Conspiracies Dominate Elon Musk’s Pennsylvania Town Hall

Happy Monday! Election Day is 15 days away. Donald Trump spent part of Sunday at a McDonald’s in suburban Philadelphia serving customers at the drive-thru window and slinging fries. But, as NBC News reported, that particular McDonald’s store “was closed for normal business during Sunday’s visit,” and the customers were recommended by the franchise and Trump campaign team.

Up to Speed

• Kamala Harris turned 60 on Sunday, spending her birthday on the stump in the battleground state of Georgia. The vice president stopped at two black churches in the Atlanta area, part of the campaign’s “souls to the polls” get-out-the-vote effort in conjunction with a coalition of black faith leaders. According to the Washington Post, the Democratic nominee asked congregants at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest “what kind of country do we want to live in? … A country of chaos, fear and hate or a country of freedom, compassion and justice?”
• Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, campaigned Sunday in Wisconsin, including several stops in Green Bay, where the hometown Packers defeated the visiting Houston Texans. WBAY reported that Vance visited a private home where Republican fans were set to watch the game. He also popped into Kroll’s West, the bar and restaurant across the street from Lambeau Field. “It was wild. There was a lot of energy in there. He actually signed a few beer bottles,” Eddie Heuring of Appleton told WBAY.
• The National Republican Congressional Committee raised just under $19 million in September, according to a Sunday FEC filing, well short of the more than $30 million its Democratic counterpart brought in during the same month. Despite the fundraising disparity, the two committees were neck and neck in cash on hand, with just $1 million separating them. However, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent about $27 million more than the NRCC. The news comes as Republicans have complained that their House of Representatives and Senate candidates have trailed Democrats in the money battle.

Stumping for Trump, Musk Amplifies Misinformation

OAKS, Pennsylvania—Elon Musk spent more than an hour fanning myriad conspiracy theories as he answered questions from an audience of admirers during a Friday evening “town hall” sponsored by the super PAC he’s funding in support of Donald Trump. 

Whether the America PAC gathering in suburban Philadelphia’s Montgomery County furthered Musk’s goal of boosting Trump in a crucial state remains to be seen. The majority of the standing-room-only crowd of 1,200 appeared already committed to the former president, and voters Dispatch Politics interviewed said they were attending mainly to catch an up-close-and-personal glimpse of Musk, the quasi-celebrity billionaire businessman behind Tesla, SpaceX, and the X social media platform.

“We are here to see Elon,” said Caroline Perez, a middle-aged regular Republican voter and Trump supporter who showed up with her husband, Marco Perez, at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center for the town hall. Ditto John Wagler, 28, another regular Republican voter and Trump supporter: “I like Elon, he’s doing great things. I want to see what kind of twist he’s bringing to Trump’s side of things.”

The event did offer a window into the conspiracies—related to the United States government and otherwise—animating Musk’s participation in the 2024 presidential campaign. Not only did Musk, 53, not dissuade audience members who framed questions to him in the form of conspiracy theories, he offered up his own, even in response to relatively straightforward questions. Here’s how Musk answered the first question: “What makes you so interested in politics now?”

I think we’re at a crossroads, a fork in the road of destiny. What I see happening in the, sort of, Biden-Kamala administration is a level of government overreach and manipulation that is extremely troubling and I also see really a deliberate attempt to import as many people as possible into swing states like Pennsylvania in order to ensure that there is a permanent one state—that America becomes a permanent one-party state … You’re seeing, in some cases, 700 percent increases in the past three and a half years in illegals in swing states. What a coincidence, and when you’re talking about elections that are one or lost by 10 or 20,000 votes and then you bring in 200,000 people and then you put them on the fast track to citizenship, this is without considering any cheating. This is legalizing. If that happens over the next four years, there will be no swing states. They’re importing voters—I think that’s obvious to anyone who looks and we will have a situation like we have in California where it’s a one-party state. California is a super majority Dem state, and so it’s one party rule. And if you have one party rule that’s not a democracy … Kamala’s just a puppet of a larger machine—I’ll just call it a machine. If the machine is able to [govern] for another four years, there will not be any meaningful elections in the future.

Musk’s America PAC is active in Pennsylvania and other states registering voters and canvassing door-to-door to try and turn out the vote for Trump. The effort, run day-to-day in part by veterans of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign, is having questionable results, according to Reuters and other news outlets. (Dispatch Politics has previously reported on Trump’s risky decision to outsource field operations to third-party groups.) It may not matter; the Republican nominee has trended ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in recent polling, although the contest remains a toss-up.

Still, the town hall events Musk is hosting across Pennsylvania—considered perhaps the most pivotal battleground state—provide an interesting window into the thinking of the world’s richest man, including his ambition to transform humanity into a “spacefaring” and “multiplanetary” species. Musk, clad in all black and on a bare stage with a large American flag behind him, delivered about 10 minutes of opening remarks, then fielded questions for more than an hour from audience members, at least half of whom appeared to be wearing red “MAGA” baseball caps or other Trump paraphernalia. 

Here’s a small sample of the queries, paraphrased for clarity, that Musk received, along with his answers:

• Did you expect the impact that buying X would have on the world and the United States, free speech? Musk: “The reason I felt that it was important to acquire Twitter was that I could feel the walls closing in. … There’s one place where you can find out what’s actually going on and what’s real, that’s the X platform. We’re very rigorous on the X platform about being a fair playing field, a level playing field, being fair to both sides.”
• What do we do for kids so when they get older they will know what’s true and what’s not? Musk: “I’m a big believer in, sort of, citizen journalism. … That’s the kind of thing that is actually far better information than filtering it through a small number of publications which ends up being controlled by maybe five editors in chief. There’s like five people that control all the news. … The cumulative voice of the people should decide what is newsworthy.”
• How do we stop the steal? Down in Georgia they’re already flipping votes on the machines. Musk: “I recommend posting any evidence that you have for voting fraud or irregularities or causes of concern, just post it on the X platform and then people will support it or debunk it, one of the two.”

Incidentally, although the event space featured America PAC signage urging attendees to register to vote, vote early, and vote by mail—and although the group had a table out front before the event began where people could register to vote—Musk didn’t spend much time urging people to do so. Roughly 25 minutes into the Q&A, he encouraged attendees and people watching via livestream to register to vote in Pennsylvania before today’s deadline.

“If Trump doesn’t win, I think we’re doomed,” Musk said, about a half-hour later. “We’re in a doom loop at that point.”

Baldwin Paints Challenger as an Outsider in Tight Wisconsin Senate Race

MADISON, Wisconsin—Will the real Wisconsinite please stand up?

Wisconsin roots and ties were a big part of the Badger State’s Senate debate Friday between incumbent Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and her Republican challenger, businessman Eric Hovde. Baldwin attacked him for being a California banker pretending to be an authentic Wisconsinite. Hovde attacked her for being a corrupt career politician out of touch with the Wisconsin way.

“You take massive amounts of money from Big Pharma. Your whole campaign is funded by Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Big Tech,” Hovde told Baldwin at one point.

“Right now, multi-millionaires like my opponent, Eric Hovde, pay minute amounts [in taxes]. They’re not doing their fair share,” Baldwin said at another.

Friday’s televised debate was the only scheduled faceoff between Baldwin and Hovde this cycle. The race is a top-tier pickup opportunity for the GOP and a key seat for Democrats to defend as control of the Senate hangs in the balance. And despite Wisconsin’s status as a swing state in the presidential race, the Senate contest has largely ignored the top of the ticket and has focused instead on a battle over biographies. The result has been an ugly war of the airwaves in which each candidate has tried to paint the other as disconnected from the people they would represent for the next six years. 

Early in the election cycle, public polling leaned heavily in Baldwin’s favor, but the race had tightened in the weeks leading up to the debate. Internal polls from both parties have lately shown the race becoming closer. Fivethirtyeight’s average has Baldwin up 4 points.

Hovde has been able to tighten the race largely thanks to his personal fortune, loaning his campaign funds and spending on ads to attack Baldwin as someone more beholden to big business than to her state. Baldwin, a formidable fundraiser herself, has in turn painted Hovde, who runs a Southern California bank holding company and owns a mansion in the state, as a California millionaire trying to buy a Senate seat.

The themes of those attacks continued into Friday’s debate.

“I will not be owned by anyone, unlike Sen. Baldwin, who not only has taken massive amounts of special interest money from Big Pharma, Wall Street, Big Tech, but her partner … a Wall Street executive, is investing in Big Tech and Big Pharma, a committee she oversees, and they don’t disclose those investments and how much they’re profiting from it,” Hovde said. “That’s fundamentally wrong.”

He was referring to Baldwin’s partner, Maria Brisbane, a wealth adviser at Morgan Stanley with whom Baldwin has been in a relationship since 2018. Since the two are not married, Baldwin is not required to disclose Brisbane’s assets. Hovde’s campaign has pointed to the fact that Baldwin chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees executive agencies that regulate biotechnology, a field in which Brisbane previously advised clients. There is no evidence that Baldwin has used her influence on the subcommittee inappropriately, but Hovde has alleged impropriety and accused her of being “in bed with Wall Street.”

During the debate, Baldwin responded to that attack with an apparent reference to Hovde’s position on abortion. “Eric Hovde should stay out of my personal life,” she said. “And I think I speak for most Wisconsin women that he should stay out of all of our personal lives.”

The two-term senator remained more issue-focused Friday night, but Baldwin still got some shots in, most notably in her closing statement. “Eric Hovde owns a $3 billion California bank, a $7 million Laguna Beach, California, home, and he’s been named among the more influential residents of Orange County three years in a row,” she said. Hovde’s California ties have been a central attack of her campaign and that of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. In response, Hovde has noted that he grew up in Madison and that he has lived in Wisconsin for the last 12 years. During the debate, he pulled a Madison utility bill from his jacket pocket.

Hovde also tried to turn around a question about an ethics code and term limits for the Supreme Court on Baldwin, who has spent nearly 26 years in the House of Representatives and Senate. “I understand the desire to have a term limit. I’m supportive of term limits. I think current politicians should have term limits,” he said. Later, he asked viewers in his closing statement whether they thought they were “better off than you were four years ago, or even 26 years ago.”

But Baldwin was able to lean on her experience. When both candidates were asked to name an elected official from the other party who they thought was a model for building consensus, Baldwin named Maine Sen. Susan Collins, with whom she sits on the Appropriations Committee. “Our committee is chaired by Patty Murray, and Susan Collins is the ranking Republican member, and we have passed almost all of our bills out of committee on a bipartisan basis,” she said.

Hovde named Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin, who is retiring at the end of this congressional term. Like Baldwin, he committed to working across the aisle, but he said it would be “nice if Sen. Baldwin would exhibit some of” Manchin’s bipartisanship.

Eyes on the Trail

• Vice President Kamala Harris today campaigns with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming in suburban Philadelphia (Chester County, Pennsylvania); suburban Milwaukee (Waukesha County, Wisconsin); and suburban Detroit (Oakland County, Michigan.) Harris’ campaign is billing the events as “moderated conversations.”
• Former President Donald Trump today travels to Asheville, North Carolina, where his campaign says he will speak to the press about the devastation in the area caused by Hurricane Helene. In the afternoon, the Republican nominee hosts an afternoon campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina. In the evening, he participates in an “11th Hour Faith Leaders Meeting” in Concord, North Carolina, joined by his son Eric Trump and Ben Carson, who served in his administration as Housing and Urban Development secretary.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, is in New York City today headlining two Harris campaign fundraisers.
• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will campaign today for Harris in Pennsylvania, visiting Lackawanna and Luzerne Counties.
• West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice campaigns for Trump this evening in Erie, Pennsylvania, joined by “Babydog,” his English Bulldog. 
• The Trump campaign launches a bus tour today across Pennsylvania featuring prominent surrogates, with stops in Sharon Hill, Bethlehem, and Allentown, headlined by former California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, former Pentagon official Kash Patel, and others.

Notable and Quotable

“Never touched by a human hand. … Nice and clean.”

—Former President Donald Trump, referring to the method for scooping french fries at McDonald’s, October 20, 2024