The 24 Seven: Warmup
The 24 Seven: Warmup
The top seven stories shaping the race for the White House
1. The Middle
HARRISBURG, PA _ Drive up I-95 from Washington, around the Baltimore Beltway, to I-83 and the crush of development, nondescript office parks, the headquarters of No Such Agency, fast disappear.
Anybody who’s grown up in the Baltimore region, taken trips to Hershey Park, or gone to see a Harrisburg Senators game (AA, Nats affiliate) knows that view — the hills begin rolling more, the sky opens up a bit (on a clear day) and the distance between exits feels more like the Midwest than the Mid-Atlantic.
Exit at the Pennsylvania Toll Road just before Harrisburg and you can drive 2 hours east to Philadelphia or 3 or so hours west to Pittsburgh. It is a state capital in the middle, though very much not the “Alabama” portion of the state (as James Carville has famously noted) with its mix of revived industrial offices along the riverside and artsy coffee shops and independent stores.
The last time I was up here, in September 2020, armed militia members dotted the steps leading up to the Pennsylvania Statehouse, protesting mask mandates and the pandemic lockdown. I haven’t seen any militia members or other armed protesters toting guns on my quick trip through here today.
But the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as with the other battleground states, is about to get a lot more active with early voting starting soon.
This tweet from Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, in response to a recent Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article on paper ballots, gives a good sense of what’s on the horizon. At this moment, it’s hard to see 2024 evolving into another conflagration akin to 2020, but the predicate is there and emotions are still amped-up (in no small part because the former president and Republican Party nominee keeps fueling the fire with unfounded claims and easily disproved lies.)
(Your author did stop in at a Rutter’s for a sausage, egg and cheese croissandwich, which was pretty solid - not soppy, crisp and held together ok. Not bad for gas station cuisine. Of note was the slots room just off the side of the entrance, a good reminder how much legalized gambling has shaped the commonwealth in the past three decades.)
2. Superseding Anger
Special counsel Jack Smith’s securing of a new indictment against Trump for the January 6th attack on the Capitol, tailored to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling granting broad new powers of “presidential immunity”, spurred Trump in a series of public statements to threaten, again, to jail his political opponents if he retakes office.
3. First sitdown
Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will do their first sitdown interview this afternoon, a standard practice among new tickets, with Dana Bash of CNN. The much anticipated interview airs at 9p ET.
4. Labor Days
In her State of the Union address earlier this week, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler touted the importance of labor heading into the homestretch of the general election.
Organized labor is enjoying a notable surge in popularity across the country. (As major American institutions go, it’d be hard to find any with as broad public trust as labor — the three official estates, legislative, executive and judicial, and the unofficial fourth estate, have all seen their popularity and public trust tank during the Trump era of American politics.
Biden notably became the first president to join a picket line, during the UAW strike last year. And Republicans have been trying to get in on the action as well, Trump running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance showed up on a picket line for the first time, to which veteran Ohio Democratic lawmaker Marcia Kaptur welcomed him with a dismissive remark.
New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Chris Ager announced Thursday that the state party would be organizing outreach to union members to try and win them to the Trump side, and the Trump-era GOP has been working — with mixed success — to win more votes from labor households.
But the power and importance of labor, for many years taken as granted as a Democratic voting bloc, was flexed throughout the Democratic convention in Chicago last week, with prime speaking slots for top labor officials (like UAW president Shawn Fain who drew headlines with this “Trump is a scab” shirt.)
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5. Trump scandal of the week
Trump’s campaign team shoved a worker at Arlington National Cemetery aside to film a campaign ad at the fabled cemetery in violation of the military’s rules barring the use of fallen soldiers — in this case 13 who died in a suicide bombing during the withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago — for political campaigns.
The New York Times reports the Army released the first detailed statement of the event, which has evolved into another Trump-style-micro scandal with the Trump campaign debating reports but declining to offer evidence.
Notably, the NYT reports, the cemetery worker who was shoved aside by Trump’s campaign staff after telling them filming was not allowed, has declined to seek charges because of fear of retaliation from Trump supporters if the workers’ name became public.
6. Define conservative
For decades the catch-all term for the American right, “conservative”, was fairly well-defined within the constructs Goldwater and Reagan-era policies and ideology - strong presence on the global stage, socially conservative (anti-abortion, limit marriage to being between one man and one woman) and fiscal conservatism in the
(Yes, there is much more to this, and there have been many debates over the years just how well Republican leaders adhered to those principles, but as an ideological construct it was well-defined.)
Jonathan V. Last, always a sharp interpreter of where the Right is at the moment, who comes at with the jaundiced eye of one of the many NeverTrumpers pushed from the GOP in the past decade, has a good look at where things stand out today.7. Catch me on LiveNow from Fox tonight
Around 830p ET. I’ll be offering some updates from the campaign trail, the read on the state of the race this week and some analysis ahead of the big Harris/Walz interview tonight. You can stream LiveNow from Fox on most smart TVs and catch previous clips here on their YouTube Channel.
For booking, love/hate mail and all other inquiries (including convention surprise appearances) email tom@24sight.news.
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Cheers,
Tom