October surprises are coming at a dizzying pace. But the question is whether grave crises at home and abroad can break a dead heat between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in an election that’s already been marked by huge turmoil.
The White House is grappling with three challenges that could threaten the vice president’s hopes and offer an opening to the Republican nominee’s narrative of Biden-era negligence. A month before Election Day, the US faces the grave possibility of being dragged into a Middle East conflagration; a port workers’ strike could hit inflation-weary consumers; and political pressure is rising in the fallout of Hurricane Helene.
Trump, meanwhile, was hit on Wednesday by the unsealing of a 165-page document in which special counsel Jack Smith gives the fullest picture of his case in the federal 2020 election interference case. The ex-president has pleaded not guilty, but the filing re-injected his attempt to steal the last election into the frantic endgame of a campaign partially shaped by Democrats’ claims he poses an existential threat to American democracy.
Each situation highlights potential vulnerabilities for both candidates as voters make up their minds. The trio of tests facing Harris comes with potential economic, political and humanitarian consequences if the administration errs. And the new scrutiny of Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election could cause some voters to again question his fitness for the Oval Office.
One of the most bewildering aspects of the 2024 election is that a former president accused of trying to overthrow the previous election has an even chance of winning this one.
The depth of Trump’s alleged election stealing plot was laid bare in Smith’s filing, which said that he “extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results.” Smith, trying to get around this summer’s Supreme Court ruling that granted presidents substantial immunity for official acts, added that Trump “operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”
In one of the most damning parts of the filing, Smith said he had evidence that showed the then-president told family members, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Trump has falsely claimed that all his legal exposure proves that the Biden administration has weaponized justice against him to meddle in this election. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung claimed that “President Trump is dominating, and the Radical Democrats throughout the Deep State are freaking out.”
Trump has also forced fellow Republicans to adopt his false claims of fraud in 2020. In the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, his running mate JD Vance couldn’t bring himself to publicly say his boss lost the last election.
While Republican voters seem willing to buy into Trump’s false narrative, it remains unclear how deeply events four years ago still weigh on the minds of swing-state voters and how much, if at all, Smith’s unsealed document will shape the race.
The greatest vulnerability for Harris may lie in a sense the post-pandemic normality that Joe Biden pledged to restore in 2020 is still unrealized, while Republicans make a case that Democratic leadership is outmatched by cascading events at home and abroad.
A long-dreaded war between Iran and Israel could force the United States into fighting with Tehran after more than four decades of proxy antagonism and put Americans in harm’s way. Any consequent energy crisis could send gas prices soaring and shatter Harris’ economic credentials. The port stoppage is pulling the administration between its support for unionized labor and an imperative to prevent supermarket shortages and hiked prices. Meanwhile, Helene is the second deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland in the past 50 years, following Katrina in 2005, which became a symbol of how mismanaged natural disasters can create political cataclysms.
“Look at the World today — Look at the missiles flying right now in the Middle East, look at what’s happening with Russia/Ukraine, look at Inflation destroying the World. NONE OF THIS HAPPENED WHILE I WAS PRESIDENT!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. His argument ignores the daily chaos that raged when he was in office. But unlike in 2020, amid his botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis, Trump is not an incumbent and his post could be a crisp election argument against the current administration. Proliferating crises also allow Trump to revive one of the key themes of his campaign – that he offers strength and Harris and Biden are weak.
Each of the problems looming over the White House race might qualify for the cliche October surprise. Yet their impact is hard to assess since this campaign’s many twists have yet to have a decisive impact. Trump has, for example, been convicted of a crime and escaped two assassination attempts. An incumbent president running for reelection abandoned his campaign a few months before Election Day.
Still, after the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, there are now no scheduled set-piece occasions that offer the prospect of a major twist in the campaign. That means effectively navigating the crises that do arise could become even more vital.
Any development could in theory take on outsize significance among the perhaps several hundred thousand voters in a handful of swing states that will decide this election. Harris has a narrow lead in some national polls, but most swing state surveys show no clear leader and margins within sampling errors.
It’s hard to imagine a more unwelcome intangible a few weeks from an election than a security crisis in the Middle East, a region that has confounded American presidents for decades.
Following Israel’s ground offensive in Lebanon and its assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the region has been on even more of a knife-edge after months of Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, which followed the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. The US and its allies helped repel Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel this week, but attention has now shifted to Israel’s response following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning to Tehran that nowhere is out of reach from Israeli forces.
Netanyahu’s supporters in Israel and the United States are urging him to take advantage of a moment of weakness for the Islamic Republic after Israeli forces’ success in taking out key leaders of Iranian proxy groups. Netanyahu raised expectations of another escalation by warning that Iran made a big mistake with its reprisal attacks and “will pay for it.”
But Biden on Wednesday took the highly unusual step of publicly warning Israel against any attempt to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. “The answer is no,” he said when questioned about such a potential operation, and said the US would be discussing with the Israelis about how they might respond.
But Biden’s problem is that Netanyahu has acquired a taste for ignoring US concerns about his actions in Gaza and Lebanon. This has damaged the administration’s authority. But the Israeli leader has also acted with the expectation that Washington will be forced to come to Israel’s defense in any case.
There’s also a significant political dimension to the worsening tensions. Trump and his allies are egging Netanyahu on — both because of ideological synergy with his far-right government and also perhaps because a sense of growing crisis could boost the former president’s hopes of winning a non-consecutive second term. And Israel’s military moves, which have led to thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, also threaten to widen splits in the Democratic Party over the failure of Harris and Biden to restrain Netanyahu. Some community leaders, for example, warn of depressed progressive and Arab American turnout in key swing states, including Michigan, next month.
A walkout by nearly 50,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at ports on the East and Gulf Coast ports is blocking the flow of US imports and exports.
If parts get held up, US factories could grind to a halt. And shortages of retail goods could cause price hikes that remind Americans of the worst of the inflation crisis that Trump has blamed on Biden and Harris. The administration may have some leeway – already-shipped goods in storage may mitigate the immediate impact of the strike over pay. But political pressures will build every day for a resolution.
Biden, in the twilight of a political career defined by his reverence for unionized labor, says he won’t use his powers to suspend the stoppage. He and Harris have argued that collective bargaining is the best way to end the dispute.
Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party and attempts to court blue-collar workers are reflected in his call for workers to be given the chance to negotiate better pay. A more traditional GOP nominee might have sided with port companies and shipping lines. But the ex-president also tried to convince voters that Harris is to blame for the impasse.
The Democratic nominee said Wednesday the strike was about “fairness” and the rights of longshoremen to share in massive profits of shipping firms. And she warned that Trump’s pro-labor rhetoric was phony. “Donald Trump … wants to pull us back to a time before workers had the freedom to organize,” she said, accusing the GOP nominee of blocking overtime benefits and backing union busters when he was president.
Still, the dispute is the last thing Harris wants as she seeks to build on some polls showing her narrowing Trump’s edge on the economy — the issue that voters consistently say concerns them the most ahead of the election.
Presidential administrations are now acutely conscious of any impression they’ve failed Americans caught in natural disasters.
The vice president, therefore, rushed Wednesday to mitigate political reverberations from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which caused horrendous flooding including in parts of two swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, and killed at least 189 people with many more still unaccounted for. Harris flew into Augusta, Georgia, to survey damage and provide updates about an accelerating federal relief effort. Biden, who took an aerial tour of damage in North Carolina, asked the Pentagon to approve the deployment of 1,000 active duty troops there to join hundreds of National Guard personnel already involved.
But Trump has already tried to manipulate the tragedy for political gain, accusing Biden of “sleeping” following the storm. An ex-president who will be remembered for slapdash management of federal emergencies also falsely said Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp had been unable to reach the president.
“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said Monday. “I don’t care about what he says about me, I care what he, what he communicates to people that are in need,” the president said. “He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are. We are.”
The president’s anger did not just sum up his frustration over Trump’s attempt to exploit Helene. It highlighted the staying power of the ex-president’s signature move of reinventing reality. Four years ago, Biden thought he stamped this out for good. But Trump is still leveraging tumult for his own gain.
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