Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast’s daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It’s only 20 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
More than 100 Republican officials who support Kamala Harris for president planned to join the vice president in Pennsylvania on Wednesday for a stunning public rebuke of Donald Trump, their own party’s presidential candidate.
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“He just cannot be in the Oval Office again,” former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) told the Daily Beast Tuesday night during her drive up to the Keystone State for the event. And she predicted: Harris will prevail.
“I think there’s a silent majority,” she said. “I think there’s a silent group of women who will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump and who will quietly vote for Harris.”
Donald Trump told an all-woman town hall in Georgia on Wednesday that he's not “unhinged” as he doubled down, identifying the “enemy from within” as Nancy Pelosi and her husband who was nearly killed.
He aimed his fire at the former House Speaker, who nearly single-handedly snatched an easy election victory from Trump when she led the charge to oust President Joe Biden from the race, leaving Trump running dead even against a more formidable opponent.
“Because they are, they're very different, and it is the enemy from within, and they're very dangerous. They're Marxists and Communists and fascists,” Trump, 78, said at the Fox News town hall, as he meandered his way to his own sound byte.
POLLS OBSESSED
The race is getting tighter and tighter. Harris and Trump are separated by a single percentage point, with the Democratic candidate just barely leading 48 percent to 47 percent in a Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday. Four percent said they would vote for another candidate and 1 percent said they didn’t plan to vote in the presidential election. But when the ballot includes third-party candidates—independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party candidate Jill Stein—Harris takes a lead of 44 percent to 41 percent over Trump.
The same poll shows 51 percent of likely voters will vote for Democrats for Congress, with 49 percent supporting Republicans.
ON THE MOVE
Republicans for Harris crawled out of the woodwork for a public show of support for the Democratic presidential nominee in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. Harris was also set to sit for a high-stakes live interview with Fox News. Trump is holding a top-dollar fundraising gala at Mar-a-Lago complete with roundtables and a “candlelight dinner” for couples willing to give or raise $924,600.
WAYBACK WEDNESDAY
Stop us if this seems familiar… on Oct. 16, 2016, Donald Trump was beginning to suggest the election would be “rigged” against him at “many polling places.” Of course, he had claimed his loss in the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz was rigged, too. But this was the first hint of his general election denialism, quickly forgotten the next month when he won–although frequently revived since.
BEAST OF THE DAY
No matter how well Kamala Harris does in her first Fox News face-off Wednesday evening, it’s a safe bet that Brett Baier won’t emerge the favorite. As Baier petitioned hard to snag the interview, he invited a torrent of critics—on both sides of the aisle.
Meanwhile, some Democrats are wondering why Harris, even if she is in search of any and all votes, is putting herself so squarely in enemy territory.
“She is going into the lion’s den,” a Democratic strategist told The Hill—particularly when the anchor is Baier, the 54-year-old host of Special Report and the face of the network’s straight-news coverage.
SHAMELESS PLUG
John Oliver is bringing his biting mix of comedy and polemic to The Daily Beast Podcast which drops at midnight. He tells Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles how he’s coping with the run-up to the election, how as an immigrant he marks the U.S. out of 10, and what he really thinks about the British royal family.
Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major podcastplayers.
