Democrats have spent the last year eyeing a familiar trio of northern states that would deliver the White House in November: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are the “clearest pathway” to victory, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign leaders wrote in July — as long as she also picks up a single electoral vote in the Omaha area.

The Trump team, meanwhile, has been focused on its own path in the Eastern time zone, a veritable “Red Wall” trifecta that overlaps with the northern “Blue Wall” around the Great Lakes.

“As long as we hold North Carolina, we just need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania,” a Trump campaign official told reporters last month in a strategy briefing. “That is all we need to win. So when everybody is running around with all the machinations, she’s still playing defense.”

The different strategies, which both hinge on a win in Pennsylvania, have been reflected in ad spending by both campaigns and the super PACs supporting them, according to AdImpact, which tracks spending and reservations on television, radio and digital platforms for ads that have already run. The data shows that the Trump and Harris camps largely agree on the seven principal states where they will advertise and the several more where they have hired staff. But the two sides have deployed decidedly different battle plans.

Republicans, for instance, have spent 19 percent of their ad money between March 12 and Sept. 3 in the presidential contest in Georgia, compared with the 11 percent Democrats have spent. Democrats have focused 16 percent of their spending in Michigan, compared with 12 percent of the Republican spending.

Republicans, meanwhile, have moved a greater share of their chips into Pennsylvania, which given its size is likely to hold the key to the election if the outcome is close. That state has seen 36 percent of Republican ad dollars, compared with 21 percent for the Democratic side.

“Pennsylvania and Georgia have taken center stage for the final act of this election,” said John Ashbrook, a Republican strategist. “The map becomes nearly impossible for Republicans without Georgia, and it becomes nearly impossible for Democrats without Pennsylvania.”

The fall electoral college chess game, a vestige of 18th-century concerns that the Founding Fathers had about majority rule, always produces complex gamesmanship late in presidential contests. But this year the map is historically small, the margins in the key states are expected to be tiny, and the various paths each candidate has to victory appear more limited.

Both major-party campaigns continue to have staff in states such as Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire, where Harris made a visit Sept. 4. But both campaigns have focused their spending on a smaller footprint of just seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — as well as Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District.

Within that core battleground, the Trump team has identified a subset of voters, called “Target Persuadables,” that makes up about 11 percent of the voting pool and is the focus of much of their spending. A separate program within Trump’s coordinated campaign is focused on turning out voters who lean Republican but are not certain to get to the polls or turn in a ballot.

The Harris campaign — which has raised and spent much more money — has a more ambitious plan for voter communication, with more money going to more states and with a greater reliance on national advertising buys that do not target specific states. Eighteen percent of the money spent by the Harris side has been spent nationally, compared with 8 percent on the Trump side.

Harris also has a much bigger operation overall. On the whole, the Democratic side had spent or reserved at least $933 million for advertising as of Sept. 3, compared with $485 million on the GOP side. That spread could narrow over the coming weeks, because Republicans have been less aggressive than Democrats in making future ad reservations tracked by AdImpact.

But the Harris campaign has not tried to hide the fact that it has a more geographically expansive plan than its Republican counterpart.

“Our campaign strategy relies on a wide map: Trump is all in on one to two ‘must win’ states. We don’t have that luxury. Every single battleground state is close, so we need to compete aggressively in every state to build a pathway to 270 electoral votes,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a memo to top donors on Sept. 7.

The Harris effort, including independent groups, has put about 13 percent of its state-specific advertising resources into Arizona and Nevada, compared with about 9 percent for the Trump campaign and allied groups, according to AdImpact. A win in both those states for Harris would make up for a loss in either Wisconsin or Michigan, giving her an electoral college victory if she carried Pennsylvania.

The challenge Harris faces is that if she held Michigan and Wisconsin but lost Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, she would need to win North Carolina or Georgia and one of the two Western states to make up the difference.

One of the major groups supporting Harris, American Bridge 21st Century — which has spent or reserved $44 million so far — has decided to focus all of its spending in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Future Forward, the other major Democratic super PAC, has spread its spending across all the battlegrounds, including the Omaha media market in Nebraska.

On the Republican side, the two largest advertising super PACs have roughly divided up the states, with a notable overlap in Pennsylvania. Preserve America PAC, backed by casino magnate Miriam Adelson, has focused on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, while MAGA Inc. has focused on Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Recent polls in North Carolina have shown a close race, with Harris leading in an early-September survey by Quinnipiac University by three points among likely voters. That has raised concerns among Republican strategists about the integrity of their eastern “Red Wall.” Democratic strategists continue to view Georgia as a more favorable state than North Carolina, in part because of its higher percentage of Black voters.

After Harris’s strong debate performance this week, Republican allies of Trump are no longer talking about the sweep they saw as a possibility this summer, when President Joe Biden was crashing in polling. Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, echoing the Trump campaign’s early pitch, said Wednesday that voters should focus on the strongest bulwark for another Trump term.

“It comes down to two states — it’s Pennsylvania and Georgia,” McCarthy said on CNBC. “If Trump carries exactly what he did before, and he wins Pennsylvania and Georgia, he is at 270. He doesn’t need Arizona. He doesn’t need Nevada.”

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

For days, Donald Trump and his allies have zeroed in on Springfield, Ohio, amplifying baseless claims that Haitian immigrants there are eating others’ pets. The promotion of such rumors, which thrust the city into the national spotlight, is rooted in a centuries-old racist trope of vilifying newcomers to the United States and highlights the country’s present-day divides, historians say.

“We’re going to get these people out,” Trump said Friday during a news conference at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., promising to conduct “large deportations” if he is elected president.

His remarks were the latest in a swirl of canards that Trump has spread about Haitian immigrants, despite local officials debunking the claims. Leaders in Springfield have said the claims are harming the community, which has been forced to evacuate schools, city hall and other buildings after receiving threats since Trump’s remarks.

Trump first mentioned Springfield while debating Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night, saying: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” His deportation pledge followed a Thursday rally where Trump accused Haitian immigrants of having “taken over” Springfield and “walking off” with people’s pets. Hours earlier, the Republican presidential nominee posted a meme on his Truth Social platform showing kittens holding a sign that read: “Don’t let them eat us, vote for Trump!”

Trump has also incorrectly said that Haitians in Springfield are in the U.S. illegally, though local officials have rebutted that as well. The migrants were granted temporary protected status in the United States after fleeing violence at home.

The claims are the latest instances of Trump using dehumanizing language when talking about people who immigrate to the United States. They also mirror stereotypes some Americans have used against foreigners in the United States for nearly a century and a half.

Since the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the 1800s, they — along with others from European, Asian or Latin American nations — have been the subject of political cartoons, newspaper articles, caricatures and books that were used by some in politics and media to spread anti-immigrant rhetoric and instill fear in other residents, experts said.

“My first thought was: Here we go again,” said Anita Mannur, director of American University’s Asia, Pacific and Diaspora Studies program. “This is a trope we’ve seen time and time again that is used to ‘other’ people of color [and] new immigrants.”

Immigration and border security has been a flash point leading up to the November election. Republicans have singled out Springfield, which has seen an influx of Haitian immigrants in recent years after a boom in manufacturing jobs attracted new residents. The Haitian immigrants, Springfield’s city manager said in a video posted to Facebook this week, have bolstered the city’s workforce and helped stabilize its economy.

Yet the sudden arrival of people has stretched schools, health clinics and other public services. Tensions soared in Springfield last summer when a Haitian immigrant drove into oncoming traffic and hit a school bus, killing Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy. His parents this week pleaded that their son’s death not be used for “political gain” after Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, tweeted that the boy “was murdered by a Haitian migrant.”

“To clear the air, my son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered,” Nathan Clark said Tuesday during a public meeting in Springfield. “He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.”

Trump repeating the rumor about Springfield residents’ pets — which Republican Party leaders picked up from a Facebook post and Vance elevated Monday — fits into the former president’s record of portraying immigrants broadly as threats. His attempts to vilify immigrants and people of color, including his campaign’s use of racist tropes, align with tactics that populist and authoritarian leaders have used throughout history, scholars and historians say.

Such leaders win support by creating fear about certain groups, then portraying themselves as the only person who can address the problems they cause, said Florida International University law professor Ediberto Román, who studies xenophobia and immigration.

In response to questions from The Washington Post, Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said people in Springfield were experiencing “very real suffering and tragedies” that have been “largely ignored by the liberal mainstream media until now.” A spokesman for Vance did not respond to requests for comment; earlier, a spokesperson told The Post that Vance’s office had received calls from Springfield residents with “concerns over crime and traffic accidents.” Spokespeople for Trump and Vance also expressed sympathy for the Clarks and pointed to the deaths of two other children and a young woman, seeking to tie the incidents to the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies.

Stereotypes about immigrants eating dogs, bats or rats have long circulated in the United States — beginning during the wave of Chinese migration in the 1800s. More recently, during the 2012 presidential election, conservatives briefly seized on a passage in President Barack Obama’s memoir about being given dog meat as a child while living in Indonesia. During the covid pandemic that originated in China, old racist tropes denigrating Asian Americans spread online. Trump called the covid-19 virus the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu.”

The goal in spreading such stereotypes is to portray newcomers as unfit for American society or invoke disgust toward them, Mannur and other experts said.

“One of the ways to vilify Asian Americans was to cast them as ‘other’ through these imagined eating habits: that they were supposedly eaters of cats or dogs or rats,” Mannur said.

“So that’s what Trump is doing,” she added, “painting this image that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are coming after your pets. It doesn’t really matter whether they eat them or not. There’s still now this perceived threat.”

People around the world have long consumed wide-ranging cuisines, sometimes depending on the varying sources of available protein. But those differences can be weaponized to sow division and propel the notion that some immigrants are incapable of assimilating “because they’re so different … they can never be like us,” said Julia Young, a history professor at the Catholic University of America.

That can fuel nativism, or the idea that immigrants present an existential threat, she said.

“The most successful claims for politicians trying to demonize immigrants have to have a tiny kernel of truth in them, or something that might make them easier to believe,” Young said. “So, for instance, in the case of Haitians: Most people in the U.S. know nothing about Haiti, but they might know that it’s a place where voodoo is practiced. And if that’s your only association to Haitians, then it doesn’t become that far-fetched to believe that they might take or eat your pet for an animal sacrifice — which is reprehensible and baseless, but still easier to believe.”

Haitians have a long history of immigrating to the United States and as of 2022, most of the 700,000-plus Haitian immigrants in the United States had already become U.S. citizens, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. But the number of newer arrivals seeking to enter the country has jumped in recent years. Many are fleeing gang and political violence in Haiti. Some had earlier moved to South America and are coming directly from there.

The number of Haitians crossing the southern border illegally has dropped from approximately 45,000 in fiscal year 2021 to more than 1,000 last year, according to Border Patrol data. Officials attribute the decline to a new Biden administration parole program that has allowed Haitians and others to enter legally at airports if they have a U.S. sponsor and prior approval. Approximately 200,000 Haitians have arrived legally under that program since 2023, federal records show.

For Haitians in the U.S. and abroad, the episode has prompted anger and sadness. Farah Juste, an activist and singer who lives in Florida, said she’s not bothered by the comments, but can tell that others in the Haitian diaspora — from places such as New York, Montreal and Boston — are furious over it. “I’ve heard them on TV, I’ve heard them on the radio” reacting to Trump and Vance’s comments, she said.

Still, anti-immigration sentiments, or nativism, has been part of American politics since the country’s inception, said Young, the history professor. “Each new generation of immigrants — whether they’re Irish, Pole, Italian, Chinese, Mexican or what have you — has been met with this dangerous rhetoric, almost fantastical claims about them and [an] ‘us versus them’ mentality.”

Luke Ritter, a historian who has extensively researched nativism and American conspiratorial beliefs, echoed Young: “Nativism in the U.S. rises and falls across time like the waves of the ocean. Each time nativist rhetoric increases, it takes on a slightly different shape and color, but it draws from the same well of anxiety.”

Trump seizes on those anxieties by blaming immigrants for problems in American society, Young said.

Immigration limits are core parts of Trump’s platform. His immigration policy proposals include an unprecedented mass deportation of undocumented immigrants by rounding them up and potentially putting some in detention camps, as well as the suspension of the refugee program. Immigration advocates and former government immigration officials have criticized his deportation plans as alarming and impractical.

Since he entered politics, Trump has disparaged immigrants in inflammatory and sometimes racist language. He launched his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech in which he told supporters that Mexico was sending rapists, drugs and crime into the United States. He has called immigrants animals, thugs and terrorists, dismissed them as carriers of disease and portrayed Latino migrants as staging an “invasion” of the United States. Last year, he said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” drawing criticism from experts who compared his language to that of Adolf Hitler.

Trump has also turned his rhetoric toward Haitians in the past: In 2018, he called Haiti and other nations “shithole countries.” In 2017, the New York Times reported he said immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS.” In 2021, he repeated the idea on Fox News, saying there are “hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti” and that many of them “probably have AIDS.”

Tony Jean Thenor, a 66-year-old social worker from North Miami who emigrated from Haiti in 1980, said Trump’s comments add another layer of trauma for Haitians who came to the United States to escape gang violence and political disarray in their home country, a situation that has been exacerbated by decades of foreign intervention.

“It’s not that we came to destroy life here,” Thenor said. “It’s because we are running to take a breath of fresh air.”

Widlore Mérancourt, Maria Sacchetti, Mariana Alfaro, Azi Paybarah and Amy B Wang contributed to this report.

Republican nominee Donald Trump spent his second rally since Tuesday’s debate promoting false online accusations trying to discredit Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance, alongside baseless allegations of chicanery in the reporting of crime statistics and jobs data.

“She can’t talk,” Trump told a crowd of thousands in Las Vegas on Friday, three nights after facing Harris for the first time, claiming victory and saying he would not agree to another debate. He asked if Harris had received the questions in advance, picking up on internet rumors that the host network, ABC News, has denied. Trump also referenced a Facebook post suggesting, without evidence, that Harris had audio devices in her earrings.

“I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in the ear,” Trump said.

In almost 90 minutes of remarks, Trump alleged that similar plots against him had been foiled by insiders who exposed tampering with government statistics on jobs and crimes. Without evidence, he claimed a routine revision of economic data was an attempt to disadvantage his campaign.

“Fortunately, we had a leaker or a whistleblower,” Trump said. “I don’t care which. I love that person. I’m not sure who it is.”

Trump also used newly released Justice Department survey data about crime in 2023 to incorrectly claim the figures contradicted debate moderator David Muir’s use of FBI data showing a decline in overall violent crime in the first quarter of 2024.

“So David Muir owes me an apology,” Trump said. He added: “And his hair was much better five years ago.”

Trump played a clip of Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August and mocked her for repeatedly thanking the cheering crowd. He baselessly accused her of lying about working at McDonald’s during college in the 1980s and of wanting to restore the draft, which she has not supported. He paradoxically called her a communist and a fascist. He said voting for her would be “a vote for war with Russia” and “a vote to obliterate Israel.”

Returning to his core campaign theme of immigration, Trump falsely portrayed a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app, which allows migrants to request legal processing appointments, as a tool that shows where to drop off undocumented immigrants.

“Could you believe we have phone apps?” he said. “The cartels have apps where they call in so they know where to deposit their illegal people.”

If elected, he pledged to deploy federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement to implement large-scale deportations, including to “liberate” the Colorado city of Aurora that he falsely claimed was overrun by Venezuelan gangs. He also said Nevada, which does not border Mexico, was receiving more immigrants because Texas had tightened its border.

“Can you believe I have to say this?” he said. “We are going to liberate parts of our country.”

In Trump hands, a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report concluding that ICE had not issued court notices to 291,000 unaccompanied children became 325,000 migrant children lost to rape and murder. “They’re either gone or they’re in the service as slaves, sex slaves or slaves,” he said.

He recited an anti-immigration parable about a snake that has been a fan favorite at his rallies since the 2016 campaign. And he gave a shout-out to Stephen Miller, his adviser who was the architect of separating migrant families at the border and has proposed using the military for mass deportations.

“A brilliant young man who has always been with me no matter what, the good times, the bad times,” Trump said of Miller. He also praised Kash Patel, a former Pentagon aide who has called for prosecuting journalists if Trump wins a second term.

Trump also called up celebrity guests including mixed martial artist Henry Cejudo, whose name he repeatedly struggled to pronounce but whose hair he complimented, and social media personality Bryce Hall, whom he called “young and handsome.” Of musician Nicky Jam, who is a man, Trump said, “she’s hot.” He also called up the YouTube personalities known as the Nelk Boys, one of whom criticized Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), for taxing Zyn brand nicotine pouches.

Trump attacked Walz with the nickname “Tampon Tim” and falsely accused him of requiring tampons in boys’ bathrooms. Walz signed legislation that provided state-funded sanitary products in public school restrooms. Trump echoed his remarks at Tuesday’s debate by falsely accusing Walz of allowing abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy or even executing children after birth, which is not legal in any state.

He also baselessly accused Democrats of wanting to raze Manhattan and build structures with no windows.

Trump repeatedly ribbed, “We have a lot of time.” But hundreds of fans left within the first 30 minutes, many complaining that he had been late and that the sound quality was poor. Almost all of the standing crowd had left before the end.

Arnsdorf reported from Washington. Cheeseman reported from Las Vegas.

Just eight minutes apart, the two political arms competing for the House majority blasted out memos claiming momentum citing the exact same analysis.

“Inside Elections shifts six races toward Democrats as momentum grows,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote a little past 4 p.m. Thursday.

“Inside Elections: House Republicans still the favorite,” the National Republican Congressional Committee boasted in its memo soon after.

That’s a sign of just how close the race for the House is: Each side found something tangible to praise in the latest report from the independent political analysis organization. The battle for the House is now fully resembling trench warfare, a political hand-to-hand combat.

The two most storied political analysis shops, Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales and the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, published reports that backed up Democratic claims of new momentum from Vice President Kamala Harris’s emergence in the presidential contest. Yet both give Republicans a decent chance of retaining the majority in the House.

Inside Elections noted that Republicans are “still slight favorites to hold the House” but estimated that the range of outcomes is a mere “Democratic gain of five seats to a Republican gain of five seats.”

The Cook Report delivered basically the same message. “We ultimately believe the most likely outcome is a single-digit gain for either party,” wrote Erin Covey, the organization’s House analyst.

That’s either enough to give Democrats the barest of margins, leaving them fearful of illnesses to determine their majority status on any given day, or enough to leave a narrow Republican majority staring down a group of 15 to 20 staunch conservatives who upended much of the GOP agenda over the past two years.

For obvious reasons, the presidential contest receives the vast majority of attention these days, while the battle for the also narrowly divided Senate gets a similar level of hype with so many of those battleground races overlapping with the key electoral college contests.

In the House, Democrats will go into the election with 214 seats (three of which are vacant but are in deep-blue territory) while Republicans hold 221 (one vacancy in deeply red terrain), an even narrower margin than the 222-213 Democrats held just ahead of the 2022 midterms.

With those estimates from the two independent analysts, the majority might once again fall below 225 seats, which would be another marker for how divided the times are.

In the 39 elections since the end of World War II, the majority has ended with at least 225 seats in all but five times, according to the House historical site. This era now resembles the late-1990s and early 2000s, when the GOP went four-straight elections winning a majority but with less than 230 seats.

Usually one party or the other tends to go on long, steady runs with sizable majorities that eventually collapse, and usually in a big fashion. House Republicans had an eight-year run of being in charge in the past decade, most of that time holding more than 240 seats. That was until the 2018 midterms delivered Democrats a gain of more than 40 seats for the majority.

Democrats controlled the House for 40 years last century in a run that ranged from holding between 232 seats and more than 290 — until the bottom fell out in 1994, when they lost 54 seats and the majority.

Yet the 2020 and 2022 elections have demonstrated the static nature of American politics.

Four years ago, House Democrats swung big, thinking they had strong tailwinds from the backlash to President Donald Trump and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But Democrats end up losing more than 10 seats despite President Joe Biden’s 7-million-ballot margin in the popular vote, clinging to a tiny majority, with just 222 seats.

Before the midterms two years ago, House Republicans declared that a “red wave” was at hand and targeted 75 Democratic districts, including 31 that Biden had won in 2020 by at least 10 percentage points.

They got the majority, barely, only because of a surprising GOP performance in New York and Los Angeles regions.

Having learned their lessons, the DCCC and NRCC have shrank their ambitions this election cycle and are targeting a much smaller share of the House’s 435 seats than they did in recent campaigns.

The “Red to Blue” program, for Democrats, officially lists fewer than 30 candidates running in districts held by Republicans. And the NRCC’s “Target List” tops out at 40 seats held by Democrats, many of which are receiving not much financial support.

As the political analysts note, the true battlefield might include fewer than 35 seats.

“The race for the House remains incredibly close. The battleground is confined to a few dozen seats across the country where neither party appears to have a clear advantage,” Covey wrote.

Each side starts off with the likely claim to three seats from the other party as a result of mid-decade redistricting that happened in Alabama, Louisiana, New York and North Carolina.

Inside Elections rates seven seats held by Democrats as pure toss-ups, while five Republican seats have that ranking. Another six Democratic seats have a “tilt” rating toward staying in that column, while 10 GOP seats “tilt” toward them.

The Cook Report’s slightly different rating places 11 Democratic seats and 13 GOP seats in the pure toss-up category.

Some races will probably change in the final seven weeks of campaigning, either becoming newly competitive or losing steam as one candidate races ahead. For now, there are less than 30 total seats truly competitive.

A Democratic victory would be the third time in four elections that the House majority changed hands, an era of instability only rivaled by the immediate postwar era in which the majority switched four times in the five elections from 1946 to 1954.

Harris’s strong campaign has boosted chances for Democrats and, while they need to win more of the toss-up races, they now have the better chance to expand races into GOP territory and multiple paths to the 218 seats needed for the majority.

“If Harris continues to perform well at the top of the ticket, that will improve her party’s chances in the House because of the lack of ticket splitting,” Gonzales and Jacob Rubashkin wrote in Inside Elections.

The Cook Report’s ratings give Republicans a likely floor of 208 seats, with Democrats’ worst-case outcome being 203 seats, and the remaining 24 deciding the majority.

Citing private polling shared with their analysts, Republicans were on track to hold and probably expand their majority before Biden bowed out of the election on July 21.

“District-level polling looked dismal for Biden,” Covey wrote. “Trump was carrying districts that Biden won by several points.”

As is the case in the presidential and Senate races, House GOP candidates have a money problem. Their incumbents running in competitive races had a median cash on hand of $2.3 million, compared to $1.8 million for their Democratic challengers as of June 30.

But, according to Covey, Democratic incumbents held a nearly $4-to-$1 advantage over GOP challengers. That advantage will allow Democrats to focus more of their financial resources on offense and force Republicans to play more defense.

And not all toss-up races are created politically equal.

Of the 11 toss-ups Democrats are defending, seven of those districts favored Biden over Trump four years ago, with Trump narrowly winning in three others.

Of the 13 toss-ups Republicans are defending, six favored Biden by at least 10 points four years ago, with three more giving him a margin of victory between 5 and 10 points.

Trump needs to shore up his standing in the next few weeks following his shaky debate performance Tuesday, while Harris could provide more energy and help Democrats.

Regardless of which side wins, its majority is all but certain to be small and difficult to manage next year.