Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast’s daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It’s only eight 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
A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned.
The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.
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“The grift and greed I‘ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors’ money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.” Read the full story here.
Two Washington Post staffers, one of whom is a 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner, resigned from the publication’s editorial board Monday after billionaire Jeff Bezos pulled an endorsement of Kamala Harris less than two weeks before the election.
Editorial board member Molly Roberts, who writes about tech and policy, confirmed to the Daily Beast on Monday she has left the editorial board—but not the paper—over the endorsement decision. David Hoffman, who won the Pulitzer in editorial writing for his series on “tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age,” also resigned from the board but will remain at the paper, according to The New York Times.
In a scathing statement posted to X, Roberts said the decision to end presidential endorsements was not the editorial board‘s. “It was (you can read the reporting) Jeff Bezos’s,” she wrote. “I’m resigning from The Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets,” Roberts wrote. “Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet.” Read the full story here.
POLLS OBSESSED
Harris got some encouraging news from a new ABC /Ipsos poll, which shows her leading Trump 51 percent to 47 percent among likely voters. The gap narrows among all registered voters, with Harris edging Trump by just 2 percentage points, 49-47 percent.
According to data compiled by FiveThirtyEight, Trump wins 54 out of 100 times, according to election simulations. Harris, on the other hand, wins 46 times out of 100.
ON THE MOVE
Former President Barack Obama is joining Bruce Springsteen Monday night in Philadelphia to rock out and try to rally votes for Kamala Harris. The vice president herself is campaigning in Michigan, another key battleground state. Trump is campaigning in Georgia, including attending the National Faith Summit in Atlanta.
MONDAY MEMORIES
One of the enduring mysteries of the Trump administration was finally solved on Oct. 28, 2020: Just who was Anonymous? The mononymous senior Trump official-turned critical editorial writer had riled up the then-president and his inner circle for many years. But finally Anonymous unmasked himself. Read more
BEAST OF THE DAY
Geraldo Rivera, a former close friend of Donald Trump, issued a stark warning to Latino men who might be thinking of voting for the Republican candidate in the upcoming presidential election.
“F--k these racists,” the former Fox News host posted to X late Sunday. “Latino men of good will, have pride in yourselves and your ancestors. A vote for Trump is a vote against self-respect.” Along with a number of fascistic Trump comments from recent weeks, Rivera’s post specifically referenced remarks from podcaster Tony Hinchliffe who described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” at a Trump rally in New York City on Sunday.
Rivera’s own father was Puerto Rican and moved to New York where he met the broadcaster’s mother. Geraldo himself spent time living with his grandparents in Puerto Rico as a teenager. In 2008, he published a book, which drew on his father’s story titled His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S.
SHAMELESS PLUG
There’s more to politics than presidents and on The New Abnormal tonight, co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy will break down some of the most important local elections with Daniel Nichanian, the editor-in-chief of Bolts magazine.
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
