The last full week of the 2024 campaign is finally, mercifully, almost over.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are neck-and-neck in national polling, as they’ve been for months. In more than a half-dozen swing states, the margins separating the candidates are very close — and either candidate could clearly pull ahead by Monday.
There are signs, however, of which way this thing may be going. Harris is closing, by any honest account, with a show of strength. Her thousands-strong crowd on the Ellipse on Wednesday, not to mention the thousands more turned away for lack of space, was a shot directly across the bow of Trump, whose own crowd began abandoning him once again last week in Michigan. The former president kept his supporters waiting for hours while he talked to Joe Rogan.
But that rally was nothing — nothing — like the spectacle that played out in Manhattan, on Sunday at the iconic Madison Square Garden. In New York, his former home, the ex-president hosted an acerbic comedian whose choice of jokes included an ugly swing at Puerto Rico — which he likened to an “island of garbage” in the ocean. Trump himself followed this up by being driven around on the tarmac in a garbage truck for seemingly no reason, the orangeness of his skin’s hue only made more apparent by the neon-orange vest he wore for the stunt.
So much for New York being in play!
And then there’s JD Vance, who appeared on Rogan’s podcast The Joe Rogan Experience for an interview that was published on Thursday. The vice presidential contender sought to normalize himself once again but found himself unable to come up with good answers for a surprisingly peppy Rogan, who questioned him about his hardline stance on abortion rights.
Vance could only sputter that Democrats were trying to go “way too far” with abortion rights and “celebrate” abortion as Rogan replied, dismissively: “I think there’s very few people who are celebrating, though.”
At one particularly cringeworthy moment, the senator from Ohio claimed that he raced home and stood in front of the door of his family’s home with his firearms after the first assassination attempt against Trump. Vance, of course, has had Secret Service protection for months, and the agency is not generally fond of their protectees embracing the “fight” part of “fight or flight” in a dangerous situation.
Harris, disappointing some armchair campaign managers, won’t be making an appearance on the massively popular podcast after Rogan indicated that he had wanted the vice president to come to his studio in Austin, Texas for the interview, while her team insisted he travel to them.
As Trump and his running mate continue to announce events on a day-to-day basis, the Harris campaign is prepping for one final swing through every major battleground state through the weekend and next Monday.
Both campaigns are putting a heavy focus on North Carolina as Election Day draws close. Trump will rally in Gastonia on Saturday, while Harris will be in Charlotte the same day. The late-game competitiveness of the state — and, in particular, the GOP’s intense focus on a state Trump won in the past two cycles, is raising questions among some as to whether the Republican candidate may be privately feeling endangered there.
There is also some good news for Harris in Michigan, where two polls in as many days have shown her opening up a small but noteworthy lead over Trump. But as we know, everything remains far too close to even try to predict.
