Kamala Harris stands up to Fox
Kamala Harris stands up to Fox
The vice president enters the belly of the beast. Plus: a swing-state roundup
Hello! There are 19 days till election day.
Three things to know
🗳️ Early turnout records are being shattered in crucial states. Georgia in particular stands out: more than 600,000 people are said to have voted in the last two days alone. Whether this is better news for Trump or Harris nobody knows, but if the campaigns have strong enough data and ground games, they will have a good sense of who is turning out and where — the best proxies for their support short of a result. A Georgia judge this week threw out several new Trump-friendly measures that would have made voting harder and counting slower.
🤥 At a rally in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance came the closest he’s come in some time to repeating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, something even Trump has been back and forth on lately. "I’ve answered this question directly a million times: no,” Vance said. “I think there are serious problems in 2020. So, did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.” It was another of his signature press Q&As held in front of a crowd of supporters who can boo journalists as they ask him to account for himself and his running mate.
(Source: Aaron Rupar)
🐘 Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris held an event of her own featuring numerous Republicans speaking on her behalf against Donald Trump. Here she is introducing them:
Among those speaking was former congressman Adam Kinzinger, late of the January 6th select committee, who has long been one of his sometime party’s most outspoken Trump critics. Here’s what he tweeted in advance of the event:
Today, as a conservative, I will join VP Harris in Bucks County PA to remind voters democracy knows no party. We need to defeat Donald Trump so we can go back to a healthy political system where unity and patriotism is once again something we strive for. To put “country first” is not just something we say, it’s something we all need to put into action; and I am honored to stand next to @KamalaHarris today.
Harris takes the fight to Fox
Mere weeks ago, the top centrist criticism of Kamala Harris was that she was making herself insufficiently available to journalists for tough questioning, and focusing instead on communicating through rallies and social media. Some of that was just understandable griping from journalists desperate to get their turn with her, but regardless, no-one can now accuse her of hiding under a rock.
After a couple of weeks that have seen her sit for lengthy discussions on shows with reach massive audiences – Howard Stern, Call Her Daddy, The View – Harris last night appeared on Fox News with one of the pro-Trump networks’ more level-headed anchors, Bret Baier.
For Democrats, sitting down for a Fox grilling is not something to be done lightly. Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg has proven exceptionally capable at handling the network’s disingenous and combative questioning style, but Harris so far had not been tested by its methods at length. So how did she do?
By all accounts, including Baier’s own, very well.
Faced with an interviewer who repeatedly talked over and contradicted her answers, Harris returned to the authoritative, prosecutorial tone that has lent her credibility throughout her career but which she’s dialled back in order to fight a “joyful” campaign.
It came out particularly strongly when Baier tried to press her on “dividing” the American people. Where even the expert Buttigieg tends to thwart Fox’s tactics with a smile, Harris decided to fully call out Baier for playing a misleading clip in an effort to wrongfoot her:
In this exchange, Harris dodged multiple traps while managing to land her own point of view. This sort of response is something many Democrats cannot nail: it demands a verbal and mental agility that Joe Biden has evidently lost, hence his departure from the race; it requires you to marshal facts and attributing quotes pulled from memory under pressure; and it also demands a balance between an even tone and justified outrage.
I would argue that aside from the substance of what she said, what Harris pulled off on Fox last night was an excellent balancing act.
The Trump campaign is betting that uneasy Republican voters who might be peeling away from him do not believe Harris is capable, intelligent, sane or well-tempered enough to do the job.
Like much of what Trump and his team say, the accusation is actually a confession, and Harris has lately taken to saying the same about him in the most explicit terms — weak, unstable, unfit. Here she is at a recent rally in North Carolina:
That she has to draw attention to Trump’s slow-motion cognitive and mental collapse without being seen to fly off the handle is indicative of the double standard always applied to female candidates. Even worse is the stereotype of the “angry Black woman”, a trap Harris is unjustly obliged to avoid.
This interview will prove to unfamiliar voters who knowingly or unknowingly hold her to these absurd standards that she is not, in fact, a subnormal harridan with no grasp on her temper. Many of those voters either did not vote for Biden four years ago, did not vote at all. Harris cannot afford not to appeal to them.
Fox News is one of the only places they might encounter her directly – and last night, she managed to rise above and call out Baier’s tactics without losing her composure or talking down to his audience. Job done.
If it’s your thing, you can watch the whole interview here.
The seven crucial states
Less than three weeks to go, and the campaigns are narrowing their focus ever further to the handful of battlegrounds that will decide the election.
I’ve put together an explainer on this for Euronews, running through the top seven swing states. Here they are, along with their electoral college worth:
🌵Arizona (11)
🍑 Georgia (16)
🚗 Michigan (15)
🎰 Nevada (6)
🚬 North Carolina (16)
🔔 Pennsylvania (19)
🧀 Wisconsin (10)
Five key points to remember about them:
Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The margin of victory in the three states combined was only about 100,000 out of millions of votes cast; Trump won Michigan by 0.23%, Pennsylvania by 0.72% and Wisconsin by 0.77%. That is how close the US came to avoiding a Trump presidency.
Biden did not drop a single Clinton state in 2020, but retook the three above while picking up Arizona (+0.3%) and Georgia (+0.23%).
In 2016, Clinton very nearly lost New Hampshire and performed surprisingly poorly in Minnesota, home of Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. But certain longtime Republican states trended her way, including the two Biden picked up.
Perennially purple North Carolina voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but has been red ever since. It’s the only one of the above states that Trump won twice.
In all six of the swing states Biden won, the Trump team mounted failed legal challenges to the results. Many of their cases were so poorly formulated that several people involved in the effort were disbarred in various jurisdictions, and Trump is facing a criminal indictment for his pressure campaign in Georgia.
You can read the whole piece here.
🚨 Sound the alarm
Last night, I went to a screening of War Game, a stunning documentary in which a range of former US government and military officials play out a scenario in which armed extremists embedded in the armed forces stage a military coup on January 6th, 2025. Here’s the trailer.
You must absolutely watch this film if you can – it’s available for streaming in various places – but besides that, there’s crucial reading to be had from the Associated Press, who have conducted a major investigation into the radicalisation of American servicemembers:
"While the pace at which the overall population has been radicalizing increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate. Their extremist plots were also more likely to involve weapons training or firearms than plots that didn’t include someone with a military background, according to an Associated Press analysis of domestic terrorism data obtained exclusively by the AP. This held true whether or not the plots were executed.
While the number of people involved remains small, the participation of active military and veterans gave extremist plots more potential for mass injury or death.
Hundreds of active and former servicemembers are among those arrested for taking part in the insurrection of January 6th, 2021 – and do not forget, it is these same forces that Congress may rely on to defend itself as it certifies the next election.