This article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings here. To submit a question to next week’s Friday Mailbag, email onthetrail@deseretnews.com.
Hello, friends. 39 days until Election Day.
3 things to know
- Kamala Harris travels to the border Friday, coming face-to-face with a big political vulnerability: immigration. Even as Donald Trump pitches an extreme immigration agenda centered on mass deportations, voters trust Trump over Harris to handle the country’s immigration situation. When Harris arrives in Arizona today, she’ll find a state in the thick of the debate — aided by a high-stakes immigration ballot measure that will go before voters in November. Read more here.
- The fight for Latter-day Saint votes continues: a week after the Harris campaign launched an advisory committee to target Latter-day Saint voters in Arizona, the Trump campaign held a meeting at Mar-a-Lago to strategize about its outreach toward Latter-day Saints. There are enough Latter-day Saints in Arizona and Nevada to hypothetically swing both states, and their neighbors in Utah are paying attention: the Utah Republican Party is organizing all-expenses-paid canvassing trips to Phoenix and Las Vegas over the next two weekends. Read more here.
- Trump will return to Butler, Pennsylvania, next week, the site of the attempted assassination in July. Meanwhile, the Senate and the DHS continue their investigations of the incident, which include “enormous failures in leadership” on the part of the Secret Service. Read more here.
The big idea
The votes shall then be counted
All eyes are on Nov. 5, when millions of Americans will cast their votes. But equally important is January 6 — when those votes will be certified by Congress.
In 2021, a push by Trump and his allies in Congress interfered with that process, delaying the certification of the election. This cycle, less than half of U.S. adults expect a peaceful transfer of power, according to one poll conducted in April.
In an effort to insulate against that possibility, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, which — in part — makes it harder for individual members of Congress to object to electoral votes: now, any objection must be supported by one-fifth of the Senate and one-fifth of the House. Previously, any single member of Congress was able to raise an objection.
The bill also clarified that the vice president’s position is “solely ministerial,” and has no power to overturn the votes. Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to unlawfully interfere with the election results, which Pence declined to do; this cycle, Harris will oversee the election’s certification.
The new law “solved a problem,” Valerie Smith Boyd, the director of the Center for Presidential Transition, told me this week. But we won’t know until January 6 if it works, she added: “We will see in this cycle whether those were exactly the right answers.”
Among House Democrats, Politico reports, there is a concern that Republicans will try to find other avenues to stymy the results if Trump loses. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, led an effort to petition the Supreme Court to overturn election results in late 2021. If Republicans maintain control of the House, Democrats fear, Johnson will lead a similar effort.
But Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, feels confident that no such effort will be successful. Moore is vice chair of the House Republican Conference, and in an interview this week, he called the 2022 changes to the Electoral Count Act a “good, solid reform.”
“I think that reduces the temptation for disingenuous members to make this a big thing every four years on January 6,” he said.
It was Democrats, he reminded me, that objected to electoral votes in 2005 and 2017, the last two times a Republican candidate won the Electoral College. (Neither effort found support in the Senate.) But Moore sees no moral justification there. When some of his Republican colleagues justified their efforts to oppose the election in 2021 by saying Democrats had done the same in past cycles, Moore remembers chiding them. “That’s just wrong,” he said. “Just because that’s someone else’s bar, it’s not my bar, right? ... Democrats did this in the last two elections. That is not a reason for us to do it, too. They were wrong, and I think we were wrong to do it.”
The role of Congress, Moore notes, is to simply open the certificates from the states and count them. “My firm understanding is, in the absence of two (slates of) electors that have been sent to the federal government, we have no role to play. We are to count the ballots, and that’s it,” he said. “If there’s two slates of electors, have at the debate. If not, I still believe it’s unconstitutional.”
At present, polling indicates the presidential race will be decided by razor-thin margins; are any of Moore’s Republican colleagues gearing up to make objections should Trump lose? “No, I’m not hearing anybody talk about any specifics,” he said.
What Moore fears more is the chance of violence surrounding the election. A Deseret News/HarrisX poll in August found that a majority of U.S. voters are concerned about political violence both before and after Election Day. “I hope we get through it,” he said. “But yeah, before or after. It concerns me.”
Weekend reads
Does Mike Pence have a place in the Republican Party? It depends on whether Trump wins, perhaps: “Not in the Republican Party of today,” said Sen. Mitt Romney. “The Republican Party of tomorrow may be a different matter.” Mike Pence quietly lays the groundwork for a post-Trump future (Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett, Semafor)
The undecided voters aren’t all like Mike from North Carolina, who we met last week — highly engaged, highly informed, but hasn’t decided who he trusts more to protect Social Security. Instead, most undecided voters are unengaged — they’re voters unlikely to cast a vote in the first place. That is guiding both campaigns’ ground games: they’re trying to convince people not just to vote for them, but to vote at all. It’s a voter-registration and voter-enthusiasm race. The Undecided Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are (Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic)
As Harris visits the border, this is a remarkable piece of journalism, in its scope alone: the Texas Tribune and The Associated Press teamed up to send journalists to five different spots along the U.S.-Mexico border simultaneously, and to document exactly what they saw. Many Americans say immigration is out of control, but 24 hours on the Texas-Mexico border showed a new reality. Will it last? (Texas Tribune and AP)
See you on the trail.
Editor’s Note: The Deseret News is committed to covering issues of substance in the 2024 presidential race from its unique perspective and editorial values. Our team of political reporters will bring you in-depth coverage of the most relevant news and information to help you make an informed decision. Find our complete coverage of the election here.