October 29, 2024

Tuesday, October 29, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

Kamala is always busy.

Here is the new ad from the KH campaign. 👇

5-9 pm EDT.

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Michigan Yesterday.

Philadelphia yesterday. Barack Obama as surrogate.

Touch all 4 tweets to watch the videos. 👇

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Trump is always crazy.

Yes, he is, though the New York Times yesterday ran a column with this headline -

‘Crazy’ Is Beginning to Sound Like an Understatement.

Who are I to disagree with Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.

Let’s try this -

Trump is always crazy.

Trump is deranged and dangerous.

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Trump’s racist rally at Madison Square Garden may really be hurting Trump.

Donald J. Trump and his allies are full of bravado over his chances of victory in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. But there are signs, publicly and privately, that the former president and his team are worried that their opponents’ descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist may be breaking through to segments of voters.

That anxiety was clear after Mr. Trump’s six-hour event at Madison Square Garden in New York City, where the inflammatory speeches on Sunday included an opening act by a comedian known for a history of racist jokes who derided Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” and talked about Black people carving watermelons.

The backlash among Puerto Rican celebrities and performers was instantaneous across social media, prompting the Trump campaign to issue a rare defensive statement distancing themselves from offensive comments. In a tight race, any constituency could be decisive and the sizable Puerto Rican community in the battleground state of Pennsylvania was on the minds of Trump allies.

Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement that the Puerto Rico joke “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

The Trump ethos has generally been to never apologize, never admit error and try to ignore controversy. Ms. Alvarez’s statement was a rare break from that tradition, reflecting a new concern that Mr. Trump risks reminding undecided voters of the dark tenor of his political movement in the closing stage of the 2024 race.

Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, seeming to harbor similar misgivings, were quick to criticize the joke and the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, who made it.

David Urban, an informal Trump adviser with long ties to Pennsylvania, where there are large numbers of Puerto Rican voters, posted on X: “I thought he was unfunny and unfortunately offended many of our friends from Puerto Rico,” adding the hashtag “#TrumpLovesPR.”

The pushback also came from officials in Florida, where Mr. Trump’s campaign is based and some of his advisers have spent their careers.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida posted on X on Sunday: “It’s not funny and it’s not true.” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, of South Florida, condemned Mr. Hinchcliffe’s comments and said she was “disgusted,” adding that it did not reflect Republican values.

“Puerto Rico isn’t garbage, it’s home to fellow American citizens who have made tremendous contributions to our country,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted on X on Monday. But he also made a point to note that “those weren’t Trump’s words. They were jokes by an insult comic who offends.”

Asked to comment on Mr. Trump’s allies showing worry that some of the attacks are breaking through, the Trump campaign did not immediately respond.

But Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, dismissed concerns. “Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke, as you said,” he told reporters on Monday. “Maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it.” But, he added, “we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America.”

Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who has specialized in mobilizing Latino voters, asked publicly on Sunday for $30,000 in small donations to a PAC so he could send the video of the offensive comments to Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania.

By Monday morning, he had met the goal and had sent a blitz of 250,000 texts with 15 seconds of the comedian’s set disparaging the island.

“Puerto Ricans have a unique affinity for their homeland,” Mr. Rocha said. “When you attack the island, it cuts so deep with the community.”

Vice President Kamala Harris seized on the remarks, telling reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Monday morning that Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden offered fresh evidence of the former president’s divisiveness. Mr. Trump, she said, “fans the fuel of hate and division and that’s why people are exhausted with him.”

Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, is preparing to deliver a speech at the Ellipse near the White House that’s being cast as the closing argument of her three-month campaign, after she replaced President Biden on the ticket. It is the same spot where Mr. Trump delivered a speech to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, calling on Congress to reject President Biden’s electoral college votes. Hundreds of those supporters then marched to the Capitol and violently disrupted the certification.

Mr. Trump’s current extended orbit is a mash-up of longtime political veterans, down-ballot elected officials and operatives who embrace the New Right view that the country is in an existential battle internally and that the ends justify their means for victory.

Most on the Trump team believe the attacks on Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the fighting over whether he is racist cover ground that is already known by an electorate that has become numb to Mr. Trump’s provocations and threats to weaponize government.

His advisers and close allies have marveled privately that nothing has appeared to harm Mr. Trump so far politically, and it has given many a sense of invincibility about what he can get away with. And they think in a fragmented media environment in which nontraditional outlets have enormous sway, such headlines and stories matter less than they once did.

Some of them also view Sunday’s rally as a success, arguing that Mr. Trump’s filling an arena in deep blue Manhattan offered a demonstration of his political strength to voters around the country.

But few of Mr. Trump’s own events contained the kind of overt racism and misogyny the Madison Square Garden rally did.

“She’s a fake — I’m not here to invalidate her — she’s a fake, a fraud, she’s a pretender,” Grant Cardone, a businessman and internet figure, told the crowd. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

And some of Mr. Trump’s own close allies privately expressed concern that the headlines about the event came at a problematic moment, when the small group of persuadable voters across the country is tuning in to the election, and that it was a needless risk when people are already casting ballots during early voting in many states.

There have been other moments suggesting the Trump team has concerns.

While Mr. Trump’s allies often publicly insist that voters have tuned out warnings about Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism, there were clear signs the Trump campaign was concerned about statements from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, the retired four-star Marine general John F. Kelly. In interviews, he described his former boss as a fascist and claimed that Mr. Trump made complimentary statements about Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump and others who worked for him have denied the accusations.

The Trump team mobilized at full force to rebut Mr. Kelly — indicating they feared the attacks could appeal to the roughly five percent of voters they assess as undecided — in the lead-up to the rally.

After Ms. Harris called Mr. Trump a fascist, his campaign released a video featuring a Holocaust survivor, Jerry Wartski, who rejected comparisons of Mr. Trump to Hitler and demanded that Ms. Harris apologize. Mr. Wartski also attended Mr. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where several speakers tackled accusations about his character head on.

Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and longtime friend, said from the stage that Mr. Trump respected all faiths and that “accusations of extremism, they couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Sid Rosenberg, a New York talk radio host, responded to Hillary Clinton likening Mr. Trump’s event to a pro-Hitler rally from 1939. Mr. Rosenberg joked that it was “out of character for me to speak at a Nazi rally, I was just in Israel.” He said that a vote for Mr. Trump was a vote for an administration “that cares about the Jewish people,” while calling Democrats “Jew-haters.” Hulk Hogan, more simply, looked at the crowd and said, “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here.”

Mr. Trump himself also tried to signal his strength with diverse groups, citing that Jews, Muslims and Catholics alike were all lining up behind him. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” he said.

Perhaps most striking was the joint statement issued days before the rally by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, calling on Ms. Harris to stop calling Mr. Trump a fascist. It accused her of inflaming political tensions, ignoring Mr. Trump’s history of demonizing his own opponents.

Mr. McConnell’s presence on that statement was especially notable.

Despite his endorsement of Mr. Trump months ago, Mr. McConnell told his biographer Michael Tackett that he hoped the former president “would pay a price” for his role in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. According to Mr. Tackett’s biography, Mr. McConnell called Mr. Trump “erratic” and said that American voters chose wisely in voting him out of office. He also said he viewed Mr. Trump’s actions in connection with Jan. 6 to be “as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine,” though he did not vote to convict him in an impeachment trial and said the criminal justice system would be the place to address it. (New York Times).

One more thing. And two. And three. Etc.

Reminder - Puerto Ricans by state: Pennsylvania: 450k, North Carolina: 100k, Wisconsin: 65k, Michigan: 50k, Florida: 1.1 million, New York: 1 million, 230K in Texas and 100k in Georgia.
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The Archbishop of Puerto Rico called out Trump:

Here is a look at other things speakers said at the [Trump] rally, which the [Trump] campaign has not commented on.

Tony Hinchcliffe

In addition to disparaging Puerto Ricans, Mr. Hinchcliffe made a crudely sexual anti-immigrant remark about Latinos in general. “It’s wild,” he said of people crossing the border. “And these Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”

Two minutes later, pointing to someone in the audience, Mr. Hinchcliffe said: “Cool, Black guy with a thing on his head? What is that, a lampshade? Look at this guy, oh my goodness. Wow. I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together.” (Watermelons have a long history as an anti-Black stereotype.)

He described Palestinians as violent and Jews as cheap: “When it comes to Israel and Palestine, we’re all thinking the same thing. Settle your stuff already,” he said. “Best out of three. Rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians, they’re going to throw a rock every time. But you also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper, if you know what I’m saying.” He made a motion with his hands to indicate dollar bills.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor turned Trump lawyer, argued that because some Palestinians had committed violence, people shouldn’t trust any of them or allow any of them into the United States.

“They won’t let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won’t let a Palestinian in Egypt,” he said, referring to two countries that have sizable Palestinian populations. “And Harris wants to bring them to you. They may have good people. I’m sorry, I don’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at 2.” (Source. New York Times).

BREAKING: The Bulwark is reporting that according to 4 different Trump campaign sources the Trump campaign approved of these remarks by Tony Hinchcliffe last night.

Originally Tony had planned to call Kamala Harris a “c-nt” but the campaign pushed back on that.

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Your Daily Reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th and September 18th. He will now be sentenced on November 26.

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Optimism and why.

‘We’re going to win this’ - An Interview with Jen O’Malley Dillon, Campaign Manager of the Harris-Walz Campaign.

Jen O’Malley Dillon was interviewed by Jen Psaki on Sunday.

Jen O’Malley Dillon will lift your spirits. Who wouldn’t want that.

‘We’re going to win this’: Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon on why she's 'very confident.’

The interview starts around 3:50.👇

More optimism and why.

Harris Aides Quietly Grow More Bullish on Defeating Trump.

The Vice President with Michelle Obama at a rally on Saturday in Kalamazoo, Mich.

While still cautious, advisers and allies believe that casting Donald Trump as a fascist is working, and that their expansive ground game and appeals on abortion rights may carry the day.

As the presidential contest enters the final sprint, campaign aides and allies close to Vice President Kamala Harris are growing cautiously optimistic about her chances of victory, saying the race is shifting in her favor.

Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist — paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights — will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph. Even some close to Mr. Trump worry that the push to label him a budding dictator who has praised Hitler could move small but potentially meaningful numbers of persuadable voters.

Officials within the Harris campaign and people with whom they have shared candid assessments believe she remains in a solid position in the Northern “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, saying internal polling shows her slightly ahead in all three — though by as little as half a percentage point.

They think she remains competitive across the four Sun Belt battleground states. Arizona and North Carolina appear to be the toughest swing states for Ms. Harris, these Democrats said, and they feel better about Georgia and Nevada.

Mr. Trump’s aides, for their part, believe that he can win at least one of the blue wall states, and that he remains competitive in all three. They are particularly hopeful about Pennsylvania, where members of his team say internal data shows him ahead, albeit within the margin of error. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers are far more openly bullish, telling allies that he could sweep the seven battleground states.

This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen political strategists, campaign aides, pollsters and others close to the two campaigns and candidates, many of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Few Democrats dispute that the race appears extraordinarily competitive: Never in modern presidential campaigns have so many states been so tight this close to Election Day. Polling averages show that all seven battleground states are within the margin of error, meaning the difference between a half-point up and a half-point down — essentially a rounding error — could win or lose the White House.

The tempered sense of Democratic confidence follows a period of high anxiety in the party as polls tightened in recent weeks. But now Ms. Harris and other party leaders have begun to discard their winking warnings that she is the underdog.

“Make no mistake: We will win,” she said at a rally on Sunday in Philadelphia. “We will win because if you know what you stand for, you know what to fight for.”

Mr. Trump, too, is broadcasting that he is marching toward victory. He has planned rallies over the final weekend before Election Day in New Mexico and Virginia, two comfortably Democratic states where polling averages show him trailing by at least six points.

A packed, nearly six-hour Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday night provided a vivid illustration of how he is leaning into his base as Ms. Harris courts moderate Republicans. Speaker after speaker promised that Mr. Trump would take back the White House, mixing in racist and misogynistic remarks, vulgar insults and profanity-laden comments to appeal to his most faithful supporters.

“The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer,” Mr. Trump told tens of thousands of cheering fans gathered in the deeply Democratic city. “Nine days from now will be liberation day in America.” (Fact check. There were 18,000 in attendance at Madison Square Garden. MSG holds 19,500 people. Neither number can realistically be described as “tens of thousands.”

The former president is ending the race much as he has all his campaigns, with promises to stop what he falsely says is a flood of undocumented migrants who are taking American jobs, raising housing prices and causing a crime wave. Even as Democrats call him fascist, he has escalated threats to prosecute and jail his political opponents, whom he calls “the enemy within.”

Ms. Harris’s aides believe the argument tying Mr. Trump to fascism is helping her sway moderate Republicans, even though the leading super PAC supporting her bid has raised worries that it is not Democrats’ most effective message. Democratic officials emphasize that they have won — or overperformed — in a wide range of contests since 2016 by painting the former president as divisive.

And some of Mr. Trump’s advisers are concerned that the warnings from John F. Kelly, his former White House chief of staff, that the former president made admiring statements about Hitler while in office could break through with undecided Jewish voters, potentially hurting him in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Both campaigns also see reasons for trepidation within the election’s significant gender gap. While Ms. Harris leads with female voters, largely because of abortion rights, some Democrats fear she will not win over enough women to compensate for an expected deficit with men. And some of Mr. Trump’s advisers worry that abortion rights will remain a mobilizing force for Democrats even two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

For all his bravado in public, Mr. Trump is privately cranky and stressed, according to three people in contact with him, with a schedule marked by chronic lateness. Ms. Harris, aides say, is energized by her crowds, particularly the 30,000 supporters who watched her discuss abortion rights at a rally featuring Beyoncé on Friday in Houston.

And Ms. Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who predicted Democratic defeat in 2016, has told people privately that he would rather be in their position than in Mr. Trump’s.

“In 10 days, we beat him at the ballot box,” Mr. Walz said at an event on Saturday night in Phoenix. He added, “I’m a super optimistic person.”

Democrats are closing with a trifecta of messages that have been the foundation of Ms. Harris’s snap campaign: support for abortion rights, promises to improve the economy by lowering costs and housing prices, and warnings that Mr. Trump is a dangerous authoritarian. But she has largely refused to separate herself from the Biden administration, which remains broadly unpopular.

On Tuesday in Washington, she will deliver what aides are billing as a closing argument at the Ellipse, where Mr. Trump rallied the crowd that eventually stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The most powerful force in our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA, and it sure looks like it will be again,” said Simon Rosenberg, a strategist who was one of a handful of Democrats who correctly predicted the party’s overperformance in the 2022 midterms. “What is likely to happen in this election is that Trump will end up underperforming his polls.”

Some of Democrats’ assurance stems from their campaign’s sizable financial advantage and what they believe is their superior field operation. In the final weeks, the campaign has dispatched an army of 2,500 staff members across the battleground states, while the Trump campaign has an untested strategy that relies heavily on inexperienced super PACs and outside groups.

“We will win,” Gov. Tony Evers, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in an interview on Saturday from aboard a campaign bus. “We have a good ground game that’s going to carry us.”

In Michigan, union organizers have found a sunnier outlook for Ms. Harris than they expected when surveying their members. An internal United Auto Workers poll of the union’s members in battleground states found Ms. Harris with a five-point lead among white voters without a college degree, and a 13-point advantage among men without a college degree — striking results among types of voters she is not expected to win broadly.

While some party strategists are worried about the early-voting numbers in Nevada and Georgia, top officials in the Harris campaign say those figures are not as significant as they might seem. Their vote models suggest that Mr. Trump has successfully pushed many of his supporters to vote earlier, effectively cannibalizing the strong turnout he has usually garnered on Election Day.

“We feel very, very good about what we’re seeing for early vote,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chair, said in an interview on Sunday on MSNBC. “Those lower-propensity voters that don’t always vote, they’re tuning in, and they’re showing up at a higher level in support of the vice president.”

Mr. Trump’s aides dispute this analysis, saying they are pleased with their improvement in early voting. Their campaign is focusing its final efforts on what aides believe is a small fraction of undecided voters — largely younger men — who could be persuaded to support the former president.

Democrats are somewhat resigned about their weakness among Michigan’s Arab American voters, who remain furious about U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Another area of concern for Democrats is the fate of their senators in several battleground states. Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin were both polling well ahead of Ms. Harris until recent weeks. Now they are also locked in tossup races for their political survival.

And Democrats, even at the top levels of the Harris campaign, worry that the party is not correctly modeling the electorate in its polling, repeating a misstep that led Mr. Biden’s campaign aides to overestimate his strength in the final days of the 2020 race.

Any minor endorsement or shift in movement has Democrats jittery. When Terrelle Pryor, a well-known former professional football player from Jeannette, Pa., posted an Instagram story last week of his ballot filled out for Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, Pennsylvania Democrats privately passed around a screenshot and anxiously wondered if they were losing ground with Black men.

“The smallest thing could alter the outcome,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior aide to President Barack Obama. “It could be the weather in Waukesha County, a voting machine screw-up in Fulton County, Ga., or the vibes the last few days.” (New York Times)

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One more reason for Optimism.

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