around the administration, and then they figured pretty quickly, if we want jobs after we leave this administration, we have to become anti-Trumpers,” he said. “You think Mark Milley winds up teaching at Princeton, teaching at Georgetown, on the speakers bureau, advising J.P. Morgan? You don’t get hired for those jobs unless you pronounce yourself anti-Trump and say things against Trump.” He also questioned why they did not leave Trump’s administration if they thought so badly of Trump. “If you, in fact, believed, as some of these people claim, that Donald Trump is all these horrible things—Nazi, fascist, all these crazy terms they throw around—why didn’t you stand up and walk out of that White House or that administration the moment you heard those terms?” he said. “Why didn’t you say that at the time and not wait ’til after the fact?” 

Eyes on the Trail

• President Joe Biden cast his 2024 ballot, at an in-person, early-vote site today in Wilmington, Delaware. Per White House pool reports, Biden stood in line with other voters and waited his turn.
• Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns today in Saginaw, Michigan. Tonight she campaigns in Ann Arbor, Michigan, hosting a “When We Vote, We Win” rally alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
• Former President Donald Trump this afternoon addresses a gathering of pastors in Powder Springs, Georgia. In the evening, the Republican nominee hosts a campaign rally in Atlanta.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Monday campaigns for Harris in Wisconsin, stopping in Manitowoc and Waukesha.
• Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio campaigns for Trump this evening in Wisconsin, with stops in Racine and Wausau.
• First lady Jill Biden and Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz today are campaigning together, headlining Harris events in Michigan, with stops in Bay City and Traverse City, plus one in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff campaigns today for Harris in Pittsburgh.
• West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice campaigns for Trump this evening in Avella, Pennsylvania, joined by his pet English Bulldog, “Babydog.”
• South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem this evening headlines a Team Trump on Tour event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
• Eric Trump campaigns for his father this evening in Wyandotte, Michigan, where he’ll headline a Team Trump on Tour event.
• Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming today campaigns in Michigan for the Democratic Senate nominee, Rep. Elissa Slotkin.

Notable and Quotable

“WHEN I’M PRESIDENT THE MCDONALD’S ICE CREAM MACHINES WILL WORK GREAT AGAIN!”

—Former President Donald Trump in an X post, accompanied by a photo of him at a McDonald’s drive-thru window with an edited-in image of President Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and holding an ice cream cone (Biden actually did don the hat months ago, but he was not holding ice cream while he did it, nor was he outside of a McDonald’s), October 26, 2024