Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that foreign adversaries, especially Russia, are working “to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.” The intelligence community urged Americans to “seek out information from trusted, official sources, in particular, state and local election officials.”
That warning is an important backdrop for the next several days.
We are in the final hours of an unusual campaign season. Appearing to recognize that women were alienated from the Republican Party after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Trump did not try to appeal to anyone but his base. His campaign courted white, male, low-propensity voters while hoping they could hold the white suburban women who in the past have voted Republican. If they could turn out that base to cause enough trouble at polling places, they could open a way to challenge election results.
To that end, as soon as Trump took control of the Republican National Committee early this year by putting his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley in charge, they killed the get-out-the-vote efforts begun by previous chair Ronna McDaniel and put money instead into legal bills, both to pay Trump’s lawyers and to fund a legal team that could fight to keep people from voting and that could challenge election results.
Trump has doubled down on his appeal to his base voters, his speeches getting darker (along with his makeup, oddly) and more violent in the past weeks as his rallies are getting smaller. On Sunday, November 3, he told supporters that he should not have left the White House in 2021, appearing to think that holding the building would have enabled him to hold the title of president, as if it were a king’s castle rather than a symbol of a democratic office from which he had been ousted. He said he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, and called Democrats “demonic.”
But early voting numbers suggest that strategy has, so far, not worked. Without an official ground game, Trump turned to outside vendors, including Elon Musk, to get out the vote. Paid canvassers are not as reliable as volunteers, and Musk didn’t do it well anyway: his operation is being sued in California for violating labor codes, while his effort to collect voter information by running a “lottery” is also currently in court.
So far, men do not appear to be turning out in the high numbers Trump hoped for. On Rumble tonight, Donald Trump Jr. complained that “women are still showing up more than men.” He berated men for not “get[ting] off their butts” and voting. “If I can do what I’ve been doing for the last few months just getting crapped on by everyone all over the country…you can wait in line.” His eyes mostly closed, Don Jr. also suggested that celebrities are endorsing Harris because they are “on an Epstein list or a Diddy party list or both”—referring to men who were indicted for sexual abuse or assault—and that Harris is blackmailing them.
In fact, newly released tape recordings reveal financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein saying that he was Trump’s “closest friend.”
At the same time, the tactics the Trump campaign used to build his base have alienated the women who had stayed with him after Dobbs, and it’s clear that Trump knows it: at a rally today, he had a backdrop of women holding pink “Women for Trump” signs.
But Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance apparently didn’t get the memo: today he called Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris “trash,” prompting MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace to say: “In my humble view, light’s out. Women. You can disagree with us. We’ve actually learned to take it for our whole careers all the time in every form. But you call us trash? Oh, oh, oh, J.D. Vance. You just effed up in a way that I’ve never seen in my political life, and I worked with Sarah Palin.”
Today, news broke that Trump’s regional field director for western Pennsylvania, Luke Meyer, is a white nationalist who, under the name Alberto Barbarossa, co-hosts a podcast with Richard Spencer, who organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. When Amanda Moore of Politico outed Meyer, he responded: “Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly appear and be working in the shadows.” Meyer has called Trump a “con artist” but told Moore he supports Trump because Trump creates chaos that will cause a crisis that will make Americans turn against non-whites, enabling white nationalists to rebuild the country as they wish.
With his dark and unpopular message, Trump’s campaign has been unable to find people to act as surrogates, meaning that Trump and Vance are carrying their message to the voters largely alone. Trump financial backer Elon Musk and supporter Robert Kennedy Jr. are also speaking for the campaign, but they are not doing it any favors.
Musk expects to lead a government efficiency commission that he has said will cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget, throwing the country into an economic crisis of about two years. He says it will emerge in a stronger position than it is now, but that seems of little comfort to those who will be hurt.
Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who claims to have suffered from a worm in his brain, says Trump has promised to put him in control of the public health agencies: Health and Human Services and its sub-agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH,) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
As he campaigned today in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump continued his usual lies about voter fraud and immigration, and promised that voting for him would “fix every single problem our country faces and lead America, and indeed the whole world, to new heights of glory.” Above all, he attacked his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. He boasted that the election was his to lose, but significantly, he felt obliged to campaign today in North Carolina, a state he won in 2016 and 2020.
Also contradicting his pronouncement was an account of his campaign by Tim Alberta published Saturday in The Atlantic. It showed a chaotic campaign run by advisors frustrated with Trump’s instability and bitterly divided. The information campaign co-chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles shared with Alberta reads like a preemptive attempt to blame others for an election loss. Alberta recorded that campaign officials told him they were done. “The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.”
In contrast, the closing argument of Vice President Kamala Harris, her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and their many, many surrogates has been upbeat. After appearing on Saturday Night Live, Harris spent Sunday in Detroit, Pontiac, and East Lansing, Michigan, before heading today to Scranton, Pittsburgh, and Reading, Pennsylvania. Unlike Trump’s, her rallies appear to be getting even bigger, and she has not mentioned her opponent in the closing days of the campaign, instead urging Americans to look to the future.
Harris held her final rally tonight in Philadelphia on Benjamin Franklin Avenue near the Philadelphia Art Museum, where the statue of the famous fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, an underdog who became a champion, stands. Artists Lady Gaga, Oprah, The Roots, Jazmine Sullivan, Freeway and Just Blaze, DJ Cassidy, Fat Joe, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Ricky Martin, and Adam Blackstone all performed for the crowd, many of whom stood in line for hours to get in.
“We are all in this together…. Are we ready to vote? Are we ready to win?” Harris asked the crowd. “One more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime, and the momentum is on our side. Our campaign has tapped into the ambitions and the aspirations and the dreams of the American people. We are optimistic and we are excited about what we can do together. And we know it is time for a new generation of leadership in America. And I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States of America.”
She reminded the audience that this could be one of the closest races in American history and that her supporters needed to “finish strong.” The Harris-Walz campaign has focused on voter turnout, with an exceptional ground game of volunteers knocking on doors, phone banking, and texting. “Every single vote matters,” she said, encouraging people in the crowd to vote and to spread the word to neighbors, friends, and family. “Your vote is your voice, and your voice is your power,” she said.
“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that. We are exhausted with it. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.
“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom, including the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said. And she pledged always to put “country over party and self and to be a president for all Americans.”
“Tonight…we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to face our future and that we can confront any challenges we face when we do it together.”
“We still have work to do,” she said. “We like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake: We will win.”
