SHOW NOTES: Bullies, Authoritarians, and French Fries

Welcome! Today brings my family a day past the eight-year anniversary of my wife starting a chemo pill that was supposed to keep her around for about 18 months. She’s still here. Thanks for all your continued prayers.

🚨🚨Breaking News. Pennsylvania Senate race has moved into the toss-up category, from leans Democrat.

😂 LOL. They’ve reached this point on the left.

Just a Fact. With two weeks left in this presidential race, Democrats have given up making a persuasive case for Kamala Harris and have instead decided to shame and bully people into voting for her. It is not going to work. I’m old enough to remember when Kamala Harris’s campaign said they would “lighten the mood” and not just try to scare people about Trump. That did not last long. The current “vibe” is desperation, not joy, unless the joy has the last name Reid.

There Are The Authoritarians They Warned Us About. Elizabeth Warren is attacking McDonald’s (!!!!) for price gouging after Donald Trump’s campaign stop. The Democrats have warned us that if we were not careful, leaders in Washington would use the government against their perceived enemies.

Desperation. The New York Times felt the need to find McDonald’s workers to criticize how Donald Trump manned the fryer. This is how you know his stunt — and it was a campaign stunt — was effective. The whole of the press corps is screaming about it.

The Final Georgia Poll. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution has released its final poll of Georgia, and it is a disaster for the Harris campaign. Trump leads by four points. What is most notable are these bits of data:

1. Trump wins with the 18-29 year old crowd.

2. Harris wins women by 18%, but Trump wins men by 31%.

3. Harris has 29% job approval among men.

4. The most telling bit of data and the most damning part for Kamala Harris is the 17.8% of black voters who say, two weeks before the election, that they are undecided.

In my professional experience as someone who has run political campaigns in Georgia for both Republicans and Democrats, those are not undecided voters. Those are black voters who are staying home because they don’t like Harris but can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump. And that helps Trump.

As of today, 1 in 4 Georgia voters have already cast their ballot.

Related. Republicans Eat Into Democrats’ Early Voting Advantage (WSJ)

By the Way. I’m told by people tracking all of this that there are several majority-minority congressional districts in swing states where black voters are underperforming in turnout. This could be them waiting for the “souls to the polls” voting effort, but it could be what the polling has suggested for some time — black voters are not excited about Harris.

Her Experience Isn’t Relatable. What I have said to much rage and hatred from the left is what is true. Talk to black voters in the South, male and female, and they do not think Harris has had the “lived experience” of an African-American, and they are beyond the historicity of it, given they already got Barack Obama. Harris is the daughter of immigrants, one of whom descends from a line of slave owners in Jamaica. She grew up in Canada and had a comfy life in Berkeley, which she used to refer to as “privileged” and now claims to be “middle class.” Black voters do not relate to her and her background.

Related: Unseen Middle-Class Black Voters Move Right (Salena Zito)

Is a Democratic Congresswoman Compromised By Chinese Agents? This disturbing story in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Congresswoman Grace Meng has uncomfortably close ties to Chinese agents and the Chinese Communist Party. We’ve already seen one New York political candidate forced out of a race due to Chinese communist pressure, and this is a disturbing trend.

Democrats Start Prepping For Their Loss. All the guys they hate cheat. That’s how they win. When politics becomes your favorite sport or religion, you get cheap punditry like this.

Must See TV

Kamala Harris’s “town hall” with Liz Cheney was no town hall. Audience members were not allowed to ask their own questions. Only pre-screened questions submitted by God-only-knows-who were asked.

This is not a good look.

The Harris Campaign’s Dumbassery

Two weeks before the election with Pennsylvania as a must-win state, the Harris Campaign’s environmental spokesgal, who’s other job is fighting to ban gas stoves, has announced Kamala Harris really isn’t as in favor of fracking as she claimed. She won’t ban it but won’t let it be expanded. This has provided an opening to sow more distrust of her position in places like Pennsylvania. Then the anti-gas spokesgal reversed her reversal. Over to you, Fox News and future Cabinet member Doug Burgum:

This is my daily Show Notes email. It is my show prep that I send to my listeners right as the show starts. You can listen live right here. Paid subscribers get the full show notes, with so much more below the fold.

Now, on to the big stuff, including all the signs in the newspapers and press across America today that they’re signaling to the Democrats that they should prepare for a Trump victory.

They’re Starting to Hint

I don’t think Politico would have, as the top story on its website this morning, coverage of the fight over who might be Trump’s Chief of Staff in a new Trump White House if the press wasn’t starting to realize how this campaign is trending.

The contenders are Susie Wiles, Brooke Rollins, and Kevin McCarthy.

The bottom line is that Wiles has earned it. She’s been Trump's steady hand, built him a professional campaign, got his head back in the game after the assassination attempt and Biden's departure, and earned his trust.

Still, having this as the top story two weeks before the election is a big indicator of where Politico suspects the election is going.

Flavor Flav, Call Your Office

In the mid-1980’s, William Jonathan Drayton, Jr. who went by the stage name Flavor Flav, procured and started wearing a big clock around his neck. He’d yell out, “What time is it?” And he had a big ass clock around his neck everybody could read.

Someone must send him to the next Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris event. These days, the kids on the right love to ask, “Don’t you know what time it is?” Flavor Flav did it best, but the point is still the same.

100% of Americans 100% already have formed an opinion on Donald Trump. That we are two weeks before the election and 17.8% of black voters just in Georgia still are not decided is not the time to lecture Americans on the parade of horribles you think you might get from a second Donald Trump term. Everybody has already considered those and they are undecided on Harris, not Trump.

That neither Cheney nor Harris nor the whole of the Lincoln Projectors et al have clued in on the fact that “threat to democracy” is not the issue for undecided voters right now is telling just how badly the Trump haters, broken by their hatred, have lost their ability to tell time or read the greens.

Isaac Schorr of Mediaite and formerly National Review, tweeted yesterday, “I've felt this way for a while but it really struck me watching the Sarah Longwell-Kamala Harris event: Elite Never Trumpers probably would have been more helpful to Democrats if they actually pushed them to moderate rather than just declaring their undying devotion for them. Would have been more politically effective but a lot less monetizable. Says a lot about the divergence -- and Longwell is a particularly egregious example -- between their stated and revealed preferences.”

Frankly, a lot of these anti-Trump Republicans, including Longwell, are not as politically astute as they claim, never really were the strategists they claim to be, and when not dripping with disdain for the voters they need to persuade, simply do not understand them. Also, they’re liberals who were at home among liberal Republicans. So they, cheap dates for Harris, had no convictions beyond stopping Trump that could be used to redirect Harris’s policy paths. If anything, they agree with her and have taken off their moderate masks to be the liberals they always privately were.

Here, at this late hour, they have poorly played their hand. “Threat to democracy” isn’t going to persuade someone who had to scale back family vacations because of grocery prices. “This is the end of America” really isn’t persuasive when the family of five can’t afford a big car and all of the government demands they drive electric despite their power in Western North Carolina still being out.

Cheney, Longwell, Harris et al don’t just know what time it is, they don’t know how to persuade Republicans. They just bully and shame and that is not effective at this time.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are today running pieces about “what if the polls are wrong.” Here is what the New York Times wants its readers to process:

Let’s call the first approach the unified theory. It tries to explain, in one swoop, why the polls and Democrats do well in midterms, while the polls and Democrats do poorly in presidential elections.

This theory holds that pollsters simply can’t reach enough of the least politically engaged voters — and these voters overwhelmingly back Mr. Trump. The polls can do fine in midterm elections, when only the highly engaged (and now relatively Democratic-leaning voters) cast ballots, but they underestimate Mr. Trump in presidential elections.

If you’re a liberal reader of this newsletter, this theory may send a shiver down your spine. All cycle, we’ve noted Mr. Trump’s strength among less engaged voters. We’ve agonized over the challenges in polling. Recently, we’ve observed that the Times/Siena poll shows strange similarities to the midterm election. The unified theory stitches all of this together into one potential nightmare for Democrats, where all the subtle patterns in the Times/Siena data add up to a harbinger of yet another polling misfire — and another Trump presidency.

A version of this theory is popular among the most renowned pollsters and data scientists, and there’s a lot of evidence to support it.

Here is what the Wall Street Journal wants its readers to know:

Pollsters are still debating whether Trump himself exerts a unique force on voters that pollsters haven’t yet navigated. While state polls were off-base in 2016 and national polls erred in 2020, polling was considered generally accurate in the midterm elections of 2022, when Trump wasn’t on the ballot.

Some in the survey field have thought that Trump supporters are less trustful of civic institutions and so less likely to take surveys, while others might be wary of telling pollsters their true choice of candidate. Kennedy said there are signs in some recent polls that Trump voters in fact aren’t masking their voting intention, at least this year: People registered as Republicans have been as likely as registered Democrats, if not more so, to take some surveys.

“He’s become so normalized,” she said of Trump, “so I’m hoping that the measurement of people’s voting intention has become more accurate.”

Do I detect a pattern?

Harris Plagiarism Scandal Spreads

Turns out Kamala Harris did not just plagiarize a book but also testimony, under oath, before Congress in 2007. Wow.

By repaying the loans of prosecutors and public defenders, Harris argued, the bill, which had been introduced with bipartisan support, would provide an incentive for lawyers to enter public service, or at least diminish the incentive to leave it.

The statement was simple and pragmatic. But Harris wasn’t the first person to make it.

Virtually her entire testimony about the bill was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois, who had testified in support of the legislation two months earlier before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both statements cite the same surveys, use the same language, and make the same points in the same order, with a paragraph added here or there. They even contain the same typos, such as missing punctuation or mistaken plurals. One error—a "who" that should have been a "whom"—was corrected in Harris’s transposition.

Does Harris have any original thoughts?

In Other News

• IRS announces new federal income tax brackets for 2025 (CNBC)

• In Trump Ad, ‘Not a Thing That Comes to Mind’ Ties Harris to Biden’s Liabilities (NY Times)

• Simple Economic Explanations Keep Breaking Down. Here’s Why. (WSJ)

• Trump ground game faces new fraud claims as video shows door-knock hack (Guardian)

• Suspected Tren de Aragua gang members caught after fleeing brutal Stamford murder scene (NY Post)

• Democrats brace for a possible crack in the blue wall and signs of North Carolina slipping (NBC News)

• Senate Democrats running away from Harris in ‘blue wall’ states (The Hill)

• A jittery Harris campaign makes big plans to clinch a narrow win (CNN)

• CBS Producer in Gaza Has History of Antisemitic, Anti-Israel Commentary: ‘Are Jews Really Human Like Us?’ (National Review)

• Peloton partners with Costco to sell Bike+ as it looks to reach young, wealthy customers (CNBC)

• America’s Most Famous Inflation Gauge Is Easing — But Some of Your Biggest Expenses Are Left Out (Bloomberg)

• Former Abercrombie CEO arrested in sex trafficking investigation (ABC News)

• North Korean troop claims revive talk of EU ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine (Politico)

Trump’s Closing Argument

It boils down to one word: Hope.