Trump, Harris Try to Turn Out Polarized Men and Women

Happy Monday! We can’t decide if we were more grateful for the extra hour of sleep this weekend or dismayed by the extra hour of election season.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise cameo on Saturday Night Live on Saturday, appearing in the opening sketch with Maya Rudolph, who portrays Harris on the show. A commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission on Saturday claimed the appearance—which lasted about two minutes—violated the agency’s “equal time” rule, which allows candidates to ask for equal air time with their election rivals on American broadcast channels. NBC on Sunday filed an “equal time” notice, which would allow Trump to appear for free on the network prior to the election, if he requests it. On Sunday, Harris campaigned at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
• Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, speaking at a Pennsylvania rally on Sunday, hinted that he would not “mind” violence directed at journalists. “All we really have over here is the fake news, right? And to get me somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,” said Trump, referring to the panes of bullet-proof glass surrounding him at the venue. “And I don’t mind that so much.” A campaign spokesman later claimed Trump was “actually looking out for [the media’s] welfare, far more than his own.”
• A federal judge on Friday rejected a request from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s America PAC to move a pending civil suit from a Pennsylvania state court to federal court. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner brought a lawsuit against the pro-Trump PAC for allegedly running an illegal lottery, since lotteries in Pennsylvania must be administered by that state. 
• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a statement on Friday identifying two videos that have recently gone viral on social media as fabricated by Russian intelligence agencies. One of the videos purports to show Haitians voting illegally in Georgia, and the other alleges that Harris received a $500,000 dollar bribe from disgraced rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs. “This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans,” the statement read. 
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the U.S. economy added just 12,000 jobs in October, much fewer than in previous recent reports. The Labor Department attributed the near-stagnation following several robust reports—in September, there was a gain of 223,000 jobs—to recent hurricanes and labor strikes, but the figures continue the trend of a slow cooldown in hiring numbers. The unemployment rate, however, was unchanged from September, holding at 4.1 percent in October. Average hourly earnings—a key inflation indicator—rose 4 percent year-over-year, improving on last month’s figure by $0.13. 
• More than 200 people have died as a result of heavy flooding in southern Spain last week, according to Spanish authorities, and hundreds more remain missing. Residents of the Valencia region affected by the devastating heavy rainfall are accusing the government of being negligent in its response, pointing to warnings over text messages that arrived only moments before rivers burst their banks and a sluggish response from state authorities. In a visit to inspect the damage Sunday, Spanish King Felipe VI and his wife, Queen Letizia, were confronted by angry crowds hurling mud and shouting at them. The royals later canceled the rest of their visit to the region. 
• The State Department told the Associated Press on Sunday that it believes an Iranian-American journalist, Reza Valizadeh, has been detained by the Iranian government for months. Valizadeh had previously worked for Radio Farda, part of the U.S.-funded Radio Europe/Radio Liberty network of news outlets, and had tweeted in February about family members being detained in order to pressure him to return to Iran. 
• U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday ordered multiple B-52 bombers, ballistic missile defense destroyers, fighter squadrons, and tanker aircraft to the Middle East, according to a Pentagon statement. The forces are intended to serve as replacements for the departing USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, which is preparing to leave the region by mid-November. 
• The Israeli military confirmed on Saturday that a Friday amphibious raid by Israeli commandos in northern Lebanon had resulted in the capture of a suspected Hezbollah commander. The unit apparently arrived deep in the northern part of the country by water using speedboats in the rare raid. The suspected terrorist, Imad Ahmaz, is believed to be a “significant source of knowledge” on Hezbollah’s naval operations, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Lebanon’s Minister of Public Works and Transport, speaking to local media, claimed that Ahmaz was a civilian captain. 
• Meanwhile, on Sunday, the IDF said that soldiers had carried out a ground raid into Syria to capture a Syrian citizen IDF officials say was involved with Iranian networks—the first time in the current war that the military has announced an operation by Israeli ground forces in Syria, though officials did not specify where or when exactly the raid had taken place. The IDF said the target, Ali Soleiman al-Assi, had been responsible for targeting the Golan Heights.
• Israel carried out airstrikes in northeastern Lebanon and the suburbs south of Beirut over the weekend. According to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, at least 52 people were killed—and 72 more wounded—on Friday in the strikes in the northeast, while it appears that most residents had evacuated in the strikes near Beirut. The IDF said it used “precise intelligence” to target military infrastructure and weapons production sites in the northeast. About a dozen people were reportedly injured in central Israel on Saturday in rocket attacks by Hezbollah. 
• Britain’s Conservative Party elected Kemi Badenoch, a member of parliament for North West Essex, as its new leader on Saturday. Badenoch, 44, is the first black woman to lead a British political party and heads the Tories’ more conservative wing. The Conservatives likely face at least four years in opposition following their defeat by Labour in this summer’s election.
• An “irregular armed group” allegedly associated with supporters of former Bolivian President Evo Morales took over military barracks near the Bolivian city of Cochabamba on Friday. The Bolivian Foreign Ministry said that more than 200 military personnel had been taken hostage in the raid. 

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus

If our social media feeds on Saturday evening were anything to go by, a whole lot of people didn’t read our edition from last week about the dangers of overinterpreting polls. 

With just three days to go until Election Day, Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, whose work is widely considered the gold standard in the state, dropped a bombshell: Her new poll of likely Iowa voters for the Des Moines Register found Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump in Iowa by 3 points. Yes, you read that right—Harris leading Trump in Iowa, which went for Trump by 8 points in 2020. 

The poll that set off a thousand liberal victory tweets may or may not prove to be directionally correct come Election Day, as far as the topline goes. Selzer has a stellar track record, but she’s also been wrong before. But one thing did seem clear: Harris polled extremely well with women, leading the former president by almost 20 points. 

That enthusiasm for Harris among women is emblematic of the dynamic that has been at the heart of this presidential election campaign: increasing gender polarization and efforts by both camps to play to their strengths—women, for Harris, and men, for Trump—in the closing days of the campaign. The polarization has shown up in campaign ads and rhetoric by the candidates and their proxies—efforts that have sometimes devolved into slurs and jibes that could ultimately do more harm than good for their electoral chances. And looming over the entire race is a reality that the Harris campaign has seemed almost reluctant to acknowledge: If the vice president wins this week, she’ll become the United States’ first female president. 

It’s not just in one, relatively small Iowa poll where Harris is showing out with women. In the New York Times/Siena College poll of the battleground states released over the weekend, Harris leads Trump by 16 points with women who are likely voters in the seven all-important states. 

Polls are, as we’ve discussed before, imperfect instruments. But large surveys of Americans generally have revealed growing gender polarization—particularly among the young. Gallup found that between 2017 and 2024, an average of 40 percent of women ages 18 to 29 said they were either liberal or very liberal, compared to an average of 25 percent of men of the same age group who said the same. That’s a much starker difference than during the period between 2008 and 2016, when an average of 32 percent of young women said they were liberal, as opposed to 27 percent of young men. 

It’s a dynamic both sides have spent the last few months on the trail trying to exploit. 

In one particularly controversial effort last week, the Vote Common Good political action committee (PAC)—a progressive evangelical PAC supporting Harris—produced an ad narrated by actress Julia Roberts seeking to give women permission to vote for Harris, even if that means lying to their Trump-supporting spouse about it. 

In the 30-second spot, a woman in a bedazzled American flag baseball cap and her husband in a cap with an eagle on it go into a polling place. Over the top of the voting booth, the woman makes eye contact with another woman as her pen hovers over a bubble to vote for Trump. Then, she votes for Harris.“Did you make the right choice?” the husband asks, to which she replies, “Sure did, honey.” 

“In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” Roberts says during the voiceover, in a not-so-subtle reference to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” It’s not clear how many women the PAC thinks it can reach with this message; a YouGov poll in the field from October 28 to 30 found that 12 percent of women surveyed reported having voted differently from their romantic partner and lying to them about it. 

The ad prompted a strong reaction from some on the right. “I find that entire advertising campaign so repulsive, it is so disastrous,” said Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point U.S.A. “It is like the embodiment of the downfall of the American family.” Fox News host Jesse Watters said, outraged, that if his wife lied to him about who she voted for, it would be tantamount to her having an affair. 

The ad—with its allusion to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that sent the decision about abortion’s legality back to the states—also signaled the importance of abortion to Harris’ closing message with women. It’s always been a key plank of her campaign, wrapped up in her more generic message about “freedom,” but she’s recently gone out of her way to emphasize it even in states she’s unlikely to win. Late last month, she campaigned in Houston with pop singer Beyoncé–whose song “Freedom” has become the anthem of the campaign—in a rally that was almost exclusively about abortion rights and Texas’ abortion restrictions. “I’m here as a mother, a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in,” Beyoncé said. “A world where we have freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided.” 

Women are more likely to vote than men—and they’re already doing so in this election, voting early at higher rates than their male counterparts. But the Trump campaign has bet all its chips on the demographic least likely to vote at all: young men. “The Trump campaign is making a massive, massive, colossal, epochal bet that a bunch of young dudes who’ve never voted before—even for Trump—are going to turn out so massively that they are going to erase the advantage Harris has with women who have voted before, including in midterms,” Jonah noted on Friday’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast. 

Trump—who has in the past succeeded at turning out low-voting propensity, non-college-educated men—has done a full-court press on podcasts whose main audience is young men. He’s appeared with YouTuber and wrestler Logan Paul, in an hourlong YouTube video with golfer Bryson DeChambeau, and on a spree of male–centric podcasts later in the summer and into the early fall, culminating in a three-hour sit-down late last month with the most popular podcaster on Spotify: Joe Rogan. Last week, his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio made his own appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” in an interview during which he skated from hesitancy about the COVID-19 vaccine to what he called “Islamist” influences on local governments to his ticket’s likelihood of winning “the normal gay guy vote.”

Harris has deployed her own surrogates to try to claw back some support she’s lost among black men in particular. Former President Barack Obama has led the charge, at times seeming to scold men for their squishy support of Harris. “I’ve got a problem with that,” he said in Pennsylvania last month. “I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman that’s president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for it.”

As a rule, the Harris campaign has not leaned into the fact that, if she won, Harris would be the first female president. It’s a sharp contrast to the way the last female Democratic nominee handled the prospect of breaking the ultimate glass ceiling: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan was “I’m with her,” and the Democratic convention where she was nominated feted her as someone who was breaking barriers. Harris’ nominating convention was light on the “history-making” talk—she didn’t mention it at all in her acceptance speech. Though her allies sometimes reference the significance of her candidacy, it’s rare to hear Harris herself speak much about it—perhaps in an effort to blunt the very effect Obama described, both with Republicans and men who would normally vote Democratic. 

And indeed, former President Donald Trump has a checkered history with women, to put it mildly. Eight years ago, the “October surprise” in the 2016 election—one among several, it must be said—was the revelation that Trump had bragged about assaulting women in a hot-mic recording during an Access Hollywood taping. More recently, he was held civilly liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a porn star with whom he had allegedly had an affair just after the birth of his fifth child. 

Neither he nor his surrogates have done much to help his image as it relates to women in recent weeks. Referencing illegal immigrants and various geopolitical threats last week, Trump said that he wanted to “protect the women of our country … whether the women like it or not.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, responded over the weekend by declaring female voters would send Trump a “loud and clear” message on Tuesday, “whether he likes it or not.”

Trump’s backers have also made an issue of the fact that Harris is a woman. Last week, Elon Musk’s America PAC posted, and then deleted, an ad that repeatedly called Harris a “c-word,” flashed to an image of a cat meowing, and then claimed the “c-word” it was actually talking about was … “communist.” Trump and his supporters have repeatedly suggested Harris slept her way to her current role. And at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late last month, one speaker referred to Harris’ “pimp handlers.” 

Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley—who endorsed the former president—issued a word of caution last week on Fox News: “That is not the way to win women.” 

On Saturday night, Trump was speaking before a crowd in North Carolina, riffing on Harris’ assertion that she worked at McDonald’s. Then, an audience member interjected: “She worked on a corner!” 

“This place is amazing,” Trump said, laughing. “Just remember it’s other people saying it, it’s not me.”

Worth Your Time

• The final months of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have been marked by a number of quintessentially Trumpian scandals and near-scandals, Tim Alberta documented for The Atlantic. “‘People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,’ Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. ‘What’s discipline got to do with winning?’” Alberta reported. “In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.”
• New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sat down with our old friend David French and Bret Stephens, fellow Times opinion writers, to discuss the future of conservatism and the GOP. David sees the seeds of optimism in a potential Harris victory: “I’m not naïve,” he said. “I know that a renewed Reaganism isn’t waiting in the wings. The way I look at a Harris presidency is that it will give Republicans a chance to redefine themselves without Trump threatening, bullying and intimidating everyone who doesn’t fall in line. There are still many quite good and competent Republicans in Congress and in state capitals, and even if they may end up more populist and less libertarian than I’d prefer, there is a world of difference between them and Trump. I would have been happy to vote for many, many non-MAGA Republicans, had they gotten the party’s nomination instead of Trump.”

Presented Without Comment

NBC News: RFK Jr. Says a Trump White House Would Immediately Push to Remove Fluoride From Water

Also Presented Without Comment

Mediaite: Biden Clenches Fists, Grits Teeth as He Calls Trump Someone You Want to ‘Smack in the Ass’ in Scranton Rant

Also Also Presented Without Comment

The Hill: Trump Says He ‘Shouldn’t Have Left’ the White House in 2021

In the Zeitgeist

This spoof of a campaign ad for an unfortunately named New York City Council candidate would be funny if it were just the product of the creative minds at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It’s much funnier if you know that there’s a real guy named Harvey Epstein running a campaign for city council.

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew reported on Harris’ efforts to reach Latinos in Arizona, Jonah opined on foxes, hedgehogs, and the struggle for the good life, Nick tackled (🔒) Trump’s latest violent fantasies, Chris gave us the rundown (🔒) on what to expect on Election Night, and in Dispatch Faith, Bonnie Kristian reminded readers we’re all going to need to continue living with one another once this election is over.
• On the podcasts: Jonah addressed his CNN mix-up and Robert F. Kennedy’s potential role in a Trump White House on the weekend Remnant, and Jamie is joined on The Dispatch Podcast by former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania to discuss Harris’ chances in the Keystone State.
• On the site: Guy Denton praised Fatherland, the new play about January 6, Mary reviewed Anne Applebaum’s new book on authoritarianism, Russian dissident Garry Kasparov reluctantly endorsed Kamala Harris, and Luis offered his view on Conclave, a thriller about picking a pope.
• On the site today: Michael Zuckert pens this week’s Monday Essay about what Abraham Lincoln can teach us in acrimonious times and Kevin reports from Alpharetta, Georgia, on how a church in the swing state is preparing for Tuesday’s election.

Let Us Know

Is it a concern that our political parties are so polarized by gender?

Correction, November 4, 2024: The caption on the image in this newsletter originally misidentified Dana White as Joe Rogan.