Tim Walz Revs Up Blue Voters in a Red Swing State

Happy Wednesday! Election Day is 48 days away. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst brought a prop to the GOP Senate leadership press conference Tuesday, a board game entitled “Kamala’s Twister,” complete with a spinner.

Up to Speed

• Vice President Kamala Harris participated in a 45-minute interview with the National Association of Black Journalists on Tuesday in which she spoke about her economic plan and condemned former President Donald Trump for spreading baseless claims of migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Tonya Mosley of NPR, Eugene Daniels of Politico, and Gerren Keith Gaynor of theGrio pressed her for direct answers to their questions when she would ramble or deflect. She gave an indirect answer when asked if she would handle Israel’s war in Gaza the same way President Joe Biden has. “I absolutely believe that this war has to end, and it has to end as soon as possible, and the way that will be achieved is by getting a hostage deal and the ceasefire deal done, and we are working around the clock to achieve that end,” she said.
• Donald Trump on Tuesday seemed to promise that he would attempt to alter the cap he placed on the federal deduction for state and local taxes, commonly referred to as “SALT,” as part of the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul he championed as president and signed into law in December 2017. In a Truth Social post promoting a Wednesday rally on Long Island, the former president said he would “get SALT back,” referring to the deduction he capped at $10,000 as part of his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. A generous SALT deduction is especially popular in blue states and locales with high tax rates. Congressional Republicans have largely opposed efforts by Democrats and some in their party to restore the full SALT deduction, calling it a subsidy for high-tax blue states.
• Senate Republicans once again rejected a bill from Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois that would forbid states from banning in vitro fertilization and mandate that insurance companies cover the procedure. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had hoped to put Republicans, who cited religious liberty concerns as reason to vote down the bill, on record after Trump proposed that either the government pay for IVF treatments or mandate insurers cover them. Last week, Republicans were open to Trump’s intentions but generally favored a tax credit to help families cover such costs.

Harris Campaign Focuses on Driving Dem Turnout in North Carolina

ASHEVILLE, North Carolina—There are all the signs of a growing city nestled here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Billboards advertising new home construction. Traffic jams at 2 p.m. Plenty of out-of-state license plates.

“Is anyone from Asheville?” said one man, who declined to give his name and who moved here in 2011 from Louisiana. He was sipping a beer underneath an awning at Salvage Station, the outdoor music venue on the bank of the French Broad River downtown where Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, was set to appear on a drizzly Tuesday evening.

Connie Parker and Beverly Grass really are from Asheville. The two sisters, 63 and 66, respectively, were born and raised here and have the accents to prove it. Parker still lives in town but Grass lives an hour and a half away in Iron Station, in the outer suburbs of Charlotte. Both are lifelong Democrats who are excited to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Oh, honey, one month from today, we can early vote,” Grass told Dispatch Politics while clutching her own beer (there’s a lot of it in Asheville). “We have a 90-year-old mother and it’s on her calendar.” And will their mother be voting for Harris too? “Oh yeah,” Parker put in. “Where do you think we got it from?”

Buncombe County, where Asheville is the largest city and county seat, is a blue island in a sea of red in the western arm of North Carolina. And while the region is small compared to the state’s metropolitan powerhouses of Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro, the Asheville area is clearly a key part of the coalition Harris is trying to assemble. Democratic presidential candidates have been achingly close to pulling off a repeat of Barack Obama’s narrow win of the Tar Heel State in 2008—Donald Trump won North Carolina four years ago by fewer than 75,000 votes—and if Harris and Walz can pull it off, Asheville will be part of the story.

“North Carolina is certainly not going to [let] a little rain stop us from making Kamala Harris the next president of the United States,” Walz told the cheering crowd of around 2,500.

Asheville was a small city of about 60,000 throughout the latter part of the 20th century, but since 2000, its population and that of surrounding Buncombe County exploded by more than 30 percent. Tourism—from the Vanderbilt family’s Biltmore Estate to the proximity to the Great Smoky Mountains to the craft-beer trend—made Asheville a regional destination. Young people are attracted to the bohemian scene and lower cost of living, and older people found it an attractive place to retire or purchase a second home. 

But even as Trump has increased the GOP’s margins in the surrounding rural counties, the Asheville area has become more solidly Democratic. Buncombe County gave both Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 around 55 percent of the vote. In 2020, Joe Biden got roughly 60 percent. 

Democrats are hopeful they can bump those numbers up even more thanks to a healthy surge in voter registration, which has increased in Buncombe County by more than 13,000 votes between August 2020 and August 2024. The largest bump came from those who register as unaffiliated. That could be good news for the Harris campaign, since those newly arrived nonpartisan voters are more likely to lean left, not right. 

That would certainly apply to Emily Thomforde, 41, and Jamie Montgomerie, 45. The couple moved to Asheville just six months ago from California, and were excited to see so much support for the Democratic ticket from their new neighbors. Thomforde told Dispatch Politics she is a “green” voter and to the left of Harris and Walz on a number of issues, but she said the stakes of the election are too high to sit out.

“I know I’m more to the left than even a lot of people in this rally,” she said. “But I see the consequence of like, as much as I want to go even more liberal than this and more environmental, the cost of not having Harris is too great, even if I don’t agree with absolutely everything she does.”

These are the sort of voters Walz was here to encourage to come out. Despite his image as a white, Midwestern dad with a superficial resemblance to the average Trump voter, the progressive governor of Minnesota tends to deliver more red meat to Democratic audiences than he does appeals to Republicans curious about crossing party lines. In Asheville, he spoke not to the wavering Republicans but to their exasperated Democratic family members who hope their relations can snap out of supporting Trump.

“We have them in our families, don’t we know?” he said before briefly taking on the persona of someone rationalizing their support for the former president. “‘I don’t really like Donald Trump, but I like what he stands for.’ Oh, really? Suppressing women’s reproductive rights? Is that the one you want? Or is it cutting taxes for billionaires while you get screwed in the middle class? Is that the one you like? Or is it ignoring real problems, like our children being shot dead in schools? Is it those things?”

As in other swing states, there is a serious effort in North Carolina to peel Republican voters away from Trump and toward Harris. 

But despite an appearance at Tuesday’s rally by Bob Orr, the former Republican state Supreme Court justice who has endorsed Harris, the campaign’s goal in Asheville seemed geared toward building on the wave of enthusiasm among Democrats for the change at the top of the ticket. And that newfound energy is certainly there. Connie Parker said her neighbors are more excited now that Harris is the nominee, and she pointed to her “Harris for President” T-shirt.

“I’ve been wearing my shirt everywhere, and I get fist bumps, thumbs up,” Parker said. “I didn’t know so many people looked at my chest!”

Eyes on the Trail

• Donald Trump will be on Long Island, New York, tonight for a rally at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. New York is not a presidential swing state, but there are a handful of key House races there, including at least two competitive races in districts on Long Island. 
• Kamala Harris is scheduled to address the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 47th Annual Leadership Conference, in Washington, D.C., today. Later, the vice president will participate in a “virtual campaign event.”
• President Joe Biden is scheduled to host a reception tonight at the White House celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.
• Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio continues his tour of swing states today, this time giving remarks in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the Republican vice presidential nominee is expected to talk about economics.
• After delivering remarks at campaign receptions virtually and in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, second gentleman Doug Emhoff will speak today at two similar events in New York City, including one in Brooklyn.

Notable and Quotable

“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented.”

—Former President Donald Trump at a town hall in Flint, Michigan, September 17, 2024