Can Latinos Stomach Harris?

Anyone’s game: Right now, the race looks extremely close. Kamala Harris has changed course a bit in the last two weeks, choosing to get herself out there a bit more, but via aggressively normie formats instead of traditional media spots: The View, The Howard Stern Show, the absolutely terrible millennial/Gen Z podcast Call Her Daddy, and possibly the worst of all: sharing a Miller High Life with Stephen Colbert. Harris has a narrow lead in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia; Trump is leading in Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Pew finds that Harris is the favorite of 48 percent of registered voters, while Trump has won over 47 percent. The New York Times notes that her fundraising haul has far outpaced his.

None of this is to say that Harris is a good candidate or that I want to spend a single minute of my short time on God’s green Earth listening to mid-L.A. millennials yas kweening Harris on abortion rights; it’s just to say that she’s performing decently well in this last stretch. But she has one major liability: her inability to win over Latino voters.

In a Univision town hall last night, Harris tried to pitch her border approach and solutions for bringing the cost of living down. Her cheerleaders over at NPR called this “show[ing] empathy with Latino voters” and talked, in fawning terms, about how she “laid out her economic plans—such as expanding the child tax credit and tax breaks for first-time home buyers—sprinkling in her own life experiences as the daughter of a single parent.” Politico was a little more critical, noting that Harris actually didn’t “offer up any specific policies for Dreamers” whose immigration status is tenuous by nature of how they arrived here.

In Nevada, something like one in five voters are Hispanic; in Arizona, it’s more like one in four. Though both states went for Joe Biden last time around, Trump has been quickly gaining support with Latino men under 50, and specifically with third- and even fourth-generation Latino and Hispanic voters. “Support for Democratic presidential candidates among this group has been declining each cycle,” notes Politico. “Biden earned 61 percent of the Latino in 2020, Hillary Clinton carried 66 percent of this demographic in 2016 and Barack Obama won more than 70 percent of it in 2012.” Now, polls show Harris has 54 percent of registered Latino voters’ support compared with Trump’s 40 percent. (I always find the use of such broad categories to be somewhat distasteful, especially when you have a term like Latino that could classify a recent immigrant escaping Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela or a third-generation secular Mexican American, but polling relies on such grouping.)

“The chances of a Trump win in the Electoral College are about even,” writes Nate Silver on his Substack, where he details the sources of some Democrat poll panic this week: dawning recognition that the election is nearing, uncertainty about the situation in the Middle East and how the hurricane recovery efforts will hurt voting, and a fear that Harris isn’t performing as well in her media blitz as they might like. Harris’ win probability, according to Silver’s forecasts, went down a bit in both Wisconsin and Michigan, but broadly speaking, the overall state of the race is unlikely to change drastically in the last few weeks.

In other words: It’s pretty neck and neck, and Harris will continue to have a bit of a problem in Arizona and Nevada, despite her best efforts to pander on Univision.

Scenes from New York: No, it’s really not.

Let’s be clear. Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939 2/3

— Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal (@bradhoylman) October 9, 2024

• “Former president Donald Trump is accusing CBS News of ‘election interference’ after the network edited 2024 rival Kamala Harris’s meandering answer to a question about Israel during a recent 60 Minutes interview,” reports National Review. “When CBS aired the full version of the interview on Monday, Trump called out the network. He accused 60 Minutes of either cutting out portions of the vice president’s long-winded response, or even splicing in another answer that she had given elsewhere in the interview.” Twitter users have posted side-by-sides of Harris’ meandering answer, which aired in a preview on Face the Nation, and her possibly edited answer, present in the 60 Minutes interview itself. CBS has not released a transcript and the Harris campaign demurred on answering the question of whether the clip was edited to spare Harris embarrassment.
• Elon Musk “unveiled a slick two-seat sedan called Cybercab late Thursday, saying production may start in 2026 and that the vehicle could cost less than $30,000,” reports Bloomberg. Cybercabs are fully autonomous, with no steering capabilities.
• AI-enabled search of your own personal photo album will soon be available, basically allowing you to query and retrieve personalized information about what you specifically did in a given time period or at a given place (i.e., “What parties did I attend in 2021?”)
• I am worried about the pheasant hunting. I thought we didn’t give vice presidents guns anymore?

Scoop – Tim Walz to kick off man-focused media blitz.

- GMA intv with Michael Strahan on football field
- MI events on Friday, geared toward Black men
- Friday night lights @ Mankato West
- Pheasant hunting with social media influencers https://t.co/kT9mqsVBKa

— Elena Schneider (@ec_schneider) October 10, 2024

• Seriously, who is the they? Strange theories have abounded as to Hurricanes Helene and Milton being sent by the malevolent forces, but the who-is-doing-what part is never explained.

Yes they can control the weather.

It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene ???????? (@mtgreenee) October 4, 2024

• An absolutely crazy tale of how government intervention is making life worse for Uber and Lyft drivers and more expensive for the companies (though that’s not exactly the framing of the piece).
• I don’t think that this is correct. I think the upper middle class—and also the middle class, and also poor people—don’t want anti-social behaviors run amok; there’s a difference. (And public transit is paid for by the taxpayers, so they ought to be able to use it without being harmed or harassed.)

The upper middle class yearns for public transit but without poor people https://t.co/P7Q6YDufi4

— oomf magazine (@oomfmagazine) October 9, 2024

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