A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the campaigns’ media strategies in the waning days of the race and make the case for why — contra the potentially Elon Musk-inflected vibes — there are reasons to be bullish on Kamala Harris’ chances.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
After weeks of avoiding the question and offering dodgy non-answers in response, Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (OH) on Wednesday finally publicly admitted he does not believe Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
Continue reading “JD Vance Finally Admits He Does Not Think Trump Lost The 2020 Election”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
You go where the votes are. Period.
It’s not validating Fox News to agree to an interview in hopes of reaching voters, particularly in this case disaffected Republican women.
The idea that Kamala Harris’ interview with Bret Baier was some kind of Daniel in the lion’s den moment conflates the relatively straightforward task of dealing with a hostile interviewer with the exceedingly difficult task of penetrating a closed-off, self-reinforcing news bubble based on endlessly repeated falsehoods, relentless appeals to tribal identity, and the grinding delegitimization of people of color and political foes.
When it came to confronting a hostile interviewer, Harris more than held her own against Baier. Here she is rejecting the misleading clip Baer showed her of Trump speaking earlier on Fox News, which was not one of the many recent examples of him warning of an “enemy within” but was instead a tepid defense of his own rhetoric:
WOW — Kamala Harris forcefully calls out Bret Baier for playing a deceptive clip whitewashing Trump's comments about "the enemy within" pic.twitter.com/JmIwSQXVjv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2024
As for puncturing the Fox News bubble, Harris’ presence essentially did that, albeit for less than 30 minutes on a Wednesday evening in October. There’s only so much you can do. I’m reminded of this smart thread on debunking v. pre-bunking from two years ago by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M: “Every day our political discourse is dominated by an agenda-setting war (what issues we should talk about) and a frame war (how we should frame/understand those issues). Again, so much of our political discourse is about controlling our political discourse.”
Harris didn’t have much control over the Fox News agenda-setting: “immigration” – by which we really mean the vilification of people of color as “other” – dominated the first 10 mins of a 26-minute interview, and abortion never came up. But she was relentless in maintaining her own framing of the issues that did come up. The tradeoff – losing an agenda-setting battle in order to fight and try to win a framing battle – is the calculation the Harris campaign made in deciding it was worth it to reach some subset of voters.
And it never hurts to force a little bit of reality into the faces of Fox News viewers.
Kamala Harris, defending the Constitution at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania:
Kamala Harris: "We know the Constitution is not a relic from our past, but determines whether we are a country where the people can speak freely and even criticize POTUS without fear of being thrown in jail or targeted by the military."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 16, 2024 at 4:36 PM
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For the second day in a row, a state judge has rejected last-minute rules changes by the MAGA-dominated Georgia State Elections Board.
An advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit to stop the pressure campaign by the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) against TV stations to prevent them from running ads in favor of the passage of Amendment 4, which would protect abortion rights.
Two related developments:
After fielding the question dozens of times since July and mostly bobbing and weaving around it, JD Vance was pushed by a reporter Wednesday into saying that he didn’t think Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Contrary to the defendant’s claim … that he bears no factual or legal responsibility for the ‘events on January 6,’ the superseding indictment plainly alleges that the defendant willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C., and then directing them to march to the Capitol to pressure the Vice President and legislators to reject the legitimate certificates and instead rely on the fraudulent electoral certificates.”
As recently as this summer, while settling his judgment against Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump’s attorneys pitched a new hush money agreement to the porn actress, Rachel Maddow reports:
The armed North Carolina man arrested Saturday for allegedly threatening FEMA workers says he was motivated to intervene in person by that blitz of bogus social media posts about Hurricane Helene aid being withheld – and semi-admits to being bamboozled: “I went up and saw that there was absolutely nothing there, so I stayed, and I volunteered all day.”
The full report, including a phone interview with the man, from WGHP in Greensboro:
Hurricanes Helene and Milton are each projected to exceed $50 billion in damages. Only eight prior hurricanes have produced that much damage, but five of those have been in the past seven years.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who just turned 100 years old and has been in hospice since February 2023, when he was a mere 98 years old, fulfilled his wish of living long enough to cast his vote for Kamala Harris.
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The first I heard of this was late this afternoon from TPM Reader EM. But even after EM shared a link verifying the story, I still couldn’t quite believe it was true. But it really does seem to be true. Not only have reporters from multiple local news outlets covered it, they also have pretty clear photographic evidence. Mailers going out in support at least of Colorado’s GOP House candidates Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd are being sent and paid for by the Arizona Republican Party.
So here’s the deal. The Colorado GOP appears to be under the control of one weird dude, Dave Williams, who spent most of the party’s money on preventing people from firing him as party chair, trying and failing to get himself nominated for a House seat and … oh yeah, one other thing, Lauren Boebert. Other Colorado Republicans tried to oust Williams but a judge ruled against them. El Paso Country District Judge Eric Bentley ruled against state party chair pretender Eli Bremer and confirmed that Williams is in fact the chair of the Colorado Republican Party. In any case, the point is that, for the moment, the Colorado GOP is basically the personal property of this guy Williams. Once that happened, Coloradans in at least two congressional districts started getting mailers for the local Republican candidate coming from the Arizona state Republican Party.
So what’s going on here? Why is the Arizona Republican Party, which has a contested Senate and presidential race, among others, funding campaigns in Colorado?
Here’s what appears to be happening.
Continue reading “What the F***? AZ GOP Taking Over Funding Colorado Candidates!”Papa fertilization really stepped in it Wednesday when trying to convince a group of women that his supposed ardent support for in-vitro fertilization is a genuine, long-held political position — and not a bandwagon he hopped on when it became a convenient middle ground for damage control on his abortion record this campaign cycle.
Continue reading “No, Trump Is Not The ‘Father Of IVF’”I was just replying to a note from TPM Reader RG who was telling me about the situation in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District. It reminded me to remind you just how helpful I find these updates and additionally how much I enjoy reading them, especially in these final weeks of a general election campaign. I know about that race in the most general way; I know who the candidates are. But RG got me down into the details on who’s spending, what the ads look like, what the media markets are, etc. And we’re not talking about inside information. I don’t have the sense that RG is a political professional in any way, though he appears to be volunteering with one of the campaigns, just a politics-focused concerned citizen who knows his neck of the woods politically. In other words, probably like you and so many other TPM readers. So if you, like RG, have information I’d really love to know. There’s probably more going on if you’re from a swing state or in a state or district with other contested races. But let me know regardless.
A Fulton County judge this week handed down a pair of decisions that derailed, at least in part, the MAGA-controlled Georgia State Election Board’s efforts to complicate the counting of votes through a series of rules that raised the specter of election-certification chaos.
Continue reading “Fulton County Judge Derails Georgia Election Board’s Last Minute Plans”The group behind a Florida ballot measure to protect abortion rights in the state filed a lawsuit Wednesday morning against a DeSantis administration official, alleging they are engaged in an “unconstitutional” campaign to attack the referendum “using public resources and government authority.”
Continue reading “Abortion Rights Group Sues To Stop DeSantis Admin Pressure Campaign On TV Stations”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Seeming to ditch the long-held Democratic tendency to fight on only one front at a time, Vice President Kamala Harris is mixing in more attacks on Donald Trump’s authoritarianism to her usual campaign rhetoric aimed at middle class economic issues.
In recent days, Harris has more directly attacked Trump, calling him “weak and unstable” and “incredibly unstable and unhinged.” But she’s increasingly focused her attention on his anti-democratic rhetoric, going so far as to play clips of Trump at her own rally Monday. Today, in a speech in Pennsylvania, she will focus on the threat Trump poses to the Constitution.
“When Vice President Kamala Harris walked off the stage of her rally in Erie, Pa., which included a video compilation of Donald Trump’s recent comments about ‘the enemy from within,’ she told her campaign staff that she wanted to keep using the former president’s own words against him, advisers said,” the WSJ reports.
Harris wants to use Trump’s own words as “evidence” against him in the closing days of the campaign, according to the WSJ report.
In the plodding, “check the box” campaign strategy that Democrats often default to, candidates are given the false choice of either addressing voters’ most pressing concerns or warning that Trump is a menace and threat to democratic values. Harris’ “all of the above” approach in recent days weaves together both attack lines into a seamless whole.
Most notably, Harris has connected Trump’s essential weakness of character with his authoritarian impulses, his fondness for dictators, and his disregard for the Constitution. You get these threats with Trump precisely because he is a such a hollowed-out shell of a human. It’s a powerful reminder that fascism is a refuge for the weak and insecure, an argument that defuses the fear that Trump seeks to instill.
Chris Hayes lays it out plainly:
As Morning Memo touched on yesterday, Trump has entered a new, more sinister phase in his quest to retake the White House and fend off the criminal cases against him. These are the kinds of headlines that will be especially chilling in retrospect if Trump wins:
NBC News’ Ryan J. Reilly and Jane C. Timm have a new deeply reported piece on: “How Trump allies stoked election chaos in Detroit in 2020 — and what they’re planning in 2024”
Donald Trump falsely claimed that there was a peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and sidestepped a question about whether he would commit to a peaceful transition in 2024.
Politico: “Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration.”
WaPo: “The Justice Department will monitor voting in Portage County, Ohio, during the November election, after the county sheriff last month posted on Facebook urging residents to write down the addresses of people displaying yard signs for Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R) was pushed hard on abortion by Rep. Colin Allred (D) during what is expected to be their one and only Senate campaign debate in a race that is closer than anticipated and may represent Democrats last best hope of flipping a GOP seat.
But it was on Jan. 6 that Allred hit Cruz the hardest:
On January 6, I got ready to defend my colleagues and texted my wife: “Whatever happens, I love you.”
— Colin Allred (@ColinAllredTX) October 16, 2024
Ted Cruz was hiding in a supply closet. If you summon a mob to overturn a free and fair election, you should lose your job. This election is his accountability.#TXSenateDebate pic.twitter.com/Fufk5I5Z7k
TPM’s Kate Riga: Inside The Mystery Of Why The Supreme Court Declined To Hear A Pressing Abortion Case
GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN in state court in North Carolina over its report last month that he made explicit racial and sexual posts on a porn site message board.
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Over the weekend, Trump rolled out his now-familiar promise to deploy the military against Americans with a chilling, new description of his political opponents: “the enemy from within.”
Now, yet another of Trump’s former administration officials is sounding the alarm on just how seriously we need to take Trump’s promises to his base.
Continue reading “Trump Defense Sec: Believe Him When He Says He’ll Use Military Against Americans”