One month to Election Day. Here’s what to watch

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It’s officially the final month of the 2024 presidential election, an affair that has felt bonkers for months.

Americans witnessed the sitting Democratic president drop out of the race, the Republican nominee narrowly escape an assassination attempt and the rise of the first woman of color on a national ticket.

Where are the candidates spending money?

Money isn’t everything in politics, but it’s certainly not nothing. Where the campaigns – and the super PACs that support them – spend money is, if nothing else, a good indicator of where they see opportunity.

CNN’s David Wright tracks spending, and here’s what he messaged me when I asked where the money is headed in this final month as the ad wars intensify:

You can see how each side is placing bets on their best path to 270 electoral votes. In the first week of October, the (Kamala) Harris campaign is spending the most in the critical trio of “Blue Wall” states – they’ve got more than $5 million booked in Pennsylvania, about $4 million booked in Michigan, plus about $2.7 million booked in Wisconsin. And that makes sense – if Harris wins all three of those states, plus Nebraska’s up-for-grabs electoral vote in the swingy second congressional district (where the campaign also has more than $300,000 in ad time this week), she’s the next president.

The (Donald) Trump campaign, on the other hand, is looking to the Sun Belt. This week, Trump’s campaign is spending the most on ads in Pennsylvania, $3.8 million – it’s really the linchpin to both sides’ strategies. But in addition to that, the campaign is also spending $3.4 million in North Carolina and nearly $3 million in Georgia, its other top targets, and if he wins those two states plus Pennsylvania, he’s heading back to the White House. 

The policy proposals have been rolled out, and the candidates have tried to define each other. Now it’s time to get voters to the polls or the mailbox.

Voting early and by mail is already underway in much of the country, although early voting is not expected to reach the same level as it did in the Covid-19 pandemic election of 2020. Trump remains a mail-voting skeptic, but Republicans are embracing the practice in key states this year in an effort to keep pace with Democrats.

Some Republicans are raising questions about other elements of Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy, as CNN’s Steve Contorno and Fredreka Schouten report. Instead of knocking on doors in key states, Trump’s allies are using funding from tech billionaire Elon Musk to do some nontraditional things.

Contorno and Schouten write:

Targeting irregular voters, teaching supporters to surveil polling places and bombarding states with voting-related lawsuits – this is the machine the Trump campaign has built for an election that many expect to hinge on just tens of thousands of ballots cast across seven battleground states. It’s a gamble, Trump’s campaign internally acknowledges, but one that they insist is built on data they have collected over nearly a decade and tested for the past six months.

Read their full report.

Harris has supporters to the left and supporters to the right.

High-profile backers like Barack Obama, the popular former Democratic president, will hit the trail to appeal to the party’s base. Per CNN’s reporting, Obama plans a 27-day blitz for Harris. He’ll appear at events and lend his name to emails and fundraising materials.

Meanwhile, disaffected anti-Trump Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney will campaign for Harris and try to appeal to moderates, independents and even Republicans who want to move on from Trump.

Trump will get bold-face support from the world’s richest man, Musk, who is set to appear at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday at the site where Trump was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin in July.

But Trump has fewer surrogates he can turn to. Former Republican President George W. Bush is not a vocal supporter, and his vice president, Dick Cheney, has said he will vote for Harris. The party has changed so much that Bush and Cheney probably wouldn’t be welcome at a Trump rally.

The Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates could ease access to money and make people more comfortable they’ll be able to buy a house or a car. Strong jobs numbers from September suggest people who want jobs can get them. An East Coast port workers strike was short-lived and won’t turn into the campaign issue it could have been.

But some things are still going to be much more expensive on Election Day than they were when Trump was president. And oil prices could rise over the next month, making voters feel the pinch.

While larger shifts toward Harris in polling over the summer have stalled, there’s some evidence Americans’ perceptions of the economy are shifting, according to Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report. On CNN’s “Inside Politics,” she described Cook polling that finds the overall horse race in 2024 is unchanged, but there are shifts deeper down among key voters in key states. Trump’s lead on who voters trust to deal with inflation is gone. His lead on immigration is smaller.

“Voters … they’re not feeling great about the economy, but they’re feeling less pessimistic about the economy,” Walter said. Voters who feel “meh” about the economy seem to be feeling better about Harris, she said.

Keep an eye on the “meh” vote.

Will all North Carolinians and Georgians be able to vote?

North Carolina and Georgia are both key electoral states and major disaster areas as a result of Hurricane Helene.

Rescue workers are still trying to find missing people, particularly in rural parts of North Carolina that were hit by flooding and have been cut off from aid. As the humanitarian story plays out, there will come a time when it’s appropriate to start looking at whether people whose homes are gone and roads were washed away will be able to have their voices heard.

RELATED: Read more about the relief effort in North Carolina as the clock ticks to find Helene survivors.

Democrats have tried to move beyond the rift in their party over the situation in the Middle East. Progressives who want the US to do more for Palestinians were largely sidelined at the Democratic National Convention in August, and Harris has tried very hard to balance her support for Israel with recognition of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

But now Israel is in conflict with Lebanon to the north and has traded missiles with Iran. It’s not clear how or if the growing regional war in the Middle East will affect the US election, but there is a simmering division among Democrats that could present problems for them, particularly in the key state of Michigan if some people frustrated with US support for Israel decide not to vote.

There’s no way Trump’s federal trial for interfering in the 2020 presidential election will be completed, much less underway, by the time Election Day rolls around. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be developments in the much-delayed affair.

The biggest of these likely occurred Thursday, when much of special counsel Jack Smith’s case was publicly released by Judge Tanya Chutkan. There were interesting new details in the court filing, but it’s also possible that any outrage over Trump’s 2020 actions is already baked into the voting equation.

More importantly, many of the campaign tactics Smith describes sound familiar to the election skepticism being deployed by Trump and his allies in 2024. Read more from CNN’s justice team.

Take a moment and think about your own situation. Are you registered to vote? Do you know how you’ll go about voting? Many states allow some kind of same-day voting registration, but not all. Check out CNN’s voter handbook for information on your state.

It’s one month to Election Day, but that’s a little bit of a misnomer. So many Americans are already voting that Election Day is arguably here right now. Plus, the counting of mail-in votes and the potential for recounts in consequential states mean that we likely won’t know who won the election soon after polls close on November 5.

In non-2024 developments, Trump faces sentencing for his conviction on falsifying business records in New York with regard to 2016 hush money payments on November 26.

No matter what happens with the 2024 election, Trump is unlikely to accept the results if Harris wins. His allies are preparing for a legal fight after Election Day to contest votes and potentially the certification of election results, which must be completed by December 11 for electors to gather in state capitals and officially cast electoral votes on December 17.

Then, as everyone should remember from 2020, the electoral votes are meant to be counted in Congress, this time with Vice President Harris presiding, on January 6, 2025. The new president takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.