Before I get to the campaigns’ closing arguments, let’s spend a moment looking at polls that aren’t commissioned by the Trump campaign. My favorite is always YouGov’s and the new one. Among registered voters, Kamala leads 48-46% and among likely voters, she leads 49-46%. She leads among independents 45-39%. The new Monmouth poll shows a similar result. Among registered voters, Kamala leads 47-44% and among “extremely motivated” voters she leads 51-46%.
Axios’ Sophia Cai looked at Señor T’s closing strategy: make a splash and attack, direct from Trump mentor Roy Cohn— “combining splashy, attention-getting stunts with dark, apocalyptic messaging… stay in the news, be provocative, deflect. This strategy led Trump to that fry-cook photo op at a closed McDonald's, and to have a rally with Elon Musk. It’s why he's planning a Sunday rally at New York's Madison Square Garden— a storied venue in a state he's highly unlikely to win, but that promises lots of media coverage. It’s also why Trump’s messaging— wrapped in personal grievances throughout the campaign— seems to have escalated to a daily hunt for shock value.” One thing seems certain: he isn’t trying to persuade undecided voters as much as he is trying to turn out the MAGAts with vicious attacks on immigrants and transgender people and with sexist, racist attacks on Kamala.
About a week ago, a Democratic polling and messaging firm, Blueprint, shared polling with their readers about closing arguments that work best against Trump with still-undecided voters. “The best-testing closing arguments against Trump are those that emphasize his lack of support from his former cabinet and numerous Republicans (a topic the Harris campaign is running extensive ads on), his responsibility for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and his intentions to gut Social Security and Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.”
And these are the messaging items that backfire and actually hurt Kamala— from bad to worst:
Project 2025- “Donald Trump might not call himself an extremist, but his campaign is getting its ideas from the extreme Project 2025, and JD Vance wrote the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda. Project 2025 would ban abortion nationwide and cut Social Security and Medicare. Far-right extremists will use Trump as a vehicle for their extreme agenda.”
Screwed Workers- “Throughout his career, Donald Trump has screwed over workers. His fraudulent Trump University left thousands of Americans with fake diplomas. He doesn't pay his taxes or his contractors. And when he was president he tried to strip healthcare from working Americans to cut taxes for his rich friends.”
National Debt- “Donald Trump is going to run our country the way he runs his businesses: into bankruptcy. A recent analysis found that his plan to give massive tax cuts to billionaires and corporations would increase the federal debt by $7 trillion dollars. Trump will bankrupt the country to benefit his rich friends.”
TikTok- “Trump used to believe in banning TikTok, then the owner wrote him a multi-million dollar check. Trump flip flopped and he now supports letting Chinese-owned TikTok influence Americans. Imagine what our adversaries can do once they learn how cheap it is to buy Trump.”
Selling Bibles- “ Trump's 'God Bless the USA' Bibles, which are sold for $59.99 each, are manufactured in China. It's exactly what we should come to expect from Trump: attacking China in public while working with them in private to make a profit.”
Three other messages that don’t work are about his character (including sending the J-6 mob to attack the Capitol), his selfishness and being a spoiled billionaire.
Of course, at this point, is it even possible to get any messaging through at all in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, where voters are inundated and bombarded with non-stop propaganda from the two campaigns and their allies, including John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach County deputy sheriff who defected to Russia and now openly works for Russia’s pro-Trump/anti-American propaganda machine. He was the one who made up and disseminated, courtesy of Elon Musk, the lie— fake video included— about Tim Walz sexually molesting students.
“Smears, lies and dirty tricks— what we call disinformation today— have long been a feature of American presidential election campaigns,” wrote Steven Myers. “Two weeks before this year’s vote, however, the torrent of half-truths, lies and fabrications, both foreign and homegrown, has exceeded anything that came before, according to officials and researchers who document disinformation, debasing what passes for political debate and corroding “the foundations of the country’s democracy, undermining what was once a shared confidence that the country’s elections, regardless of who won, have been free and fair.” That in itself is a goal both of Putin and Trump.
Russia, as well as Iran and China, have gleefully stoked many of the narratives to portray American democracy as dysfunctional and untrustworthy. Politicians and influential media figures have in turn given foreign adversaries plenty of fodder to work with, inciting and amplifying divisiveness for partisan advantage.
“They do have different tactics and different approaches to influence operations, but their goals are the same,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Washington, said in an interview, referring to foreign adversaries. “Very simply, they’re looking to undermine American trust in our democratic institutions and the election specifically, and to sow partisan discord.”
Numerous factors have contributed to the surge in disinformation, which Easterly and other officials have warned will continue far beyond Election Day.
Social media platforms have helped to harden media ecosystems into distinct, disparate partisan enclaves where facts contradicting preconceived narratives are often unwelcome. Artificial intelligence has become an accelerant, making fake or fanciful content ubiquitous online with merely a few keystrokes.
In today’s political debate, it seems, facts matter less than feelings, which are easily manipulated online. It all played out in full in recent weeks, after two devastating hurricanes killed hundreds across the Southeast and prompted outlandish conspiracy theories and violent threats to rescue workers.
…Perhaps the single biggest factor in today’s disinformation landscape has been Musk’s ownership of Twitter.
Twitter’s previous chief executive, Jack Dorsey, along with Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, faced public and government pressure to enforce their own policies against intentionally false or harmful content, especially around the Covid pandemic and the 2020 election.
…Musk also, according to a recent study, played an outsize role in amplifying content promoted by Tenet Media, a news outlet that the Justice Department accused last month of covertly using $10 million in laundered funds from Russia to pay right-wing media personalities like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin.
It is not clear whether Musk knew of the Russian links— the influencers claimed they did not. He certainly engaged regularly with Tenet Media’s content, though, and Tenet regularly tagged him, presumably to draw his attention, according to the study, published by Reset Tech, a nonprofit research and policy organization based in London.
At least 70 times from September 2023 to September 2024, he responded to or shared accounts linked to Tenet and its influencers to his followers on Twitter— many of them relating to this year’s election, the study found.
…John Mark Dougan, the former sheriff’s deputy from Florida now working for Moscow’s propaganda apparatus, has previously declined to comment on his connections with Russia’s disinformation campaigns, but his contributions are clear.
He appeared in a video on the platform Rumble earlier this month, detailing what he and the host claimed was an account by an exchange student from Kazakhstan accusing Gov. Tim Walz of sexual abuse. He has spread that and the other smears on multiple social media platforms and in scores of news outlets he has created from his apartment in Moscow.
In a text message, he reacted angrily to questions about making false accusations against Walz. “What about E Jean Carrols claims?” he wrote, imprecisely, about E. Jean Carroll, the woman who accused Trump of sexual assault. Referring to her vulgarly, he said she “didn’t have any evidence whatsoever,” even though a jury in New York ordered Trump to pay her $83 million for defaming her in 2019 after she came forward with her accusation.
Dougan then shared links to Hindustan Times, an English-language news outlet in Delhi, and to two sites that he created, Patriot Pioneer and State Stage, both included on a list of websites the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency cited last week as platforms for Russian disinformation campaigns.
“Lots of publications have been writing about this,” he wrote.
I’m sorry but I don’t get it. No one expects Kamala to actually lose the popular vote so what’s the point of these polls?