An earlier version of 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.
Hello, friends. I’m writing from Philadelphia, where Republicans are campaigning for Kamala Harris and Elon Musk is campaigning for Donald Trump. What a timeline.
3 things to know
- Both Harris and Trump waded into unfamiliar territory in TV interviews this week: Kamala Harris was interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News, and Donald Trump appeared in a town hall on Univision. Harris sparred with Baier on immigration and Trump’s fitness for office, and attempted to put daylight between her and President Joe Biden. Trump, meanwhile, took tough questions from voters — like this one from a Latino farmer in California, who asked who will harvest crops if Trump deports undocumented immigrants. Read more here.
- Arizona will be ground-zero on Election night — and not just because the time difference will make for a late night with election returns. The last two elections in Arizona, in 2020 and 2022, have drawn scrutiny from participants, and election officials have faced threats for their work. My colleague Gitanjali Poonia reports from Maricopa County here, digging into what has changed in Arizona since the 2020 election — and what the folks there are doing to instill trust in the electoral process. Read more here.
- After the attempted assassination on Trump in July, investigations into the Secret Service have yielded varied results. An independent review into the agency resulted in a 52-page report, released this week, that called for “fundamental reform” as the agency has “become bureaucratic, complacent and static.” Read more here.
The big idea
The Musk vs. Obama show
On Thursday afternoon, a long line of people — many of them in “Make America Great Again” hats — snaked around a high school 10 miles outside of Philadelphia. With less than three weeks to go until Election Day, these voters weren’t there to see Trump, who was in New York for the evening. They were there to see Elon Musk.
The billionaire entrepreneur, believed to be the richest man on earth, has become a key surrogate for Trump’s reelection campaign. He made his debut appearance at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, less than two weeks ago. He’s poured over $75 million into his own super PAC, dedicated to turning out voters for Trump. And starting Thursday, he embarked on his own speaking circuit across Pennsylvania, shoring up support through town hall-style speeches, scheduled nightly until Monday.
Musk’s speech Thursday — which included a Q&A session with the audience — bounced from voter turnout strategies to autonomous vehicles to Neuralink, Musk’s company designing implantable brain-computer devices. But to Musk’s audience — whose only requirement for entry was signing an online petition, and voting in Pennsylvania — Musk has quickly become Trump’s most recognizable, and perhaps most influential, surrogate on the campaign trail.
With early voting underway in most states, both major-party campaigns are undertaking an all-hands-on-deck approach to campaigning — and big-name surrogates lead the way. On Trump’s side, it’s Musk who’s taken the outsized role. On Harris’ side, it’s former President Barack Obama.
Obama has quickly become a central figure on Harris’ team. He rallied voters in Pittsburgh last week, and will appear in Arizona Friday and Nevada on Saturday. Next week, he’ll rally in Michigan and Wisconsin, leading up to a joint appearance with Harris in Atlanta on Thursday, NBC News reports.
To both Musk and Obama, the late-game push stems from their deep concerns about what will happen if their candidate doesn’t win. In Pennsylvania on Thursday, Musk acknowledged he hasn’t “been politically active before,” but he is now “because I think the future of America, the future of civilization, is at stake.” Obama, meanwhile, has stepped into a larger role out of concerns over what a second Trump term could mean for democracy, The Washington Post reports.
To both campaigns, too, there is an obvious motivation: in an election that will be decided within the margins, these celebrity surrogates can shore up support from groups that would otherwise be unreachable. Musk, a celebrity to tech geeks and culture warriors alike, can speak to the low-propensity voters disengaged from politics, because he was once one of them. Obama, meanwhile, is the most popular former president alive, and he carries real cachet with the Democratic base. He can also engage Black males, a demographic he addressed in his campaign speech last week.
According to the latest Deseret News/HarrisX polling, there is a need for candidates to target both groups. Harris leads Trump among Black voters, 63% to 22%, a sharp decline in support from 2020, when Biden secured 90% of the Black vote. But Trump is struggling among those who are most likely to vote, a sign that he needs the undecided fence-sitters: among those who plan to vote before Election Day, Harris leads, 59% to 37%.
When Harris announced a list of celebrity endorsements last month, Trump supporters blasted it as a sign of how out-of-touch the campaign was with everyday Americans. It’s the same critique that was leveled throughout the Democratic National Convention, when Harris painted a forward-looking vision for the party, but prime-time slots were given to yesterday’s political leaders. By rolling out Obama as a chief surrogate — a popular and recognizable former president, but a political elite nonetheless — the campaign sets itself up for the same critique.
But the Trump campaign, now relying heavily on the influence (and money) of the wealthiest man on earth, no longer has the moral high ground. Instead, both campaigns engage in a surrogate strategy that may be a matter of demographic math: Trump is digging into the base he already has, while Harris is making a desperate play for the cohort her party once had.
Trump needs to turn his hyper-online base into votes, and Musk helps him get there. Harris needs to bring a key constituency back into the fold, and Obama is her best messenger.
Poll pulse
- A larger share of U.S. voters think Harris will win the election than say they will vote for her, a new Deseret News/HarrisX poll reveals. Among U.S. voters, 47% say they’ll support Harris, while 45% say they’ll support Trump. But when asked who they think will win the election, 53% say Harris, 47% Trump.
Weekend reads
The abortion battle in Arizona is not quite what Democrats expected. When an abortion measure was added to the ballot earlier this year, Democrats thought it would drive pro-choice voters to the polls and bolster Democrats up and down the ballot. Instead, swaths of Republicans are supporting the measure — while still signaling support for Trump and other Republican candidates. Once again, Arizona shows why it’s the political Wild West. ‘Weird consequences’: Abortion rights measure could scramble Arizona election (Alice Miranda Ollstein, Politico)
Details of Trump’s mass deportation program are slowly coming into focus, including his plan to utilize an obscure 1798 law to detain migrants. But the operation would be incredibly costly: CBS News reports the logistical operation would conceivably cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars; Grist reports the operation could wreck the country’s agricultural system and food supply; Reason reports the plan could “decimate” the U.S. economy at large. For a deeper read: The Incomprehensible Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans (Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic)
Where is Mike Pence? “You can’t blame Mike Pence for wanting to keep his head down in this presidential election, given that he nearly had his head in a noose after the last one.” Mike Pence is Haunting This Election (Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic)
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.