Three things to watch in tonight’s vice-presidential debate
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Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown.
Let’s kick off October — and spooky season — with:
The vice-presidential debate
Harris’s border visit
The Pennsylvania voter registration battle
It’s debate night in America — probably the last one of the 2024 presidential election cycle.
Vice-presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz will take the stage at 9pm in New York City for the CBS News-hosted debate. Vance, with his lacklustre approval ratings, is the candidate who has the most to gain.
Here’s what to watch for during the match-up:
1. Can Vance remedy his image issues?
Vance has a likeability problem and, he’ll be eager to shore up his approval ratings — especially among women.
Walz is viewed more favourably in the Midwest battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as in Vance’s home state of Ohio, according to the latest NYT/Siena poll. Nationally, an Associated Press poll last week showed that 57 per cent of registered voters viewed Vance unfavourably compared with 32 per cent who disliked Walz.
Despite the numbers, political operatives are expecting a strong performance from the Ohio senator tonight.
“He’s a Yale Law [graduate], smart by all accounts, is pretty good on his feet, so he will probably be ready, and he’s doing a lot of work to get there,” Matt Bennett, co-founder of centrist Democratic think-tank Third Way, told me. “He certainly isn’t going to perform the way Trump did,” referring to the ex-president’s debate performance last month.
2. Who will be the instigator?
One of Kamala Harris’s best tactics on the debate stage last month was baiting Donald Trump with his most sensitive issues. We can expect Walz and Vance to try to replicate her strategy.
“I would tell [Walz] to not take the bait,” said Bennett. “What his running mate did so brilliantly was get Trump to rise every single time . . . and Vance is going to try to do that to him. He’s going to say a bunch of things to get him to react, maybe criticise his military service or attack Harris in ways that are untrue or ridiculous.”
For Walz’s part, the Democratic vice-presidential pick might tell Vance he is “weird” to his face.
Both candidates have been preparing in earnest: US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has played Vance in Walz’s practice sessions, while US representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota has acted as Walz in Vance’s run-throughs.
3. Will the debate move the dial?
There are few people who think that what happens tonight will be a poll-moving event, particularly since the headline face-off between Harris and Trump didn’t change much.
“No VP debate in history has ever really mattered,” Bennett told me. Republican strategist Doug Heye agreed, noting that undecided voters focused on the fight at the top of the ticket would not change their vote based on tonight “barring something cataclysmic”.
But the stakes are still high for the veep candidates as they will have a big platform to pitch themselves to voters — and perhaps more importantly, their bosses
Campaign clips: the latest election headlines
An Alabama gunmaker has launched a limited-edition Trump-themed AR-15 rifle, dubbed the “MAGA Patriot”. [Free to read]
Trump is drawing some of his most fervent support in the crucial state of Pennsylvania from rural areas that make up the state’s fracking industry.
In the aftermath of deadly Hurricane Helene, Trump has blamed Harris and Joe Biden for the struggles of storm victims.
Investors are turning to volatility trades to profit from the tight US election.
As Israeli troops move into Lebanon, political pressure on Harris is piling up over the Biden administration’s failure to secure a ceasefire.
Thousands of East Coast port workers began striking today. Should it stretch on and push prices up, Trump could open a new line of economic attack.
Behind the scenes
In the swing state of Arizona on Friday Harris pledged a crackdown on illegal immigration, moving rightward from both Democrats’ traditional stance on the hot-button issue and even Biden’s tough stance.
“The United States is a sovereign nation and I believe we have the duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them,” she said. Her tougher rhetoric is part of an effort to narrow the polling gap on immigration, which has been one of Trump’s strongest issues throughout the race [free to read].
In the border town of Douglas, voters told the FT’s Myles McCormick that they liked seeing the vice-president and described how important border security was to the local population.
“I believe I would vote for her,” said Jennifer Valenzuela, a 28-year-old stay-at-home mother. “It just depends [on what she says about the border],” she added, noting “more security” would make her more likely to do so.
Linda Rojas, a 68-year-old who works from home, said she was also glad Harris visited. “I definitely think that she needs a tougher approach and just look at things and get a perspective as to how it is on the border and see [if] she can implement anything new.”
“I think one thing is seeing it and another thing is hearing about it,” said Sarah Foreman, 57, a caretaker.
Trump is leading Harris by 1.3 percentage points in Arizona, according to the FT’s poll tracker.
Datapoint
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Pennsylvania in this election.
With its whopping 20 electoral votes (the most of any swing state), the candidate who wins Pennsylvania would be considered the favourite to clinch the presidency.
Harris and Trump are both frequent visitors to the state, and have spent a combined $300mn on ads, more than anywhere else. Both parties are also rushing to sign up new voters — and Republicans are winning this race.
Pennsylvania is home to more registered Democrats than Republicans overall, but the gap has narrowed; the split was 51-37 in 2008, but is now 44-40.
Two weeks ago Republicans registered 12,615 new voters to the Democrats’ 7,940. A further 7,404 were registered as “unaffiliated” or with “other parties”, according to state data released last week.
Harris will almost certainly take Philadelphia County, which encompasses the eponymous city; Biden won it by 64 points in 2020. But the biggest question is whether enough people will turn out to vote in the county to win her the state.
Viewpoints
A new report supports the idea that Harris’s “somewhat vague, yet pragmatic” economic approach “isn’t such a bad thing”, writes FT columnist Rana Foroohar. [Available for Premium subscribers]
Nobody who rewatches Trump in 2016 and compares him with today could deny that his memory is patchier and his vocabulary smaller, writes columnist Edward Luce.
FT economics leader writer Tej Parikh charts election anxiety among US businesses with a tight election impeding business-as-usual.
Alphaville’s Bryce Elder tells you all about Trump’s line of $100,000 watches and what it means for the future of luxury goods.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into pro-crypto political groups this election season, but the idea that there is a crypto constituency is “fanciful”, argues columnist Jemima Kelly.
There’s a coalition of evangelical Christians — long a core part of the Republican base — that is embracing Harris and the Democratic party, writes Eliza Griswold. (The New Yorker)
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