Stepping directly on Kamala Harris’s closing big rally at the Ellipse, speaking to her natural largest constituency of swamp bureaucrats and D.C. insiders, Joe Biden decided to run his mouth with a typical tone deaf message.
When Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her marquee closing address on the Ellipse Tuesday to tens of thousands of supporters, President Biden was tucked away at the White House and purposefully out of sight. But he still managed to step on her message just a week from the election.
The president on Tuesday night caused a headache for Harris’s campaign when he appeared to say that Donald Trump’s supporters were “garbage” while on a call with Latino voters. Biden later said he meant to refer to one supporter—Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian who made crude comments about Puerto Rico and other subjects at the former president’s Sunday rally—not all supporters.
But video of Biden’s remarks quickly circulated, and the damage was done. Republicans compared the comment, the latest in a series of verbal blunders by the president, to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 reference to Trump’s backers as “deplorables.”
Harris’s allies were caught off guard and miffed by the remarks.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told CNN that campaigns shouldn’t attack the supporters of the other candidate. “It’s certainly not words that I would choose,” he said.
Harris, speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews, said the president had “clarified his comments” and added, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and would be president for all Americans. She said Biden called her Tuesday night but the “garbage” comments didn’t come up.
More here: anxious Democrats groan at Biden’s “garbage” comment. And more below on closing arguments from each side:
On Trump and Harris’ closing arguments
For the past several months, it’s been well apparent that Donald Trump is winning this election. There are numerous factors that would indicate this. Early vote numbers are distinctly more Republican-leaning than they have been historically. Behind-the-scenes reports among Democrats indicate high levels of buyer’s remorse for picking Kamala Harris — and additional doubts about the failure to pick a higher-quality vice presidential candidate. Harris’s failures in numerous interviews and appearances to answer basic questions with anything convincing and inspirational, resorting instead to repeated talking points and not very good ones at that, have given Americans the impression they are voting for a mystery-box candidate versus the devil they know.
The billion dollars spent on giving Kamala a winner’s glow has left her still upside-down in approval ratings. Her campaign couldn’t even manage an appearance with Beyoncé without getting booed for failure to live up to expectations.
And yet. And yet.
The problem for Donald Trump is that in the past week, he’s done a lot of things and engaged with several voices that seem to give volume to his worst attributes. The scene at Madison Square Garden — as much as the media criticism is ludicrous and overblown — was more notable for what it failed to offer voters in the closing weeks. The lean-in to just more bro-centric content creators was lamentable. And the failure to offer a clear storyline of what voters brow-beaten by this economy can expect was a missed opportunity.
If your goal is to close the deal with a big national spectacle, why make it a litany of people who we already know love you like the daddy figure they never had in their lives? Why not reach for the margins, for gettable independents who truly still do exist in key states in small but key numbers, instead of sticking with the people who write your name in lipstick and circle it with a heart?
If Donald Trump loses this election, it’s going to be because of fundamental advantages for Democrats in several key states on rules set under Covid and continued to this day. But it will also be because it’s just not smart to spend the last week leading up to an election talking about all the things that your natural supporters like the most. It’s comfortable and safe for MAGA, but it’s also the kind of tactic that leaves some voters asking: what’s in the box?
Most of Harris’ prepared remarks have a closer relationship to the ads from her campaign, the Future Forward super PAC, and the down-ballot Democrats running in competitive races. They tend toward more traditional Democratic messaging on economic policy, which is often less visible in daily coverage.
The most-aired spots, with tens of millions of dollars behind them, warn that Trump would “give tax breaks to billionaires,” often with blue-collar narrators. None focus on “democracy,” though one spot in high circulation this month warned of the Trump administration veterans (including Mike Pence and John Bolton) who said that the ex-president was unfit to serve again. A new ad by Future Forward tries to connect the extremism and economic arguments, saying Trump “has plans to punish his political enemies” but “no plan to punish the corporations who rip you off.” …
Trump is ending the campaign with a clear polling advantage on immigration, and a narrower advantage on which candidate can better handle the economy. His paid messaging is designed to protect that advantage; it’s echoed by super PACs, in down-ballot races, that loop footage of migrants crossing the desert or storming a border checkpoint.
More recent ads incorporate a clip from The View of Harris declining to name a break with any Biden decision, which they tie to an argument that “nothing will change” if she’s elected. Trump’s campaign and outside groups have spent tens of millions of dollars on ads about pro-trans policies, promising to end them. Some Senate candidates facing similar attacks have rebutted or responded to those spots. Harris hasn’t, focusing instead on her own main themes.
“We’re just not running against Kamala,” Trump said in New York. “I think a lot of our politicians here tonight know this. She means nothing. She’s purely a vessel.”
Breaking down Senate expectations
For Democrats looking at the map, the path to keeping Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in power seems slim indeed. It has them hoping against hope they can make races in Florida or Texas close enough to squeak through. Michigan senator Gary Peters, the Democratic Senatorial Committee chair for this cycle, told Axios that Florida and Texas “are real and we hope to get resources into those states.” But Florida’s bright-red culture should save Rick Scott’s reelection campaign effort — and in Texas, where Trump should win easily, Ted Cruz remains the Great White Whale of the national Democratic donor class, pulling off repeated wins despite his personal unpopularity.
The Cruz race is the only incumbent-featuring one Republican consultants are worried about, in part because Democratic challenger Colin Allred, a former football player turned member of Congress, has positioned himself as a normal-guy centrist, with nothing like the cult of personality that surrounded Beto O’Rourke. Allred doesn’t aspire to Kennedyesque posing for Annie Leibovitz; he’s just concentrating on depicting Cruz as too focused on national media to pay attention to the priorities of Texans. The incongruity of Allred’s line is that, since the failure of Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016, he’s actually become a much more state-focused senator — leading the way on bipartisan legislation on the Federal Aviation Administration and CHIPS permitting reform, and positioning himself to take over the powerful Commerce committee in a GOP Senate. Touting those accomplishments, as swampy as they may sound, could be the key for Cruz to make a close election less about him as a person and more about what he can do for Texas.
By now, Republicans at all levels are used to the baggage they pick up navigating the challenges of the Trump era — probably none of them expected questions about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs. But there’s a trickle-down effect on the Democratic side, too. Kamala Harris, in an interview with a Wisconsin public radio station, re-endorsed the idea of getting rid of the Senate filibuster — framing the dumping of the filibuster as something done for the single issue of codifying Roe v. Wade. Besides the fact that this would be logistically impossible, dumping the filibuster would open the door for Republicans to pass a nationwide abortion ban, as Sinema promptly pointed out. In typical Kamala fashion, Harris has previously endorsed getting rid of the filibuster for “voting rights” and for the “Green New Deal” — and prior to that, signed a 2017 bipartisan letter along with sixty fellow senators emphatically supporting the filibuster. One of her fellow signatories, then-Democrat Joe Manchin, announced in response to her flip-flop that he could not support her for the presidency. Harris’s position now presents a new avenue for attack on Democratic candidates, and Republican consultants plan to use it. “She’s made clear she wants to pack the court and get rid of the filibuster to do every radical thing she used to support, and pretends not to support now,” one campaign advisor said. “That’s a live issue for every Senate campaign.”
Of course, given the map, the trajectory of these races, and the higher quality of many Republican candidates this cycle, getting rid of the filibuster might be the last thing in the world Democrats want to do post-Election Day. Whatever the outcome at the presidential level, a Republican Senate with new blood and new management seems a much stronger bet than anything else in this cycle of chaos. Whether that power is used to implement a more aggressive Trump agenda or to block Harris’s attempts to push policy further left, it’s the one thing this year that gives Washington Republicans hope to avoid wandering too long in the wilderness.
How Democrats rigged the vote in Puerto Rico
When they walk into the polling booth on Election Day, Puerto Ricans will be offered three possibilities: (1) statehood, (2) complete independence from the U.S., and (3) sovereignty that includes an ongoing association with the United States. What they will not see is the option of maintaining the status quo.
In previous referendums, the status quo—remaining a commonwealth—has been among the most popular options. So why would the latest referendum suddenly exclude this option? Because the Democratic Party, in concert with Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood party, have designed it that way. There is no other way to describe it: They have rigged the vote to give the statehood option a decisive advantage—and they have done it in plain sight.
The status of the island has long been the most important issue in Puerto Rican politics. It is the main divide between the two largest parties, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which advocates maintaining the status quo, and the New Progressive Party (PNP), which would like Puerto Rico to become the 51st state.
It’s no secret that the Democrats would love to see Puerto Rico achieve statehood. They believe it would add another blue state to the union, secure two more Democratic votes in the Senate, and tip the balance of power in their favor. Republicans see statehood as a threat for these same reasons.
Realistically, Puerto Rican statehood could happen only if Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House, while also eliminating the filibuster—a situation that is unlikely but far from impossible. Should that circumstance ever arise, Democrats have been preparing the ground for Puerto Rican statehood by encouraging referendums on the island. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s a good thing to check in on the popular will of Puerto Ricans. To that end, in both 1997 and 2010, House Democrats passed bills calling for straightforward referendums that included the full suite of options.
This time, however, Democrats are playing dirty. In 2022, House Democrats, in consultation with the PNP, passed the Puerto Rico Status Act, which called for another referendum—one that excluded the status quo option. The bill was reintroduced in 2023, this time with more co-sponsors, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most famous American politician of Puerto Rican descent. The Democrats’ bill was then adopted by Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood governor, as the basis for November’s referendum.
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Quote
“The average American is just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something. He is going to do something. If, on the other hand, you make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him soft, spoiled and eventually a very weak individual.”
— Richard Nixon