What was probably a minor brouhaha this week led me to make a broader observation at New York about online tunnel-vision:

When I saw a viral video of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer placing a Dorito on the tongue of a woman I could not identify (who turned out to be social-media influencer Liz Plank), I was kind of shocked. To many it looked like a parody, or at least an appropriation, of the traditional Roman Catholic form of administering a Communion wafer. The fact that there was adjoining text about the U.S. Chips Act didn’t mitigate the strangeness of the image. Why would an incredibly smart politician like Whitmer do something like this?

When this video came up in a discussion with my work colleagues, I was informed this was a meme, as though that fully explained it. When there was an explosion of protests from Michigan Catholics (some of it, of course, ginned up by MAGA folk and Democrat-hating traditionalist Catholic groups), Plank irritably explained to the “weirdos” that this was all a well-established joke:

I don’t know about you, but when I watch Jeremy Allen White feed a slice of pizza to Stephen Colbert (who is, as it happens, an observant Catholic), I don’t think Communion, I think Colbert’s being fed pizza by someone off-camera. In the Whitmer-Plank video, the size of the chip, the adoring upward glance of the Dorito recipient, and the positioning of the two women makes it very different.

But in any event, this video was circulated to untold millions of people who had never seen the Colbert-White video and probably couldn’t distinguish a meme from a matzo ball. The fact that Whitmer is wearing a Harris-Walz hat during this strange pantomime, and that Plank is a founder of the group Hotties for Harris, is an incredible gift to the reactionaries who claim Democrats are a bunch of Satan-adjacent baby-killing libertine smart-asses who would close down the churches if given the chance. It’s not just Catholics, by the way, who are a little touchy about the Eucharist. My own liberal Disciples of Christ denomination treats Communion as an indispensable symbol of human equality.

To her credit, Whitmer immediately apologized for having given offense, and she fortunately did not just say “It’s a meme, stupid boomers!” Per the Washington Post:

“Over 25 years in public service, I would never do something to denigrate someone’s faith,” the statement said. “I’ve used my platform to stand up for people’s right to hold and practice their personal religious beliefs. My team has spoken to the Michigan Catholic Conference. What was supposed to be a video about the importance of the CHIPS Act to Michigan jobs, has been construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologize for that.”

But Whitmer’s staff couldn’t let it go with that and insisted the people complaining just didn’t get it, according to the Detroit News:

“’The governor’s social media is well known for infusing her communications with pop culture,’ Helen Hare, a Whitmer spokeswoman, said in a statement. “’This popular trend has been used by countless people, including Billie Eilish, Kylie Jenner, and Stephen Colbert, and the fact that people are paying attention to a video promoting President Biden’s CHIPS Act proves it’s working.’”

Here’s the thing: Unhip people get the same vote as hip people and can’t really be expected to understand the process by which some moment on social media becomes an all-purpose explanation for whatever you want to do.

Believe me, I understand that Donald Trump and his conservative Christian backers commit more acts of sacrilege every other minute than anything secular liberals have done on social media, beginning with the idea that the 45th president is divinely ordained to lead America, continuing with his endless displays of religious illiteracy, and concluding with the fundamentally anti-Christian MAGA attitudes toward immigrants, people of color, and the poor. But this incident involving Whitmer offers a good reminder that when you are in politics, you really can become “too online” and forget that large elements of the voting public can look at an image and not get the joke.

In “The October Surprise May Be Arriving Shortly: History suggests the decisive moment is still to come,” Jeff Greenfield provides a mini-history of recent October surprises at Politico. These include a Democratic president’s failure to win release of hostages held in Iran in 1980, or put differently, Reagan’s backdoor diplomacy success in negotiating a hostage release deal that would benefit him on election day. For the 1992  elections, there was the Iran-Contra affair, which hurt then President George H.W. Bush, followed by the 2000 revelation of his son’s drunk driving arrest 24 years after it happened – not much of a surprise or game-changer, as was the 2004 revelation by Osama bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. –  Democrat John Kerry blamed it for his ’04 loss. That was followed by a huge October surprise, the tanking of the U.S. financial system in 2008, which benefited Obama. Arguably, the nastiest most deliberate, October Surprise was in 2016 when James Comey made a big deal about the F. B. I. reopening the weaponized investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Greenfield sees no clear October Surprise for 2020. But you could argue that energetic activism brewed one behind the scenes, resulting in Georgia giving its electoral votes to Biden and picking up two Democratic U.S. senate seats in 2020-21. We can hope at least that Georgia’s enormous early voting opening may herald a similar October Surprise for 2024. October surprise or no, campaigns don’t win without being otherwise prepared.

Trump’s “Let’s listen to my cool playlist” town hall rally in Oaks, PA is probably not going to be an ‘October surprise.’ But for a display of raw Trump weirdness, Democrats couldn’t ask for much more. James Bickerton reports it this way at Newsweek: “Some attendees at a Donald Trump town hall event on Monday reportedly began leaving early after the Republican presidential nominee decided to stop taking questions from the audience and instead played music for 39 minutes….The former president attended the town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, moderated by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.” What, you might understandably wonder, was Kristi Noem doing there – other than  firming up the dog-lover vote for Harris? “Proceedings were paused while two attendees received medical attention, at which point Trump jokingly asked whether “anybody else would like to faint?” He then said: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”….The incident took place after Kamala Harris questioned Trump’s mental cognizance at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, branding her White House rival “unstable” and “unhinged.” In July, President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down from the 2024 presidential contest amid concern about his age and mental capabilities….According to The Washington Post, “some in the crowd began to leave” after Trump said he wouldn’t be taking any more questions at the town hall, and instead told his team to play a succession of nine songs as he at times danced on stage….”Ron Filipkowski, who edits self-styled “pro-democracy” media outlet MeidasTouch, added: “This is absolutely insane. Trump just froze up answering questions, said he wouldn’t take anymore questions, then stood on stage for the next 30 minutes while music played. Will media cover this as something other than a seriously bizarre cognitive episode???”

When a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the president he served under a “fascist,” that is news that merits further discussion, and it is getting plenty of buzz. As Steve Benen reports at MSNBC, “When Gen. Mark Milley retired last year, following more than four decades of military service to the United States, he delivered a retirement speech that included some language that did not go unnoticed. “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator — or wannabe dictator,” the retiring general said. Many assumed, of course, that he was referring to Donald Trump, but the phrasing was at least somewhat subtle, and the four-star Army general did not elaborate. At least, he didn’t elaborate publicly at the time….As The Washington Post reported, Milley apparently put subtlety aside when speaking to Bob Woodward for the longtime journalist’s new book.

Amid reports of huge early voting turnouts in metro and suburban Georgia, Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball strikes a cautionary note, which should stem excessive  exuberance about Democratic prospects:

We still think Michigan is likeliest to be Harris’s best state out of this group, as it was for Biden in 2020, and it generally has been the most Democratic of these seven states over the past couple of decades. We have made these points about Michigan in the past (see the links for more thoughts on the particulars in Michigan).

Meanwhile, North Carolina is the one state among the seven that Biden did not carry in 2020, and we remain somewhat skeptical of Harris’s ability to actually win it.

One thing that is preventing us from being confident enough to move it to Leans Republican is the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, which could have impacts on turnout in what is on balance a Republican-leaning area. In 2020, the 25 counties that FEMA currently considers to be the disaster zone favored Trump by 25 percentage points while Biden carried the rest of the state by 3.5 points. The state has taken efforts to keep early voting on track in western North Carolina; giving voters additional opportunity to make their voices heard in the midst of an unforeseen disaster is probably the best argument there is for offering robust absentee and early voting options.

Trump has generally, although not always, led polling in Arizona and Georgia, the two typically Republican-leaning states that fell out of his grasp in 2020. Forced to choose, one might also be inclined to tilt those states to Trump. It seems possible that a critical mass of “softer” Republican voters in those states who dislike Trump personally are expressing some buyer’s remorse after they took a chance on Biden in 2020. It wouldn’t take all that many of them to flip Arizona and Georgia back to Republicans after Biden won each by less than half a percentage point.

That said, there may be other things afoot—David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris’s campaign and an Obama campaign alum, recently argued that Harris could show strength with Republicans and/or Republican-leaning independents, a group that Harris is clearly trying to reach. This is important particularly in Arizona, a party registration state where the GOP edge in registration is a bit better now than it was in 2020 (although there are lots of people not registered with a party, and we are generally leery of using party registration trends as a predictive tool). This possible dynamic is illustrated by comparing a couple of recent polls: the New York Times/Siena College recently showed Trump up 5 points in Arizona, while a Wall Street Journal poll from a bipartisan polling duo showed Harris up 2. Why the disparity? Part of it was that the New York Times found Trump and Harris with similar levels of party unity in the state, while the Wall Street Journal found Harris achieving markedly better party unity and more crossover support from Republicans. If Plouffe is right, the Wall Street Journal poll may be closer to the mark. However, the New York Times poll shows Trump with a bit more loyalty among his 2020 voters than Harris has with Biden voters, perhaps an indication that the state is shifting enough back to its GOP roots to allow Trump to win it.

While Pennsylvania and Wisconsin remain total Toss-ups in our view, we do think there has been a little overhyping of the former over the latter. It’s become common to see the argument that Pennsylvania is clearly the most important state and that the winner of Pennsylvania will win the election. It is of course true that Pennsylvania is tremendously important and that, with 19 electoral votes, it has more electoral votes than any of the other true battlegrounds. But we actually think the state is slightly more important to Harris, because we could see Trump winning the election without Pennsylvania—perhaps losing the state by a hair while winning Wisconsin and the Arizona-Georgia-North Carolina trio by a hair, which would give him victory assuming no other changes from 2020 —whereas we don’t think Harris has a real path without the Keystone State. Mathematically, Harris could do it by holding Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin as well as winning one of Georgia or North Carolina, but that would involve Pennsylvania voting to the right of the other “Blue Wall” states as well as at least two of the Sun Belt states. That does not really pass the smell test for us, although of course the individual states are so close in polling that we cannot totally rule it out.

Moving toward his conclusion, Kondik notes “We’d be cautious when making direct advance voting comparisons between 2020 and 2024, because of course there was a pandemic going on in the former year that changed people’s voting habits.” Read the whole article for a more nuanced analysis.

As Election Day draws closer, I’m joined by my AEI colleague Sean Trende to break down all things 2024. We discuss swing state polling before moving into who we think might be favored to win the White House. Did Democrats make the wrong VP pick? What’s behind Harris’s stubborn leads in the Midwestern battlegrounds? Why are some pollsters suddenly weighting on recalled vote? Who’s favored to win the House and Senate? [If the forward arrow on the red button doesn’t work, click on the YouTube logo.]

“A new Jacobin / Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) / YouGov poll conducted between September 24 and October 2 finds 46.8% of registered voters in Pennsylvania support Vice President Kamala Harris while 44.7% support former president Donald Trump for president in 2024,” Jacobin editors write. “Another 5.5% remain undecided, and 3.0% support another candidate. In a head-to-head matchup, 51.3% of voters prefer Harris, while 48.7% prefer Trump….“We have found results consistent with other polls showing a very tight race,” Jared Abbott, executive director of CWCP, said. “Kamala Harris is showing a razor-thin lead over Donald Trump, but there are enough undecided voters to tip the election, and in Pennsylvania that could prove pivotal to the entire race.” The survey also included a range of questions to determine the state of the race among working-class voters in Pennsylvania….Among the lowest-income voters, those making less than $30k a year, Harris holds a commanding lead with 53.3% to Trump’s 38.3% support. Among lower-middle-income ($30k–$60k) and middle-income voters ($60k–$100k), Trump leads by a margin of 0.6% and 4.6%, respectively. Among upper-middle-income voters ($100k–$200k), Harris leads with 47.6% to Trump’s 45.6%. And among the highest-income voters (>$200k), Trump has a lead with 51.7% compared to only 48.3% for Harris. Overall, voters with a household income below the median favor Harris (47%) over Trump (44%), while voters earning above the median are split between the candidates at 47% support for each….

Jacobin editors continue, “Among manual workers, 55.9% prefer Trump and only 36.2% prefer Harris. Among service and clerical workers, Harris has the edge with 47.7% support to Trump’s 42%. Among professionals, Harris leads with 47.3% support to Trump’s 44.9% support. The candidates are in a dead heat among managers and business owners: Harris has 46.4%, Trump has 46.4%….Among voters with a four-year college degree or more, Harris commands a sizable lead (51.1%) over Trump (40.4%). Voters with some college education, an associate degree, or vocational education also prefer Harris (49.6%) over Trump (42.3%). However, voters with a high school diploma or less prefer Trump (49.6%) over Harris (41.8%)….Among current and former union members, Trump leads with 47.1% support compared to Harris’s 43.2%, while Harris has the advantage among nonunionized Pennsylvanians, with 48.2% of the vote compared to Trump’s 43.2%….Interestingly, among workers who report having recently “experienced a job loss due to unfair firing,” 52.6% support Trump and only 37.4% support Harris, while 47.1% of workers who have not reported such a job loss prefer Harris and 45.3% prefer Trump. Among workers who report working a “very or somewhat insecure job,” 58.3% prefer Trump while only 32.6% prefer Harris. Those who work a “very or somewhat secure job,” however, prefer Harris (47.5%) to Trump (44.5%)….Among urban and suburban voters, 52.8% prefer Harris and 39.9% prefer Trump. Among rural and small-town voters, 52.4% prefer Trump and 37.4% prefer Harris. Among white, non-Hispanic voters, 51.5% prefer Trump and 42% prefer Harris. And among non-white voters, 68.2% prefer Harris and 14.5% prefer Trump….The results demonstrate that, while Harris has a strong lead among lower-income voters, she is struggling to win middle-income blue-collar voters without a college degree, and especially those voters who have recently experienced a job loss or who report job insecurity. “The bottom line is Harris needs to win more working-class voters. That’s the key to this election,” said Dustin Guastella, a researcher with the CWCP. “Blue-collar voters could decide the race in Pennsylvania.”

In “Harris’ mission critical in final push: Wipe out Trump’s advantage on the economy,” Sahil Kapur writes at nbcnews.com: “Kamala Harris is zeroing in on a monumental task that could make or break her prospects in the final month before Election Day: wiping out Donald Trump’s persisting advantage among voters on whom they trust to handle the economy….While Harris has gained ground on stewardship of the economy, Trump still leads in most surveys about the issue, which frequently ranks as the top concern for voters. The Harris campaign and Democratic allies believe she must erode that advantage and at least fight it to a draw….“With four weeks to go, we’re going to be laser-focused on this and be talking about this,” a Harris aide said….The aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said Harris and her team will spend the final stretch of the campaign presenting her as the candidate fighting for the middle class, citing her upbringing and agenda, while portraying Trump as caring more about cutting taxes for wealthy Americans like himself and hitting his plan for aggressive tariffs as a de facto middle-class tax hike….Her strategy is playing out through TV and digital campaign ads, a gradual stream of policy rollouts and speeches, and a new media blitz by Harris designed to connect her biography to her economic vision….Top Democrats are acutely focused on the economy after they were burned by the issue in recent elections….And exit polls showed Joe Biden underperforming the polls in 2020 amid a deficit against Trump on handling the economy. Now party strategists believe that among the narrow but crucial slice of swing voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, the economy will carry the day.”

Kapur continues, “Still, Harris is performing better than Biden did on the economy against Trump. She has put proposals to lower costs front and center in a departure from Biden, who focused more on touting macroeconomic gains; that fell on deaf ears with many middle-class and lower-income voters, who still feel the pinch of higher prices more than low unemployment or record-high stocks….A recent NBC News poll found that Trump led Harris by 9 points on handling the economy — down from the 22-point lead he held over Biden earlier this year. A Cook Political Report swing state survey in late September found Harris pulling even with Trump on “getting inflation under control,” although Trump still led by 5 points on whom voters would rather see “deal with the economy.” A New York Times/Siena College national poll released Tuesday found that the economy is the No. 1 issue influencing likely voters, with abortion a distant second and immigration just behind that….As Harris ramps up her media appearances, a Democratic strategist said she would do well to deliver “tight and strong” answers about the economy at every opportunity. The aide, who spoke candidly about Harris on condition of anonymity, added: “She has this instinct to go to a word salad, and there’s no need for that.” Alyssa Cass, the chief strategist for Blueprint 2024 added, “A closing message very laser-focused on reducing prices by going after corporations and a middle-class tax cut, paired with a focus on protecting Social Security, Medicare and the [Affordable Care Act], allows her to close the gap on prices that currently exists….”

After the Democratic National Committee ran an ad warning that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, I assessed her spoiler potential at New York:

In a presidential contest so close that every one of the seven battleground states could go either way, the major-party campaigns are spending some of their enormous resources trying to ensure that minor-party candidates don’t snag critical votes. This ad from the Democratic National Committee is indicative of these fears:

Not only does this ad convey the simple message that “a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump,” but it includes the reminder that according to the Democratic narrative of the 2016 election, the Green Party candidate was the spoiler who gave Trump his winning margins in the key battleground states whereby he upset Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote.

It’s true that Stein won more votes than Trump’s plurality in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016. So if all of her voters had instead voted for Clinton, Trump would have not become the 45th president and the hinges of political history would have moved in a very different direction. But even though Stein was running distinctly to Clinton’s left and appealing to disgruntled Bernie Sanders primary voters, it’s not 100 percent clear what would have happened had she not run (the Greens, of course, are a regular presence in presidential elections; it’s not as though they were conjured up by Trump in 2016). Some might have actually voted for Trump, and even more might have stayed at home or skipped the presidential ballot line.

The picture is complicated by the presence of an even larger minor-party candidacy in 2016, that of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who won 3 percent of the national presidential vote compared to Stein’s one percent. One academic analysis utilizing exit polls concluded that Clinton would have probably lost even had neither of these minor-party candidates run.

In 2024, Libertarian Chase Oliver is on more state ballots (47) than Stein (39), including all seven battleground states (Stein is on six of them, all but Nevada). Traditionally Libertarians draw a bit more from Republicans than from Democrats (many of them wouldn’t vote for a major-party candidate in any event). But it’s understandably the Greens who worry Democrats, particularly since Stein is counting on defections from Democratic-leaning voters who are unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. As the Times of Israel reported last month, there are signs Stein’s strategy is working to some extent with Muslim voters:

“A Council on American-Islamic Relations poll released this month showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18% with Harris, who is US President Joe Biden’s vice president, trailing at 12%.

“Stein, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins.”

It’s also worth noting that Stein chose a Muslim (and Black) running mate in California professor Butch Ware.

Any comparisons of her 2024 campaign with her past spoiler role should come with the important observation that non-major-party voting is likely to be much smaller this year than it was in 2016, when fully 5.7 percent of presidential voters opted for someone other than Trump or Clinton. The non-major-party vote dropped to 1.9 percent — a third of the 2016 percentage — in 2020. Earlier this year it looked like independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would push the non-major-party vote even higher than it was eight years ago. But then Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, which reduced the “double-hater” vote unhappy with both major-party candidates, followed by Kennedy’s withdrawal and endorsement of Trump showed that particular threat evaporating. Despite his efforts to fold his candidacy into Trump’s in the battleground states, Kennedy is still on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, though it’s anybody’s guess how many voters will exercise that zombie option and who will benefit. Another independent candidate, Cornel West, stayed in the race, but he’s struggled with both funding and ballot access; he’s not on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, or Pennsylvania, and he’s competing with Stein for left-bent voters unhappy with Kamala Harris. Unsurprisingly, Republican operatives have helped both Stein and West in their ballot-access efforts.

There are some indications that the non-major-party vote will drop even more than it did earlier this year. A new Pew survey shows that only 12 percent of registered voters who express a preference for a minor-party or independent candidate are “extremely motivated to vote,” and only 27 percent of these voters think it “really matters who wins.” These are not people who will be rushing to the polls in a state of excitement.

It’s hard to find a credible recent national poll showing Stein, Oliver, or West with more than one percent of the vote. But a late-September New York Times-Siena poll of Michigan, with its significant Arab-American and Muslim populations, did show Stein with 2 percent of likely voters. In an extremely close race, even small splinter votes can matter, as the experience of 2000 in Florida will eternally remind Democrats. Had that year’s Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, not appeared on the ballot, it’s pretty likely Al Gore would have been the 43rd president. So anything can happen in what amounts to a presidential jump ball, and you can expect Democrats to continue calling Stein a spoiler while Republicans not-so-quietly wish her well.

En route to his conclusions in “Media organizations are blowing their endorsements, Matthew Yglesias flags a study, “Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public,” by David E. Brookman, Joshua L. Calla, Christian Caballero and Matthew Easton at OSF Reprints. From the Abstract:

Recent research finds that political persuasion efforts often have limited effects. We explore a potential explanation for this finding: that political practitioners have poor intuitions about how to persuade. This would be surprising in light of longstanding theories that political elites can easily manipulate public opinion (Lasswell 1938) and the large sums spent to secure their expertise (Sheingate 2016)—but resonate with findings regarding the surprising limits of expert forecasts (Milkman et al. 2022; Tetlock 2005). In this paper, we evaluate how well political practitioners can predict which messages are most persuasive. We measured the effects of N = 172 messages about 21 political issues using a large-sample survey experiment (N = 67, 215 respondent-message observations). We then asked both political practitioners who work to persuade the public (N = 1, 524 practitioners, N = 22, 763 predictions) and laypeople (N = 21, 247 respondents, N = 63, 442 predictions) to predict the efficacy of these messages. We find that: (1) political practitioners and laypeople both perform barely better than chance at predicting persuasive effects; (2) once accounting for laypeople’s inflated expectations about the average size of effects, practitioners do not predict meaningfully better than laypeople; (3) these results hold even for self-identified issue experts and highly experienced practitioners; and (4) practitioners’ experience, expertise, information environment, and demographics do not meaningfully explain variation in their accuracy. Our findings have theoretical implications for understanding the conditions likely to produce meaningful elite influence on public opinion as well as practical implications for practitioners.

None of which bolsters confidence in the messaging skills of campaign strategists. That doesn’t mean campaigns should not bother seeking experienced political message crafters and strategists. But it does suggest that their messages should be subjected to rigorous review and more skepticism.

Many a campaign has run aground by emphasizing the wrong messages or poorly presenting the right ones. There’s no foolproof way for a campaign to hire the best messaging talent. Although likable candidates with lackluster messages have sometimes won elections, winning political campaigns would rather have message-crafters and strategists who have a good track record.

Recently I got to thinking about the use of defectors from the other party by the Harris and Trump campaigns, and wrote up some implications at New York for how they differed:

For a presidential election characterized by immense partisan polarization, there is a remarkable amount of attention being paid to defectors. Kamala Harris campaigned last week with Liz Cheney, the woman who was the No. 3 House Republican as recently as 2021 and who happens to be the daughter of iconic conservative Dick Cheney, who has also endorsed Harris. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign has blessed a road show by ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard that is showing up in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada.

The obvious reason for this high-profile deployment of apostates is that this is a very close presidential election between two equally matched party bases that can achieve total victory with even a small accretion of additional support. But that doesn’t mean the two campaigns have mirror-image strategies for deploying defectors. A closer look, in fact, suggests very different approaches based on very different ideas of where to find the crucial bloc of persuadable voters.

The Harris-Walz campaign, like the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, is focusing on a clearly identifiable slice of the electorate: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (some call them anti-Trump Republicans and others Nikki Haley Republicans) who don’t want to vote for Donald Trump but are reassured by the company of like-minded leaders that it’s acceptable to vote for Democrats. Despite the complaints of some progressives that the size of this bloc of voters is perpetually overrated, Pew’s authoritative analysis of validated voters shows the share of moderate/liberal Republicans voting for the Democratic nominee doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent between 2016 and 2020. The value of these voters is enhanced by their demographic characteristics; they are disproportionately college educated and somewhat older and very likely to show up at the polls, all other things being equal. In addition, the Harris campaign can reach out to them without modifying its message significantly, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out:

“Harris’s Republican supporters generally don’t claim her policy agenda is better than Trump’s. Their argument is simply that supporting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power is a threshold issue he fails to clear. Trump ‘tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,’ said [Liz] Cheney, ‘He can never be trusted with power again.’”

So conventionally speaking, Harris is able to use Republican surrogates to reinforce her implicit message that she is much closer to the country’s mainstream — closer to “the center,” in the language of the Beltway — than Trump and a safer option for voters fearful of both left and right extremism. If Harris is indeed a “Marxist,” as Trump likes to say, could Dick Cheney and his daughter really support her? Probably not.

Now the mirror-image strategy for the Trump-Vance campaign would be to identify and deploy relatively conservative Democrats to denounce Harris and Tim Walz as radical leftists who are inadequately patriotic, too “woke,” and in love with open borders and runaway government spending. That is, after all, what the Trump campaign and conservative media are saying around the clock. But there just aren’t any notable Democratic celebrities this year who are willing and able to play the role of centrist defector played by Zell Miller in 2004, Joe Lieberman in 2008, or Artur Davis in 2012. To a remarkable extent, Democratic opinion leaders have lined up behind Harris. That’s one major reason the Trump campaign is going in a different direction in using apostates. The big-name defectors who are available are by no means sensible centrists tut-tutting about her San Francisco liberalism. They are people like Kennedy and Gabbard, who have an entirely different rationale for going MAGA, as the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo explained after taking in their Reclaim America event for Trump in Michigan:

“The message delivered to the thousand people who showed up at a local Detroit area theater that day was hardly typical GOP fare.

“Speakers issued dire warnings about the dangers of illiberalism, corporate power, ‘poison food,’ state surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Former Vice President Dick Cheney and past Ambassador John Bolton were name-dropped and booed as war pigs. Mentions of illegal immigration were scant. Dystopian rhetoric about big city crime was absent.

“This is Blue MAGA.”

If the messengers aren’t the Democratic equivalent of the Cheneys or the host of former GOP administration appointees who have endorsed Harris, neither are the voters Kennedy and Gabbard are targeting typical middle-of-the-roaders. Au contraire, particularly with respect to the former 2024 candidate Kennedy:

“Kennedy’s political value is not in the typical Democrats he can bring to Trump but in the unconventional voters and audiences he can reach. He has received positive attention on influential podcasts, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, whose host praised Kennedy as ‘the only [presidential candidate] who makes sense to me’ before he quit his campaign in August …

“How big a boost Kennedy and Gabbard provide Trump is ultimately the million-dollar question. A Trump campaign adviser, speaking anonymously, said the campaign’s internal data indicates about 30 percent of the Reclaim America Tour’s audiences are people who ‘are not in our system.’”

What this suggests is that the deployment of these ex-Democrats is part and parcel of a Trump campaign strategy that has eschewed traditional get-out-the-vote methods in favor of a focus on “low-propensity” voters. This controversial approach has its critics and its admirers, but it does seem Team Trump is pursuing it consistently.

It’s probably not a coincidence that prize Trump surrogate Kennedy had a sizable following among low-propensity voters at the peak of his now-abandoned independent presidential campaign: voters hard to classify by conventional ideological categories and often relying on unconventional sources of political information — like, for example, Joe Rogan — while expressing mistrust and even fury toward conventional politics and other Establishment institutions. It’s not surprising that a master of rage and chaos like Trump might have a potential edge among “I hate everybody” voters who believe government and corporations are conspiring to poison their children and then send them off to war.

A lot may depend on which campaign’s theory of the nature of persuadable voters is accurate and how well their surrogates are able to reach out to them. For all we know, the Cheneys could be the key to victory for Harris and Kennedy the key to victory for Trump. In either event, that would blow many minds.

At 538, Monica Potts reports: “The American public has long been generally supportive of Israel, and was largely in favor of sending U.S. military aid to Israel at the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but polling since then suggests that support has fallen as the war drags on — instead, many Americans are worried about the harshness of the Israeli government’s response to the attacks, and want the U.S. government to help broker a diplomatic end to the conflict….Last year, a 538 analysis found that sympathy for Israelis spiked soon after the attacks despite a longer-term trend of increasing sympathy for Palestinians, especially among Democrats and independents. In an average of polls at the time, a solid plurality of around half of Americans said they sympathized more with Israelis than they did with Palestinians (or with both/neither party)….Today, Americans are more split on who they sympathize with. In a AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll from Sept. 12-16, 25 percent leaned more toward Israelis, while 15 percent said they sympathized more with Palestinians, 31 percent answered both equally, and 26 percent said neither…..A YouGov/The Economist poll fielded in late September found that 32 percent now think the Israeli government’s response has been too harsh, while 22 percent think it has been about right and 17 percent think it has been not harsh enough. Other polling suggests even more Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions, though the number may not have shifted drastically since last year: For example, 42 percent of Americans thought the Israeli military’s response had gone too far in the September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll, which was two points higher than the share in a similar AP-NORC poll from November of 2023….That’s all despite the fact that most Americans have consistently viewed Hamas, rather than Israel, as primarily responsible for the conflict.”

Potts adds, ” Nearly 60 percent said Hamas is the “main culprit” in the current conflict in an Atlas poll from Sept. 11-12, while 14 percent blamed Israel (and the rest said they didn’t know). But when given the option, Americans held other actors responsible as well: The September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll found that around three-quarters of Americans thought the Israeli government, Hamas and the Iranian government each bore at least some of the responsibility for the continuation of the Israel-Hamas conflict — though a larger share said Hamas bore “a lot” of the responsibility (52 percent, compared to 44 percent who said the same of the Israeli government)….The Israel-Hamas conflict has had more than a few effects on politics here at home, as different groups clashed over U.S. support for Israel — the United States has sent more than $12 billion in military aid to Israel since the attacks — in the face of a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Whether and how the U.S. should continue sending aid to Israel is a question that has proved a political minefield for American leaders….The public’s views on U.S. military aid to Israel have shifted over the course of the conflict. In YouGov/The Economist polling over the past year, the share of Americans who think the U.S. should increase its military aid to Israel has decreased over time, from 24 percent in November 2023 to 18 percent in September 2024. Over the same time period, the share who felt the U.S. should send more humanitarian aid to Palestinians has increased from 26 percent to 32 percent….In the September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll, 41 percent thought the U.S. was spending too much aiding Israel. Moreover, 38 percent think that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, according to the most recent YouGov/The Economist poll….However, Americans remain invested in the U.S. helping resolve the conflict in some manner, according to the September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll: While only 27 percent said it was extremely or very important that the U.S. aid Israel’s military against Hamas and 42 percent said the same of providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, 57 percent wanted the U.S. to play a role in recovering getting the remaining hostages held in Gaza by Hamas released, and 52 percent wanted the U.S. to help negotiate a permanent ceasefire. A Pew Research Center survey last month also found that 61 percent of Americans want the U.S. to play a “major” role in diplomatically resolving the conflict, up from 55 percent in February.”

Potts concludes, “When it comes to the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Trump had an advantage on the issue of handling the Israel-Hamas war, with 52 percent in a late September Fox News poll saying they trusted him more, compared to 45 percent who picked Harris. In the September YouGov/The Economist poll, 31 percent said Trump’s stance in the conflict was “about right,” compared to only 22 percent who said the same of Harris….That said, both Trump and Harris may actually have some room for persuasion here: Many Americans were unclear about both candidates’ approaches to the current conflict — 37 percent in the same poll said they were “not sure” whether Harris had been too supportive of Israel, not supportive enough or about right, and 38 percent said the same of Trump….Overall, Trump’s advantage over Harris could be a reflection on the fact that Trump is out of office and not currently making decisions regarding the conflict, or the fact that he has repeatedly claimed to be the most pro-Israel president in history, appealing to the pro-Israel stance shared by most of his base. In contrast, Harris faces pressure from both wings of her own party, and her role in the current administration could pose a challenge to her campaign if the conflict continues to escalate and the U.S. struggles to respond.” Despite other polls showing voters in general are more concerned about issues like inflation and immigration, in a close election, the U.S. role in the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors could be a significant issue in Michigan and other states.

J. Miles Coleman shares some observations about the battle for Georgia’s electoral votes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Since 2004, Democrats have flipped a half-dozen counties in the Atlanta metro area. While Biden didn’t add any new counties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 coalition in 2020—he simply expanded on her margins—the county that seems next in line to flip is Fayette, which is immediately south of Atlanta’s Fulton County. In 2020, Trump carried it 53%-46%, down from his 57%-38% win from 2016….Republicans can still sweep the precincts in southern and western Fayette County, where the population center is Peachtree City. But the northern part of the county, which is anchored by Fayetteville, has grown at a faster rate over the past few decades and is voting more in line with nearby Henry County—which is to say, quickly in the blue direction….In 2022, Secretary of State (and new Center for Politics scholar) Brad Raffensperger led the Republican ticket statewide. Raffensperger’s 56%-41% vote in Fayette County was impressive by Trump-era standards, but it was not the 30-point spread that Obama-era Republicans could routinely get. Map 2 compares Raffensperger’s showing to Romney’s from a decade earlier. Map 2 also includes Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) result in Fayette County from his 2022 runoff. Warnock took 49.5% there, which was still a loss, but it was an improvement from the 46.4% he took in the 2021 runoff election. On the 2012 map, about one-third (13 of 37) of the precincts are colored the deepest shade of red—in the Senate runoff map, only two are….Outside of the Atlanta metro, we are also watching a county that is about two hours south of Fayetteville—one of this county’s residents made news last week for a historic milestone. Jimmy Carter’s home of Plains is located in Sumter County, GA. Though it has less than half the population, it has voted roughly in line with Wilson County, NC: both counties have strong Democratic heritage but, with their rural character, have become more marginal over the longer term….A few decades ago, Republicans could usually only carry Sumter County in landslides: in both his runs, George W. Bush carried it by a single point as he easily won the state. While Biden’s 5-point margin there was an improvement over Clinton’s showing, Warnock was the only statewide Democrat who carried it in 2022 (he did so in both the general election and runoff)…Assuming Georgia remains highly competitive, we’d expect Fayette County to move towards Harris and Sumter County towards Trump, while a “maximum realignment” scenario could involve both counties changing sides….We would also note generally that, while none of our selected counties came from the impacted regions in either state, Hurricane Helene’s aftermath may add an extra layer of uncertainty in parts of both Georgia and North Carolina.”

“Vice President Harris is taking a significantly different approach than fellow Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the final stretch of the presidential campaign,” Amie Parnes writes in “Harris employs radically different approach than Hillary Clinton” at The Hill. “Harris hasn’t leaned into shattering the glass ceiling or making history the way Clinton did, even though she’d be the first woman elected to the nation’s highest office….She’s also hyperfocused on the Midwest, including Wisconsin, a state Clinton regretted not visiting in the final days of the campaign. Clinton ended up losing the Badger State as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, stunning Democrats at the time.”

Regarding Harris’s messaging tone, Parnes explains “In another difference, Harris has used an advertising strategy centered around positive or contrast ads, instead of just negative ads attacking former President Trump, as Clinton employed in the last few weeks of her campaign. “Kamala saw what Hillary did, what Hillary went through, what slings and arrows came her way and she seems to be both ready for it and seemingly able to thread a needle in a way that has been very successful,” said Tracy Sefl, the veteran Democratic consultant who has served as an adviser to Clinton. “Is it fair to say that Hillary showed her the way? Yeah. Are there also a million differences? That is also true.”

Parnes notes, “Democrats point to Harris’s recent visit to the border as proof that they’re seeking to go on offense even on issues where Republicans may have an edge. While Biden had gotten pummeled on the issue in recent years, Harris “took a chance” on highlighting the issue when she traveled to the southern border in Arizona. ”

“I think one of the biggest changes is how risk-averse we were,” one Democratic operative said, referring to the Clinton campaign. “We didn’t do anything to shake the apple cart. But I think this campaign feels good about doing those things, and that’s a huge difference.”

In addition, “Since becoming the Democratic nominee following Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Harris has not highlighted her own identity, something Clinton doubled down on throughout her campaign, with signs that read ‘I’m with Her’ and talk of shattering the glass ceiling.”

Further, “Democratic strategist Steve Schale, the director of the super PAC Unite the Country, which is also running positive and contrast spots, said the contrast ads are a “smart place” for Harris to be with about a month remaining until Election Day….As long as they’re in a place where her favorables remain where they are, it’s a good spot to be,” Schale said. “And I suspect they’re going to stay in this lane that they’re in.”