Wall Street Journal: “As the election enters its final sprint, current and former senior intelligence officials are warning that Trump during a second term might seek to retaliate and harness America’s powerful spy agencies for his own political purposes.”
“And the Republican former president could appoint skeptics of the intelligence community to lead some of its agencies, according to people familiar with his thinking.”
“Mike Johnson’s tightrope walk to remain House speaker starts this coming week,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The Louisiana Republican needs to pass a short-term spending bill to keep the government funded, avoid sparking open GOP rebellion, keep the Republican majority in the November election and then get colleagues to line up behind him in January. It is a tall order even for Johnson, who defied expectations by navigating the House through a series of sticky intraparty battles after stepping into the role of speaker when Kevin McCarthy was ousted last year.”
“Johnson, whose party has a historically minuscule 220-211 majority, doesn’t have a clear path to a spending deal and is making no promises. How he handles the arcane but ideologically fraught fight in the coming weeks could have profound implications for Republicans’ chances at the ballot box and Johnson’s own political future.”
The Hill notes one 30-second ad, titled “Told Us,” includes Donald Trump saying, “for 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated and I did it and I’m proud to have done it.”
Another 30-second ad, called “Big Family,” is narrated by an Alabama resident who discussed how her embryo transfer was canceled after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.
The last ad, a one-minute spot titled “Laurel,” is narrated by a Wisconsin resident who discussed how she couldn’t get treatment quickly because of a blood clot in her uterus. Doctors were afraid of prosecution for treating her.
Dan Pfeiffer: “If you polled the press corps and most Democrats who are not working for the Harris-Walz campaign, 85 percent would say that Kamala Harris would win if the election were held today. If you ask the people who are actually deep in the numbers and paying really close attention to what’s happening in the battleground states, it’s closer to 50-50. And I think it’s very possible that if the election were held today, Trump would win…”
“When you dig into the battleground state poll numbers, they’re all toss-ups, every single one of them. There’s not a single battleground state poll where one of the candidates is up or down by more than two points, and most of them are tied, or at one point. And when you start doing the math of what happens if one of the candidates does not win Pennsylvania, it all gets very complicated, very quickly.”
“A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for Americans to place bets on the outcome of congressional elections via a prediction-market startup, a victory that opens the door to legalized wagers on U.S. elections,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Karl Rove told Fox News that allowing sentencing to proceed in Donald Trump’s New York hush money case could have given Trump a boost in the polls.
Said Rove: “Donald Trump has risen in the polls the more the people have reacted negatively to his treatment in the courtroom. And if the judge had gone ahead with this, it could have easily been the October surprise.”
“Spectators at the University of Michigan football game against Texas on Saturday will be reminded of a different rival before the game: Ohio State,” CBS News reports.
“At the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an aerial banner paid for by the Democratic National Committee will read: ‘JD Vance <3 Ohio State + Project 2025.’ It’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Republican vice presidential nominee, who got his bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University, and the dense conservative blueprint by the Heritage Foundation for a potential second Trump term.”
“From the tailgates until kickoff, fans at four separate college football games in battleground states on Saturday will see aerial banners paid for by the Democratic National Committee.”
New York Magazine: “Part of Harris world’s thinking is that voters already know about Trump’s character and have set views of him that aren’t worth reinforcing in the tight but highly valuable speaking windows Harris will have on the campaign stage. (It’s not like she has new information to add that might change those views.)”
“And since the debate rules about muted microphones mean she is unlikely to have many clear back-and-forths with him, many close to her team figure she should not try too hard to create moments like her viral ones questioning Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh as a senator.”
“She just should not be baited. She should bait him. He can be rattled. He doesn’t know how to respond to substantive, direct attacks.”
— Hillary Clinton, quoted by the New York Times, on Kamala Harris debating Donald Trump.
“Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie,” the New York Times reports.
“The former president’s preparations are more improv. They are pointedly called not ‘debate prep’ but ‘policy time,’ meant to refresh him on his record. Nobody is playing Ms. Harris; sometimes his aides sit at a long table opposite him and bat questions back and forth, or other times he pulls up a chair closer to them. Mr. Trump has held just a handful of sessions so far, interrupting one at his Las Vegas hotel so he and his advisers could go up to his suite to watch Ms. Harris’s convention speech.”
Associated Press: Harris and Trump are getting ready for Tuesday’s debate in sharply different ways.
“If any voters had forgotten that Donald Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day,” the New York Times reports.
“At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Mr. Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, laid out years-old allegations from the women in detail as he denied that they were telling the truth. He had just attended a federal appeals court hearing related to a civil case in which he was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming a New York writer, E. Jean Carroll, decades earlier. Mr. Trump was not required to attend the hearing, but decided he wanted to.”
“State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil’s (R) former chief of staff Chad Condit has sued her for alleged sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment, claiming in a lengthy complaint that the Central Valley Republican pressured him into performing sex acts when he worked for her,” Politico reports.
“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”
— Former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a statement explaining that he’ll vote for Kamala Harris.
“The Nevada Supreme Court has ruled that the Green Party is ineligible to appear on the state’s presidential ballot after its petition failed to include the required language for minor parties to qualify for the ballot,” the Nevada Independent reports.
“Kamala Harris had planned to object, fact-check and directly question Donald Trump while he was speaking during their debate next week. But now, with rules just finalized to mute the candidates when their opponents speaks, campaign officials said Harris advisers are scrambling to rewrite their playbook,” Politico reports.
“Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings.”
“Instead, four Harris campaign officials argued that she will be ‘handcuffed’ by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.”
“Donald Trump has pulled it off,” Politico reports.
“Voters will go to the polls in November without resolution in any of the four criminal cases against the former president and Republican presidential nominee. A judge’s decision Friday in New York to postpone Trump’s sentencing for his criminal conviction in the hush money case until Nov. 26 was the last domino to fall. But for months, Trump has been rattling off unlikely legal victories — sometimes aided by his own appointees to the bench — and outmaneuvering federal and state prosecutors who pushed for quick trials.”
“It’s an outcome his supporters have often described as drawing to an ‘inside straight’: a calculated gamble to delay his criminal cases at all costs to ensure that he avoids accountability from the courts during his bid to reclaim the White House. But he’ll have to wait until November to see if the gamble pays off.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.