Harris Is Gaining Ground Nationally

There have been some national polls taken since the debate. Here are those taken by two serious nonpartisan pollsters as well as some taken by partisan pollsters. That a pollster is partisan doesn't mean that they always make up or fudge the numbers, just that the temptation is there. They also like to be seen as accurate because candidates always want accurate numbers internally, and being seen as incompetent is not a selling point when trying to acquire new clients.

Harris	Trump	Net	Pollster	Dates
50%	45%	Harris +5	Data for Progress (D)	Sept. 12-13
52%	46%	Harris +6	Ipsos	Sept. 11-13
44%	42%	Harris +2	Redfield & Wilton (R)	Sept. 12
51%	47%	Harris +4	RMG Research (R)	Sept. 9-12
45%	41%	Harris +4	TIPP Insights (R)	Sept. 11-13
50%	45%	Harris +5	YouGov	Sept. 11-13

The average of the polls is Harris +4.3. The margin of error on these polls is about 4 points, but a bit smaller on the numerical average of the six polls (because the total sample size is bigger) and there are still 7 weeks to go. There could be serious methodological errors (shy racists, overcorrection for the Trump effect, etc.), an October surprise, etc. etc., but it is a safe bet that Jen O'Malley Dillon is sleeping better these days than Chris LaCivita.

If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of modern polling, ABC News has a page explaining how the polls it sponsors with Ipsos work. In short, they don't use random digit dialing anymore. They get a list of street addresses from the USPS and ask some fraction of people on it to fill out the survey online. People who lack Internet access are given a tablet and a free Internet connection. All participants get a small incentive worth $1-2.

National polls are one way of measuring the race, but not the only one. The state polls put Harris above 270 EVs (see map) but just barely, with nine states nominally swing states. Indiana isn't a swing state but there is only one (flaky) poll of it.

Another resource is the betting data. PaddyPower in Ireland allows people to bet on political outcomes. (If you want to follow the link you may need a VPN pointed at Ireland or the U.K.) They have Harris with a 55.6% chance of winning the election and Trump with a 50.0% chance. As to the popular vote, the bettors think that Harris has an 81.8% chance of winning it and Trump has a 25.0% chance. The numbers don't add to 100% in each case due to the vig (the bookie's take—the bookie always wins). But all in all, there is a sea change since early June, when it looked that Joe Biden's goose was cooked and Trump would coast to an easy win. (V)

Follow the Money

If you want to know what the campaigns really think is important, don't bother asking them. They will make up some random story. What you need to do to discover their real priorities is to follow the money. Money talks. One straightforward way to follow the money is to see where the campaigns are spending money on ads. AdImpact does that. Here is what their research shows:

Wow. It is not exactly right to say that Trump's campaign is betting the farm on Pennsylvania, but they are sure worried about it. Pennsylvania is also the top priority for the Harris campaign, but not so extreme. Harris is apparently more nervous about Michigan than Trump, possibly due to the modest Arab-American population in Dearborn. Trump also sees Georgia as a priority, more so than Harris. Also keep population in mind. Nevada is a low-population state with only two major media markets (Las Vegas and Reno). It wouldn't be possible to spend $20 million there, even if a campaign wanted to.

But remember, ad spending isn't the whole game. What the chart does not show is spending for running field offices in a state and GOTV operations. Harris has 50 offices in Pennsylvania, staffed by 150 people. That doesn't show up in the chart. Trump opened his first office there in June and certainly doesn't have the ground game there that Harris does. That stuff also matters. (V)

Trump Apparently Targeted in a Second Assassination Attempt

Yesterday was Sunday, which means, of course, that Donald Trump was in church. Oops, wait, no. Sorry, Sunday is his golfing day. Along with Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Anyhow, during yesterday's round, the Secret Service was conducting its usual sweep of the holes that Trump was about to play (specifically, the sixth and seventh holes on one of the Trump International Golf Club courses), and an agent saw a gun barrel poking out from some bushes along the perimeter of the course. One or more agents fired their weapons in the direction of the gun barrel, and the suspect dropped a bunch of his stuff (including the camera he was using to record his activities) and ran for it.

The would-be shooter, in part because he left a bunch of his possessions behind, was identified and apprehended fairly quickly. He is 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh. He's got a fairly long history of petty crime and, according to his social media accounts, he voted for Trump in 2016. However, Routh is also strongly pro-Ukraine, and so apparently turned against the former president on that basis. That said, while there may have been a vague political agenda here, the presence of the camera suggests it was also another "look at me!" incident, like the first assassination attempt.

It's not clear if the shooter actually got any shots off. If he did, he was far away from Trump at the time (300-500 yards) and Trump was not in danger, and certainly was not struck or grazed. So there will be no opportunities for dramatic photos or bandaged ears or anything like that. Meanwhile, given that the shooter was apparently a Trumper, and apparently was not a Democrat, that angle is not available for Trump and his acolytes to carp upon. In short, the first assassination attempt did not move the needle, despite much greater potential to do so, so we don't see how the second one will have any meaningful impact on the presidential race. (Z)

Vance Keeps Fanning the Flames Used for Grilling the Cats and Dogs

Usually when a politician not named Donald J. Trump gets caught in a lie, he stops repeating it and lets the story die off. Not so with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). He has been barbequed for a week for saying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, are stealing the townfolks' cats and dogs and eating them for dinner. At the debate, Trump repeated the lie and moderator David Muir immediately fact-checked him by saying that ABC News had contacted the Springfield city manager who said that no such thing was happening. When ABC contacted the city police, they also said there were no reports of pets being stolen.

So Vance just let it drop, hoping everyone forgets it in a week? Nope. That would be too easy. Instead, he went on Meet the Press yesterday and repeated the false story for the third time. Then he went on CNN and said it again:

In addition, Vance said that there are 20,000 illegal immigrants from Haiti in Springfield. Actually, there are 16,000 immigrants from Haiti there, all legal. The town was declining for decades, then the city council developed a plan to get new companies to move in and take over some of the old buildings. They did but there weren't enough workers to fill all the new jobs, so the city hired some immigration lawyers and worked out a path to have Haitians get visas to come to Springfield legally to work in the factories that desperately needed workers they couldn't find locally.

Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal wrote in a statement that there is "no evidence to even remotely suggest that any group, including our immigrant community, is engaged in eating pets." Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) also had enough. He went on ABC's The Week and said the rumors are "a piece of garbage that was simply not true." He also noted that the "Haitians are legal and just came to work because Springfield has many companies that couldn't find enough workers."

Does it matter who is lying? Yes. Trump supporters have called in bomb threats, forcing schools and other buildings to be evacuated, disrupting life in the community. Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said the threats were a "hateful response to immigration in our town." And Vance is on the air making it worse.

Donald Trump got into the act and affirmed that he will organize mass deportations of immigrants. He said: "We're going to start with Springfield." (V)

Trump Is Going to Try an Untested GOTV Strategy

Traditionally, campaigns try to get as many voters to the polls as they can from areas that lean toward them. There is not a lot of cherry-picking. If your zip code leans in their direction, the party will try to get you to the polls. Volume has always been king.

Donald Trump's campaign is planning on using a different strategy this time. It believes that the key to winning is to get low-propensity voters to the polls because it believes they favor him. The idea is somehow to trade quantity for quality. Some Republicans think this is a bad idea. At the very least, how do you locate these people and motivate them? That's why no campaign has ever tried it before.

In addition, the campaign has outsourced much of the voter contact work to third parties. Normally, campaigns and outside groups may not coordinate at all, but this spring, the Federal Election Commission ruled that parties and outside groups can have some limited coordination about getting people to the polls. The Trump campaign has taken this to heart and given contracts for millions of dollars to outside groups to contact voters. At least one investigation showed that the work done by the outside groups was deeply flawed, with some of the workers hired not contacting any voters at all. To some extent, the problem is caused by the Democrats having vast numbers of dedicated volunteers who do their assigned work because they believe in it while Republicans don't. So the Republicans have to pay people to do it, and some of them take the money but don't do the work. Another problem is that when a campaign outsources basic work that campaigns normally do, it is introducing the possibility of grift.

One group that has long been subject to scrutiny is Turning Point, which promised to spend $100 million on its "Chase the Vote" program in all the swing states. Now it is mostly focused on Arizona and a little bit on Wisconsin. It says it doesn't have the resources to operate in the other states.

However, another group may be more effective. Elon Musk has his own personal super PAC, America PAC. Armed with $30 million, it has been working on GOTV in swing states. It does door-knocking, mailers, and digital ads. It could be that Musk doesn't trust Trump to do GOTV correctly, so he has taken it upon himself to do it instead. Maybe he really hopes Trump wins and he will be appointed Secretary of Everything.

Still another issue is that the RNC is putting a huge focus on training volunteers and paid staff to be ballot workers and ballot observers. These people would normally be out in the field talking to voters.

The consequence of having a limited GOTV goal and then outsourcing the work to outside groups that use paid canvassers who don't always do what they are paid to do, could be that the Republican GOTV operation may not work well. It could end up being dwarfed by the Harris and DNC operation, which is based on hundreds of thousands of volunteers and aims at the greatest possible volume, rather than focusing on a narrow group of people who, by definition, tend not to vote.

And there is another potential fly in the ointment here. Many of the unlikely voters are young. Turnout among seniors is often >80% whereas among 18-29-year-olds it is often <50%. Roughly half of the young nonvoters are women. These are precisely the people who could be moved to vote by Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris. One study of Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 suggested that Winfrey added 1 million votes to Obama's total. Could Swift do the same thing for Harris? We do know that in the 24 hours after Swift told her fans to go register at vote.gov, 400,000 people visited the website. We don't know how many actually registered and how many will vote, but the Republicans are not the only ones aiming at low-propensity voters. Yesterday, Trump wrote: "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" on his money-losing social media site. Maybe he is on to something. (V)

Harris Is Down on the Farm

Democrats have a tendency to focus on big urban centers like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, along with their inner suburbs. That is often it. Kamala Harris is seriously trying something different: She is spending time in smaller cities and even in rural areas. She got the message: 90% of success is just showing up. She has been to Eau Claire, WI; Johnstown, PA; and Savannah, GA, recently, to take a few examples. A vote in a small city or a rural area counts as much as a vote in the big city. When a candidate is in state campaigning, the local media will pick it up, even (or maybe especially) if the candidate is in an out-of-the-way place.

In theory, Democrats have known this for years. When Howard Dean was chairman of the DNC, he had a 50-state strategy. He wanted a viable Democratic Party in all 50 states. Many top Democrats felt that putting money in Idaho or Mississippi was just throwing it down the toilet, but he felt that things can change but they won't if you don't try. Eventually, Dean left the DNC and the Democrats went back to mostly focusing on big cities in blue or swing states. Joe Biden's campaign was all about increasing turnout in big cities. Harris is not following that strategy. She is going after noncollege voters in small cities, exurban locations, and even the rural countryside. She has enough money to advertise everywhere, but she is backing up her commitment by putting her valuable time into nontraditional campaign stops. She believes that when voters hear what she has to say, they will be open to voting for her. But she has to approach them where they are. Biden didn't do this, but of course, Harris is much younger than Biden and has the energy to make many more campaign stops per day than he could, even some after 4 p.m.

In Pennsylvania, both Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) successfully used the "lose-by-less strategy" in the Alabama (or Pennsyltucky) part of the state. Harris' Pennsylvania state director, Brendan McPhillips, ran Fetterman's 2022 campaign and well understands the value of "losing by less" in rural counties. In Georgia, Harris is doing the same thing. Her principal deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, who ran the campaign of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) in 2022, put a lot of focus on rural Georgia in that campaign.

Trump is pooh-poohing Harris' strategy. He claims that rural voters are all his and uses racist and sexist tropes to try to keep them that way. The racist ones might work in all-white areas, but the sexist ones might backfire. Even rural women don't like to hear that women are too stupid to be president. (V)

Harris Is Really, Really Trying to Win North Carolina

For Kamala Harris, North Carolina is not the dessert. It is an essential part of the main course. She has campaigned in the state nine times so far, and has 20 field offices with more than 150 people working out of them.

The most straightforward way to get 270 EVs for her is the three northern blue wall states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) and NE-02 (Omaha), but she is really giving it her all in North Carolina. Maybe this will be like 2008, when Barack Obama won it, or maybe this will be like Arizona in 2016, when Hillary Clinton diverted resources from the blue wall to try to win a "possible" state, which may have caused her defeat. In terms of money, Harris can afford 20+ offices in North Carolina, but the critical resource, as always, is her time.

One thing that makes North Carolina special this year is the gubernatorial race. The Republicans are running a bats**t crazy all-around bigot, abortion hater, and porn lover, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC). The Democrats are running a mild-mannered Jewish AG named Josh S., same as in Pennsylvania in 2022. That Josh S. won easily against an equally nutty all-out Trumpist. The gubernatorial race could bring marginal Democrats to the polls, just to vote against Robinson. Harris understands this and is tying herself closely to this Josh S.—Josh Stein—since he is better known in the state than she is.

Harris is advertising heavily in North Carolina and the ads are showing excerpts from her debate with Trump. She also plans to do media interviews with local media outlets. About 20% of the state is Black, not as much as Georgia. However, the rapidly growing Research Triangle area bounded by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill has many transplants from out of state who work in the tech, finance, and the pharmaceutical industries, as well as at the three big research universities in those cities. The transplants typically bring their liberal political views with them and could be a big source of votes for Harris.

Look at the polling:

Until the end of July, it was no contest: Trump was crushing Biden in North Carolina. Then something happened in July and it suddenly got very close. What could it have been? We have our ideas about that but we'll let you figure it out. (V)

Republicans Keep Suing to Change the Rules

Although they won't say it in public, Republicans know that in fair elections, they would usually lose outside of deep-red states. So they are making a huge effort to jigger the rules in their favor. In three key states, the RNC is suing to get the rules changed in its favor, although the issues are different in all of them.

In Michigan, every voter has a legal right to request an absentee ballot without giving any reason for doing so. The return envelopes must be signed by the voter. The lawsuit here is about signature verification. The RNC is claiming that the local election officials are not putting enough effort into verifying the signatures on the envelopes and the guidelines from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) do not emphasize the need for very careful verification. The underlying tone is that if the signature on the ballot envelope looks a little different from the one the voter used when registering, possibly 50 years ago, the ballot should be chucked.

In Nevada, the lawsuit claims that Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D) is insufficiently vigorous in verifying that every person registering to vote is a U.S. citizen. The lawsuit claims that thousands of noncitizens have managed to register in Nevada and will vote in November. It is a crime for noncitizens to register and the registration form requires anyone registering to certify under penalty of perjury that they are eligible to vote. Aguilar responded to the lawsuit by saying: "Any claims of a widespread problem are false and only create distrust in our elections."

In North Carolina, the RNC's current lawsuit against the Board of Elections is its fourth one. It is about voter ID. The University of North Carolina issues students digital student IDs they can store on their smartphones. To verify the ID, the student has to use a fingerprint or faceprint. If it matches the one stored in the ID app, a green checkmark appears on the screen. The RNC is arguing that only paper IDs, which the university no longer issues, are valid. If the RNC wins the cases, no UNC students will be able to vote unless they have some paper ID, such as a U.S. passport. The RNC would be overjoyed if this happened.

In Pennsylvania, a key voting case has now ended. On Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots with no date on the envelope or an obviously incorrect date should be rejected, even if they arrive before Election Day.

In reality, the dates have no value, but state law requires them. If a ballot is received on time, it was obviously filled out on time, even if the voter forgets to fill in the date on the envelope. If a ballot has a date before Election Day but arrives too long after Election Day, it doesn't count. In other words, what actually matters is when the ballot arrives. Nothing in the process requires election officials even looking at the date on the envelope. But the state Supreme Court nevertheless ruled that it must be included on the envelope because state law says the "date" box must be filled in correctly.

Republicans see this as a big win because more Democrats vote absentee than Republicans, so more of the disqualified ballots are likely to be Democratic ballots. In such a closely fought race, every ballot counts. The instructions tell the voters to sign and date the envelope, but some voters still forget. As a consequence of the new ruling, there will undoubtedly be some ballots thrown out, although local elections offices could potentially give those voters the opportunity to cure their ballots if there is time. (V)

The New Senate Is Likely to Have Two Black Women for the First Time

If current polling is correct, on Jan. 3, 2025, there will be two Black women in the U.S. Senate at the same time for the first time in history. Nevertheless, there also will be more white men named John in the new Senate then than the sum total of all Black women senators in over 200 years of Senate history.

Right now, there is one Black woman in the Senate, Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA). She was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) after then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein died. She is not running for election, but she was there to vote for judges and other appointees. Before her, only two Black women have served in the Senate: Carol Moseley Braun and Kamala Harris.

Delaware has an open seat because Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) is retiring. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), who is Black, is running for it. She has already won the state's only House seat four times, so she knows how to win statewide elections, and her victory is virtually certain. She is campaigning on guaranteeing women reproductive rights and combating gun violence.

Nearby Maryland also has an open seat, due to the retirement of Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). There was a competitive Democratic primary, with Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks beating Rep. David Trone (D-MD), despite his spending $50 million of his own money on the race. Alsobrooks is Alsoblack. But her path to the Senate won't be so easy. She is facing popular former Republican governor Larry Hogan, who has broken with Donald Trump on many policy issues. He is much better known than Alsobrooks. Her main hope is that the state is so blue, that anyone with a (D) after his or her name can win in Maryland. (V)

Today's Presidential Polls

If Iowa is this close, heaven help Donald Trump in Wisconsin, which has a border with Iowa. But this could just be a statistical fluke due to a poor sample. Ann Selzer is the best there is, but even she can have bad luck with an unlikely sample once in a while. (Z)

State	Kamala Harris	Donald Trump	Start	End	Pollster
Iowa	43%	47%	Sep 08	Sep 11	Selzer
New Mexico	49%	39%	Sep 06	Sep 13	Research and Polling

Click on a state name for a graph of its polling history.

Today's Senate Polls

New Mexico used to be a swing state. No more. Nella Domenici is the daughter of former New Mexico senator Pete Domenici. Looks like any hopes of a Domenici dynasty are going to be dashed. (Z)

State	Democrat	D %	Republican	R %	Start	End	Pollster
New Mexico	Martin Heinrich*	50%	Nella Domenici	38%	Sep 06	Sep 13	Research and Polling

* Denotes incumbent

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