John Heilemann: “The target audience for the next three weeks contains essentially no one who watches Fox News or MSNBC or reads the Times, the Post, the Daily Dish (or Puck).”

“How do you reach them? Via Stern and Colbert, Call Her Daddy and All the Smoke, or Charlamagne tha God—with whom Kamala is sitting down on Tuesday, an interview that’s part of a much wider effort to address her issues with Black voters.”

Harris also gave an interview yesterday to The Shade Room, a website with a massive Black audience.

“Just a former president suggesting he’ll use the military against his fellow citizens for exercising their freedom of speech. Nothing to worry about, folks. Seriously, when is he gonna grow that little mustache already? Because there’s only three weeks left!”

— Jimmy Kimmel, on his show last night.

A new AARP poll in Michigan finds Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are tied among likely voters in a multi-candidate field, 46% to 46%. 

Key finding: “Since our August poll, some demographics have shifted in major ways. Voters in the 50-64 age range have moved towards Trump by 11 points, and voters in the 65+ age group have moved towards Harris by 11 points.”

In the U.S. Senate race, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D) holds a three-point lead over Mike Rogers (R) among voters overall, 49% to 46%.

“With just weeks left in the 2024 presidential contest, Donald Trump already has plans in place to aggressively challenge the election results if he fails to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris,” Rolling Stone reports.

“According to four conservative attorneys and other sources who’ve spoken to the former president on this matter, Trump intends to declare — as soon as on Election Night — that the race is being ‘rigged’ or ‘stolen’ from him, by pointing to slow vote-counts of mail-in ballots in crucial battleground states as his evidence for supposed Democratic shenanigans afoot.”

Trump, in private conversations with close allies and advisers in recent months, has stressed: “You gotta call them out very early in the process, like that night, otherwise they can get away with it and cover their tracks.”

“The co-manager of Donald Trump’s White House campaign has raked in $22 million and counting from the Republican nominee’s political operation in just two years,” the Daily Beast reports.

“Chris LaCivita, an influential GOP operative, reaped a $19 million financial windfall in 2022 when he served as a ‘strategic consultant’ to two Trump-affiliated super PACs, campaign finance records show. Then, after joining the Trump campaign, he negotiated three contracts that gave his tiny LLC a generous cut of Trump’s TV and digital ads, direct mail and other campaign spending.”

Time: “Over the decades, the book has come to include ready-made orders to suspend habeas corpus, the ancient and bedrock principle that those arrested appear before a judge, put parts of the country under military control, impose martial law, block Americans from traveling overseas, and restrict telecommunications… When Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, members of his national security staff actively worked to keep him from learning the full extent of these interpretations of presidential authority, concerned that he would abuse them.”

“Now some former Trump advisors are raising the alarm about the dangers of Trump having access to the Doomsday Book in a second term. The former officials—which include Mark Harvey, who oversaw the Doomsday Book while on Trump’s National Security Council, and Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security—worry that Trump would use the powers in situations that fall far short of the crises they were drafted to address.”

“Trump has a history of testing the limits of presidential powers, and in a second term would be free of many of the guardrails that restricted his first one.”

A new Yale Youth poll finds Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump among voters under age 30, 56% to 35%.

For comparison, Joe Biden won this age group by 60% to 37% in 2020.

“The Senate Majority PAC (SMP) raised $119 million in the third quarter, leaving it with $109 million at the beginning of this month to try to keep Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in power,” Axios reports.

Tom Nichols: “The term fascism has been so overused as a denunciation that many people have understandably tuned it out. But every American should be shocked to hear a presidential nominee say that other Americans (including a sitting member of Congress) are more dangerous than two nations pointing hundreds of nuclear warheads at America’s cities. During the Cold War, conservative members of the GOP would likely have labeled anyone saying such things as a ‘comsymp,’ a fellow traveler, or even a traitor. Indeed, one might expect that other Republicans would be horrified to hear such hatred directed at their fellow citizens and such comfort given to the nation’s enemies.”

“Pretty to think so. But today’s Republican leaders are cowards, and some are even worse: They are complicit, as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin proved today in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. At least cowards run away. The GOP elected officials who cross the street against the light just to get away from the reporters are at least showing a tiny, molecular awareness of shame. Youngkin, however, smiled and dissembled and excused Trump’s hideousness with a kind of folksy shamelessness that made cowardice seem noble by comparison.”

“A group of Republican donors and operatives has been the hidden hand behind some of this campaign’s most controversial advertisements attacking Kamala Harris and bolstering Donald Trump,” the New York Times reports.

“Over $100 million was raised and spent over the past four years by a political nonprofit called Building America’s Future… And in the presidential race, the group is expected to have spent more than $35 million to peel off liberal support for Ms. Harris from vital demographic groups, such as younger men and Muslim Americans, and to get third-party candidates on ballots.”

“Building America’s Future will be publicly revealed in federal campaign finance filings on Tuesday as the sole funder of two super PACs that have disclosed little about their backers.”

Dan Pfeiffer: “With the exception of talented communicators like Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom, I urge Democrats to avoid doing interviews on Fox News. The audience is relatively small, and the odds that a persuadable voter in your state or district watches the interview is infinitesimal. The network invariably takes the speaker’s worst moment and cycles through that clip all day on their social platforms. It’s a rigged game, and it takes a certain type of politician to make the risk worth it.”

“Despite all of this, I think Kamala Harris’s decision to do this high-risk Fox News interview is the right one.”