The Home Stretch: Here’s the election news for Oct. 28
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Both campaigns will be hitting the major swing states in the last eight days before Election Day, and there’s no shortage of news about this race. Here’s your daily update.
Where is everyone?
Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, are making a run at all seven swing states this week. Harris starts today in Michigan, where she will concentrate on messaging around jobs with visits to Saginaw and Macomb. Walz will hit up two locations in Wisconsin — Manitowoc and Waukesha — and then the two will reunite for a rare joint appearance at an Ann Arbor rally along with singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers.
On the Republican side, presidential nominee former President Donald Trump will stick with Georgia today, appearing at the National Faith Summit in Powder Springs in the afternoon and holding a rally at Georgia Tech this evening. Vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance will be in Wisconsin, visiting Wausau.
In local news, current Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff will hold a campaign event today at 5 p.m. in Pittsburgh, though location details were unavailable as of this writing.
Any new data?
We will soon reach the point in the cycle where pollsters hang up their telephones, but in the meantime, here’s what we’ve got for today.
InsiderAdvantage polled likely voters in crucial swing states Michigan and Pennsylvania from Oct. 26-27 and found Trump ahead one point in each, 48-47. They also polled likely voters in the same time frame in Pennsylvania on the Casey-McCormick U.S. Senate race and found it tied, 47-47.
Suffolk University has Trump up one point in Wisconsin, another battleground state, with a 48-47 split. Trafalgar Group found Trump at +2 in Arizona and Georgia, both 48-46.
Today’s TIPP Insights tracking poll — which has bounced steadily between the two candidates — is dead even, with both candidates garnering 48%.
FiveThirtyEight has Trump winning in 54 out of 100 simulated electoral college situations with Harris at 45, and that pesky 269-269 tie is still a possibility.
A bit of news
Here are just a few of the political news stories from the past day.
Trump drew more than 20,000 people to a Madison Square Garden rally in New York City on Sunday. The event sparked a firestorm of controversy after speakers made several racist and bigoted remarks.
Harris is preparing to deliver her own closing argument at a rally on the Elipse in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The rally is expected to draw about 20,000 people.
San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa crashed a teammate’s post-game interview on Sunday to make emphatic gestures at his Make America Great Again hat. “Jersey Shore” star Vinny Guadagnino also apparently supports Trump, as he attended the former president’s rally in New York on Sunday.
Harris unveiled plans for a Puerto Rico Opportunity Economy Task Force on Sunday.
“I will create a new Puerto Rico Opportunity Economy Task Force, where the federal government will work with the private sector, with nonprofits and community leaders, to foster economic growth and create thousands of new, good paying jobs in Puerto Rico, including for our young people,” she said in a video posted to Instagram.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s America PAC for “running an illegal lottery.” The PAC has been giving away $1 million every day to registered voters in swing states who sign the PAC’s petition for “free speech and the right to bear arms.” An Arizona voter won the cash prize yesterday.
How everyone’s feeling
Opinions are not in short supply this morning from columnists and experts. Here are a few.
• USA Today’s Marla Bautista says that “Trump vows to attack public education if elected. It’s our kids who would suffer.” “The Republican Party has consistently attacked public schools and teachers unions while promoting vouchers and other initiatives that drain resources from classrooms. The idea of shuttering the Department of Education has been a GOP rallying cry for decades. I recently watched an interview with Trump on ‘Fox & Friends’ during which he claimed, ‘We’re going to take the Department of Education, close it, I’m going to close it.’ Trump’s vow reflects a broader agenda, like the one described in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, aimed at reducing federal oversight in education and limiting government spending on essential services.”
• Over at Newsweek, Delano Squires writes, “The Democrats Have No Place for Black Men With Traditional Values.” He argues, “The party’s views on social progress are shaped in large part by feminists and Pride activists, which means men who want to have any influence on the political Left must be willing to use their “power” and “privilege” on behalf of women or people in the LGBTQ coalition. This explains why some of the most vocal critics of Black men this election cycle have been surrogates who look like us. In the last month, we have seen President Barack Obama chastise “the brothers” during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh.”
• Also at USA Today, Ingrid Jacques asks, “Where’d the joy go? Harris ditches happy vibes for fearmongering about Trump.” “Harris’ initial jolt has fizzled, however, and polls indicate that she’s losing ground in these crucial final days of the campaign – while Trump is gaining it. That’s why in recent days, the tenor of Harris’ campaign has changed dramatically from one of joy to one of fearmongering. Gone are the days of focusing on her ‘opportunity economy.’ Now is the time for calling Trump a ‘fascist.’”
• “Donald Trump’s Racist NYC Rally Was Vile. It Was Also Political Suicide,” says David Rothkopf at the Daily Beast. He adds, “To all those Republicans who shed crocodile tears because their feelings were so hurt that people were calling Donald Trump a fascist: Stop. To all the MAGA defenders who said it was over-the-top to compare Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to that held by the German-American Bund in an earlier incarnation of Madison Square Garden: Shush. To all those who were falling once again for the bought-and-paid-for narrative that Trump somehow had the momentum going into the final week of campaign 2024: Nope.”
• And lastly, at the Washington Post, Shadi Hamid discusses “How education and religion have redrawn America’s political map.” “The declining salience of class represents perhaps the most consequential political shift of the past century in the United States, altering the very nature of the partisan divide in the process. From the end of World War II until 2012, whites among the top 5 percent of income earners were the most likely to vote Republican. Not only is this no longer the case, the pattern has reversed almost entirely. Now, the top 5 percent are the least likely to vote Republican. Meanwhile, Democrats are losing working-class white voters by a 2-1 margin.”