Happy Wednesday! Election Day is 20 days away. We’re looking forward to seeing Donald Trump work the fry cooker at McDonald’s during a campaign stop this weekend. How many of our readers have worked in fast food?

• Vice President Kamala Harris agreed with a popular radio host that her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, supports “fascism.” Appearing Tuesday on The Breakfast Club, a syndicated hip-hop radio show in Detroit, Harris told host Charlamagne tha God that Trump is “weak” and wants to “please dictators and seek their flattery and favor.” The Breakfast Club has a large listenership among black Americans in more than 90 radio markets across the country as well as on BET and YouTube. The Democratic nominee also noted that hers would be a “margin-of-error race.”
• Trump, meanwhile, sat for an interview with John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, in Chicago on Tuesday. Trump seemed to be speaking in front of a friendly audience at the event, which was sponsored by the Economic Club of Chicago. The former president defended his support for tariffs, saying his plans to enact more taxes on imports will have a “massive effect, positive effect” on the economy. When pressed by Micklethwait about the added cost on imported goods to the American consumer, Trump responded, “The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn’t have to pay the tariff.”
• Early voting began Tuesday in the key swing state of Georgia, where more than 300,000 voters cast their ballots on the first day. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that this more than doubles the first-day early vote in Georgia’s previous two general elections, in 2020 and 2022. At a Trump rally in suburban Atlanta Tuesday night, the Republican’s campaign promoted early voting, including using a phrase that Democrats themselves used to push pre-Election Day voting in 2020: “Make your plan to vote.”
• The New York Times’ Teddy Schleifer reports the Harris Victory Fund, the primary joint fundraising committee of the Harris campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and state Democratic parties, raised $633 million between July 1 and September 30. “That’s about 50% more than the ~$420 million that Joe Biden did during this period in 2020,” Schleifer noted.

MILWAUKEE—With precisely three weeks to go before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin spent Tuesday evening courting black voters with a pitch focused especially on what her party can do for economic opportunity.

“I really believe that if one has a path to a good paying job that supports your family, if one has access to high-quality health care, if one has rights and freedoms and is free of discriminatory barriers to success, that is the platform,” said Baldwin, who was first elected to the Senate in 2012 after serving seven terms in the House. “That’s where we start, and I’ve been proud in my time in the United States Senate to have really advocated for things that address all of those issues.”

Baldwin appeared alongside the NBA’s Doc Rivers, who is heading into his first full season as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, for a Tuesday afternoon panel discussion before a mostly black crowd of about 30 people at Gee’s Clippers, a black-owned barber shop on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

Asked by Dispatch Politics about her connection to black voters, Baldwin mentioned her interest in health care reform. “Access to health care is something that’s really resonant in my life, and it’s something that the community really struggles with—the disparities that we see in maternal health care, maternal mortality in the black community, the disparate incidence of asthma and other conditions,” she said.

Baldwin’s race against her Republican challenger, Eric Hovde, has become close in recent days, and internal polls from both parties indicate the candidates are separated by 1 or 2 points, if at all. If Baldwin is to win a third Senate term in Wisconsin, and perhaps see Vice President Kamala Harris carry the state in the presidential election, it will depend on black voters turning out. She noted on Tuesday that Sen. Ron Johnson, her Republican colleague from Wisconsin, defeated then-Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes to win reelection in 2022 by 1 percentage point, or fewer than 27,000 votes. That was thanks in no small part to low voter participation in Milwaukee, where just under 39 percent of the population is black. 

Barnes, unlike Baldwin, is black. But the two-term senator had help from Rivers and other black voices to make the case on Tuesday at the barber shop that featured Bucks jerseys on the walls and whose floor looked like a basketball court. The shop’s owner, Gaulien “Gee” Smith, emphasized a barber shop’s importance within black communities.

“I always say there’s two businesses in the urban community that can truly change the trajectory of that community, one being the barbershop, the other being the what?” Smith said, as the crowd replied. “Church.”

Smith later lamented that “this election is that close” despite former President Donald Trump’s presence on the ballot. 

After he declared that people are “trying to whitewash history,” River likewise bashed Trump, saying Harris was far more qualified to be chief executive. He referenced the late Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson, who argued that there were higher standards for black coaches to be hired than white counterparts.

“I would love for you to look at, like, if you didn’t put names, and you had two job applications, and you look at Kamala Harris, who has been in all three branches of government,” Rivers said. “And then, if you look at this other resume: convicted felon, sexual assault, just—there’s no way you would hire the person.”

Baldwin also made her case to the voters based on voting rights and abortion. “The right to vote, the right to exercise our franchise, the right to have our voice heard in elections, is one of the most fundamental rights,” she said. “But we have seen such erosion, and it has been efforts—partisan efforts—to erode those rights.” Baldwin referenced a Georgia ban on giving water to people standing in line to vote and long wait times for black voters due to understaffed or undersupplied precincts in their neighborhoods.

She then expressed her support for the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill she has introduced that would codify Roe v. Wade and that, critics have argued, would prohibit states from enacting a number of restrictions on abortion. “Women have fewer rights in this country now than their mothers and grandmothers had, and your zip code should not dictate how many rights and freedoms you have,” she said.

The crowd was generally affirmative when Baldwin spoke. Before the panel began, 54-year-old Tony Reese, who said his son works for the senator’s campaign, expressed fondness for her, citing her policy positions.

“The more that I got to know more about her, and the more that I become more familiar with her, I’ve actually become really a great fan of her,” he told Dispatch Politics. “I think that her policies are things that will move this country forward over the next 10, 15, 20 years.”

If you followed Dispatch Politics last week, you know that David and Mike drove across Pennsylvania to report on the most important battleground of the 2024 presidential election. On the website today, they have a story about why both Democrats and Republicans are projecting optimism about their candidate’s chances.

Among their stops along the road was tiny DuBois, where they met a pro-Harris activist doing his best to promote the vice president’s campaign deep within Pennsylvania’s Trump country. Here’s an excerpt:

Noble’s “DuBois For Harris” sign has gotten some positive response from locals as they’re driving by or idling at the stoplight. “I would say, I get about 15 percent of the people—thumbs up, honking the horn—2-1, right? Right in our margin,” he said. To bolster his case for the vice president with any undecided or inquisitive voters that might pass by the office on Brady Street, Noble and his cohorts have taped on the windows statements from prominent Republicans who are either sharply critical of Trump, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, those or endorsing Harris, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Throughout Pennsylvania, The Dispatch heard hopeful stories like this from Democratic activists, door-to-door canvassers, and party officials during a week of reporting in what could be the most pivotal of the seven battleground states on the 2024 map. Enthusiasm spiked almost immediately after Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee in late July and has not abated. Grassroots volunteers continue to flood county party headquarters and Harris campaign field offices, attendance at Democratic events delivers near Trump-size crowds, and rank-and-file Democratic voters have coalesced behind their nominee in a way they had not before Biden withdrew.

Democrats aren’t the only ones feeling hopeful in Pennsylvania. Republicans there are exuding more positivity about their position after Trump narrowly lost the state four years ago:

But the Republican insiders The Dispatch spoke with across Pennsylvania last week offered similarly rosy anecdotes, projecting almost unwavering confidence that victory was at hand. Spend some time in the heart of the less populated, “T” of Pennsylvania—the regions other than greater Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—and it’s easier to understand why Republicans there sound convinced Trump is going to outperform the polling.

Yard signs can be misleading, but the farther one travels into Pennsylvania’s interior, rural counties, the more common the public support of Trump in small towns, along highways, on front lawns, and on acres of farmland appears. Bob Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party during 2016, said this year’s support for Trump reminds him of that election, when he squeaked out a 48.2 percent to 47.5 percent victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Results reversed in 2020, when Biden topped the former president 50 percent to 48.8 percent (a fact Gleason doesn’t argue with). 

“You never know about elections, but I’m feeling much better than I did in ‘20 about this,” Gleason said over lunch in Johnstown. It’s the largest city in Cambria County, a former Democratic stronghold that recently saw the GOP take the lead among registered voters. “I think turnout will be better this time for Trump.”

Read the whole thing here.

• Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns in suburban Philadelphia this afternoon. The event, in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, will focus on engaging disaffected Republicans. Afterward, Harris travels to Milwaukee. 
• Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio headlines a Trump campaign rally in Williamsport, Pennsylvania this afternoon. In the evening, the Republican vice presidential nominee will headline a Trump campaign rally in Wilmington, North Carolina.
• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff is raising money for Harris today in New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey.
• The Trump campaign today kicks off a three-day bus tour across North Carolina, with surrogates Kash Patel, a former Pentagon official, and Brook Rollins, who runs America First Policy Institute, headlining stops in Burlington and Winston-Salem. In Mooresville, they will be joined by Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi.

“Every president has to cut their own path. That’s what I did. I was loyal to Barack Obama, but I cut my own path as president. That’s what Kamala’s going to do. She’s been loyal so far, but she’ll cut her own path.”

—President Joe Biden while boarding Air Force One, October 15, 2024