A scene on tariffs from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986 is getting some extra attention. (Paramount Pictures.)
Fans of the movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” will remember the scene. Ben Stein plays a famously boring high school teacher giving a lecture about economics to a room full of teenagers fighting to stay awake. In about a minute, he covers the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the Laffer Curve, fundamental economic topics, desperately trying to get the students to engage with him.
“Anyone? Anyone…” is the memorable device Stein uses, to no avail, to engage an audience who couldn’t care less.
Some analysts say the economy is the reason voters chose Donald Trump for a second term in last month’s election. His economic plan is rooted in the broad and cavalier use of tariffs on imports from friends and foes alike. Last week, he announced his plan to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The announcement prompted a surprise visit from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and a phone call from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Meanwhile, the American public, particularly Trump voters, remain in an economic daze much like Ben Stein’s class.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed in 1930 in an attempt to thwart the impacts of the Great Depression. It was legislation initially designed to provide relief to the American agriculture sector but became “a means to raise tariffs in all sectors of the economy.” It also marked the end of an entrenched Republican platform of protectionist policymaking during that era. The policies ended because they were…anyone…anyone? Failures.
The details
Ignorance has become a vital asset in the political space these days. Yes, it is an asset in politics, but it is the devil in economics.
As a political asset, there are voters who believe that simply throwing a tariff at any nation they are mad at has nothing but benefits. Mad at Mexico because of migration? Slap them with a tariff and border crossings will go down, right? A good number of voters believe the answer is yes. Though this is almost entirely wrong, politically speaking, that ignorance served the pro-tariff candidate in November.
Economically however, the only real certainty that a 25% tariff on Mexico will have, is a 25% price increase in America. There actually is no disagreement on how tariffs functionally work, but I will refer to PBS for a simple explanation. Importers here pay the tariff, otherwise known as a tax, and remit that payment to the U.S. Treasury. How they pass that increase in costs along may vary a little from merchant to merchant, but ultimately it ends up in the price the American consumer pays.
Yes, a tariff program, in the most basic sense, is government imposed price increases. So, if high prices are the reason why an American voted against the current party in power, voting for higher prices seems, well, ignorant.
Now, does a tariff hurt who the angry American is mad at? Sure. In our example, Mexican goods become less affordable if a tariff is applied to them. In that sense, a tariff can hurt who it is designed to hurt. But that doesn’t change the fact that Americans pay the tariff, not the other country.
Many voters have the perspective that Trump imposed tariffs during his first term, and everything worked out fine. The Associated Press reports, “When Trump first became president in 2017, the federal government collected $34.6 billion in customs, duties and fees. That sum more than doubled under Trump to $70.8 billion in 2019, according to Office of Management and Budget records.” That sounds like a lot of money, until it is put in the context of the current $29.3 trillion gross domestic product.
The tariffs Trump is discussing in 2024 are wildly bigger and are being threatened toward virtually every country. But that’s not the only thing different between 2024 and 2017.
What else is different?
Anyone? Anyone?
The economy that Trump inherited in 2017 is sharply different than the one he will inherit in January. Inflation eight years ago was low and had been for a long time. Interest rates were also low and had been for a long time. The 2016 election wasn’t about inflation, and those rather small tariffs weren’t either. But times have changed.
For the life of me, I cannot find any credible theory as to how raising prices on imported goods will have the effect of lowering prices. I’ve written that sentence six times, and I know it reads like gibberish, but I just can’t help it.
Simply put, tariffs raise prices. After a bout with historic global inflation, consumers are exhausted with high prices. We can all agree with that part.
But there is a word for thinking that raising prices will actually lower them.
Anyone? Anyone?
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Voters mark their ballots on Nov. 5, 2024 in Tryon, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Despite more Latino men shifting more Republican, a majority continued to vote Democratic in 2024, new polling released Tuesday reveals.
The findings from the 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll came a week after the historic presidential race in which Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to win his second White House term. Both heavily targeted Latino voters throughout their campaigns.
“The national exit polls are wrong about Latinos in general and Latino men in particular,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of Barreto-Segura Partners Research, during a Tuesday media briefing on the poll’s findings.
Among voters in the poll, 56% of Latino men said they voted for Harris, compared to 43% who selected Trump.
Roughly two-thirds of Latino women voters voted for Harris, while about one-third chose Trump.
Some exit polls, in contrast, emphasized the movement of Latino voters toward Trump.
Data scientists and polling experts at Barreto-Segura Partners Research, the African American Research Collaborative and Harvard University conducted the survey, which several national organizations sponsored.
Battleground states
Between Oct. 18 and Nov. 4, the survey targeted more than 9,000 Latino, Black, Native American, Asian American and white voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The survey also provided additional data for California, Florida and Texas, given the large share of minority voters in those three states.
“We’re extremely confident that our sample is accurate, that it is an accurate portrait of Latino men and Latino women, and that it is balanced to match their demographics, and that it was available in Spanish at every stopping of the survey,” added Barreto, who was a pollster and adviser to the Harris campaign.
“Young voters in particular of every racial and ethnic group shifted to be more Republican as compared to 2020 — this was not driven by any individual particular racial group, but all young voters shifted compared to 2020,” he added.
A shift of all groups towards the GOP
Henry Fernandez, CEO of the African American Research Collaborative, said “this election was not about one group moving towards the Republican Party, but instead a shift of virtually every group towards the GOP by relatively small but consistent margins, largely due to concerns about the cost of living.”
“While voters of color voted majority for Harris and white voters, majority for Trump, this shift towards the GOP occurred across almost all groups, even those like younger voters that the Democratic Party has relied on for its future success,” Fernandez said.
He added that “this weakening of support for Democrats occurred even as key issues championed by Democrats did extremely well, both in ballot initiatives across the country and in our poll.”
Among all Latino voters, more than 6 in 10 said they voted for Harris, compared to a little over one-third who chose Trump.
Meanwhile, more than half of all Latino voters felt that Democrats would do a better job at addressing the issue most important to them, compared to about one-third who felt Republicans would.
Inflation, health care cited
Across all racial and ethnic groups of voters surveyed, inflation, health care costs and jobs and the economy proved to be the most important issues.
Abortion and reproductive rights also proved to be an important issue for voters across all groups, followed by housing costs and affordability and immigration reform for immigrants already in the United States.
Roughly three quarters of voters across racial and ethnic groups were in support of a federal law that would “guarantee access to abortion and give women control over their own private medical decisions.”
The majority of Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American voters also expressed worry about Project 2025 — a sweeping conservative agenda from the Heritage Foundation.
Trump has sought to distance himself from the platform, though some former members of his administration helped write it.
Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz signs on neighboring lots in Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
Is Wisconsin — or the country — really as divided as the maps make it look?
On the spreadsheet of unofficial election totals posted by each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties following the election Nov. 5, a handful showed a clear majority for the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Many more counties were won by the winning Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Trump garnered enough votes to carry Wisconsin and enough states to return to the Oval Office in January.
A lot of those Trump-voting counties were rural ones, contributing to longstanding stereotypes about a monolithic body politic of deep blue cities and a bright red countryside.
But months before Election Day, on a mild August evening in a quaint round barn north of Spring Green, the writer Sarah Smarsh cautioned against oversimplifying the politics of rural voters — and against turning a blind eye to a part of the country that, she said, has too often been written off.
Sarah Smarsh speaks during a presentation in August near Spring Green, Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
“I grew up on a fifth-generation wheat farm in south central Kansas,” Smarsh said that evening. It’s a place of “tall grass prairie, which happens to be the most endangered ecosystem … and simultaneously the least discussed or cared about or protected. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s the ecosystem of the place and people that I also happen to believe have not been given fair attention and due consideration.”
Smarsh made her mark with the book “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” As a journalist and author she has straddled the community of her upbringing and the urbane, academic world that she entered when she became the first in her family to pursue higher education.
The child of a carpenter and a teen mom, Smarsh has explored the socioeconomic divide in the U.S., mapping it to the destruction of the working class, the demise of family farms and the dismantling of public services from health care to public schools.
“I write about socioeconomic class and I write about rural issues, but that’s because I grew up in working poverty, and that’s because I grew up on a farm,” Smarsh said. And while those identities “are enormously consequential,” she added, she seeks to break down the assumptions that people carry about them. Her message: “You don’t know who my family is, and especially if what we assume is that they’re white trash, worthless.”
It’s a story that gives new context to the election results from 2016 on, and takes on new importance after the election of 2024. The residents of those places dismissed as “flyover country,” Smarsh said back in August, have many of the same concerns of urban and suburban voters, including reproductive rights, public schools, gun violence and other subjects. And understanding them in their diversity and complexity casts politics, especially national politics, in a more diffuse and complicated light.
Where ‘people don’t care about political affiliations’
Concern about climate change and a desire to live more sustainably led Tamara Dean and her partner to move to western Wisconsin’s Vernon County in the early 2000’s, where they built a homestead, grew their own food and became part of the local agricultural community.
Tamara Dean
Climate change followed them. In their county, extreme weather events became almost the norm, with a 500-year flood “happening every few years or every year,” Dean said in an interview.
“A rural community really coalesces when extreme situations happen and they help each other out,” Dean said. “And when we were cleaning up after a flood, helping our neighbors salvage their possessions or even getting people to safety, no one’s going to ask who you voted for, and people don’t care about political affiliations.”
Dean has written a collection of essays on the couple’s time in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, “Shelter and Storm,” to be published in April 2025 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Distrust of the federal government
Residents, she found, had something of an ambivalent relationship with the federal government.
For all the complexity of agricultural economics, the U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that provide financial farm support were familiar and well-understood by longtime farmers and easily accessible to them, she said. But when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) promised recovery assistance for flooding in 2018, “it just took forever to come, and it took a lot of bureaucracy to try to get it,” Dean said. For individual applicants, “getting any kind of assistance might be so daunting that they just wouldn’t think it’s worth it.”
For Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator who has been thinking at length about politics and government in recent years, the election outcome has prompted contemplation.
Schultz left the Legislature a decade ago after splitting with Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker over legislation stripping public employees’ union rights and weakening Wisconsin’s mining laws.
Since then he has campaigned for redistricting reform and supported the overturning of Wisconsin Republicans’ gerrymandered legislative maps. In October he went public as a Republican supporting the Harris campaign for president.
In his part of the state, he saw a distinct contrast between the Democratic campaign and the Republican one.
“I saw an extremely good Democratic effort to talk to people face-to-face,” Schultz said in an interview. The GOP campaign along with allied outside groups such as American for Prosperity, however, appeared to him to focus almost entirely on mailings, phone calls and media.
“It became clear to me that politics is changing from the time I spent in office, being less people powered and more media powered,” Schultz said.
Ignored by both parties
Schultz said he’s observed a level of anger among some of his one-time constituents that has alarmed and surprised him, a product, he suggests, of having been ignored by both parties.
Dale Schultz
One target has been regulation, to the point where “they’ve lost track of why regulations are important and why they should support them,” he said. Yet he sees the direct answer to that question where he lives in Southwest Wisconsin.
“In the last 20 years there has been a renaissance in trout fishing, like I could not even have imagined 20 years ago,” Shultz said. He credits the Department of Natural Resources and its personnel for working with local communities to ensure conditions that would turn trout streams into suitable habitat to support a burgeoning population of fish. “That doesn’t happen without water quality and water quality regulations, and land use and land use regulations.”
Schultz has been spending time in conversation with friends “who are like-minded and similarly curious,” he said. “And then you just watch and wait and see what happens, and try to voice concerns that are real and that need to be dealt with, and [that] we’re not going to be able to hide from as a country.”
He hopes for the return of a time when people like him, who consider themselves “just to the right of center,” can again “talk to everyone and possibly craft a solution.”
Back in August, Sarah Smarsh offered a gentle warning about the coming election to her audience in the round barn north of Spring Green.
“Whatever happens in November, everybody else is still here — the other side is still here,” Smarsh said. “And so there’s going to be some caring to do, and that’s probably going to be for generations, because we didn’t arrive at this moment overnight.”
Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday, Nov. 12, in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin that was called early Nov. 6. Hovde did not concede then, only doing so on Monday, Nov. 18.. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)
Poor Eric Hovde. His protestations that the election was rigged against him have fallen on deaf ears. Hovde’s grudging concession to Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who beat him by 29,000 votes to hang onto her seat in the U.S. Senate, came as Republicans across the country rejoiced at winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Like his Tom Selleck mustache, Hovde’s election denial is way out of style.
Hovde’s baseless accusations during his very tardy concession speech about the questionable “legitimacy” of “absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m.” is so 2020. This year, Trump won all the swing states and, unlike last time, when he lost to Joe Biden, allegations of illegal voting, fraud, recounts, court challenges and death threats aimed at election officials have disappeared like morning dew in the Southern California sun.
Hovde heads home to Laguna Beach, California, a lonely, sore loser instead of storming the U.S. Capitol as a champion for MAGA grievance with his Trump-supporting friends.
“I entered the race for the U.S. Senate because I love our country and I’m deeply concerned about its direction,” Hovde declared in his concession speech Monday. By then, the country’s direction had taken a sharp right turn.
The top concerns that Hovde, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said motivated him to run — government spending, border security and international relations — are now firmly in MAGA hands.
“Lastly, as I’ve repeatedly expressed, I’m very worried about the political divisions and rhetoric that are tearing our country apart,” Hovde declared.
This last worry led him, Hovde said, to run a campaign that “focused on issues instead of personal attacks.” He followed this assertion by besmirching the integrity of Wisconsin election officials, denouncing his opponent as a liar and blaming Democrats for underhandedly stealing the election from him by allowing third-party candidates to run and by spreading rumors that he’s a California bank owner (a verifiable fact). For good measure, he added, “Equally concerning is the large segments of the press that don’t care to fact-check these lies and even helped propagate misinformation to help their preferred candidate.”
Anyone who watched the debate between Hovde and Baldwin might be surprised to hear Hovde congratulate himself for running a high-minded campaign rooted in the “values of integrity and morality.”
“The one thing you’ve perfected in Washington is your ability to lie,” Hovde sneered at Baldwin at the start of the debate. While Baldwin focused on her long record of detailed policy work, reaching across the aisle to pass bills that helped Wisconsinites, Hovde relied heavily on unsubstantiated accusations and repeatedly called out Baldwin’s girlfriend, a Wall Street investment adviser, demanding that she release financial information she is not required to disclose and unsubtly calling attention to the fact that Baldwin, an out lesbian, is in a same-sex relationship.
This week, Baldwin is back in Washington doing what she does best — focusing on unsexy issues that matter to her constituents (see her Wednesday press release: “Baldwin Calls on USDA to Provide Emergency Aid for Gamebird Farmers Hit By Tornadoes”). Hovde, who admitted during the debate that he doesn’t know much about what’s in the Farm Bill and then griped afterward to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna: “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?!” can’t imagine why Wisconsin chose Baldwin over him.
There was nothing nefarious about Baldwin’s win. She received a predictable boost from absentee voters in heavily Democratic Milwaukee, and as she has done in her previous statewide races, and she got a lot of votes in Republican-leaning areas of the state where she has spent a great deal of time listening to her constituents and championing their interests in bills that help Wisconsin agriculture and manufacturing. That’s the kind of work that made her the only Democrat to win the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.
Hovde distinguished himself, according to The New York Times, by becoming the first prominent Republican in the nation to suggest the election was rigged, parroting Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories.
Fortunately, this year Hovde’s complaints are just one man’s sour grapes. But in his incivility, his poor grasp of policy, and, most of all, in refusing to concede for so long and, even when he did, questioning the integrity of the election, Hovde made a divisive political environment more toxic.
As Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local told Erik Gunn, “The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words. … It contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them.”
As Hovde himself might put it, the kind of campaign he ran is tearing our country apart. Fortunately for Wisconsin, in this case, it’s over.
Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, introduces Sen. Tammy Baldwin at her victory celebration Thursday. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
In the midst of a barrage of absurd and appalling news pouring out of Washington, where President-elect Donald Trump keeps topping himself with new, unqualified cabinet appointments, Democrats are looking for hope in Wisconsin.
Two bright lights from our state made headlines after Nov. 5. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin bucked the red wave to win a third term, and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler was reported by Politico to be in the running to lead the national party. Baldwin and Wikler share an approach to politics that could help guide Democrats out of the wilderness.
After losing the White House and failing to capture control of either the U.S. Senate or the House (not to mention the likelihood of two new Trump appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court that could create an enduring far-right supermajority), Democrats would do well to look to Wisconsin for a new approach to politics.
In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin of victory — 0.9% of the vote — was the narrowest among the seven swing states he carried. Baldwin, as she has consistently done, made inroads in rural, Republican-voting counties. And Wikler deployed an approach to organizing across rural and urban areas of the state that took no vote for granted.
While extreme polarization and losing touch with working-class swing-state voters are widely counted as prime reasons Democrats lost the 2024 election, Baldwin and Wikler have a recipe for addressing those problems.
“It’s a state where showing up, being present in all different communities, rejecting the kind of false choices that cable pundits might like to inflict on a state like Wisconsin, and rolling up your sleeves can make the difference,” Wikler told me back in 2019, shortly after he moved back to Wisconsin to reenergize the state party. At that moment, Republicans had just lost complete control over all three branches of state government, with the election of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in 2018. Since then, Wikler has overseen a scrappy fight to claw back power in a state where Republicans, until recently, still dominated politics.
Wikler followed his own advice, opening new field offices across the state. He remained tenaciously upbeat as he steered his party through the rough waters of the pandemic and, in addition to helping elect President Joe Biden and reelecting Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, helped shepherd in a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court that ended the worst partisan gerrymander in the nation, which had protected a wildly disproportionate Republican legislative majority.
I was impressed by Wikler’s optimism back in 2019, when the gerrymandered maps seemed insurmountable.
He pointed to grassroots organizers all over Wisconsin who were building the case for fair maps, and “getting every elected group of human beings in the state to pass resolutions condemning gerrymandering.”
“All of that needs to clearly lead to electoral accountability for anyone who smashes the idea of representative democracy in the state,” Wikler said at the time. It sounded wildly optimistic. Yet here we are.
Commenting on the eternal debate about whether Democrats need to drive their base to turn out or persuade disaffected centrist Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats, Wikler told me, “in Wisconsin we have to do both.”
“The thing I’m frustrated by every day is the idea that you can’t fight for both white working class voters and voters of color,” he added. “Guess what? There are people of all races in the working class. And all of them want schools and jobs and safe communities and air they can breathe. And none of them like the effects of Trump’s actual policies—even if some of them think they might like Trump as a guy.”
That philosophy is very similar to the politics practiced by Tammy Baldwin, who consistently amazes pundits by winning rural and working class voters even though she is an out lesbian with a strongly progressive voting record. Listening carefully to her constituents and delivering for them, whether through the provision she wrote into the Affordable Care Act that lets children stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26, or federal investments in Wisconsin farming and manufacturing, or “Buy America” rules, Baldwin connects with her constituents across the ideological divide.
As Baldwin puts it,“People across Wisconsin want solutions to their challenges and are not all that interested in Republican versus Democrat—they’re interested in who you’ll stand up to, and who you’ll stand up for.”
Wikler agrees: “The key thing to understand is that Wisconsin voters are less centrist than they are conflicted. There’s a populist streak that has both left-wing and right-wing flavors that runs through the state. And the fundamental question that voters are asking is: ‘Is this person on my side?’”
That’s a clarifying vision that could lead Democratic politicians and voters toward a brighter day.
An anti-racism protest. The election results shake our faith that the U.S. is a country that cares about basic justice. | Getty Images
A policy tweak here. A change in messaging there.
This, apparently, was what had to happen to thwart Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris president on Nov. 5, according to the experts’ election post-mortems.
Sorry, but there is an elephant in the room. Policy? messaging? It goes far deeper than that.
We had a Republican candidate who campaigned by checking all the ism boxes. He bet heavily on racism, white nationalism and toxic masculinity that channeled his long history of misogynistic anti-feminism.
And voters preferred even that to a Democrat. Perhaps any Democrat. We don’t know if the outcome would have been any different if Trump hadn’t faced a woman of color this election.
This is not solely a party problem. It’s a national one that lays bare our majority identity.
Few are owning up to it, neither the Republican voters who embraced Trump’s message nor the Democrats who dare not speak the isms lest they further alienate voters whose support they covet for the next election.
We must grapple here with a distasteful probability.
This is who we are.
We say voters simply preferred Trump’s policy prescriptions to Harris’. We say that Harris projected weakness and Trump strength.
And we refuse to acknowledge the deeply retrograde impulses that underly many of Trump’s prescriptions, particularly those dealing with immigration. And we refuse to accept that many assign strength and weakness according to gender, misunderstanding both true strength and weakness.
Yes, we heard Trump plainly vilify undocumented immigrants as rapists and killers. We heard his condescension on protecting women whether they want it or not. We were savvy to his actions that led to upending Roe v. Wade. We know of his bromances with the world’s authoritarians. We bought that this election was about fixing an economy that wasn’t really all that broken. Voters bought the fear Trump was peddling not of just immigrants who supposedly suck up tax dollars for benefits they have no chance of accessing, but transgender people in bathrooms and locker rooms. We even knew of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, of his felony convictions and the charges still pending.
But people dismissed the news about Trump’s corruption, racism, anti-democratic goals and misogyny as politically correct whining.
Many delude themselves about who and what Trump is. So, we can all delude ourselves about who we are, the nation that elected him..
A fear: Democrats will draw a faulty lesson from Harris’ failed bid, refusing to acknowledge the party’s own culpability in not forcing President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race far earlier.
The lesson I fear they will draw is that the nation – primarily the nation’s males – are just not ready for a woman president much less a woman of color.
Too risky to let this happen again, they will say – which amounts to tacit acknowledgment that this is who we are.
The shift toward Trump might say more about those voters as men than it does about voters of color. We still have a national problem if a sizable minority of men of color equate women with weakness.
Pander to or ignore these sentiments for the next election or deal with them in patient, straightforward fashion? This is the question Democrats face.
If it’s pander, voters of color may very well start believing that there really is no difference between the major parties.
We won’t go back. That was Harris’ failed pitch to voters. But what if this vote is a sign that we haven’t moved as far forward as we thought?
This is who we are.
The question moving forward: Is this who we have to be?
Protesters march in Milwaukee after the 2024 presidential election. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
“Our strategy is year-round civic organizing,” Amanda Avalos, executive director of Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT) told Wisconsin Examiner, following the Nov. 5 election won by President-elect Donald Trump. LIT canvassers knocked on more than 665,000 doors ahead of Election Day, and the Milwaukee-based group plans to keep up its civic engagement work in the years ahead. “This doesn’t stop us,” Avalos said of the election results. “And if anything, this is fueling.”
LIT, a grassroots nonprofit and nonpartisan group led by youth of color, focuses on building political power for young people through strategic civic engagement. From canvassing neighborhoods and knocking on doors, to advocating for policy change or even preparing young people to run for office, recent years have seen the organization make a name for itself.
Amanda Avalos
It isn’t that LIT’s staff didn’t feel the waves of fear, anger, and despair many community members experienced after Trump’s victory Tuesday. Those emotions were familiar to LIT organizers. “This is not the first time that we’ve been under a Trump administration,” said Avalos. “And we know the direct negative impact that he has on the communities that we work with. And that’s young Black and brown people in the state of Wisconsin.”
LIT plans to counteract that impact by staying organized and motivated. From advocacy efforts to leadership development, sustained organizing is LIT’s mission, said Avalos, explaining that the group is dedicated to “growing our base year-round in between election seasons — not just during election season, but for moments like these…where we need to mobilize and act.”
LIT is already preparing for another big election on April 1, when voters in Wisconsin cast ballots in the state Supreme Court race.
Meanwhile, Avalos says, organizers need to take time to rest, process, grieve, regroup and find community. “That’s what it’s going to take to get through more moments like this,” Avalos told Wisconsin Examiner. “That’s what it took last time, and we continue to hold onto each other and continue to move fiercely with our plan, with our advocacy, with all the ways that young people are leading all across the state.”
The election was particularly divisive for young people. While Harris attracted many young women voters of color, Trump attracted more young men. Some young activists also expressed dissatisfaction at both major political parties. On Nov. 6, protesters gathered in Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park to protest the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and express their frustration over the sense that they were ignored by the Democratic Party. The protest was led by groups including Students for a Democratic Society UWM, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the Milwaukee Anti-War Committee. Speakers encouraged protesters to find an organization to join and get involved.
Protesters march in Milwaukee after the 2024 presidential election. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
Avalos agrees that young people feel ignored. “More than ever young people are frustrated,” she said. “The lack of social-economic progress, not being heard at the local decision-making levels — local government, state government and federal government. … There’s a lot of disillusionment, disappointment, frustration, completely valid.” Avalos has heard young people express their sense of powerlessness on issues including the war in Gaza, climate change, the cost of living, housing, tuition and gun violence, as elected officials have failed to remedy those concerns. “Those issues continue to be a priority, and we’re not at the point where we see that reflected in policy and law,” she said.
Avalos told Wisconsin Examiner that LIT will be back at the doors soon, engaging with communities and asking them what they want to to see from their elected leaders. Avalos stressed that connecting the issues that affect people’s families and communities to voting helps impress on people why it’s important to show up at the ballot box. LIT will focus on getting more citizens engaged in school board meetings, common council meeting and public hearings in the state Legislature.
As people process the fallout from the November election, Avalos said she hopes that people will support one another and remember what motivates them. “At the end of the day, it’s not because of anything more than we love each other,” she said of LIT’s continuing work, “and we need know that we all deserve better.”
Wisconsin’s sizable rural electorate played a decisive role in flipping Wisconsin into the win column for Donald Trump this week.
Trump won Wisconsin’s rural vote by a margin of about 22.3 percentage points, a 2.4 point improvement over his 2020 performance.
That amounted to a gain of about 29,000 net votes for Trump, compared to 2020. That accounts for nearly all of Trump’s statewide victory of 30,000 votes.
Trump also improved on his 2020 turnout across the state in all of the Daily Yonder county categories, from major metropolitan areas to small metro areas. But his largest turnout gain was in rural counties. In Wisconsin, where rural voters make up 26% of the electorate, compared to about 15% nationally, the rural gains were decisive.
(This article uses the Office of Management and Budget 2013 Metropolitan Statistical Areas to define rural. Counties that are not in a 2013 metro area are considered rural.)
Unlike in Pennsylvania, where Trump won because Harris hemorrhaged votes in urban areas compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, in Wisconsin Trump won the state in a battle of turnout.
Both candidates got more votes in 2024 than presidential candidates in 2020 in Wisconsin. But Trump attracted more of that increased turnout to his camp, improving his percentage of the two-party vote in all but four counties.
Three of the counties where Trump did not improve his margins were in the Milwaukee metro area, but one was rural. Door County, which flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020, remained in the Democratic column this year, with a slight increase for Harris over Biden’s performance.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Look on the bright side — all the talk about a stolen election, massive voter fraud, rigged voting machines and threats against local election workers disappeared overnight. Instead of planning an insurrection, MAGA Republicans have pivoted to picking out their outfits for president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration parties.
The minute it became clear that Trump won, Republican fulminating about “massive cheating” blew over. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe declared the election in Wisconsin a “great success.” Bipartisan poll watchers agreed: the whole thing went off practically without a hitch. Never mind the WisGOP warnings all day on social media about (nonexistent) illegal voting by noncitizens. Never mind the grandstanding at Central Count in Milwaukee by fake elector scheme co-conspirators Sen. Ron Johnson, elections commissioner Bob Spindell and WisGOP chair Brian Schimming. All is forgiven, because Trump won Wisconsin.
The mechanics of voting are not under attack. Instead, a majority of American voters, including a majority of Wisconsinites, chose to elect a right-wing authoritarian leader and to give his party control of the federal government, apparently because they believe Trump will repeal pandemic-fueled inflation (which is already way down in the U.S.).
As my friend Hugh Jackson, editor of our sister outlet the Nevada Current wrote on Wednesday morning: “the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. judiciary generally, is now even more on track to become nothing more than a functionary outlet for a right-wing extremist and authoritarian executive branch hell-bent on dismantling and superseding the rule of law. Also, poor Gaza. Poor Ukraine (poor Europe). And for all that, and so much more, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios still isn’t going to fall back to 2019 prices.”
Stress-eating leftover Halloween candy while watching the triumph of MAGA well into the wee hours, I remembered I’d agreed to speak to a group of retirees the morning after the election. What was there to say? The election results are a gut punch. Here in Wisconsin we are at the center of it. “You know Wisconsin put Trump over the top,” a journalist in Washington, D.C., texted me, helpfully.
Since I had to pull myself together and try to make sense of the results, I headed downtown and found myself in a room full of friendly faces. There’s no sugar-coating things, I told them. The results are a shock. Especially for Wisconsin’s immigrant community, this is a frightening time and we need to do everything we can to support people and ease the fear and suffering of those who are the targets of terrifying threats.
There are a few bright spots in Wisconsin among Tuesday’s results. In addition to the hiatus on election denial, there are the results of state legislative races — the first to be run with Wisconsin’s new fair maps — which ended the gerrymandered GOP supermajority in the state Senate and yielded a more evenly divided state Assembly.
The end of gerrymandering is the fruit of a long, difficult battle by citizens determined to get fair maps. It’s worth remembering that when all three branches of government in Wisconsin were controlled by a single party, that goal seemed far off. And a hard-fought win it was. We’ve come a long way. Don’t forget that progress is possible. It’s important to combat despair.
There will be a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking of this election. I’ve written about how I believe the Democrats lost touch with their working class base, and how Trump took the opportunity to move into that space with his right-wing populist message.
But the fact is Harris was a powerful candidate who picked up the torch from Biden when he fell apart, painfully, publicly and irretrievably.
There are those who say our country is too sexist or too racist for a woman of color to be elected president. Another white guy would have been better, they suggest. Without a doubt, misogyny and racism were big features of the 2024 campaign. But you don’t beat that backlash by surrendering to it. And we must beat it back. That takes a lot of resilience. Harris took us another step forward in making Americans believe they could elect a female president. It will take more than one or two tries to bring that about.
For now, perhaps the most important thing for all of us who are hurting after this election is to prioritize real, human contact. Remember that you are still surrounded by friends, neighbors and loved ones. We need to connect with each other and stay in touch. As simple and maybe even simplistic as it sounds, we need each other’s company to help get us through this difficult time. We need to see other people in person and we need to take a break from scrolling online.
Being with other people, strengthening our bonds of affection and solidarity, is the foundation of democracy. That’s where we need to start.
The Democratic National Committee is putting mobile billboards in nearly a dozen metro areas that could be crucial in determining the outcome of the presidential election. (Getty images photo illustration)
WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee is rounding out its $7 million in spending on the “I Will Vote” campaign by putting mobile billboards in nearly a dozen metro areas that could be crucial in determining the outcome of the presidential election.
The billboards are intended to increase turnout and direct voters to the DNC’s I Will Vote website that provides information about polling locations and educational materials.
The mobile billboards are set to drive around Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan; Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; Las Vegas, Nevada; Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Tempe, Arizona.
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said in a written statement that the I Will Vote campaign “is a testament to Democrats’ commitment to and investment in the many communities that make up our strong coalition of voters.”
“Throughout this campaign, Democrats have worked with diverse vendors and talent that are reflective of our values as a party and the communities that we are reaching with the campaign,” Harrison said. “This entire election cycle, the Democratic Party has not taken a single vote or community for granted and used every opportunity to engage with the pivotal members of our party that will take us over the finish line on Election Day by electing Democrats up and down the ballot.”
Previous DNC “I Will Vote” mobile billboards have been directed at Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, Haitian, Latino, LGBTQ+, Native American and rural voters, according to the announcement. The billboards have also run in nine different languages.
The DNC spent around $200,000 on this final round of mobile billboards.
More than 1 million people have visited the DNC’s I Will Vote website since its launch. Voting information can also be found at vote.gov and vote.org.
Any civil rights violations regarding voting can be reported to the Department of Justice by calling 800-253-3931 or by filling out a report online.
The DNC is hoping the billboards help Vice President Kamala Harris win the 270 Electoral College votes needed to become the country’s next president.
Polls show tight race
Harris has been polling closely, often within the margin of error, with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in the key battleground races that will determine the next commander-in-chief.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter places Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the toss-up column for the presidential race, meaning Harris and Trump are relatively evenly matched to win those states’ Electoral College votes.
Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief, wrote in her final analysis released Friday that “(p)olling averages suggest that Trump has a narrow lead in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. If he won all three, that would add up to 260 electoral votes, ten votes shy of an Electoral College victory.”
“Harris has a tiny lead in Michigan and Wisconsin,” Walter added. “If she wins both, she’ll still be 19 votes shy of 270. Nevada and Pennsylvania are currently tied in the 538 average. In that scenario, neither candidate could win without Pennsylvania.”
But, Walter writes in her article that “dramatic scenario isn’t one that we’ve seen in the last two cycles.”
“Instead, almost all of the battleground states have ultimately broken to one candidate. In 2016, Trump carried all but Nevada. In 2020, Biden carried all but North Carolina,” Walter wrote. “Moreover, analyst Ron Brownstein has noted that in every presidential election but one since 1980, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have voted for the same candidate.”
Maya Rudolph and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris appear on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 2, 2024 in New York City. With only days to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning in battleground states along with making the appearance on SNL. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — On the final frantic Sunday of the presidential race, while Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at a Black church service in Michigan, former President Donald Trump told supporters at a Pennsylvania rally that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
At a campaign rally at an airplane tarmac in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump again perpetuated the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and claimed that this year’s election would also be stolen because election results could take a while to be counted.
“These elections have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night,” he said. “Bunch of crooked people.”
The comments came as new polls showed good news for Harris. A highly regarded pollster in Iowa showed a shocking lead for Harris there and New York Times-Siena College polls of the seven major battleground states showed slight leads for Harris in some Sun Belt swing states, while Trump made gains in the Rust Belt.
As the campaign dwindles to its final hours, here are seven key developments from this weekend:
Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ White House
Trump spent much of his Lititz rally complaining about the election process and media coverage, seeming to repeat his false claim that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Trump said. “We did so well, we had such a great — so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”
He pointed to protective glass covering him on two sides and noted a press section was on another side of him.
“To get me, someone would have to shoot through the fake news,” Trump said. “And I don’t mind that so much.”
In a statement that seemed to contradict the plain meaning of Trump’s remark, campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung denied Trump was encouraging violence against reporters.
“The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else,” Cheung wrote. “It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!”
Harris heads to the Big Apple
Harris made an unscheduled trip to New York City Saturday, where she made a surprise appearance during the cold open of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” alongside actress Maya Rudolph, who portrays the veep in the live sketch comedy show.
In the three-minute opener, Rudolph approaches a vanity dresser and wishes she could talk to “someone who was in my shoes” as a “Black, South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area.”
Rudolph turns toward the faux mirror, and Harris, on the other side, responds, “You and me both, sister.”
They wore identical suits and Harris turned to Rudolph and said that she is “here to remind you, you got this.”
“Because you can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors,” Harris said, joking about a recent campaign event where Trump tried to open the door to a garbage truck.
Rudolph cackled, doing an impersonation of Harris’ laugh, before the two women began a pep talk with puns of Harris’ first name.
“Now, Kamala, take my palmala,” Rudolph said. “The American people want to stop the chaos.”
“And end the dramala,” Harris said.
Harris and Rudolph then stood side-by-side and said they were going to vote for “us.”
Harris joked and asked Rudolph if she was registered to vote in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Harris headed from New York to Michigan, where she spoke Sunday at the historically Black Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ in Detroit.
Polling bombshell in a non-swing state
Polling in the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, reported a shocking lead for Harris in a state that Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020, with women and independent voters breaking for the Democratic presidential nominee.
The poll shows Harris leading with 47% of likely voters compared to 44% with Trump, according to the Register.
The Trump campaign quickly called the Iowa poll “a clear outlier,” and instead cited a poll by Emerson College as accurate, which showed the former president having 53% support compared to 43% for Harris.
Trump also took his grievances to his social media site, Truth Social.
“All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,” he wrote. “I LOVE THE FARMERS, AND THEY LOVE ME.”
The New York Times/Siena College Sunday polls found that Harris is improving in North Carolina and Georgia while Trump has gained in Pennsylvania and maintains a strong advantage in Arizona. Harris is still ahead in Nevada and Wisconsin, according to the poll, but Michigan and Pennsylvania remain tied. The poll of Georgia showed Harris with a 1-point edge.
Both candidates were within the polls’ margins of error, meaning that the seven swing states could tip to either candidate.
While both Democratic and Republican politicians have expressed confidence in winning the election, polling experts said during a panel hosted by the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute in late October there’s no way to know for sure who will control the White House until all the votes are counted.
Kristen Soltis Anderson, founding partner at Echelon Insights, said there’s about a 60% chance that this year’s nationwide polling has been mostly correct, though she emphasized that the people who focus their careers on political polling are dedicated to providing a realistic understanding of where campaigns are headed.
“We are trying our very hardest to get it right,” Anderson said. “Even if you don’t believe in our altruism or even if you don’t believe in our academic and intellectual integrity, believe in nothing else than our financial incentives. You want to be the pollster who was right. It is very good business to be the pollster who is right.”
Jeff Horwitt, partner at Hart Research, said during the panel his firm has wrapped up its polling for this election year and expressed skepticism about the polls that emerge close to Election Day.
“Because our job, for our political clients, is to tell them the contours of the election,” Horwitt said. “How do we convince voters to vote for our candidate? What are the most effective messages? What do we have to think about? So the public polls are seeing now, they’re super interesting, and they’re important, but they’re not actionable.”
Trump welcomes sexist insult
As Trump spent his weekend in a campaign blitz across North Carolina, he welcomed a sexist remark from a rallygoer in Greensboro who suggested that Harris worked as a prostitute.
During the Saturday night rally, Trump questioned whether Harris’ previously worked at a McDonald’s. Her campaign has stated that she worked the summer job in 1983. In a campaign photo opportunity, Trump visited a closed McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where he handed fries to pre-screened people at the drive through.
“It’s so simple,” Trump said. “She’s a significant liar, and when you lie about something so simple, so she never worked there –”
“She worked on a corner,” a man from the crowd shouted.
Trump laughed at the crude comment.
“This place is amazing,” Trump said. “Just remember, it’s other people saying it, it’s not me.”
Harris has significantly gained support with women, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump has often dismissed criticism that he has lagged among women.
During a rally last week in Wisconsin, and in an attempt to win over women voters, Trump said that he would protect women and “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”
Trump repeats ‘father of fertilization’ claim
At a Greensboro, North Carolina, rally Saturday, Trump again called himself “the father of fertilization,” a title he first gave himself during a Fox News town hall with women voters last month.
“I consider myself to be the father of fertilization,” he said Saturday.
The Iowa poll — and other late surveys — showed a stark gender gap, with women voters increasingly preferring Harris.
Nearly twice as many Iowa independent women voters, 57% to 29%, favored Harris. That represents a major gain for Harris since a September survey by the same pollster showed the vice president’s edge with independent women was only 5 percentage points.
Democrats have sought to exploit their advantage with women voters by emphasizing Trump’s record on abortion access. The former president appointed three of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn the federal right to an abortion.
A flurry of state-level policymaking on reproductive rights has followed, including restrictions on in vitro fertilization, a common fertility treatment.
Trump has said he opposed an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the treatment in the state, but had not previously taken a position on the issue.
Roughly half of those have come in states that track voters’ partisanship. About 700,000 — roughly 2% of the total — more Democrats have voted in those states than Republicans, but the numbers include California, where Democrat Joe Biden won more than 5 million more votes than Trump in the 2020 election.
Among the six states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, Idaho and Virginia — that track voters’ gender, women accounted for 54% of the vote, compared to 43.6% for men.
‘Election eve’ blitz
The candidates for president and vice president plan to sprint across the key swing states in the campaign’s final days, with particular focus on Pennsylvania, the largest of the contested states where polling has shown a deadlocked race.
The Harris campaign announced Sunday the vice president would be in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on Monday, the night before Election Day, for rallies and musical performances. Scheduled entertainers and speakers included Oprah Winfrey, The Roots, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.
Harris is also set to hold an event in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a majority-Latino city, on Monday. Part of Harris’ closing message has highlighted racist comments Trump and his supporters have made about Latinos.
After spending much of the weekend in North Carolina, Trump will also hold a rally in Pittsburgh on Monday evening.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, will be in Milwaukee on Monday.
Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance will hold events in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania on Monday.
Harris will hold an election night watch party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s watch party will be at his Mar-a-Lago club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made a dent in former President Donald Trump’s lead among likely Iowa voters in the most recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. (Photos by Win McNamee and Megan Varner/Getty Images, photo illustration via Canva)
Vice President Kamala Harris has taken a narrow lead over former President Donald Trump in the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll published Saturday, just days before the Nov. 5 election.
The results are a surprising development for the state, which has been largely written off as an easy victory for Trump. He won Iowa in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The latest Iowa Poll showed Harris leading with 47% of likely voters and Trump with 44%, the Register reported.
The poll, taken Oct. 28-31 by Selzer & Co. with responses from 808 likely Iowa voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus3.4 percentage points.
While Harris’ lead falls in the margin of error, it’s a significant reversal from previous Iowa Polls. In September, Trump led the Iowa Poll with 47% to Harris’ 43%. Trump had the support of 50% of likely Iowa voters in June when President Joe Biden was expected to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
Women, independents shift toward Harris
The largest shift heading toward support for Harris has been Iowa women – particularly women who identify as independent voters as well as those age 65 and older, the Register reported. More independent likely voters as a whole now support Harris at 46% to Trump at 39%, despite the demographic favoring Trump in every earlier Iowa Poll.
Independent women favored Harris in the September poll, with 40% supporting her and 35% supporting Trump. That lead grew in the latest poll to 57% of independent women who support Harris and 29% who support Trump.
More independent men still favor Trump over Harris at 47% to 37%.
While likely voters 65 and older also support Harris as a demographic, 63% of senior women support the vice president compared to 28% who support Trump – a more than 2-to-1 margin. More senior men also support Harris but by a margin of 2 percentage points at 47% to 45%.
Iowa Republicans have stumped for Trump in swing states
Iowa Republicans have spent time on the campaign trail touting Trump’s popularity in the state and the expectation that the former president will win Iowa for the third election in a row — U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, Iowa Republicans, have traveled to swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia to rally voters in recent weeks, with Ernst saying Iowa was “in the bag” for Trump.
Though both Harris and Trump have spent most their time in key swing states ahead of the election, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told reporters Saturday that the poll results show that Iowa is a winnable state for Democrats in the upcoming election.
“We’ve been putting in the hard work, and it is paying off,” Hart said. “We’ve been educating our voters, recruiting volunteers, listening to friends’ and neighbors’ concerns, and we recognize that Iowans are looking for better leadership. The fact that Vice President Harris now leads Donald Trump in the latest Des Moines Register poll is obviously very exciting for us.”
Iowa GOP chair calls poll an ‘outlier’
But Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann disputed the accuracy of the results, comparing the Des Moines Register’s poll results to one released by Emerson College earlier Saturday that showed Trump ahead at 53% to Harris at 43%.
“Des Moines Register is a clear outlier poll,” Kaufmann said in a statement. “Emerson College, released today, far more closely reflects the state of the actual Iowa electorate and does so with far more transparency in their methodology.”
House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst argued that the Iowa Poll well respected, and should not be dismissed just because it does not show favorable results for one party.
“I’ve been in their shoes on a Saturday night before Election Day, where the Iowa poll results come out, and they don’t look like what we’d like them to (be),” Konfrst said. “And they can’t believe Ann Seltzer, one of the gold standard pollsters in the country, in 2020 and not in 2024.”
The poll also found Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who remains on the Iowa ballot despite ending his campaign, still has the support of 3% of likely voters. Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver earned less than 1% in the poll. Another 1% of respondents said they would vote for someone else, 3% responded that they were not sure who to support and 2% said they did not want to disclose who they supported.
Though the poll showed Harris in a favorable position for Tuesday, Hart said it was important to note that Iowa Poll results are not Election Day results. Konfrst said the poll is a welcome push giving “energy and enthusiasm and momentum” to Democratic voters and organizers leading up to Tuesday.
“We have three more days before this election, so remember, this is just a poll, and what really matters is that Iowans show up and make their voices heard,” Hart said.
Democrats say poll supports argument for more national help
In the final days before the election, Konfrst said that she and other Democrats are having conversations about the poll with the national party and supporting Democratic organizations, hoping to get support and surrogate visits ahead of Election Day.
“We’re going to be asking as many folks as we can to be surrogates here, but at the end of the day, we know that it’s the hard work of volunteers, our candidates up and down the ballot, the Congressional candidates and the party and all of our partners here in Iowa who are doing that hard work,” Konfrst said. “And so, surrogate or not, we think that we’re going to have a better night than expected for Kamala Harris and Democrats on Tuesday.”
Hart also said that Iowa’s decision in the 2024 presidential election could have major implications for the future of the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Iowa was ousted from its first-in-the-nation seat in the 2024 Democratic presidential nominating cycle and released its mail-in caucus results on Super Tuesday supporting Biden this year. The nominating calendar will be up for discussion again heading into 2028, and Hart said Nov. 5 results will have a crucial impact on Iowa Democrats’ argument to return to return as an early state in future elections.
“Once this election is over, we’re going to be having this conversation,” Hart said. “And the better we do here in November, the better case we can make. … The bottom line is that I hope this shows the rest of the country that Iowa is a good barometer for choosing good leadership.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, gives her “closing argument” of the campaign in a speech on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 29, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
The fallout from a comedian’s racially charged joke at a rally for former President Donald Trump continued Wednesday as the campaign for the presidency raced toward its final weekend, with Democrats on the defensive about President Joe Biden’s reaction to the joke.
Republicans claimed Biden labeled Trump supporters as “garbage,” while Democrats insisted Biden was being misinterpreted, and a battle over the placement of an apostrophe in Biden’s comment spread from the White House briefing room to campaign stops.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday further clarified Biden’s comment, made on a Tuesday evening call to rally Latino voters. Biden brought up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s remark at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
“They’re good, decent, honorable people,” Biden said Tuesday of Puerto Ricans who live in his home state of Delaware. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
An initial White House transcript of the call placed an apostrophe after the word “supporters,” making its meaning about multiple Trump supporters. A later transcript placed the possessive inside the word, so it read as “supporter’s,” making it about a single supporter, Hinchcliffe.
Biden posted on X Tuesday evening that was his intent.
“Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it,” Biden’s post read. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, also told reporters early Wednesday that it was wrong to disparage people over political affiliation, while noting Biden clarified he referred only to Hinchcliffe. The flap over Biden’s comments came just as Harris was giving her “closing argument” speech on the Ellipse on Tuesday night before a crowd in the tens of thousands.
“Let me be clear,” she said. “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
Latino voters in general and Puerto Ricans in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania in particular are seen as a crucial voting bloc in the closing days of the campaign, and both campaigns are trying to get their support.
Jean-Pierre said from the White House briefing room Wednesday that Biden does not think Trump supporters are “garbage.”
“What I can say is that the president wanted to make sure that his words were not being taken out of context,” she said. “And so he wanted to clarify, and that’s what you heard from the president. He was very aware. And I would say I think it’s really important that you have a president that cares about clarifying what they said.”
Trump repeatedly has said the United States is the “garbage can of the world” as a result of Biden’s immigration policies.
Rubio: Harris camp should apologize
But Trump and other Republicans jumped on Biden’s remark, immediately comparing it to 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment that many Trump supporters comprised “a basket of deplorables.” That comment was seen as damaging to Clinton’s campaign against Trump.
At a Tuesday evening Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida disclosed news of Biden’s statement.
“I hope their campaign is about to apologize for what Joe Biden just said,” Rubio said. “We are not garbage. We are patriots who love America.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Trump added. “Remember Hillary, she said deplorable, and then she said irredeemable, right? But she said deplorable. That didn’t work out. Garbage I think is worse, right?”
Harris brings closing argument in N.C.
At a Wednesday afternoon rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Harris echoed some of the themes she sounded in the “closing argument” speech she gave Tuesday night.
She urged voters in the battleground state to “turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has been trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other.”
She said Trump was focused on personal grievances and seeking revenge on political opponents, while she would work toward improving voters’ lives.
“There are many big differences between he and I,” she said. “But I would say a major contrast is this: If he is elected, on day one, Donald Trump will walk into that office with an enemies list. When I am elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
First on her list would be lowering the costs of health care, child care and other expenses for families, she said.
Harris appealed directly to disaffected Republicans, saying she would seek common ground with those she disagrees with. That approach, she said, was also in contrast to Trump, who used charged language to describe his opponents and pledged to retaliate against them.
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy,” she said. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table. And I pledge to be a president for all Americans, and to always put country above party and self.”
Harris won another endorsement from a nationally known Republican Wednesday, with former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger saying he would vote for her despite policy disagreements.
Trump also campaigned in North Carolina on Wednesday, in Rocky Mount, a town in a more rural part of the state about 50 miles east of Raleigh.
He said his campaign was a welcoming one to all races and religions and said Harris was the one running “a campaign of hate” toward Trump and his supporters, while lobbing an insult at the vice president.
“Kamala, a low-IQ individual, is running a campaign of hate, anger and retribution,” he said, repeating a term he has used for her before.
Election integrity
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said Wednesday they won a court case in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, over early voting hours, RNC officials said on a call Wednesday afternoon.
A judge in the key swing county extended the deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot after some voters said that long lines forced them to miss the 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline.
On the press call, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump supporter had been arrested after telling people in line near the deadline to remain in line.
Party officials, including Trump’s daughter-in-law, RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump, said the result bolstered their confidence in a free and fair election.
“We want to make people all across this country feel good about the process of voting in the United States of America,” Lara Trump said. “It is so foundational to who we are as a country that we trust our electoral process and this type of work allows exactly for that.”
Lara Trump said the party was “incredibly confident” in its staffers dedicated to ensuring the election is fair.
The issue has been a major priority for Republicans since Donald Trump and others claimed, without evidence, that election fraud caused his 2020 re-election loss.
That claim was rejected in scores of courts and a federal grand jury indicted Trump on four felony counts for using the election fraud lie to inspire the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump and allies have also speculated that his political opponents would seek to use illegal means, including voting by noncitizens, this year.
But in a departure from that rhetoric Wednesday, the RNC officials voiced confidence that the 2024 results would be trustworthy.
“I think it’s really important that we get the word spread loud and clear that we are taking this seriously, that you can trust American elections,” Lara Trump said. “In 2024, we want to re-establish any trust that may have been lost previously.”
The latest Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday found that the race between Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely close in Wisconsin.
Harris received 50% of support among likely voters, while Trump received 49%. The previous Marquette poll, conducted in late September, found that Harris received 52% of support and Trump received 48% among likely voters.
The poll, which was conducted between Oct. 16 and 24, surveyed 834 Wisconsin registered voters of whom 753 are considered likely to vote based on 2016 voting records.
Charles Franklin, Marquette Law School Poll director
“The race has tightened a little bit,” Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll, said in a public forum where he presented the poll results Wednesday.
When third party candidates including Robert F. Kennedy and Jill Stein were included in the poll, Harris received 46% of support while Trump received 44% of support. Franklin said voters who are undecided and leaning toward voting for a third-party contribute to the uncertainty in this election.
“They could so easily tip the scales one way or the other,” Franklin said. “If I haven’t made it clear by now, it should not surprise anyone if Donald Trump wins, and it should not surprise anyone if Kamala Harris wins. The polling averages for the state… are just so close that polling is not going to help us at all to have confidence in who is the likely winner.”
The poll also found a large gender gap among voters with men favoring Trump 56% to 44% and women favoring Harris 57% to 43%.
Enthusiasm is also high with 66% of those polled saying they are very enthusiastic. Democrats had a slight enthusiasm advantage with 75% of Democrats saying they are “very enthusiastic” to vote compared with 66% of Republicans.
In the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race, Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is running for her third term in office, polls slightly ahead of Republican Eric Hovde, a banker from California.
Among likely voters Baldwin received 51% of support while Hovde received 49%. The results are a big change from the last poll in September, which found that Baldwin had a lead of 7 percentage points over Hovde.
Baldwin was seen favorably by 45% of poll respondents, while her unfavorable rating was 50%; 5% said they haven’t heard enough to form an opinion. Hovde was seen as favorable by 36% and unfavorable by 48% of those polled, with 15% saying they haven’t heard enough.
With early voting underway and only six days until Election Day, on the streets around the State Capitol and on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, we asked people who they want to become the next president of the United States and what are the issues that matter to them.
Wisconsin is one of the key swing states that could determine whether former President Donald Trump returns to the White House or Kamala Harris makes history to become the first woman to hold that office.
At one end of the iconic State Street is the Capitol and at the other lies the UW-Madison campus, home to nearly 50,000 students.
On your way down State Street, you can see shop windows with posters of Kamala Harris while around the Capitol on Monday a “Japan supports Trump” demonstration carried Trump flags.
At the Farmers Market on Saturday there were campaign tables set up with leaflets and flags. The election is hard to escape.
In a series of vox populi interviews, voters who gave only their first names spoke with reporter James Gould.
Jim, a middle-aged man who stopped to talk, said he was voting for “Trump, definitely.”
Asked why, he said former President Donald Trump “has proven he can do the job” and is “hands down” a more capable candidate than Kamala Harris.
The main issues in this election for Jim are the “economy and immigration.”
UW student Zoe said her top concerns as she casts her vote will be “abortion rights, women’s rights and housing.”
She said women anywhere in the United States should have the “ability to get our help.”
Zoe said it is “truly difficult” for anyone in the “middle class to get affordable housing and live comfortably,” adding that Madison “has recently got so expensive.”
With all that in mind, she is voting for Kamala Harris.
Backing up that claim about the rising cost of living was another UW student, Austin. He added that anyone “working in the middle-class” is having a really hard time. Austin said he believes that “Kamala Harris has a plan to fix it” and doesn’t think Donald Trump has.
Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally in downtown Madison, Wis. on Oct 28, 2024 | Photo by James Gould
With just under a week to go until Election Day, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) took to the stage Monday at the Overture theater in Madison in front of a packed crowd.
During the rally to support Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, the progressive legislators also took the opportunity to address racist jokes made by a comedian who described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” and talked about Black people carving watermelon at a Donald Trump rally in Madison Square Garden.
The remarks have sparked outrage across the nation with Puerto Rican celebrities and performers taking to social media to show their disgust.
Ocasio-Cortez said as a “Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx” she found the remarks “horrific.” Adding that the Trump campaign “knew exactly what they were doing.”
“They want us to think he’s not talking about me. He’s talking about some ‘other’,” she added.“It’s the same kind of logic that says a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx has no business connecting with the community of Madison, Wisconsin.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez speaks in Madison | Photo by James Gould
“When we hear an individual, whether it’s Donald Trump or one of his cronies on a stage, talking about our fellow Americans as a pile of garbage, know that he’s talking about us, he’s talking about you,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Madison and surrounding Dane County are Democratic strongholds, so this was a rally to generate even more noise and action for Kamala Harris.
Throughout the night and even during a mic-check, the phrase “every vote counts” in Wisconsin was repeated at various times.
In an attempt to create some kind of distance to from the racist joke controversy, 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.”
Bernie Sanders, who took the stage as Ocasio-Cortez left the podium to a standing ovation, focused his speech on uniting people across the United States.
He began by criticizing Trump directly, calling him a “pathological liar.”
Sanders also emphasized f protecting working-class people and expanding the social safety net.
One of the biggest cheers of the night came after Sanders said: “We have got to cancel all medical debt in America.”
He also addressed the situation in Gaza. Sanders highlighted his frustration with the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military response following the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis and led to 250 hostages being taken captive. He said he supported Israel’s right to defend itself but condemned what he described as an “all-out war” on Palestinians in Gaza, leading to 42,000 Palestinian deaths and severe damage to Gaza’s infrastructure, health care, and educational systems.
In a social media video posted the same day as the Madison rally, he attempted to reassure progressive voters about what a Harris policy approach would look like.
Sanders told rally goers he would work with Harris to secure the release of the hostages, get more humanitarian aid into Gaza and commit to the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip for the Palestinian people.
“I promise you, after Kamala wins, we will together do everything that we can to change U.S. policy toward Netanyahu,” Sanders said.
He detailed his confidence that Harris would be much better for humanitarian priorities than Donald Trump.
Bringing his speech to an end in Madison he said: “We’ve got to bring our people together.”
Next up for the campaigns in Wisconsin, Vice President Kamala Harris will hold a rally in Madison on Wednesday night while Donald Trump returns to the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, where he was officially nominated in July at the Republican National Convention, on Friday
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA - OCTOBER 27: Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris alongside Philadelphia City Council member Quetcy Lozada (R) and Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker greets supporters at Freddy & Tony’s Restaurant, a locally-owned Puerto Rican restaurant on October 27, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. With less than 2 weeks until Election Day, Harris is campaigning in the Philadelphia area. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is slated to deliver what the campaign is calling her “closing argument” Tuesday night at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., as she aims to reach undecided voters in the final stretch of the presidential election.
Just a week out from Nov. 5, the Democratic presidential nominee will use her final pitch to voters to “turn the page” from former President Donald Trump, Harris campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a Tuesday morning call with reporters.
The Ellipse, a large grassy area just south of the White House, was the site of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, remarks urging his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol.
Harris and Trump remain neck and neck in polling, both nationally and in swing states, in a race that could very well be decided by only a handful of voters across those battleground states.
In the press call, the Harris campaign previewed the contents of the veep’s highly anticipated speech, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people.
For many undecided voters or those who are “questioning whether or not it is worth it to engage in the election at all,” Harris’ speech is an “opportunity for the vice president to intimately speak directly to that segment of the electorate’s sense of frustration, their sense of exhaustion with the way that our politics have played out under the Trump era — and offer them directly a vision that something is different, that something different is possible,” said Michael Tyler, Harris campaign communications director.
The veep is set to focus on “what her new generation of leadership really means, and centering that around the American people, what they care about, and that she’s going to make clear that she’s committed to ensuring that their needs and priorities are her top priority,” said O’Malley Dillon, who noted that Harris will touch on her vision, values and plans.
“You’re going to hear her really speak to middle-class families and what they’re worried about, and what she’s going to do about it, and she is going to very much focus the speech on them, on the American people, unlike what we hear from Donald Trump, which is his focus on himself, and we know that that is a pretty stark contrast,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Harris campaign Co-Chair Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman, said the veep will “use the powerful symbolism of the location to remind Americans that Trump is someone so all-consumed by his grievances and his power and his endless desire for revenge that he is not focused on the needs of the American people.”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continues to face a backlash following comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s series of racist and vulgar remarks during a Sunday night rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, including calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
“I think just seeing what’s happened over the course of the last 48 hours, the growth of support in some of our targeted Puerto Rican community, and some of our battleground states, obviously we have strength there to come in, but we obviously have seen a lot of movement and growth over the course of the last several days based on the response to what happened with Trump’s event,” O’Malley Dillon said.
With Trump set to hold a Tuesday rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania — a city and state with large Puerto Rican populations — the Democratic National Committee is launching a new billboard campaign across the Keystone State underscoring Hinchcliffe’s remarks.
The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, speaks at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump promised “America’s new golden age” of closed borders and world peace as he rallied a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden in his home city in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential contest against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump headlined the over six-hour rally that featured nearly 30 speakers, some of whom insulted Latinos and attacked Democratic nominee Harris over her race, and he vowed “to make America great again, and it’s going to happen fast.”
“It is called America first, and it is going to happen as no one has ever seen before,” Trump said, adding “We will not be overrun, we will not be conquered. We will be a free and proud nation once again. Everyone will prosper.”
But the event also generated intense criticism from Democrats for remarks made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who spoke during the afternoon hours ahead of Trump and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now.”
The joke could prove politically problematic for Republicans, who have been courting the Latino vote, and particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans live.
The United States is home to 5.6 million Puerto Ricans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data, and about 8% of them live in Pennsylvania.
Hinchcliffe, who hosts a podcast called “Kill Tony,” also said Latinos “love making babies” and made a lewd joke about them.
Florida Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, whose state is also home to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, on X wrote, “It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!”
Democrats brought in U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is Puerto Rican, and the vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, to blast the joke. “When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico floating garbage … that’s what they think about anyone who makes less money than them,” she said.
Harris on Sunday in Philadelphia laid out a new policy proposal focused on Puerto Rico.
The former president’s 80-minute speech mostly featured his standard campaign promises and stories, though he added a proposal to his list of tax breaks — a benefit for those caring for sick or aging relatives in their homes. Harris also introduced a policy for at-home care for seniors earlier in October.
Trump repeated his popular pledges to “get transgender insanity the hell out of our schools,” “stop the invasion” at the border and restore peace to Ukraine and the Middle East, which he claims would have never become war-torn had he been in office.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told the crowd his time campaigning around the country for Trump has revealed “something very powerful out there happening among the base.”
“I’m telling you, there’s an energy out there that we have not seen before,” Johnson said.
NYC stop a detour
Trump held the rally nine days before polls close on Nov. 5. Nearly 42 million Americans have already voted early, in person or by mail, in more than two dozen states, according to the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voting tracker.
Trump’s New York stop detoured from the seven battleground states in this election’s spotlight — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His campaign also announced on Sunday two upcoming stops in New Mexico and Virginia during the contest’s final week.
Still, both candidates once again hit Pennsylvania over the weekend, with Trump delivering remarks Saturday at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, and Harris spending Sunday rallying a crowd in Philadelphia.
Harris spoke to the press in Philadelphia, a city she described as “a very important part of our path to victory.”
“I’m feeling very optimistic about the enthusiasm that is here and the commitment that folks of every background have to vote and to really invest in the future of our country,” Harris told reporters.
The vice president criticized Trump for using “dark and divisive language,” including his comments this week that America is the “garbage can of the world.”
“I think people are ready to turn the page,” she said.
Tucker Carlson goes after Harris
Numerous speakers attacked Harris’ record — a standard feature of political rallies — but some comments invoked her race. Trump’s childhood best friend, David Rem, clutched a crucifix and told the crowd Harris is the “antichrist.”
Conservative media personality Tucker Carlson described Harris as a “Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor” as he was spinning a scenario in which the Democrats reflect on their candidate post-election.
“Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us,” Carlson said earlier in his speech.
Harris’ mother was Indian, and her father is Jamaican. Trump has previously questioned her race during his interview with the National Association of Black Journalists.
Carlson, who was fired by Fox News in April 2023, accused Democrats of telling “lies,” and said in a mocking voice, “Jan. 6 was an insurrection, they were unarmed, but it was very insurrection-y.”
The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 by thousands of Trump supporters came after months of the former president refusing to concede the 2020 presidential election, which President Joe Biden won.
Twenty-eight speakers preceded Trump, beginning at just after 2 p.m. and holding court until the former president took the stage at 7:13 p.m. Trump’s wife, Melania, in a rare campaign rally appearance, introduced him and spoke briefly.
The lineup included the founder of Death Row Records, TV personality Dr. Phil and pro wrestling’s Hulk Hogan and Dana White — some of whom spoke at July’s four-day Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose super PAC has flooded more than $75 million into the campaign, was among the cast of speakers.
Musk told the crowd to vote early and that he wants to see a “massive crushing victory.”
“Make the margin of victory so big that you know what can’t happen,” he said, referring to debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Focus on NYC
The day was heavy on the mystique of New York and Trump’s ties to it. New York City is not only where Trump grew up and followed his father’s path into real estate, but now also where he was convicted in May in a Manhattan court on 34 state felony counts for a hush money scheme involving a porn star.
A vendor hawking campaign gear to supporters waiting to enter Madison Square Garden Sunday morning advertised a hat that read “I’m voting for the convicted felon.”
Several speakers credited Trump with changing the New York City skyline. The 58-story Trump Tower stands on 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan, among his other real estate holdings on the island.
“New York City made Donald Trump, but Donald Trump also made New York City,” said Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee.
Howard Lutnick, chair and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of the Trump campaign’s “transition team,” told the story of losing just over 650 of his employees in the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001 masterminded by known terrorist Osama bin Laden.
“We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad,” Lutnick said.
Lutnick bantered with Musk on stage, estimating the pair could possibly cut $2 trillion in federal spending under a second Trump administration. Trump has chosen the duo to lead a commission on government efficiency if elected.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who took a leading role in spreading Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, received a standing ovation from the full arena.
He accused Biden and Harris of spreading “socialism, fascism and communism.”
Giuliani, a major player in Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election, appeared at the rally just days after a federal judge in New York ordered him to surrender his apartment and valuables to election workers in Georgia whom he was found guilty of defaming.
Giuliani, along with a handful of other speakers, also implied that Democrats are responsible for the two assassination attempts on Trump.
“I’m not gonna do conspiracy,” Giuliani said, “but it’s funny that they tried to do everything else, and now they’re trying to kill him.”
The accusation was a theme throughout the daylong event. Speaker after speaker implied or outright blamed Democrats for the two attempts on Trump’s life, never mentioning the perpetrators. The gunman in the first attempt was killed by law enforcement, and the second, who never fired at Trump, has been charged in Florida; neither has been found to have ties to Democrats.
Trump focused some of his comments on New York City, referencing his childhood and adding that he felt sympathy for the city’s indicted Mayor Eric Adams.
The rally ended, not with Trump’s signature closer “YMCA” by the Village People, but with a live rendition of “New York, New York” by Christopher Macchio.
Annar Parikh, a field manager with the civic engagement group North Carolina Asian Americans Together, knocks on a door of a residence in Wake County, North Carolina, on Sept. 28, 2024. No one answers, so she leaves voting information by the door. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
DURHAM, N.C. — As a weekend morning in late September dips into the afternoon, Annar Parikh finally gets an eligible voter to answer the door.
After Parikh gives a rundown of some of the local candidates in North Carolina’s election, she asks the woman if she plans to vote in the presidential election.
“It’s personal,” the woman says before closing the door.
The 26-year-old marks the house in a voter database for North Carolina Asian Americans Together, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on voter registration in the Asian American community.
“This is typical for our community,” Parikh, a field manager for NCAAT, says while peeling a clementine, recounting how difficult it can be sometimes to reach voters in the swing state.
There are more than 360,000 Asian Americans in North Carolina. Indian Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the state, with a population of nearly 110,000.
The voters Parikh is trying to reach are prized by the presidential campaigns. In an election that is virtually a dead heat, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is working to tap into the two of the fastest-growing voting blocs in the United States — Asian Americans and Latinos, especially in the seven swing states.
Asian Americans have gotten relatively little attention in the presidential campaign and Harris herself has not greatly emphasized her South Asian background — her mother was an Indian immigrant and Harris if elected would be the first president of South Asian descent.
“My challenge is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote, and I will never assume that anyone in our country should elect a leader based on their gender or their race,” Harris said in a Monday night interview with NBC News, when asked if sexism is a factor in the race.
While Republican nominee Donald Trump has held events with Latino voters, one of his first big appeals to Asian American voters will be Thursday in a Turning Point PAC event with former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii in Nevada.
Targeting communities
Also Thursday, the Democratic National Committee launched a voting media campaign across the country to engage with Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. The campaign will provide information about polling locations and multilingual advertisements in Florida, Texas and New York.
About 15 million Asian Americans are eligible to vote in this presidential election, a 15% increase in eligible voters from 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Harris campaign has launched targeted ads for Asian American voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that focus on her economic proposals.
The campaign also released an ad specific to the battleground state of Nevada featuring Asian American small business owners. Nevada is a swing state with one of the largest shares of the Asian American population in the country, at 11%. President Joe Biden won the state in 2020 with a little over 33,000 votes.
The Harris campaign has also launched a WhatsApp outreach effort in the Latino community and on Tuesday unveiled an “opportunity agenda for Latino men.”
Grassroot campaigns reflecting Asian American voting blocs have also emerged on behalf of Harris, such as South Asians for Harris, Chinese Americans for Harris, Korean Americans for Harris, Latinas for Harris and Latino Men for Harris.
Getting voters to the polls
On-the-ground efforts like voter registration and voter mobilization can be a huge effort in a tight presidential race.
“The cause of the low rate of voter registration is the same cause of the low level of information around voting, so we want to make sure we’re not just registering people, we’re also talking to them about how the process of voting works, where they can vote, how they can vote early,” said Jack Golub, the North Carolina community engagement program manager for the Hispanic Federation, a group that does civic engagement in the Latino community.
Nationally, the voting registration gap for Latinos — the difference between those eligible to vote who have registered and those who have not registered — is about 13.2 million, which is based on the most recent data from 2022 from UNIDOS, a Latino advocacy organization.
The Trump campaign has largely focused on trying to make inroads with Latino voters through roundtable discussions with leaders as well as a town hall hosted by Univision for undecided Latino voters. Separately, Harris also took part in a Univision town hall with undecided Latino voters.
A Monday poll showed that Harris continues to outperform Trump among Latino voters in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But Steven Cheung, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement to States Newsroom that the former president is an advocate for the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and has “created an environment where diversity, equal opportunity, and prosperity were afforded to everybody.”
“Anyone who says otherwise is disgustingly using the AAPI community to play political games for their own benefit,” Cheung said. “The 2024 campaign is poised to build upon the strength and successes of Asian Americans during President Trump’s first term to propel him to a … second term victory.”
It comes down to policy
With Harris at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket after Biden’s withdrawal last summer, more Asian American voters are planning to support her compared to when Biden was in the race, according to a comprehensive survey by AAPIVote and AAPI Data.
The late September survey also said 66% of Asian American voters said they plan on voting for Harris, compared to 28% of Asian American voters who said they would vote for Trump. About 6% were undecided.
Chintan Patel, the executive director of Indian American Impact, said that while he has noticed an enthusiasm for Harris leading the presidential ticket, it still comes down to policy, specifically the economy, for the South Asian community.
“Yes, the community is excited about the opportunity to elect a South Asian president, there’s no question, but we’re also looking for, what are her plans?” he said.
His organization focuses on electing Indian Americans and has backed Harris.
“One of the things that I think is really resonating with the community is her plans around the economy, creating an opportunity economy, particularly helping small businesses,” Patel said. “Small businesses have been such a vital, important part of mobility for South Asian Americans, particularly the immigrant story, the first generation story, that is how we have seen mobility.”
Harris often talks of her late mother’s roots. But that seems to have little sway in some parts of North Carolina’s South Asian community — a surprise to Eva Eapen, an 18-year-old canvasser for NCAAT.
Eapen, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said she expected to see more excitement in the South Asian community when Harris picked up the torch for Democrats as the presidential nominee.
“I don’t know if it’s lack of engagement. I don’t know if it’s lack of information. I don’t know if it’s lack of mobilization, but they don’t really care,” she said. “Maybe it’s more policy over nationality as Hindi?”
Several South Asian voters who States Newsroom spoke with in North Carolina made similar remarks. The fact that the Democratic presidential nominee was South Asian didn’t guarantee their vote and they instead expressed concern over the cost of living and the economy.
Ikamjit Gill, 28, said the biggest issues getting him to the polls are inflation and the economy.
“It’s not a big thing for me,” Gill said of Harris’ background.
Gill said he’s a registered Democrat and voted for Biden in 2020, but this year he’s considering voting for Trump. He said he was laid off from his tech job under the Biden administration and got his first job under the Trump administration.
“I’ve been out of a job for a while,” he said. “I just want some change.”
Vishal Ohir, 47, of Wake County, North Carolina, said he was initially leaning toward voting for Trump, but was impressed by Harris during the presidential debate in September. He liked her detailed plans around housing and the economy.
Ohir said he’s still undecided but in the end, he wants a presidential candidate who can tackle the cost of living because “everything has gone up.”
Arvind Balaraman, 53, of Wake County, North Carolina, said he’s frustrated that wages have not kept up with the cost of living. He said he’s not particularly excited there’s a South Asian candidate running for president. He just wants his grocery bill lowered.
“Everything has doubled, tripled,” he said of prices. “You had two different parties in the last two terms and the prices are still going up.”
Balaraman said he’s undecided, but still plans to vote in the presidential election.
Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the Republican clerk for Kent County, Mich., has to remind voters that elections are run by people and mistakes can occur; it doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. In the final days of the election, local election officials are busy dispelling rumors and misinformation. (Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline)
In the final days of the presidential election, lies about noncitizens voting, the vulnerability of mail-in ballots and the security of voting machines are spreading widely over social media.
Fanned by former President Donald Trump and notable allies such as tech tycoon Elon Musk, election disinformation is warping voters’ faith in the integrity of the democratic process, polls show, and setting the stage once again for potential public unrest if the Republican nominee fails to win the presidency. At the same time, federal officials are investigating ongoing Russian interference through social media and shadow disinformation campaigns.
The “firehose” of disinformation is working as intended, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that advocates for responsible use of technology in elections.
“This issue is designed to sow general distrust,” she said. “Your best trusted source is not your friend’s cousin’s uncle that you saw on Twitter. It’s your local election official. Don’t repeat it. Check it instead.”
With early voting ongoing, local officials such as Travis Doss in Augusta, Georgia, say they are fighting a losing battle against fast-moving social media rumors.
Doss, the executive director of the Richmond County Board of Elections, said many voters in his county do not believe absentee ballots are counted properly. Many think election officials are choosing which ballots to count based on the neighborhood from where they’re sent, or that voting machines are easily hacked.
In recent weeks, Doss himself heard a rumor that a local preacher told his entire congregation to register to vote again because the preacher had heard — falsely — that everyone had been removed from the voter registration rolls.
“Somebody hears something and then they tell people, and it’s the worst game of telephone tag there ever is,” Doss said. “It’s so hard to correct all the misinformation because there’s so many things out there that we don’t even know about.”
As early voting began in mid-October in Georgia, Doss had to remind some voters that poll workers would observe the polling place and election equipment all day, ensuring no one tampered with the process. He noted that the tabulation machines are not connected to the internet, nor are they being hacked. He also had to emphasize that the ballot drop boxes were sealed and secure.
The amount of disinformation spreading throughout the country is immense.
College students in Wisconsin have been targeted with text messages meant to intimidate them into not voting, even when they’re eligible. The Michigan State Police had to correct rumors that people were unlawfully tampering with voting machines in one precinct, when it was actually two clerk’s office employees testing the ballot tabulating devices. Scammers posing as election officials have been calling Michigan voters claiming they must provide their credit card and Social Security numbers to vote early.
“In order to protect our democracy, we must address the mis- and disinformation that is spreading like wildfire,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP.
Ongoing lies
Musk, the owner of the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), has gorged on a smorgasbord of common election conspiracy theories. At a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania, he falsely insinuated that voting machines designed by Dominion Voting Systems could steal this election from Trump. Dominion successfully sued Fox News and others for promoting that lie after the 2020 election.
Last month, Musk posted that Democrats are expediting citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally so the party could get a permanent electoral advantage. Journalists have thoroughly debunked his claim. Trying to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment to motivate voters to the polls, Trump and his allies have for months repeated the lie that noncitizens are voting in droves.
Musk shared a bogus claim about widespread voter fraud in a Wisconsin county in the 2020 election. The targeted jurisdiction, Henrico County, posted a thread on X correcting Musk’s assertions with data. Musk also amplified a claim that Michigan’s voter rolls were packed with inactive voters and ripe for fraud. Top state officials had to rebut those false claims too.
“The most dangerous and effective thing is that retweet button,” said Jay Young, senior director of voting and democracy at Common Cause, a national voting rights group that has a social media monitoring program tracking online disinformation.
Beyond Musk’s posts, disinformation has thrived on X.
Your best trusted source is not your friend’s cousin's uncle that you saw on Twitter. It’s your local election official.
– Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting
The American Sunlight Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that fights misleading information and is run by the former head of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security disinformation team, released a report this month on the scope of the problem. The report found that nearly 1,200 likely automated accounts on X are spreading Russian propaganda and pro-Trump disinformation about the presidential election.
American spy agencies believe the Kremlin is actively pushing election disinformation this year.
And nearly half the Republican candidates running for top state offices or Congress have questioned the integrity of this year’s election, primarily through social media, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Many of the candidates’ posts include falsehoods.
Sustained lies about election integrity have consequences: State and local election officials have been bombarded by threats and harassment this year, and confidence in elections has plummeted.
According to an October NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, more than 3 in 4 Americans remain confident or very confident that state and local agencies will carry out a fair and accurate election.
Still, 58% of Americans say they are concerned or very concerned that voter fraud will occur this year. Among Republicans polled, 86% are concerned about fraud, while 55% of independents and 33% of Democrats have a similar fear.
How officials respond
Over the past four years of going to town hall meetings and other community events throughout Oconto County, Wisconsin, on the western shore of Green Bay, County Clerk Kim Pytleski has repeatedly heard from voters who say that because their preferred candidate did not win in 2020, there must be something wrong with the electoral process.
Presented with conspiracy theories, Pytleski, a Republican, doesn’t just tell voters they’re wrong; she asks where the voter got that information, and then she walks them through the specific concern with step-by-step details about the voting process.
One concern that often comes up: the volume of absentee ballot applications voters receive in the mail. Many residents think the applications are actual ballots that can be marked and returned.
Voters will claim if there were that many ballots being sent, there must be election fraud, she said. Pytleski has had to explain that those were applications, and they were coming from political parties and other groups. Voters can only receive one ballot from her office, she will tell them.
“And when we’ve explained that, for the most part, people are like, ‘OK, that makes sense. I get that,’” she said during an interview in August.
Touching her right hand to her heart and raising her hand to the sky, Pytleski said she’s a dedicated member of the Republican Party, like most of the county’s voters. But it has been challenging for her to go to those meetings and feel voters’ suspicion. She’s even been called a liar to her face.
“I’m walking into a room that feels not so super-friendly, and I have to remind them that this is the girl that rode the bus route with your children, this is the girl who grew up in that house down the road,” she said. “My name means something to me, so I would never do anything to jeopardize that or the actual process.”
Misinformation can arise after local election offices err in some way, whether it was a misprint on a ballot, an electrical power outage at a polling place or something else.
Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the Republican clerk for Kent County, Michigan, regularly reminds voters that elections are run by humans and humans make mistakes, but that there are checks and balances in place to ensure elections remain secure and transparent, she said.
On her desk, a decorative sign reminds her to “Serve the Lord with Gladness.” She said she hopes voters will share her optimism and faith in the system.
“Their rights are going to be protected, their votes are going to be counted, the election is going to be accurate and fair, and we’re going to have a good day,” she said. “Anything that arises, we’ll be ready for it. It’s as simple as that.”
Beyond listening to local election officials, voters can rely on election protection hotlines run by experts and pro-democracy advocates, said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a national legal advocacy group.
The committee is one of many voting rights groups in a coalition that is leading the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline this election season. The groups run similar hotlines for people who speak Spanish, Arabic and around 10 Asian languages.
With all the hotlines, Hewitt said, voters can call with questions or concerns about their access or about election procedures.
“This is something that we attend to not just when there’s a problem, but it’s something that we try to get ahead of,” he said. “We’re there to help guide them every step of the way.”
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.
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