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The next phase of the US election campaign is coming right at us and it’s even nastier than the last. As hurricanes Milton and Helene rolled in to Florida and North Carolina and at least four other states, bringing tornadoes, storm surges, and miles of destruction, Donald Trump’s team poured out new attack lines blaming the government (aka the Democrats), for the bad weather and for not doing enough to deal with its devastation.
In a downpour of misinformation, Trump baselessly claimed that Harris “wined and dined in San Francisco, and all of the people in North Carolina … no helicopters”. The stats told a different story, that the National Guard had completed 146 flight missions, resulting in the rescue of 538 people and 150 pets.
Other allegations came thick and fast including that the national disaster fund had been spent on illegal migrants not those in desperate need because of storm damage. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was forced to set the record straight and set up a fact-checking channel on its website. Meanwhile, Georgian Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, not known for her thoughtful approach to national emergencies, asserted that “they could control the weather”.
Former broadcast journalist, and now professor at Dublin City University, Colleen Murrell believes that the power of misinformation and disinformation to sow conflict will continue to ramp up on social media over the next few weeks as the campaign goes into its final stage. Meanwhile, as Murrell explains, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has significantly shifted a gear this week, and chosen to take some interviews with media big hitters.
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With a little less than a month before election day it’s all to play for. Trump and Kamala Harris remain pretty much neck and neck in the polls, and only the reckless are willing to put money on the result. With the election expected to be decided by a handful of voters in swing states, who are not yet committed to either candidate, both sides are moving fast, trying new things and throwing vast quantities of money around.
Harris, having apparently not been willing or interested in working with the mainstream news channels in the first few months of her campaign, has changed tack with her media strategy. For a centrepiece interview, she sat down in the CBS studio with seasoned journalist Bill Whitaker to answer some tough questions on the economy, Israel immigration and guns (yes she owns one, a Glock).
As a Conversation editor covering the US election from an international perspective, I have seen Harris start to look a lot more comfortable in her leadership role in the past few months, while still not always nailing the big speeches or the pithy media responses. But for CBS she performed pretty well, appeared more relaxed in front of the camera than she has before and was, sometimes, more concise. Other observers have felt this was a marked improvement on her ability to handle this type of interview earlier this year.
In a race this tight Harris needs to perform well at pretty much everything and she, and her team, have clearly decided that after spending most of the summer developing her presence on social media, where she was a bit of a hit surfing the brat summer theme, they needed a new approach, and 60 Minutes with its 8.4 million viewers was worth the risk.
Over a handful of days the vice-president did a swing through the Howard Stern show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Howard Stern Show as well as the more comfortable territory of a bunch of podcasts. Harris seems much more persuasive in those podcast interviews (who wouldn’t be?), than under pressure on 60 Minutes still, but she is definitely upping her game.
Over the summer, the Harris team stayed away from most traditional media, the big TV channel interviews for instance, and focused on working with their candidate on social media, where she became part of a brat summer swing. This was clearly aimed at winning over younger votes, who they need to turn up on November 5. Harris memes were a bit of a summer success story, associating the vice-president more of a relaxed type, happy to go with the flow.
But social media trends only get you so far, and those who don’t go near Instagram and Twitter/X are unlikely to be won over. Some of these harder-to-reach voters are far more likely to switch on CBS, than pick up on a TikTok trend. And if they are not watching the TV, then the campaigns will have to go out on the streets and find them.
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Chasing the last votes
Regular Conversation correspondent on the US election, Thomas Gift, has been back visiting his home state of Pennsylvania (PA) over the past few weeks, and has been letting me know what the middle of the key swing state is looking like, campaign wise. Last week he described to me how a set of large Trump banners have become a semi-permanent feature in the streets of Chambersburg, PA. Chambersburg is set right in the middle of the state, almost half way between the major cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
While Harris is likely to win the cities, Trump is expected to win the more rural areas of PA, the state with the fifth biggest population in the US, and a crucial 19 Electoral College votes. They are both fighting over the suburbs, and this is where the battle is likely to be won. More Democrats have moved to the suburbs, from more urban residential areas in the past few years, and suburban populations are growing fast.
Another factor could be the shift in the demographics of those old Pennsylvania industrial towns (where Billy Joel said they were closing all the factories down), they now have a growing population of Latino voters, moving to take up jobs in call centres that have opened there, as A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, a professor of history at Penn State university, details. Latino voters supported Joe Biden in 2020 and, according to a recent government census, Allentown is now 54% Latino. Helpfully for the Democrats, 53% of PA’s Hispanic population is of Puerto Rican descent and Puerto Ricans tend to lean Democrat. Both parties are busy identifying opportunities here.
Trump is rolling out a huge campaign machine in the state, and Harris is pumping money in too. As someone who went to high school in Pittsburgh, I’m naturally fascinated by what is going on in the state, but it is fast turning out to be everybody’s one to watch, as PA is expected to be the tipping point for the campaigns. Whoever wins here is pretty likely to win the presidency. In the last 10 elections, Pennsylvania has selected the eventual occupant of the Oval Office eight times, as Gift wrote for us this week.
Therefore it’s no surprise that Harris and her allies have spent US$21.2 million (£16.9 million) on political ads in Pennsylvania (three times what they’ve spent in Georgia, twice what they’ve spent in Michigan and 18 times what they’ve spent in North Carolina). Meanwhile, Trump’s team are also splashing the cash here in the keystone state, with a US$20.9 million total so far, far more than they are spending in Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina. It’s helping to ensure Pennsylvania will remain central to this race right up until election night (and possibly beyond).
Gift will be among my guests at a special Conversation event we’re hosting next week. He and several other expert panellists will be discussing why the result of this election is just as important to the rest of the world, as it is to the US. If you happen to be in London on October 17, do sign up to join us for a lively look at the significant global decisions the new president will hold in their hand.
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