Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast’s daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It’s only 32 days until Election Day and here’s what’s happening in the race to the White House between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
THE DOWNLOAD
CNN’s senior political data reporter, Harry Enten, warned Friday that Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign is in trouble—so much so that he said a win would be “historically unprecedented.”
Enten analyzed the polling data around the question, “Do you think the country is on the right track?” Apparently, just 28 percent of Americans think the United States is currently headed in the right direction under its Democratic leadership. This figure sits at 42 percent in years when the White House incumbent’s party wins the presidency and just 25 percent when it loses, he said.
“This to me is a bad sign for Kamala Harris’s campaign,” he said. “The bottom line is it looks a lot more like a loser than it does like a winner when it comes to the country being on the right track.”
President Joe Biden on Friday expressed concerns over whether Trump and his allies will instigate political violence after the election if he loses to Harris.
“Two separate questions,” Biden said when asked at a White House press conference whether he had confidence the election will be free, fair, and peaceful. “I’m confident it’ll be free and fair. I don’t know whether it’ll be peaceful.”
Making his first White House briefing appearance of his entire presidency, Biden said, “The things that Trump has said, and the things that he said last time out when he didn’t like the outcome of the election, were very dangerous. I’m concerned about what they’re going to do.”
POLLS OBSESSED
Could this race be any tighter? CNN’s latest Poll of Polls, published Friday, puts Harris at 49 percent to Trump’s 48 percent. The average is of the four most recent national polls of registered or likely voters that reached CNN’s standards for being nonpartisan. The polls were all conducted after Trump and Harris debated but before Tim Walz and JD Vance faced off this week. So tight is the race that the Poll of Polls has not shifted in a month, CNN said.
ON THE MOVE
Everybody hit a swing state on Friday. Harris campaigned in Michigan, which Biden narrowly won in 2020 and which Trump carried in 2016 in a stunning upset. Trump and Vance did their bus tour through Georgia, where the former president met with Gov. Brian Kemp—even though they can barely stand other—to survey hurricane damage before heading to North Carolina. Walz was scheduled to make a campaign stop in Wisconsin.
FLASHBACK FRIDAY
The vice-presidential debate on Oct. 4, 2016, was as distinctly vanilla as Mike Pence, who at the time, as governor of Indiana, went head-to-head with Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. But there was real heat between the two mid-westerners (Kaine was born in Minnesota and brought up in a Kansas City suburb) over Trump’s tax returns. Trump had for months broken a 2014 promise to release them and Kaine pounced on Pence over the issue, prompting bickering which was impossible to control. “All right,” Kaine said as the moderator told them both to stop. “We’re having fun up here.”
BEAST OF THE DAY
Elon Musk plans to join other MAGA World stars at Trump’s return rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, at the site where a shooter wounded the former president in an assassination attempt in July.
The world’s richest man will be making his first campaign trail appearance alongside Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Vance is also scheduled to be there, as are some Trump loyalists in Congress, including Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former White House physician who examined Trump’s gunshot wound.
In a post on Trump’s X account late Thursday, the Republican nominee touted his forthcoming event as “HISTORIC!” Replying to the tweet, Musk wrote: “I will be there to support!”
SHAMELESS PLUG
The New Abnormal co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy are angry about the current political mess that Americans find themselves in—but not at who you might think. Their target? “A supposed Democrat that was supposed to do a really important job and failed.” Find out who is riling them up by downloading on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
