Donald Trump went viral with a carefully staged photo op at McDonalds, an apparent meditation about a golfing legend’s genitalia and crass insults at a charity banquet. He has dominated headlines after issuing dark threats, including deploying the military against the “enemy from within”; repeatedly declined to say he would accept the results of the election; and delivered long, roundabout speeches and an impromptu 39-minute dance session.
Speaking to a crowd in Erie, Pa., on the last Saturday in September, former president Donald Trump lambasted his Democratic opponent.
“Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired — sad — but Lyin’ Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way,” he said, mispronouncing the Democratic presidential nominee’s name as the crowd chuckled. “There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing.”
Ten minutes later, he offered an even blunter assessment, warning that the nation’s immigration system was being mismanaged by “stupid people like Kamala.”
“She’s a stupid person,” he said, before adding again, as if for emphasis: “Stupid person.”
Since Harris emerged on the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Trump has repeatedly attacked her intelligence — deriding her as a “dumb,” “mentally unfit,” “slow,” “stupid,” and an “extremely low IQ person,” among other similar pejoratives.
To some of the former president’s fiercest supporters, he is simply stating a truth and articulating aloud their view of her. But for many voters, as well as experts, Trump’s sneering dismissiveness of Harris’s intellect reeks of racism and sexism.
If elected, Harris — who is Black and Indian American — would make history as the first female president, as well as the first female president of color, and Trump’s repeated jabs at her intelligence go beyond mere insults.
The attacks are particularly striking given Harris’s deeply accomplished résumé: former San Francisco district attorney, former California attorney general, former U.S. senator and now vice president.
“This lands differently when you do this to women of color, because you’re saying, ‘How dare you get out of the box I put you in,’” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office.
“There is a history in the United States about the perception of Black people, about the perception of Black women, that we’re not smart enough, that we’re not good enough, that you only get to where you are because of affirmative action,” she said. “So when you attack people of color, when you attack the vice president, you’re really showing that you have these biases.”
The Trump campaign rejected the notion that Trump’s questioning of Harris’s intelligence is in any way racist or sexist.
“Only dumb and low IQ individuals would be offended by that, expressing faux outrage because they need every excuse to explain away their insecure, miserable, and pathetic existence,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Being unintelligent has nothing to do with race or gender. It has everything to do with Kamala Harris being wholly unqualified to be President because of all the hurt and misery she has brought to America.”
Harris has raised her own questions about Trump’s acuity and fitness for the job, though with less stark language and name-calling. In an interview with journalist Roland Martin last Monday, Harris accused Trump’s staff of deliberately keeping him from the public, noting he had recently pulled out of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview, has refused a second debate with her and won’t release his medical records.
“Why is his staff doing that?” she asked. “And it may be because they think he’s just not ready. And unfit and unstable.”
Trump’s digs at Harris’s intelligence began to intensify almost as soon as President Joe Biden bowed out of his reelection bid on July 21 and endorsed her. The very next day, Trump described Harris as “Dumb as a Rock” in a social media post.
He has since continued to press the theme. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning, Trump described her as “a low IQ person” who is “not smart.” The night before, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Manhattan, Trump’s comedy roast included a jibe at Harris’s intellect.
“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the white-tie crowd. “This is a person that has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”
During an interview Tuesday at the Chicago Economic Club, Trump said Harris “is not as smart as Biden, if you can believe it.” And last Monday, he took to social media to call on her to “pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility,” and dismissed her recent appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” as “slow and lethargic.”
Trump’s attacks on her intelligence happen on an almost daily basis — and sometimes more than once a day. Trump described her as “dumber than hell” at the Detroit Economic Club on Oct. 10, and in Reading, Pa., on Oct. 9 warned, “People are realizing she’s a dumb person and we can’t have another dumb president.”
He continued: “Somebody said to me — one of my people, a nice person, a staff person — said, ‘Sir, please don’t call her dumb. The women won’t like it.’”
Trump has struggled with both Black and female voters. An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month found women supported Harris by a 14-point margin, with 55 percent preferring her and 41 percent preferring Trump. The same poll found that Harris also overwhelmingly leads Trump among Black voters, with 84 percent preferring her to the 11 percent who prefer Trump — although Trump has improved his margins slightly among Black women, to the consternation of the Harris campaign and Democrats.
Trump has so far refused to heed advice to avoid bad-mouthing Harris’s intelligence — in part because, as one confidant put it, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share a candid insight, “he doesn’t respect her as a worthy opponent.”
The Harris campaign declined to respond to questions about Trump questioning her intelligence. Her team has largely followed the vice president’s posture: not leaning into the history-making nature of her bid as potentially the first woman of color to be president, while dismissing Trump’s broadsides as “the same old tired playbook” that has left Americans exhausted and ready for change.
Last week, Harris accused Trump’s staff of hiding him away, rhetorically asking a large crowd in Greenville, N.C.: “Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”
Trump has long viewed himself as a counterpuncher — forcefully attacking anyone who goes after him, including his White male opponents. Trump, 78, repeatedly went after Biden, 81, over his alleged cognitive abilities, arguing that the president was not physically or mentally capable of serving a second term.
But Trump also has a rich history of sexist attacks, and has reserved some of his most vituperative abuse for women of color. In 2018, Trump demeaned three Black female reporters in as many days, describing one as a “loser” and sneering at another, “You ask lots of stupid questions.” In 2019, amid a fight with House Democrats, Trump took to social media to encourage “The Squad” — a group of congresswomen of color — to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”
He has also attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is Black, as “low IQ Maxine Waters” and as “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”
For supporters of Harris, 60, the insults are deeply offensive and, they say, geared as firing up Trump’s base.
“There’s an air of misogyny about it, there’s an air of racism about it,” said Kim Barbaro, 49, a Democrat from Ottsville, Pa., in rural Bucks County. “There’s a lot of dog whistles going on when he speaks, so I’m hoping we’ve reached the tipping point with it, because it’s gotten so intense.”
“We need to return back to decency. He’s an unkind human and I’m not here for it,” she added.
Alexandra Moncure — a 35-year-old former Republican turned independent after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — took full-time leave from her marking job in Manhattan to volunteer at one of Harris’s Pennsylvania campaign offices and said she believes Trump’s attacks on the vice president’s intelligence come “from a place of insecurity.”
“I think it’s one of his approaches in terms of how he activates his base to attack people — on gender, on race, on anything that he views as something that could detract from her,” Moncure said.
Marjorie Margolies — a former Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication — arrived in Congress during the first “Year of the Woman” in 1992, when four women won election to the Senate, and said she is astonished that a presidential candidate deliberately treats his female opponent this way.
“It boggles my mind that this is acceptable behavior,” she said. “I’m stunned, I’m appalled, and mostly I’m surprised that there are that many people out there who think that this is acceptable behavior. And I’m oh so sad.”
But, she added, she thinks Harris’s handling of this particular brand of insult has been masterful.
“She doesn’t want to give it too much air,” Margolies said. “She doesn’t want to give it a place to resonate. I think that is smart.”
Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, remain largely undaunted by this line of attack, with many agreeing with and encouraging it. Julie Apfelbaum, a Republican who attended Trump’s recent Coachella rally in Harris’s home state of California, said Trump’s criticisms of Harris are totally justified.
“She’s stupid,” said Apfelbaum, an insurance broker from the Thousand Oaks, Calif., area, before offering a mocking rendition of Harris speaking. “She gets done talking, and it’s like, ‘What did she say?’ She said a bunch of nothing. She does a word salad, like they say.”
Later in the Coachella rally, the audience punctuated Trump’s speech with shouted insults at Harris. One man stood up from his seat to yell that Harris was dumber than a rock. Someone responded that they shouldn’t insult rocks.
Hannah Knowles in Coachella, Calif.; Maeve Reston in Washington Crossing, Pa.; Marianne LeVine in Oaks, Pa.; and Jeremy Merrill and Clara Ence Morse in Washington contributed to this report.
The deadly shooting at a July 13 Donald Trump rally was preventable, but multiple security failures allowed a 20-year-old gunman to climb atop an unsecured roof and fire eight shots, killing an attendee and wounding Trump and two others, the bipartisan House task force investigating the attack wrote in a preliminary report released Monday.
The task force’s 53-page report, which is based on 23 interviews with state and local law enforcement officials, thousands of pages of documents obtained by federal, state and local agencies, and briefings from Secret Service and the FBI, details the failures that allowed Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., this summer.
Inadequate planning and coordination between local and federal law enforcement, fragmented lines of communication between law enforcement agencies and the failure to establish a secure perimeter were among the mistakes that allowed Crooks to not only access the unsecured roof but also move freely around the property for hours before the rally, the task force’s members argued in their report.
The report largely echoes preliminary reports released by the Secret Service and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee last month.
“Put simply, the evidence obtained by the Task Force to date shows the tragic and shocking events of July 13 were preventable and should not have happened,” the lawmakers who wrote the report concluded.
Several of the report’s key findings were already publicly known, but interviews with local law enforcement officials provided more details on the Secret Service’s failure to adequately prepare for the rally and establish day-of lines of communication between local and federal law enforcement officials.
State and local law enforcement officials who spoke to the task force were critical of the lack of a unified command post and communications hub for state and local police, Secret Service and other federal partners. They also criticized a lack of “a unified briefing” between all entities ahead of the rally that “may have led to gaps in awareness among state and local law enforcement partners as to who was stationed where, spheres of responsibility, and expectations regarding communications during the day.”
The task force will continue to interview federal and local officials familiar with the events of July 13 in the next phase of its investigation, while expanding its scope to also investigate how a second gunman was allowed to come within several hundred yards of Trump on Sept. 15 at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida.
A separate independent panel that released its own findings on the July 13 incident last week called for dramatic change at the U.S. Secret Service. The panel concluded that the protective agency had become “bureaucratic, complacent and static,” calling for new leadership from outside the agency.
The bipartisan task force did not offer recommendations for the agency in its report. But it offered a scathing assessment of the security failures that led to the shooting.
“In the days leading up to the rally, it was not a single mistake that allowed Crooks to outmaneuver one of our country’s most elite group of security professionals. There were security failures on multiple fronts,” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), chairman of the task force, said in a statement.
ATLANTA — Vice President Kamala Harris criticized former president Donald Trump over the issue of abortion access at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, pointing out that the family of Amber Thurman — a Georgia woman who died in 2022 after she did not receive proper medical care because of abortion restrictions — was in the audience.
In the waning weeks of the presidential campaign, Harris used her time in Atlanta to emphasize the Republican nominee’s role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion. The comments came the week after the Georgia Supreme Court moved to restore a six-week abortion ban.
Democrats see abortion access as a driver for voter turnout this election cycle. Harris told the Atlanta audience that Trump “still refuses to take accountability for the pain and the suffering he has caused,” and has failed to acknowledge “the pain and suffering” that has ensued as a result of abortion restrictions around the country.
Harris played a clip of Trump at an all-women Fox News town hall, in which the moderator said Thurman’s family had just participated in a call hosted by the vice president’s campaign.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Trump said in the clip. “We’ll get better ratings, I promise.”
Harris said Trump had “mocked” Thurman’s family in the clip and later asked, “Where is the compassion?”
“What we see continually from Donald Trump is exactly what that clip shows,” Harris told the audience. “He belittles their sorrow, making it about himself and his television ratings. It is cruel. And listen, I promised Amber’s mother that we will always remember her story and speak her name.”
The crowd then began to chant alongside Harris: “Amber Nicole Thurman.”
Harris also repeated her assertion that Trump is exhausted from campaigning after several canceled appearances, and called into question Trump’s coherence.
“He is only focused on himself, and now he’s ducking debates. And canceling interviews because of exhaustion. And when he does answer a question or speak at a rally, have you noticed he tends to go off script and ramble? And generally, for the life of him, cannot finish a thought,” she said.
Harris told reporters earlier Saturday that she was responding to Trump’s comments at her rallies more frequently because “he’s becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged, and it requires a response.”
“I think the American people are seeing it, witnessing it in real time. And we must take note of the fact that this is an individual who wants to be president of the United States,” Harris said. “And I think the American people deserve better than someone who actually seems to be unstable.”
At a smaller campaign event earlier Saturday in Detroit, Harris said that voters need to “just watch” Trump’s rallies if they remain undecided.
“We stand for the idea that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you bring down, it’s on who you lift up,” Harris said, adding that at rallies, Trump “spends full time talking about himself and mythical characters, not talking about the working people, not talking about you, not talking about lifting you up.”
Harris’s events in both Detroit and Atlanta included celebrity cameos.
The recording artist Lizzo, speaking in Detroit, pointed to her roots and pushed back on Trump’s recent comments insulting Detroit.
“They say that if Kamala wins, the whole country will be like Detroit,” Lizzo said during the event. “Proud like Detroit. Resilient like Detroit. We’re talking about the same Detroit that innovated the auto industry and the music industry, so put some respect on Detroit’s name.”
Harris later took the stage at the event wearing a T-shirt that said “Detroit -VS- Everybody.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement after the Detroit rally that Harris “needs Lizzo on the campaign trail to hide the fact that Michiganders were feeling good under President Trump.”
In Atlanta, R&B singer Usher rallied for Harris.
“Let me make certain that I’m talking to all my ATLiens out there,” he said, energizing the thousands of rallygoers. “We need everyone to get out there and support this campaign.”
“We love you, Usher!” one attendee yelled out.
“I love you more, but I love Kamala Harris even more,” Usher said. “I want her to be our next president of the United States.”
Vazquez reported from Washington and Wells from Detroit.
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Standing in a high school gymnasium 10 miles from America’s gambling capital, former president Barack Obama implored any undecided or hesitant voters to place a figurative bet on Kamala Harris.
“Sometimes I talk to folks who don’t think it’s going to make a difference whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins,” Obama said in front of a rowdy crowd of thousands on the first day of early voting in Nevada. To them, he said: “Do not sit back and hope for the best. Get off your couch and vote.”
The rally in North Las Vegas was the second stop in a busy stretch of battleground state travel for the former president, who remains one of the nation’s most popular Democrats. Harris’s campaign is increasingly deploying Obama as its not-so-secret weapon in the race’s waning weeks, leaning on him to whip up enthusiasm in what could be a historically close contest.
In his 40-minute speech, Obama sought to underline the ways politics can have a tangible impact — and how an election “can make your life better or it can make it worse.” The coronavirus pandemic was the ultimate example, Obama argued, accusing his successor of mishandling the crisis and causing hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.
“People’s grandmothers, people’s fathers, people’s moms who would have been alive if Donald Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him,” Obama said.
Sure, he added, a president won’t fix the country’s most intractable problems overnight, but Obama said that Harris would be a leader who “cares about you, who listens to ordinary people, who listens to people who are experts in these areas.”
Harris’s campaign has also looked to Obama to help juice her support among men, especially young men of color who appear to be more open to Trump’s messaging than that of past Republican nominees.
So far, Obama has employed a multipronged approach. He bluntly admonished men who may have voted for him in 2008 and 2012 but who might be reticent about casting their ballot for a woman — “speaking some truths,” he called it at a stop in Pittsburgh, where his frank reproach made headlines.
In North Las Vegas, he upbraided “some men who seem to think Trump’s behavior of bullying people or putting them down is somehow macho or a sign of strength.”
But Obama has also begun taking Trump on more directly than ever, mocking the Republican candidate’s bizarre behavior and mental fitness. He has alluded to the long-standing animosity between himself and Trump, who fueled his early political career by falsely questioning Obama’s birthplace.
“When it comes to health care, Donald Trump has got one answer,” Obama said. “He wants to end the Affordable Care Act. He doesn’t even really know what the Affordable Care Act is or how it works. He just knows I did it.”
But even as he needled Trump for “loony” behavior, Obama called for a return to character and values, drawing a stark contrast with the Republican nominee’s comments earlier in the day at a vulgar rally in Pennsylvania, where he referred to Harris as “a shit vice president.”
Attendees at Obama’s rally in North Las Vegas cheered his barbs at Trump, and some welcomed the tough love he directed at men who “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” as he put it at a stop last week.
“I am very blunt, and I like that,” said Anita Freeman, a Las Vegas resident and high school teacher who said she attended the Saturday rally to “hear what the message is firsthand from the Democratic Party.”
She hasn’t made up her mind who she will vote for, she said, but she’s leaning toward Harris. And she has appreciated the messaging from Obama, who she voted for twice and said reminds her of her father. He’s been right to call out sexism in the race, she said.
“There are a lot of people who still hold onto old cultural beliefs that women should not have power,” said Freeman, who said that in the 1980s she was the first female firefighter in the New Jersey township where she grew up.
Michael Dakan, who traveled to Nevada from Los Angeles to canvas for Democrats, said he’s noticed how lately Obama is “less tempered about what he says.”
“But he’s still Obama, he’s still presidential, he’s measured, he’s what we hope to have in a president,” said Dakan, who was wearing a Deadhead shirt that read “Make America Grateful Again.” “When I listen to him speak, he just puts me at ease. He has a certain grace.”
The race between Harris and Trump in Nevada is among the tightest of any state in the country, according to The Washington Post’s polling average, which shows Harris clinging to a lead of less than a point.
The state is one of seven that likely will decide who winds up in the White House next year. Democrats have recently dominated here, winning the state’s electoral college votes in the last four presidential contests and in six of the last eight. But Trump appears to have gained ground as concerns over skyrocketing rents and home prices have some voters itching for a change.
Responding to this newly competitive environment, Democrats have been parading through the Silver State. Harris has ventured here multiple times recently, vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz stopped in earlier this month and former president Bill Clinton will rally voters here next week. Trump has likewise campaigned in Nevada and will return next week.
Voters here may also play a key role in determining which party controls the House. In the race for Senate, Democrats have a considerably larger advantage: Incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D) is leading her Republican challenger, Sam Brown, who has struggled to gain traction and keep up in polls and fundraising.
As in several other states, abortion politics are playing a major role in Nevada. Voters will decide whether to amend the state’s constitution to ensure a right to the procedure. Democrats are hoping the issue will energize voters and spur increased turnout, benefiting them in other races.
Obama — who is set to travel to Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia in the coming days — noted the statewide vote Saturday night. He said that while “there are good people of conscience on both sides” of the abortion debate, “we should at least agree that such a deeply personal decision should be made by the woman whose body is involved and not by politicians.”
The former president’s soaring rhetoric seemed designed to conjure up memories of his eight years in office, a time many Democrats now remember fondly as an era of ascendant political optimism.
In doing so, Obama sought to draw a direct line from himself to Harris — a link he made explicitly at the Democratic National Convention, when he said that “the torch has been passed.”
While the Harris campaign — and Obama, too, in recent appearances — has made a mantra of the phrase “We’re not going back” in reference to Trump’s time in office, they are in fact pushing a different brand of longing for the recent past.
At his Friday stop in Tucson, Obama recalled fondly his opponent in the 2008 presidential election, the late-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “He understood that some values transcend parties.”
And on Saturday, he mentioned the late Democratic senator from Nevada, Harry M. Reid, who he said “refused to see politics as just this battle between good and evil.”
The message appeared to be: Remember when times were tamer and politics somewhat more polite?
BERLIN — President Joe Biden leaves Thursday for what is likely to be his final trip as president to Europe, where Germany will bestow its highest honor on him for spearheading global efforts to protect Ukraine as European leaders strategize for a potential future in which the United States could be less engaged in the transatlantic alliance.
Biden had initially planned to visit Germany last week to take part in a multinational summit focused on Ukraine, but the trip was scrapped as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. The president is returning to a Europe where diplomats are anxiously waiting to see whether they will confront modest shifts under a Kamala Harris presidency or a dramatic upheaval of global alliances if Donald Trump prevails.
Biden will meet Friday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about Western efforts to bolster Ukraine’s defenses, White House officials told reporters Wednesday. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is set to award Biden the country’s highest honor, the Special Class of the Grand Cross, which is reserved for heads of state.
“I have no doubt that the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine, the trajectory of the war, how allies can best support Ukraine will be a subject of conversation,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under the ground rules of a call with reporters. “The bottom line for the United States and for President Joe Biden is that we want to put Ukraine in a position of strength.”
The official added: “We want it to prevail in this war, and we need to give it the capabilities that it needs to do that. But we cannot do that alone — we need to do that with our partners and allies.”
Before last week’s trip was postponed, Biden had been planning to follow his visit to Germany with a stop in Angola, fulfilling a long-standing promise that he would visit Africa as president. On Wednesday, the White House announced that the president will visit Angola in December.
Bolstering the NATO alliance in defense of Ukraine has been a hallmark of Biden’s foreign policy, and the Berlin trip offers him an opportunity to push for whatever incremental gains he can in the final days of his presidency and cement his legacy as a leader who led a coalition of democracies battling the creep of authoritarianism. Biden last year defiantly traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in the middle of a full-scale Russian invasion and declared in Poland a short time later that the world “would not look the other way” in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
“When Russia invaded, it wasn’t just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages,” Biden said in Poland. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO is being tested. All democracies are being tested. And the questions we face are as simple as they are profound: Would we respond, or would we look the other way?”
Biden is a president who until recently was hoping for an additional four years in the world’s most powerful position. Hanging over his remaining tenure is the prospect that Trump, a man he views as a threat to American democracy and the Western alliance, could retake the office from which Biden ousted him four years ago.
That has put enormous pressure on the president to simultaneously burnish his legacy and, to the extent he can, take practical steps to prevent Trump from undoing it if he wins.
Biden has framed Ukraine as a crucial front in the global clash between democracy and totalitarianism. Some analysts attribute this worldview in part to Biden’s experience during the Cold War, contending that America’s Eurocentric approach may diminish in the face of China’s rising power.
“His entire political life, professional life, the alliance with Europe generally and the alliance with NATO specifically has been at the core of his foreign policy outlook,” said Ivo Daalder, chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the U.S. ambassador to NATO under former president Barack Obama. “He’s probably the last truly Atlanticist president born before the Cold War. And even though alliances in Asia … are important, on foreign policy, for Joe Biden, the first thought comes from across the Atlantic, not across the Pacific.”
Diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic see the trip to Germany in part as an effort by Biden to use what remains of his bully pulpit to advocate for more support for Ukraine before someone else occupies the Oval Office.
Trump, who has summed up his approach to foreign policy as “America First,” has a starkly different outlook on America’s role in European affairs, one that is friendlier to Putin and more adversarial toward other NATO members. He has suggested that the United States should not defend allies that do not pay their fair share of NATO dues, while his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is a sharp critic of U.S. support for Ukraine. According to a recent book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, Trump may have spoken with Putin as many as seven times since leaving office.
If many European allies see Trump as a threat, they view Harris as a relative unknown. As Biden’s No. 2, she has been a spokeswoman for his foreign policy, expressing support for NATO and meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a half-dozen times. But while Biden had decades of experience with global diplomacy, Harris has put little emphasis on foreign policy during her compressed campaign for the White House.
European officials say they expect a Harris presidency to largely maintain the status quo, but they worry she will not have Biden’s substantive and emotional attachment to NATO.
“If we get Kamala Harris, it’s going to be very interesting, because we don’t know at all what her compass is when it comes to foreign policy. We have no idea,” a senior NATO official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. “All we can expect is it will be a continuation of the Biden foreign policy. That’s as much as we can prepare for.”
Ukrainian officials have been hopeful that Biden would use his last months in office to secure long-term American support for their war effort more than two years after Russian tanks crossed into their country. Ukrainian officials are focusing their lobbying efforts on the lame-duck months of Biden’s presidency — after Election Day in November, but before a new president takes office in January — hoping Biden will be focused on his legacy and less concerned about domestic politics.
Zelensky and his team have told Biden’s advisers that putting Ukraine on more solid footing, including pushing for its admission to NATO, would cement his place in history as the leader who saved Ukraine from Russian conquest. Zelensky unveiled a “Victory Plan” to Biden during a meeting in Washington last month, saying that more U.S. help would allow Ukraine to end the war next year. He spoke again with Biden on Wednesday, the senior administration official said.
The U.S. reaction to Zelensky’s push has been lukewarm so far. Ukrainian officials had hoped that the White House, for example, would have already granted Kyiv permission to launch attacks deeper into Russian territory using American-made weapons, but Biden has so far rebuffed that request.
European leaders have made it clear they were disappointed by the scuttling of last week’s planned summit on Ukraine, especially because a potential second Trump presidency could bring greater uncertainty. Few European policymakers say they believe Trump would formally withdraw from NATO, but many fear a more transactional approach to the alliance and dwindling U.S. support for Ukraine.
NATO and European policymakers have sought to push through aid packages, sign defense pledges and bring key elements of Ukrainian aid under the NATO umbrella before the Nov. 5 election. Working groups in Berlin have been mapping out plans for different scenarios, but efforts to game plan for Trump have been stymied by the former president’s unpredictability. And given the size of the U.S. share of funding for Ukraine, there may be little they could do if a U.S. president turns off the tap.
“No matter what happens in November, we must be prepared for the fact that the demands on Germany and the E.U. for more responsibility will increase,” the German government’s transatlantic cooperation coordinator, Michael Link, told German media in July.
So with Biden making perhaps his final visit to Germany, the nation’s leaders are trying to celebrate their mutual strides while also trying to figure out what else can be accomplished.
Beyond that, the trip is in part a goodbye, as Biden and Scholz have for the most part worked hand-in-glove.
“I think this is also a farewell gift in a way, just to say, ‘Thanks for keeping us as your main partner in Europe,’ so to speak,” said Jackson Janes, a resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “We hope that we can continue to have the relationship we had with you, regardless of who wins.”
Wootson reported from Washington. Brady reported from Berlin. Francis reported from Brussels.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has offered Americans $47 for each swing state voter they recruit to his effort to elect Donald Trump.
Democratic groups have started paying at least $160 to more than 75,000 voters who agree to contact dozens of their friends and relatives with requests to support Kamala Harris.
In Philadelphia, a nonprofit plans to mail 102,000 copies of a comic book this weekend to every voter under the age of 32, featuring the Liberty Knights, a superhero squad that defeats Dr. Mayhem’s quest to steal the city’s spirit, entomb it in ruby shards and stop the youth from voting.
For those who would still rather party than do politics, there are free concerts, street festivals, coat drives, tailgates and daytime raves popping up near early voting centers in key states that blur the difference. Other operations are hiring thousands of people and organizing many more volunteers to knock on doors, place phone calls and share social media about how to vote.
None of these get-out-the-vote efforts are the work of the presidential campaigns or political parties. They belong instead to a vast, shadow machinery built by partisans often under nonpartisan banners to provide the final nudge that delivers the White House by mobilizing unlikely voters in about seven states. Funded largely without public disclosure, through local outfits and national networks, most of the operations have been lying in wait for years in preparation for this moment.
“We are registering tens of thousands of voters, signing up tens of thousands to vote by mail, and we are maximizing early vote,” said Kevin Mack, whose tax-deductible nonprofit, the Voter Project, created the comic book and has tried to juice voting by giving away $1,000 Target gift cards, $2,000 rent checks and $10,000 grants to community groups around the Democratic-heavy neighborhoods of Philadelphia. “At the end of the day, the combined efforts will increase youth turnout in Pennsylvania by over 100,000 people.”
There is no centralized way to know how much money they will spend or just how many people they will reach. Many of the national groups refuse to disclose their budgets, while hundreds of local groups fly entirely under the national radar, funded through tax classifications that will not report their income until next year and will never disclose their donors.
But people involved expect independent field and mobilization machines to easily be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the razor thin margins dividing Trump and Harris in the target states, they could easily prove decisive in one or more states.
“Groups like ours grew over time to become these behemoths because we could do this cheaper and more efficiently than a campaign,” said Ralph Reed, the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which he says has deployed about 4,000 part-time paid staff and many more volunteers in the battlegrounds with the goal of knocking 10 million doors, including repeat visits. “A presidential campaign stands up in 12 to 15 months, and building this takes much longer than that to do right.”
On the left, a long-standing national network, America Votes, has a goal of knocking on doors in the seven states more than 30 million times this year. Organizers say their focus is on about 2.5 million suspected Democratic-leaning voters who started voting in federal elections after Trump’s 2016 victory. The field operation is done in partnership with dozens of other groups — including BlackPAC, Somos PAC and the Unite Here union — and includes tens of millions of dollars transferred from Future Forward, the largest independent advertising operation supporting Harris.
One of their partners, the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, which is focused on supporting Harris and expanding the federal social safety net, is budgeted at $40 million with a focus on eight states, including four of the core presidential battlegrounds, according to a briefing document obtained by The Washington Post. They claim to have already deployed more than 4,200 paid canvassers to knock on more than 3 million doors and make contact with more than 150,000 voters.
“With Trump on the ballot, we assume there will be another huge turnout from Trump’s base. Winning these battleground states means a Blue Surge matching the MAGA Surge’s turnout,” said Greg Speed, America Votes’ president, in a statement. “In a numbers game, there are more of us than them, but mobilizing our young and diverse coalition requires a massive mobilization not only online, but especially on the doors to break through the noise and get out the vote.”
That numbers game has become an obsession in the closing weeks of the campaign, as more money is pushed into a smaller battlefield than any recent presidential contest, largely because Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District have become less competitive. All told, the seven primary states in play — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina — cast 31 million votes in 2020, or 20 percent of the ballots nationwide.
But the share of voters still undecided in those places — not knowing whether to vote or whom to vote for — is just a fraction of that group, dominated by people who are disconnected from mainstream political conversations. The least attentive now find themselves the targets of an avalanche of political spending, invading their phones, infiltrating their friend networks, knocking on their doors and showing up in advertising where they consume media.
“We are talking about maybe 5 million human beings out of 42 million who are registered in seven battleground states,” said Dmitri Melhorn, a Democratic strategist at Oakland Corps who has worked to develop the outside infrastructure on the left. “You are talking about one out of eight or one out of nine people. You are talking about people who are different in how they consume politics.”
No single independent group compares to the size of the two major-party campaigns and their affiliated national and state parties, which have all begun to ramp up operations.
The coordinated Harris campaign boasts 2,500 staff and 353 offices in the seven targeted states, while the smaller Trump operation claims more than 300 offices for “hundreds of staff.” Both have been deploying small armies of weekend volunteers — the Harris campaign said it knocked on 800,000 doors and made more than 10 million calls last weekend — though the campaigns have been selective in the numbers they release. The Trump campaign has an elaborate system for rewarding about 40,000 trained “super volunteers,” who can earn a special hat, apparel and other memorabilia if they hit certain benchmarks of voter contact.
But neither campaign has designed their program to work in isolation. Both are counting on their independent allies to fill in gaps and multiply their efforts.
“It is very much the field goal unit, and here we are in the fourth quarter,” said Donald P. Green, a political scientist who studies voting behavior at Columbia University. “Polls tend to report likely voters. Turnout efforts tend to target unlikely voters, and of course a few percentage points could turn any of the seven contested states.”
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon released a list of voter mobilization organizations in September that she said “will play a critical role” in the campaign’s success, in a clear signal to donors interested in writing unlimited checks. They included America Votes, SOMOS, BlackPAC and Galvanize, a group that targets White women.
Another group on O’Malley Dillon’s list, the Strategic Victory Fund, is funding a program called ProgressNow that has announced $60 million in spending across 10 states, including the seven battlegrounds, with the goal of creating “a surround sound environment” for targeted voters through digital ads, organic viral posts and other social media, said Anna Scholl, ProgressNow’s president.
The group has 90 paid organizers and more than 20,000 volunteers creating and sharing content. Some of the most successful pieces of content, including messaging about getting to the polls, have involved digital ads meant to look like horoscope readings or viral ASMR, a whispered type of video meant to give listeners tingling feelings.
“It’s one of those things that you look at and say I don’t know entirely why that works, but it does,” said Scholl.
Two other Democratic-leaning efforts, Relentless and the Empower Project, have been recruiting tens of thousands of lower propensity voters in Democratic-leaning communities across the battlegrounds to work as paid relational organizers. For a few hours’ work, more than 75,000 people will make real money calling, texting, emailing or posting in the social feeds of their friends and family with messages to support Harris and urge people to get to the polls.
“You can see 100 TV ads about how great a movie is, but if your best friend tells you it’s horrible, you believe them. We believe the same thing is true in politics,” said Mike Pfohl, Empower Project’s president, who expects to hire more than 40,000 “mobilizers” to reach 10 million voters across 10 states, including the seven battlegrounds, through the effort.
Relentless is active in five of the presidential battlegrounds states with a target of 35,000 paid communicators. They offer $160 for a few hours’ work, and then $40 more if they do more texting and calling on Election Day, when data will be updated to make clear who has still not voted.
“What we look for in a participant is someone who is a low-turnout voter but interested in getting involved this year,” said Davis Leonard, the chief executive officer of Relentless, an effort funded by the Progressive Turnout Project. “Their sphere of influence is bigger than they think.”
The Trump campaign has boasted about its recent partnerships with multiple outside efforts, including relative newcomers to the field organizing space: Turning Point USA and Musk’s America PAC, a group that has been sending canvassers, mail and text messages into swing states, spending more than $87 million in recent months. (Musk has donated nearly $75 million to the group through late September, about 90 percent of the money raised, according to federal filings.) Both groups have struggled in recent weeks as they have tried to rapidly scale up their operations, with Turning Point recently merging its operations in Wisconsin with America PAC.
Outside groups on the right have also so far dominated the postal get-out-the-vote or early-vote efforts, according to the tracking firm Mintt. Two-thirds of such mail has come from outside groups, and eight of the top 10 organizations sending mail with those messages are Republican, including America PAC, the National Sports Shooting Foundation, a gun manufacturer trade group, and Women Speak Out Fund, an affiliate of SBA Pro-Life America.
Women Speak Out has announced plans to reach 10 million persuadable and low-turnout voters in the 2024 cycle. The National Sports Shooting Foundation effort, which is focused on driving registration and turnout among gun owners, does not endorse any candidate but has tried to highlight the contrast in the presidential contest between Trump and Harris, said Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the group. “We think she has made her position on gun rights pretty clear,” he said.
Groups that benefit Democrats, meanwhile, have been dominating another category of outside spending: free giveaways and party promotion to make voting feel fun.
The Detroit Pistons in partnership with Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan nonprofit that holds events largely in Democratic areas, will hold a downtown Detroit “tip off early voting” event on Saturday called “Pistonsland,” with carnival rides, food and performances by hip-hop artists Lil Baby, Baby Face Ray, Peezy, Sada Baby and Skilla Baby. Other “Vote City” events have been planned for Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Rock the Vote has also partnered with the WNBA and the NFL on voter education and mobilization efforts.
“Teaming up with musicians and sports teams for these on-the-ground activations enable us to reduce barriers and create opportunities to participate,” said Carolyn Dewitt, Rock the Vote’s president, in a statement.
Daybreaker, a daytime party promoter championed by Democratic donor advisers, has a packed schedule of officially nonpartisan midday dance parties planned for cities across the battleground map over the coming weeks to promote voting and registration. One Detroit event in New Center Park is promoted as featuring both “pole dancers” and “poll dancers” — and free breakfast.
“We’re bringing the collective joy back to collective action — So dress in purple — and let’s party to the polls!” announce the promotions for the events, which include stops in places like Las Vegas; Flagstaff and Phoenix in Arizona; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Kenosha and Green Bay in Wisconsin.
In major cities, the Harris campaign has begun paying for weekend street festivals near early-voting centers, but their effort joins other groups that have already been in the communities for a while. One group called ShowUpStrong24 has been holding neighborhood events for months around voter registration in Philadelphia, a program that is now shifting to early-vote activation.
Christian Leonzo Vargas, a marketing consultant who has been leading many of the efforts, has organized coat giveaways, rent check giveaways, free “brews and ballots” events at a local brewery and backpack giveaways in recent months. This week he will hold a silent journaling event in one neighborhood, followed by a walk to an early-voting place with headphones that allow everyone who gathers to listen to the same songs.
One recent sweepstakes organized on social media gave away two $1,000 Target shopping sprees. Participants had to check their voting registration online, resulting in more than 1,000 new voting registrations, Vargas said. He said the offer of help for people struggling makes the conversation about voting easier.
“We went into low-propensity neighborhoods at their low-propensity apartment complexes,” Vargas said about the back-to-school giveaway that distributed 1,500 backpacks. “One of the things the community members said was, ‘Thank you for helping us before asking for something.’”
StandUpStrong24 and the Voter Project are fully tax-deductible, nonpartisan nonprofits that do not expressly show support for any party or candidate. Like dozens of other similar groups that could impact the result next month, they will never have to disclose either their donors or how much they spent on all the free stuff they gave away.
Other efforts are far more conventional. On an early Thursday in Detroit, at a job site at the Gordie Howe bridge, volunteers for the AFL-CIO union members handed out fliers on one side explaining Harris’s role in casting the tiebreaking vote for the American Rescue Plan, which shored up pension plans, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which lowered prescription drug prices. On the other side of the flier, the union warned of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy plan for Trump that the nominee himself has largely disavowed.
Kecia Harper, an operating foreperson and union member, said some of the other workers have said they are swayed to vote for Trump. But she wanted them to know that she thought Trump was distracting them with misinformation about immigration from the real issues that affect working people.
“He does the whole, ‘Get everyone over here talking about the dogs and the cats,’ instead of talking about the real things,” Harper said.
Meryl Kornfield in Detroit and Marianne Levine contributed to this report.
Vice President Kamala Harris will sit for an interview with Fox News on Wednesday — her first formal appearance on the network — as she continues her media blitz with Election Day fast approaching.
The network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, will conduct the interview in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Harris is currently leading Donald Trump by two points, according to The Washington Post’s latest analysis.
Following a cautious rollout after moving to the top of Democratic ticket, Harris has in recent days embraced a spate of unscripted interviews in a bid to engage a broader audience. She has appeared on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast, SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” and on Tuesday participated in a live interview with Charlamagne tha God, a well-known radio personality.
Harris’s decision to interview with Fox News appears to be the latest effort by Democrats to reach voters across the aisle. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the vice-presidential Democratic nominee, has appeared on the network, as has Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who quipped at the party convention this summer that “you might recognize me from Fox News.”
The Murdoch-run network, which says it reaches nearly 200 million people each month, is the go-to election news source for Republicans.
The interview will be pretaped and will air at 6 p.m. Eastern on “Special Report With Bret Baier,” a program that draws an average of 2.3 million viewers, according to Fox News.
Responding to a question on social media, Baier said the interview would be taped “as-live” before the show and aired without any cuts.
I never said it would be edited. I said it would be taped as-live before my show – You will see the WHOLE interview on @SpecialReport -Unedited. Uninterrupted unchanged. You can have the transcript too if you want. It all will air. Thanks. https://t.co/tn3CF5iqto
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) October 15, 2024
In a separate video, Baier said he will ask Harris “about things that matter” to voters, including the economy and immigration. He asked viewers to send him questions for Harris.
Ian Sams, a spokesman for Harris, took aim at Trump on social media, saying he refused a second debate with the Democratic candidate while “Harris is willing to even go on Fox.”
Baier is the host and executive editor of “Special Report with Bret Baier” and the host of Fox News Radio’s “The Bret Baier Podcast.” This election cycle, Baier created “Common Ground,” a segment that Fox pitches as featuring discussions between “political leaders from across the aisle” with “the goal of finding middle ground.”
Baier started at the network in 1998 as a reporter based in Atlanta and is the author of seven books, including a biography of George Washington. He has interviewed top political leaders of both parties as well as global leaders, the network said. Last year, he co-hosted the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 presidential cycle, which Trump did not participate in.
In September, Baier said he believed it was Trump and not Harris holding up the prospect of a second presidential debate proposed by Fox. During an appearance on a conservative radio show, Baier said he did not know Trump’s reasoning, adding that he thought the former president “couldn’t get away from the light of 70 million viewers,” and would eventually have to do it “if it was on Fox and something he could agree to.”
Trump attacked Fox and Baier in a post on Truth Social after the interview was announced. He said Harris “has wisely chosen” Baier because he is “considered to be ‘Fair & Balanced’” while accusing the anchor of being “very soft” on people on the left.
“I would have preferred seeing a more hard hitting journalist, but Fox has grown so weak and soft on the Democrats,” he wrote.
On Tuesday, Trump taped an hour-long Fox News town hall that will air Wednesday, during which he repeated many false or misleading claims that went largely unchecked by the moderator.
María Luisa Paúl contributed reporting.
THREE FORKS, Mont. — Wylie Gustafson has been voting for Sen. Jon Tester, a third generation Montana farmer, for years, sticking with the Democrat even as Montana turned redder and redder.
But this year, Gustafson, a 63-year-old rancher and musician, will be voting for Tester’s Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, a businessman born out of state — even if he feels a bit badly about it.
“Maybe there’s a little bit of guilt involved with not going with Jon this time,” he said. “Because I think Jon is a good guy.”
Whether other Montanans feel the same way will not only determine Tester’s fate, but may decide which party controls the U.S. Senate next year, with profound implications for federal tax policy, judicial nominations, and more.
The Senate is split 51-49 in Democrats’ favor and West Virginia’s seat is almost certainly going to flip after the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin III. That leaves Tester as Republicans’ No. 1 target next month and Republicans and Democrats have flooded the airwaves with more than $270 million in advertising to try to influence the race.
There was a time when the Senate had many like Tester in it — Democratic lawmakers who charmed votes from people who chose Republicans at the top of the ticket, or vice versa. But in recent years, split-ticket voters have become more rare, as people line up in their partisan corners, voting straight red or blue up and down the ballot.
In Montana this year, voters are weighing their affection for Tester, 68 — a local fixture with a flap top and three missing fingers lost in a meat-grinding accident — against their discomfort with the Democrat’s votes to convict Donald Trump in both impeachment trials. The election will reveal whether the once-purple state has trended even redder since Tester won his last race by 3.5 percentage points in 2018.
The latest polls suggest Sheehy, 38, a former Navy SEAL who moved to Montana 10 years ago and became a millionaire founding an aerial firefighting company, has a seven percentage point edge, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll. With Montana in jeopardy, National Democrats have poured millions of dollars into long shot attempts to unseat GOP senators in Texas and Florida.
Voters, many of whom refer to Tester by his first name, rarely brought those national stakes up in interviews with The Washington Post this month, instead wrestling with more local and personal concerns about Montana’s rapidly changing identity amid an influx of newcomers in recent years.
Gustafson decided his appreciation for Tester’s authenticity as a native Montanan does not outweigh his desire for a representative who more closely matches the state’s politics, saying he turned away from Tester after he voted for a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and Democratic climate change legislation.
He is voting for Sheehy, despite his “reservations” about the veteran not being a native Montanan. “You know Montana: It’s like, you have to be here for a couple of generations before we consider you not a Johnny-come-lately,” joked Gustafson, who is related to the state’s lieutenant governor. “But I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they come to Montana and understood why Montana is what it is.”
That question of what makes Montana what it is has loomed over the Senate contest, with Tester repeatedly charging that his opponent is a wealthy outsider who wants to change the state, and Sheehy, who has never held office, punching back that Tester’s liberal votes are what do not belong here.
Tester is fighting for his political life in a state that backed Donald Trump by more than 16 percentage points in 2020 by playing off many Montanans’ anxieties about the wealthy outsiders relocating here and driving up real estate prices. He’s blanketed the airwaves with grainy images of his ancestors arriving to homestead their land in Montana eons ago and painting his opponent as a wealthy carpetbagger.
The state’s Republicans think many of the tens of thousands of transplants who have flooded in since 2020 are conservatives who were fleeing covid-19 restrictions in the nearby blue states of California and Colorado. However, the state does not register voters by party, making it difficult to precisely assess the newcomers’ lean.
Almost half the state is now made up of people who were not born there, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, including Sen. Steven Daines (R) and Gov. Greg Gianforte.
“There is a theory that Jon Tester has a 10-year overdue invoice on the changing demographics of Montana and I don’t know if that’s true,” said Matt McKenna, a Montana Democratic strategist who’s worked on past Tester campaigns. “You should be very skeptical of anyone who tells you they know who these new people are.”
Several voters who had moved to the state recently and planned to vote against Tester said they saw Montana as a red haven.
“We left California to get away from the politics,” said Rhonda Brennecke, 58, who moved to Montana 5 ½ years ago and stopped for a brief interview on her way into a GOP fundraiser for Sheehy and others in Gallatin County. “So happy to be here. We’re just really happy for people like Sheehy and [GOP Rep. Ryan] Zinke.”
Tester has painted many of these newcomers, including Sheehy, as lacking “Montana values” of fairness and trustworthiness.
“There’s a lot of folks that move here that have hundreds of millions of dollars who want to buy their friends and buy places, buy houses and buy, buy, buy, buy, buy,” Tester told a crowd of a few dozen voters in Butte this month. “But the truth is, this state’s always been about the working man. It’ll always be about the working man.”
Sheehy, who has largely shunned the news media, has protested that he couldn’t control where his mother’s womb was when he “crawled out of it,” and moved to the state as soon as he could.
“What Jon Tester is saying is that unless you were born here, you don’t matter to him and your voice shouldn’t be heard,” Sheehy’s spokeswoman Katie Martin said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter if you moved 30 years ago, 40 years ago or 10 years ago like Tim and his wife did after their military service. In Jon Tester’s mind you don’t matter, your vote shouldn’t count, and he doesn’t represent you in Washington.”
Tester said in a brief interview that his message against Sheehy is not targeted at all newcomers. “A lot of working folks have moved here,” he said. “Just a few people are trying to buy the state and make it into their own personal playground.”
Tester’s argument has broken through to some voters, some of whom blame newcomers for the housing crisis in Montana, which was recently ranked the least affordable state by a national Realtors group.
“The fact that Tester has been homesteading his family’s property for so long and [is a] third generation Montana and dirt farmer, represents Montana values or represents what Montanans are like — a lot of people just vote strictly on that,” said Katie Campbell, a grassroots engagement coordinator for the Americans for Prosperity Action conservative group, which is canvassing for Sheehy.
Campbell said she tries to convince skeptical voters in the bluer southwest part of the state that Sheehy is also a true Montanan. “I just try to say, ‘What makes you Montanan?’” Campbell said. “I think that if an individual has chosen to put down their roots here in the state of Montana and build up their family and build up their life and their business and create their future here, I mean, that qualifies you as a Montanan to me.”
As Tester faces a cascade of daunting polls, Democrats hope his sophisticated ground game operation, built up over several cycles, and an abortion rights initiative on the ballot will boost their candidate, who has campaigned on abortion rights.
“If Tester goes over the top, I think that will be what will do it,” Don Seifert, the former GOP county commissioner of Gallatin who supports Tester, said of the abortion rights initiative. Still, he conceded he’s very concerned about his candidate’s chances.
Tester appears frustrated that the race is tight, telling the crowd in Butte it “shouldn’t be.”
“He’s made a ton of mistakes. Just a ton of mistakes,” Tester said of Sheehy.
Sheehy has been dogged by reporting that raised questions about the origin of a gunshot wound in his arm that he once told a park ranger was the result of an accidental discharge in Glacier National Park and later says he sustained in combat, leaked recordings that revealed him disparaging Native Americans as drunks, and young women as “indoctrinated” single issue voters on abortion, and questions about the financial health of his firefighting business that he touts as a success story.
Sheehy has hit Tester for taking campaign contributions from lobbyists, and has also attacked Tester in personal terms, taking a page from Trump’s playbook. In leaked recordings of Sheehy’s campaign stops released by the Daily Montanan, Sheehy made fun of Tester’s “stupid” haircut, described him as “waddl[ing]” around the state and called him “Jabba the Hutt.” Trump and his allies have also gone after Tester’s weight.
“I think Montana is going to decide that Jon Tester is 350 pounds of B.S.,” said Zinke, one of the state’s two GOP congressmen, when asked to comment on the race while riding a horse at the Montana State University Homecoming Parade in Bozeman. “His record finally caught up with him.”
Laura Benshoff contributed to this report.
Republican lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina challenging the legitimacy of overseas ballots have prompted a backlash among military personnel, their spouses, veterans and elected officials.
Scores of veterans and active-duty members of the armed forces have posted online or contacted their elected representatives out of concern that their votes might not be counted. Military and elected leaders, along with voting rights advocates, have decried the lawsuits as well, calling them a betrayal to the men and women serving the country overseas.
“Literally, these are the people who are putting it all on the line for what we have in America,” said Allison Jaslow, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and now is chief executive of the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “And we’re going to compromise their ability to have a say in how they vote for who sends them to war? It’s just beyond the pale.”
A group of House Democrats over the weekend called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to guarantee that overseas Americans, including those serving in the armed forces, retain their right to participate fully in U.S. elections, after six Pennsylvania Republican members of Congress filed a lawsuit last week.
The Democrats said they had heard from constituents domestically and overseas after The Washington Post reported on the lawsuits. The Pennsylvania suit asks a federal judge to order that all overseas ballots, including those from military personnel and their families, be set aside and the identities of the voters confirmed before the votes are counted.
The Republican National Committee filed separate lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina last week alleging that the states allow “overseas citizens who never lived in either state to illegally vote,” according to a news release. Both states allow people born to parents who were previously legal state residents to cast ballots.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) asked a judge Monday to sanction the RNC for what she described in a filing as a “frivolous” lawsuit.
Cleta Mitchell, one of the lawyers who helped former president Donald Trump challenge his defeat in Georgia in the last election cycle, worked with leaders in Pennsylvania on the lawsuit, she told The Post. Mitchell said protocols around overseas voting are “porous,” creating ample opportunities for noncitizens to request ballots and vote illegally.
Mitchell said those who support the lawsuit are not trying to disenfranchise eligible voters but rather trying to firm up a system that makes it too easy for those not entitled to vote in U.S. elections to cast ballots.
She said state-level failures “have created a very unstable, nonverified and nonverifiable voting program that is easily exploited and manipulated.”
Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), an Army veteran whose district is home to 40,000 veterans and military families as well as the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, called the Republican lawsuits “an attempt to disenfranchise literal active duty military members who are overseas, risking their life for our country,” as well as their families. Ryan is among the Democrats who signed the letter to Austin.
Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general, said in an interview that he was shocked to learn of the lawsuit and compared it to a “hostage-taking” of the votes of men and women who have taken an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution.
“I would just say as a retired senior military officer and somebody that served overseas and did vote a number of times by absentee ballot very, very frequently, that the expectation of our military members and their roles as citizens is that their votes will count,” Votel said.
In the letter sent to Austin on Saturday and reviewed by The Post, Ryan, along with Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) and others, requested “further clarification” on how Austin plans to protect voting rights among Pennsylvania residents living abroad.
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said in statement that Austin “believes that service members serving overseas, eligible family members and U.S. citizens overseas have the right to vote, and DOD will continue to work to help them do so.”
The ballots in question are governed by a federal law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which requires states to allow eligible Americans living overseas, including military personnel, to vote in federal elections. Although many states require overseas voters to provide identification such as a driver’s license or passport, Pennsylvania does not. The Republican House members who filed the suit said that makes those ballots vulnerable to fraud.
President Joe Biden issued an executive order in March 2021 requiring Austin, as the head of the Defense Department, to facilitate voting among both military and nonmilitary Americans abroad. The Democrats who signed the letter called on Austin to enforce that order, and also asked him to explore whether the Republican lawsuit could threaten the constitutional rights of overseas Americans.
“While some of our colleagues are actively seeking to sow discord and misinformation, we urge you to carry out President Biden’s executive order and Federal Law to the best of your ability and ensure that all Americans have their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in federal elections,” the lawmakers wrote.
Overseas voting has traditionally been supported by both Republicans and Democrats because of how many uniformed Americans use it. Even in 2020, when Trump attempted to discredit domestic absentee balloting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, he and his allies did not attack overseas voting.
The Pennsylvania lawsuit is notable for targeting a group of voters that was long thought to favor Republicans because of the prevalence of military personnel stationed overseas, but is now seen as more evenly divided or even leaning Democratic. The suit adds to a long list of Republican-backed litigation around the country with just weeks to go before the Nov. 5 election, with much of it aimed at disqualifying mail-in votes or removing ineligible voters from rolls.
While in the Army, Jaslow said, one of her duties was serving as a voting assistance officer, helping service members understand their rights, how to register to vote and how to vote absentee. The point, she said, is to make sure that service members follow the rules and understand them.
For voting purposes, service members can declare either where they lived before entering the military or a later address, but they must declare one, according to an Army guide on the issue.
Pat Moore, senior counsel for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, said it’s notable that none of the three lawsuits mentions an example of an ineligible voter casting a ballot from overseas. He said that roughly 20,000 overseas voters from Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina apiece cast ballots in the 2020 election.
It’s clear, Moore added, that Republicans are calculating that overseas votes overall, including civilians, will favor Harris.
“If six Republican congressmen want to go on record saying they are harmed by military voters casting ballots, be our guest,” Moore said.
Six of Pennsylvania’s eight Republican congressmen signed on to that lawsuit. Among them is Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), an Army veteran who served in the military for 40 years. All of the lawmakers who brought the case voted against accepting Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, despite no evidence of widespread fraud. Perry’s phone was seized by the FBI during the Justice Department’s investigation into the attempt to activate Trump’s presidential electors in states he had lost, part of the effort to reverse the 2020 presidential election. Perry’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to Perry, the Republican House members who brought the suit are: Guy Reschenthaler, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Lloyd Smucker and Mike Kelly. All are seeking reelection this year.
Ryan said that soon after news of the lawsuit circulated, he heard from multiple local Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion leaders as well as veterans in his district who were “really stunned” by the effort.
“This is an attack on the voting rights of veterans and a lot of other Americans from Trump cronies who have no respect for the law,” Ryan said.
The backlash has apparently cooled efforts by Republicans to remove people from voter rolls they claim are not eligible, in some cases using unreliable data to claim that the individuals are not residents of the states where they are registered. On Monday, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Attorney General Aaron Ford, both Democrats, announced a settlement with a longtime conservative activist in the state who had been seeking to remove scores of names from registration rolls, some of them people serving in the military overseas.
The activist, Chuck Muth, said he would screen out Army post office addresses in future voter-roll challenges.