The 24 Seven: Cash Dash

The top seven stories shaping the race for the White House

AI generated image of “campaign money”

1. Harris Haul

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign continues to rake in astounding campaign hauls, announcing this week that they collected $361 million in August — giving them a massive cash advantage over the campaign of former president Donald Trump, as The New York Times reports.

But with two months left until voting wraps on Election Day and early voting starting shortly, it also presents a different problem — is it possible to spend all that money in a compressed timeframe. There’s only so many hours in a day and only so much ad-volume available in the seven key battleground states.

We’re starting to see some of that spill out from the presidential race out into the Senate and House races (the Harris team announced recently it was sending $25 million to downballot candidates.)

Also interesting, according to an FEC filing reviewed by 24sight News, one of the Trump-aligned super PACs, Right for America, which is being bankrolled by Republican heavy hitters Ike Perlmutter, Miriam Adelson and others, reported it is purchasing almost $1 million ($952,000) of advertising on X.com, which is an astounding amount for the social media giant.

Kyle Tharp

at FWIW, an expert in digital campaign spending, notes that the campaigns and groups have only spent a total of $9.3 million so far on Twitter (err X).

2. Trump Sentencing Delayed

Judge Juan Merchan, who has been overseeing the New York criminal case of Trump’s efforts to sway the 2016 election with hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, announced that sentencing would be delayed until shortly before Thanksgiving this year, the second time his sentencing on 34 felony counts has been delayed.

In his order, Merchan noted the unique nature of the case and conviction, given it’s the first ever conviction of a former U.S. president and that Trump is the Republican nominee for president again, The Washington Post reports.

3. Hunting

Franklin and Marshall poll director Berwood Yost has a good look beyond the toplines of Pennsylvania polling which has found there to be, apparently, a minimal 3 percent of voters who remain undecided. Digging into F&M’s August poll, Yost writes that the number of possible persuadable voters, who could potentially decide the election given Pennsylvania’s importance in the 2024 race, could actually be closer to 1 out of every 7 voters.

Yost cites the large number of independents and “Traditional Rs” and “Other Rs” as key groups who are movable heading into the start of voting. (Notable also, in Yost’s findings, is the almost entirely cemented bloc of support among “Trump Rs” who say they will definitely be voting for Trump, mirroring longrunning national trends of Trump support.)

4. A $400K Video

Why spend $400,000 per video if you’re the Russians? (As two employees of RT who allegedly funneled $10 million to Tenet Media’s co-founders, according to the Justice Department, did.)

Trygve Olson, a senior advisor to The Lincoln Project, and expert who has worked overseas in former Eastern bloc republics looking to establish democratic norms in a post-Soviet world, writes of the classic Soviet propaganda tactics of planting, nourishing and then harvesting elaborate disinformation campaigns — seeds of propaganda are planted well before they’re harvested, as in during the homestretch of the 2024 race.

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5. PA 10

A top House Republican, Rep. Scott Perry, is facing a tougher than usual re-election bid in the commonwealth’s 10th District (which covers much of York and nearby Harrisburg) against challenger Janelle Stelson.

Stelson, the Democratic nominee and a former longtime Pennsylvania newscaster, has been hammering Perry on his long-running opposition to abortion, Axios reports.

Stelson has also been flooding the airwaves since Labor Day with advertising, part of a broader cash advantage among House Democrats over House Republicans in the final sprint.

Perry used to trounce in his races easily, beating his Democratic opponent in 2016 by a 2:1 margin. But his past three bids have drawn much tighter, according to Ballotpedia, with the long-running lawmaker only winning by between 6 and 7 percentage points since 2018.

6. Free Media

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Lorraine Ali details what most people — after a full decade of watching him routinely — understand well about Trump’s tactics of flooding the airwaves with bullcrap and gobbledygook, deeming that it is does seem to be very strategic, a “Gish Gallop” strategy of debating by burying the opposition in non-sequiturs and outrageous comments.

7. More media?

Will Harris (and by extension running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz) do more sitdown interviews akin to the big CNN interview last week?

It doesn’t seem likely, but Trump and running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, are continuing to do more interviews and events — adding to the pressure. And voters deserve, as best as can be ferreted out from each major party candidate, to get a sense of what they’re voting on.

Their first debate will likely garner plenty of attention given the timing (after Labor Day) and the novelty (this is their first head to head showdown onstage). The Trump-Biden debate in June, which began the historic spiral resulting in Harris being placed at the top of the Democratic ticket, drew a strong 51.3 million viewer, according to Nielsen, but that was still well less than the 73 million who tuned in for the first Trump-Biden showdown in October 2020.

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Cheers,

Tom