Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast’s daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It’s only four 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
Donald Trump is pushing last-minute swing voters into voting Kamala Harris, her campaign officials said Friday.
Internal data shows Harris winning late-breaking battleground voters by a “double-digit margin,” campaign officials said, a margin that would suggest a path to victory for the Democrat.
ADVERTISEMENT
But they also warned that they “fully expect” Trump to make a bogus declaration of victory after the polls close on Tuesday and said they are preparing for court battles over it. Read the story here.
When comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made his now-infamous racist joke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally—“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now, I think it’s called Puerto Rico”—he “picked on the wrong people,” the actor Rosie Perez told the Daily Beast.
“Puerto Ricans have contributed a lot to this country, and one thing is that we don’t take c**p,” Perez said. “We just don’t. Everybody knows that about us. Conservative, liberal, moderate, whatever—our pride comes first.”
Perez was “shocked” to hear Hinchcliffe’s words, as well as the rest of the event’s vituperative, freely expressed bigotry. “It was supposed to be a political rally, so I thought there was going to be a certain decorum on stage,” Perez said. “We can have our policy differences, but when you bring in stuff like that it changes the ballgame. Read the story here.
POLLS OBSESSED
Harris now has a 3-percentage-point lead over Trump in the key battleground state of Michigan fueled by support from women and Black voters, a final election poll from the Detroit Free Press shows. But her edge over Trump, 48 percent to 45 percent, is still within the survey’s 4-point margin of error, leaving the race in the Great Lakes state a toss-up. Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Natural Law Party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has dropped out of the race but remains on the ballot—each got 3 percent of support, and independent Cornel West, 1 percent.
The polls are super tight in all seven crucial swing states. But data analysts at FiveThirtyEight explain: “A close race in the polls does not necessarily mean the outcome will be close. All seven swing states are still within a normal polling error of going to the candidate who is currently ‘losing’ in each.”
ON THE MOVE
Trump battled for votes in Michigan—including in Dearborn, where Arab-American voters are angered over the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza—before heading to Wisconsin for a night time rally. Harris took her campaign to Wisconsin, where she’ll hold a star-studded nighttime rally with Cardi B with expected performances by GloRilla, Flo Milli, MC Lyte, The Isley Brothers and DJ GEMINI GILLY.
FLASHBACK FRIDAY
Blue state highways were not safe from Trump Train convoys on Nov 1. 2020. They were popping up across the nation, including in the safely Democratic states of New York, New Jersey and Washington. “WHOOO! We shut it down baby! We shut it down!” one MAGA follower posted to X (then Twitter) about the northbound Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. Not everyone was a fan: another video showed the same scene from the perspective of a normal driver who commented, “You suck, you suck, everyone on the right lane sucks,” as she waited for the pro-Trump jam to be over. Read more here.
BEAST OF THE DAY
Conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt resigned from The Washington Post on Friday, shortly after exiting a stormy livestream debate.
Hewitt‘s is the latest resignation to rock the Post but this time unexpectedly from the right. It shows Bezos’ crisis isn’t easing up but instead hitting both sides of the political divide.
Hewitt walked off the Post‘s show “First Look,” with liberal columnists Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus, after a heated discussion on Donald Trump’s lawsuit about alleged voting irregularities in Pennsylvania. Read more here.
SHAMELESS PLUG
No, it’s not the weekend to unplug from the news and W. Kamau Bell is joining The New Abnormal hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy to talk about the state of the nation ahead of what is already on track to be the biggest election turnout ever.
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
