Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast’s daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It’s only 19 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 pulled out of another mainstream interview Thursday–this time nixing a sit-down with NBC News.
The interview, CNN reported, would be in Philadelphia with NBC News' senior business correspondent, Christine Romans. CNN’s Brian Stelter said one source suggested that it had only been “postponed.”
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It was the second time in a week that he had canceled a scheduled appearance outside the conservative news sphere, CNN’s Reliable Sources reported Thursday. He had canceled an in-studio appearance on the CNBC flagship show, Squawk Box, which was due on Friday. Trump even canceled a planned event with the NRA in Savannah, Georgia, next week citing a “campaign scheduling conflict,” according to the pro-gun rights group.
JD Vance on Thursday denied that a Donald Trump administration would use the military against American citizens who oppose him, even though Trump has suggested he would.
“Oh, of course not, of course not,” Vance said at a rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when a reporter posed the question to him directly.
The crowd booed the reporter. But Vance said that he was glad to get the question, calling the suggestion “so preposterous.”
POLLS OBSESSED
Harris and Trump are tied in must-win Pennsylvania, with the Democratic nominee leading her GOP opponent by a sizable margin in New Hampshire, according to two polls first reported by POLITICO.
In Pennsylvania, the vice president leads the former president 46 percent to 45 percent, according to a UMass Lowell/YouGov survey of 800 likely voters in the Keystone state. The poll was conducted online Oct. 2-9 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.97 percentage points.
ON THE MOVE
It’s all about the battlegrounds. Former President Bill Clinton hit the trail again for Harris, campaigning with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in North Carolina. JD Vance held a rally in Pennsylvania. Harris was hitting three different spots in Wisconsin before heading to Michigan. And Trump is going it alone tonight at the Alfred E. Smith dinner in New York, which Harris declined to attend.
THROWBACK THURSDAY
Oct. 17, 2020, and Donald Trump was contemplating what would happen if he lost to Joe Biden as he faced double-digit polling deficits. “Could you imagine if I lose? Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know,” he told a rally in Macon, Georgia. Without giving away spoilers, he didn’t leave the country–and also decided that he didn’t really lose. Read more.
BEAST OF THE DAY
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, a “stupid,” “ill-tempered” and “despicable human being,” according to his own newly revealed records.
McConnell made the withering assessments in a series of private “personal oral histories” that he gave to the AP’s Michael Tackett for his forthcoming biography The Price of Power. The AP on Thursday reported the book’s juicy details.
He explained his past comments to the Associated Press this way: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what J.D. Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him. But we are all on the same team now.”
SHAMELESS PLUG
Need some fact-based reality after the reality gap of politics? The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel and The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump are joining The New Abnormal co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy for a dose of realism.
Find out what they think about the week so far on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
