Through the Finish Line

Anyone’s race: “The candidates are statistically tied among likely voters in each of the seven swing states in the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll, with the razor-thin margins in these battlegrounds underscoring how the final blitz of advertising, rallies and door-knocking campaigns could decide who claims the White House,” reports Bloomberg. “Across all seven states, the candidates are in a dead heat, with 49% support each among likely voters. The poll’s overall statistical margin of error is 1 percentage point.”

In Arizona and North Carolina, Donald Trump is leading by a tiny margin, still very much within the margin of error so it doesn’t even really mean much; in Georgia, Trump and Kamala Harris are tied, per Marist College polls released overnight. Quinnipiac polls released yesterday show that Harris leads Trump 49 percent to 46 percent among likely voters in Michigan. In Wisconsin, the two are tied.

Though the economy is still the No. 1 issue for voters, they’re becoming a bit more bullish: “About two-thirds of swing-state likely voters say the economy is on the wrong track, down 5 points from a year ago,” notes Bloomberg. Fewer swing-staters say that they’ve noticed price increases over the past month compared with how many noticed price increases when asked a year ago.

No concessions: On Tuesday, NBC News’ Hallie Jackson asked Kamala Harris what “specific concessions” she would be willing to make with the GOP in order to pass nationwide abortion legislation if she’s elected president—for example, not forcing Catholic hospitals to provide abortions and other religious exemptions for those who oppose the procedure. Harris responded: “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

“It’s a question that’s out there because it’s not a guarantee that Democrats will win control of Congress,” followed up Jackson. Harris again declined to answer. “I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole with you right now,” she said, saying at one point that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals. “Let’s start with the fundamental fact. A basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body. And that cannot be negotiable, which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v. Wade, and that is it.” There’s something very Biden-esque about how Harris seemed almost pissed off at the question itself.

Regardless of your thoughts on abortion, this answer is bad for two reasons: One, she’s failing to extend olive branches to moderates, and two, she’s already a bit harmed by the correct public perception that she lacks legitimate policymaking experience. Embracing pragmatism and signaling that she’d be able to work well with a Republican Congress might be a smart move for Harris.

Does Harris have a closing pitch? I’ve been searching far and wide for what Harris’ pitch to voters is as early voting starts and election day nears. Though her campaign has been short, spanning basically three months (August, September, and October), she’s struggled to formulate a clear message other than that she’s the candidate of joy. At times, she’s distanced herself from her earlier run for president and the progressive causes du jour she championed back then; she has mostly pitched her policy priorities as a continuation of Joe Biden’s agenda, just more, while also emphasizing that she’s pretty law-and-ordery and a champion of abortion rights.

Her pick of Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, showed she wanted an attack dog able to go after the Trump/Vance ticket, versus a pragmatic pick like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who could’ve shored up a swing state, but then her campaign mostly…hid the buffoonish Midwesterner from the media, with him doing very few cable news hits following his selection. And Walz does little to reassure voters that the Harris ticket has the requisite foreign policy experience, so it feels a bit like a miscalculation.

For a while, it seemed like she was shying away from sitting for broadcast interviews and doing splashy media hits, but now she’s been making the rounds: The View, Telemundo, a Fox News interview, the Gen Z podcast Call Her Daddy, Charlamagne tha God. “Harris rocked the media blitz that big media mocked” reads a questionably accurate headline from The Nation. But simply appearing on shows is different than doing a good job on them, and Harris has been at times stiff and overscripted, at other times overly giggly and just kind of incomprehensible.

“So Harris is campaigning on personality, and Trump is campaigning on…policy?” writes Nate Silver on his Substack, articulating some of the challenges with Harris’ campaign focus. “Not in a wonky, Buttigiegian way, obviously. But at least there are some CLEAR GOALS ARTICULATED IN ALL CAPS rather than Harris’s triangulated language.” Silver continues:

“This is why it’s not surprising that Harris does comparatively better in favorability ratings than in head-to-head polls—and also why I don’t particularly think there’s any reason to expect that gap to close. Her message is: I’m a likable person, and I’m not Trump, and you’ll just have to trust me to sort out the details. His is: I’m an asshole who fights for you, and here’s a bunch of stuff you’ll get if you vote for me. It’s the Billboard Lawyer message—and there’s a 53 percent chance it will work.”

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Scenes from New York: City council is currently weighing a bill that would force employers in NYC to let paid sick leave be used by employees to…take their pets to the vet or “be with them during surgery.”

Introduced by Councilman Shaun Abreu, a Democrat representing Manhattan, this bill makes me want to jump off a cliff, mostly because pets are not the same as humans and we should stop this cultural slide toward pretending they are.

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QUICK HITS

• Doctors held off on publishing an important study that revealed their findings on puberty blockers because they feared how it would be used politically. “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” said Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who runs the U.S.’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The study, which has received large sums of money from the National Institutes of Health (totaling almost $10 million in federal support), found that puberty blockers did not actually seem to help transgender kids’ mental health. The fact that they held off on publishing the study ought to be a huge scandal; doctors should be working to do no harm, and to provide accurate information based on their clinical findings, not to service a particular political agenda.
• “The Los Angeles Times‘ editorials editor resigned Wednesday after the newspaper’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election were blocked by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong,” reports Axios. Soon-Shiong has decided that the paper should not endorse any candidate this time around.
• “For the first time, the share of eligible New Yorkers who have signed up to be organ donors has passed 50 percent,” reports The New York Times. 
• Have you ever made a mistake that you learned from, asked Anderson Cooper of Vice President Kamala Harris in a CNN Town Hall. “I worked very hard at making sure I’m well-versed on issues and I think that is very important, it’s a mistake to not be well-versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.”

hey Siri: Why isn’t Kamala performing better with the masses?

Siri: watch this clip from tonight’s CNN town hall pic.twitter.com/iYAgUXz8Yi

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) October 24, 2024

•  Import PSA from my dear friend (and sometimes Reason writer) Nancy Rommelmann:

Buy my book! https://t.co/UpA6hHeNFs pic.twitter.com/OXSBSCMe6v

— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) October 24, 2024

• Bill Ackman on Harris vice presidential contender Tim Walz: “I can’t imagine a world in which this guy is president of the United States.” (Watch here.)
• Yes:

name one innovation that came out of singapore aside from lee kuan yew vibe reels https://t.co/pJSNVYaxZy

— roon (@tszzl) October 23, 2024

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Source: https://reason.com/2024/10/24/through-the-finish-line/