In theory, the question should have been easy.

Debate moderator Linsey Davis on Tuesday night pointed out to former president Donald Trump that he had repeatedly promised during his first two presidential bids to present a new approach to health care. She pointed out, too, that he hadn’t delivered one.

“So tonight, nine years after you first started running,” Davis said, “do you have a plan, and can you tell us what it is?”

Trump treaded water for a bit, bashing the Affordable Care Act but also taking credit for “saving it.”

Davis was not hoodwinked. “So just a yes or no,” she followed up: “You still do not have a plan?”

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump replied.

Don’t we all, Mr. Trump. Don’t we all.

This should theoretically have been an easy question because Trump should have assumed someone at some point would ask. Davis was responding specifically to Trump’s most recent promises to revamp access to and the cost of health care, but she was also responding to those literal nine years of similar promises. When Trump pledged a new health-care policy shortly before the 2020 election, I created this chart showing his past similar promises, none of which had been kept. (You will note that the line labeled “now” is not actually now.)

Over and over, promises of a new health-care plan. Over and over, no plan. Or even concepts of one.

Trump’s failures to deliver on his health-care policy promises in particular are punchlines in his political career, surpassed only by his efforts as president to launch “infrastructure week.” Remember that time Trump handed a journalist a giant binder of paper with his policy proposals, only to have her visibly flip through a few pages that were blank? That was his health-care plan! Or, it seems, some of the concepts.

So, again: Trump should have had an answer. Except that, as I wrote on Wednesday, he’s not used to having to answer difficult questions. He’s not used to being in a place where the interviewer isn’t sycophantic and he can’t simply walk away. Davis had a unique opportunity and earned a revealing response.

The damage done, though, wasn’t simply in the clumsy phrasing, one that will live alongside “alternative facts” in defining an aspect of Trumpism. Nor was it simply that it revealed the hollowness of all of those Trump promises on health care. It was also unusually problematic for Trump in this moment against this opponent.

Trump and his allies have spent the past few weeks pillorying Vice President Kamala Harris for having no delineated policy proposals. This is ironic in part because Trump in 2015 publicly rejected the idea that voters actually cared about such proposals (which is generally true). But, still: This was one central line of attack. On matters of policy, his team insisted, Trump would prevail over Harris easily, in part because she had nothing to offer.

What does Trump have to offer? Well, concepts of plans.

His supporters will counter that he does have policy proposals, ones articulated in what his team calls “Agenda 47.” It was presented largely through video snippets in which Trump talks generally about things he wants to do, most of them very familiar. This section of his website has been de-emphasized in favor of the “platform” Trump helped write for the Republican convention (which is somehow even vaguer). But when I looked at it in June, there was no specific proposal on health care — and very few mentions of it in general. (Search for yourself!)

This has made it much easier for Harris and her allies to suggest that the thick sheaf of proposals compiled by the Heritage Foundation — the infamous “Project 2025” — is what Trump actually plans to do if he is elected again. Trump correctly points out that the descriptor “Trump’s ‘Project 2025’” is misleading, since he didn’t write it. But his critics correctly point out that the authors of the document are largely people who worked for Trump when he was president and can be expected to return to the federal government if he wins. And, since Trump has no plans of his own, their plans would become his.

It is okay if Trump doesn’t have a detailed proposal for overhauling the health-care system. It is a system that is notoriously complicated and involves countless competing priorities. It is one in which expense is unevenly distributed, making it that much harder to figure out a fair way to cover the costs. The reason the Affordable Care Act was such a big deal in the first place (to paraphrase Joe Biden) was that it managed to address a significant chunk of the issue in one fell swoop (through a clunky and patchwork process).

But for that reason Trump should stop pretending he has a plan. It’s not that people thought he did, mind you. Even when he first started touting his imminent proposal, it was understood that he was blowing smoke. Donald Trump, the political neophyte who shrugs at policy details, was not going to be the person to slice this Gordian knot. But he keeps saying it because he says untrue things all the time, and his supporters grant him the benefit of the doubt.

Trump’s “concepts of a plan” comment, though, will make it that much harder for anyone else to grant him that benefit before Election Day.

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has long expressed hostility to immigration, even legal immigration, in the face of declines in birth rates in the United States. Since being elevated to serve as Donald Trump’s running mate, his hostility has manifested in more aggressive ways, most notably in his recent elevation of baseless claims that immigrants in a small town in his state — again, legal immigrants — are eating other people’s pets and otherwise making life in the area worse.

The political goal is unsubtle, certainly. Even when presented with the fact that no evidence of the alleged pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio, exists, Vance encouraged his and Trump’s supporters to continue hyping the claim anyway. Elevating the idea that immigrants are scary or harmful is central to Trump’s politics, particularly this year.

But it also means that Vance ends up meandering into some dubious territory. As when he was asked during an interview on CNBC whether he didn’t acknowledge that there are also positive economic aspects to immigration.

“If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants,” Vance replied, “then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country — the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.”

The claim that “Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens” is false for multiple reasons. First, that Harris is not centrally responsible for the administration’s immigration policies (overheated rhetoric about being “border czar” notwithstanding). Second, the total is wildly inflated, counting people stopped at the border among the “flood.” The actual number of immigrants entering the country — many of whom are given permission to stay while asylum claims are adjudicated — is far lower. Though, again, the immigrants at issue in Springfield, most of whom are from Haiti, are here legally and permitted to work, making them more obvious contributors to the economy than those without work permits.

But the most clearly ludicrous claim from Vance is his assessment that America isn’t the most prosperous country in the world. It is. And immigration plays an obvious role in that.

Data from the World Bank demonstrates the United States’ ongoing leadership on the metric of gross domestic product, the numeric proxy for “prosperity.” This country has the highest GDP by far and has had it for some time.

Vance, a former venture capitalist, might be expected to know this. And as he continued his answer, he moved the goal posts a bit, suggesting that while eggheads or people who work at a “Wall Street bank” might think America is prosperous, the Biden administration has overseen “skyrocketing inflation, lower take-home pay” and dissatisfaction with the economy. (That last complaint is heavily partisan and driven by claims like Vance’s, so we can set it aside.)

Inflation has risen since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s true. It is also true that this is not unique to the United States. And it is the case that the country’s median, inflation-adjusted annual income jumped to more than $80,000 in 2023, recovering to levels last seen before the pandemic hit. Vance refers to “take-home pay,” which is a way to double-dip on the inflation critique, since rising wages are moderated by rising prices. That said, income increases have been outpacing inflation for some time.

What’s critical to note here is that American prosperity is intertwined with historic immigration patterns — and that, moving forward, immigration will be essential to continued prosperity.

The most obvious reason is that America is getting older. The youngest baby boomers turn 60 this year; the oldest turn 78. America is getting grayer, with more people relying on taxpayer-funded programs for seniors, even as a smaller percentage of the population is paying taxes. Vance wants way more American-born babies to fill that working-age population hole. But immigration remains a central U.S. advantage in increasing our population and meeting that need.

As for his assertion that it was somehow ludicrous to think that immigration and prosperity were linked, we can again look at the numbers. There is no correlation between the most-prosperous countries in the world and the percentage of their populations that is foreign born, it’s true. The chart below, contrasting GDP (vertical axis) with foreign-born populations (horizontal) just shows countries all over the place.

But if we adjust for population size, a correlation emerges. Countries with the higher percentages of foreign-born workers among the most prosperous countries are also those with the most GDP per resident. (Notice that the countries form more of a line, though the United States is still an outlier.)

The causation here doesn’t necessarily run in that direction; more prosperous countries are more appealing places for immigrants to seek out, as the United States has seen over the past half-century. But it is the case that immigration and prosperity overlap.

Vance is a politician, one running as part of a ticket predicated on presenting immigration as a central problem for the country and a central failing by his and Trump’s opponents. As such, Vance once again ends up wandering into dubious territory, this time suggesting that the country is not the wealthiest and most economically powerful in the world.

Not every American is wealthy, sure, even on a global standard. But it is broadly true that Americans enjoy more prosperity than residents of other countries — and that immigrants to the United States contribute to that prosperity.

BELLAIRE, Mich. — Sheryl Guy planned to oversee one last presidential election, and she hoped it would go more smoothly than last time.

In 2020, the clerk in northern Michigan’s sparsely populated Antrim County initially misreported that Joe Biden won the heavily Republican area. Within days she corrected the tabulations with the accurate vote totals, but the error still provided fodder for far-fetched theories that spread across the country as Donald Trump falsely claimed he had won.

Guy, 63, has weathered vilification, lawsuits and death threats. She was looking forward to retirement after the election this fall — until she realized who might take her job.

Winning a five-way Republican primary for county clerk last month was Victoria Bishop, who promised to shake up the office, hand-count ballots and scrub people from the voter rolls. With no Democrat running, Bishop was all but assured of winning in November.

This gnawed at Guy, who recently left the Republican Party and views Bishop’s pledges as signals that she will entertain the kinds of baseless claims that thrust the county into national headlines in 2020 and eroded public trust in elections. She decided to launch a write-in campaign to try to keep her job.

“It’s my obligation to do this, to do what’s right,” she said from behind a desk scattered with papers.

The unusual race in this bucolic county near the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula shows the persistence of false claims about the last presidential election and how the effort to fight them often falls to local officials. With mail voting beginning this month in Michigan and many other states, election officials from both parties have raised concerns about misinformation and the potential for violence as Trump raises the specter of fraud and warns that he, if elected, may try to prosecute those who oversee voting.

County and municipal clerks are the engines that make elections run — often with tight budgets, small staffs and intense deadlines, all of which can lead to mistakes. They register voters, mail absentee ballots, oversee in-person early voting, conduct Election Day activities, count ballots and transmit the results to the state for certification. Once little-known civil servants, since 2020 they have been shoved into the political limelight and subjugated to routine harassment. A wave of election officials have quit or retired in recent years, and their departures create openings that could be filled by those who want to transform long-standing voting procedures.

Guy came to work for the county as a switchboard operator as soon as she finished high school in 1978 and worked her way up the ranks over the following decades. “I graduated on Friday, started on Monday,” she said. “I’m very boring. Never left.”

This is Guy’s fourth time running for clerk since 2012 but the first time she faces an opponent.

Guy’s campaign manager, Daniel Bean, spent Sunday and Monday distributing 100 yard signs that feature Guy’s name in bold letters and these instructions: “Write in & fill in the oval.” He keeps reminding voters it’s Sheryl with an S, not a C, but he’s also confident the county’s board of canvassers will consider the intent of voters when it decides which ballots to count for her. A leading concern: that voters will forget to fill in the oval next to her written-in name.

Bean worked with Guy for four decades at the county before he retired as sheriff last year. In 2020, he briefly thought something nefarious may have happened with the election results, he said, but he investigated and quickly determined ordinary human error was at fault. He fears Bishop’s election could plunge the county back into acrimony and arguments over debunked allegations of hacked machines.

“This county has been through a lot in the past years, and I don’t think it needs this again,” he said as he sipped coffee in the back of the Hen’s Den, a diner adorned with small American flags and a sign with a stern-faced chicken.

Bishop, 78, often wears a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase “Michigan first” as she promotes a message of ridding the voter rolls of dead people and those who have moved out of the county. Bishop, who has not publicly spelled out her views on the 2020 election or what she believed happened in Antrim County, declined to comment for this story. But in a letter to the Antrim Review newspaper this month, Bishop expressed frustration about Guy’s abrupt plans to try to keep her job.

“She did not like the way you voted, so now she wants to throw away your vote and stay in office, temporarily,” Bishop wrote, arguing Guy would leave office early so a replacement could be appointed. Guy wrote back a week later to say she planned to serve a full term if elected.

An election under scrutiny

The 2020 errors in Antrim County began in a mundane way. Guy and her staff received last-minute paperwork for a candidate for local office, and when they added him to the ballot, they did not update all the voting machines. That caused the machines to report their vote tallies into the wrong spaces on the spreadsheet of election results.

Guy spent all night working on the election but didn’t realize she had a problem until she left the office and started hearing from residents who found Biden’s victory in the county impossible to believe. The day after the election, she and her staff struggled to understand what happened and got incorrect results again when they first re-tallied the votes. Within days, they determined Trump had won with 61 percent of the vote. The state later confirmed that result with a hand count.

But the damage had been done. Trump seized on the problems as he raged about his losses in Michigan and other swing states and sought to challenge the results. His legal team asked the county’s prosecutor to turn over voting machines — a request he rebuffed.

A Trump ally in the county sued over how the election was conducted, and a month later a judge granted him the opportunity to examine voting equipment. Soon, a team arrived by private jet to photograph the machines and study their inner workings. The team published a report falsely claiming the machines were intentionally flipping votes for Biden, and Trump tweeted that it revealed “massive fraud.”

The judge soon dismissed the lawsuit, and appeals courts declined to revive it. But already the false notion that voting machines were designed to help Biden had taken root with a segment of Trump’s base. Trump allies used the problems there to justify a draft executive order to seize voting machines. Trump didn’t issue the order but did mention Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021.

“In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden, and the same systems are used in the majority of states in our country,” Trump said that day. Soon after, his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters and others harassed and threatened Guy. One told her she would go before a firing squad. “Nasty stuff,” Guy said. “Dirty, rotten, nasty.”

The tension mounted. At times, she asked deputies or maintenance workers to escort her and her staff out of the building. Guy started locking the door to her house for the first time. She put on weight as she found herself stress-eating and drinking more Coors Light and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Her husband urged her to resign.

“Never quit a job in my life,” she said. “I don’t know how. And so I wasn’t going to be a quitter on my people either.”

Bishop’s plan for Antrim

Across a county dotted with lakes, forests and cherry orchards, Bishop has put up giant neon-yellow signs promising to “Restore election integrity in Antrim County!” In one campaign flier, she tells voters, “Recent elections have left me with many questions, and I believe many of you may have the same questions.”

Her campaign is run by her husband, Randy Bishop, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Trucker Randy on a local radio program. On his show, he questions how elections are run, rails against the Republican establishment and touts a health program that he says will allow people to lose weight without exercising. In recent weeks his show has featured ads for MyPillow, MAGA Water and a northern Michigan “gun doctor” who will repair “anything but an Abrams tank.”

Last month, he expressed frustration that Guy was considering a write-in campaign, saying she seemed worried about what would happen if his wife got the job. “What is Sheryl Guy covering up?” Randy Bishop asked on the show. “What is she afraid that Vicki may find once she takes office in January?”

Two years ago he sued Guy and other county officials for $1 million, alleging the county’s election practices violated his constitutional right to equal protection under the law. A judge quickly threw out his case.

Guy criticized Victoria Bishop’s plans to change how elections are run, saying she would risk subjecting the county to costly litigation if she pursued them. State and federal law specify how the voter rolls must be maintained, limiting the ability of county clerks to take voters off them. Counting ballots by hand instead of machine is time-consuming and less accurate, according to election experts.

But Bishop in her letter to the Antrim Review said critics had mischaracterized her plans, saying she wanted to use hand counts simply to confirm that the number of ballots matched the number of voters.

As a meeting of the Coffee Klatch Conservatives broke up on Wednesday, Bishop’s supporters called her idea common sense. Some said they were annoyed that Guy launched her write-in campaign after primary voters had their say.

“I don’t think that’s a good policy — to say you’re not running, and then you don’t like the results, and you do a write-in campaign,” Sue Leassner said.

Tom Stillings, a former chairman of the Antrim County Republican Party, said he doesn’t believe Guy has fully explained what happened in 2020 and thinks Bishop might be able to find out more.

“Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I want an explanation,” he said.

But one attendee, Marina Friend, said she planned to write in Guy’s name because she didn’t think Bishop knew enough about overseeing court records and other duties of the county clerk. “She’s a known quantity,” Friend said of Guy.

Several hours later, three dozen Guy supporters — a mix of Democrats and Republicans — met with her to talk about the mechanics of the campaign and brainstorm ways to get the word out about her candidacy. They discussed handing out bracelets and keychains with Guy’s name on them so voters could easily remember her name when they go to the polls. They sorted out who could lend them a fence post driver so they could put up extra-large campaign signs. And they emphasized the importance of fundraising. “We’re looking for money,” her campaign manager told the group.

Guy has made inroads with local Democrats, who now wave her signs alongside ones for Vice President Kamala Harris during weekly rallies.

“Sheryl was always a good clerk. We liked her, and we felt this was something we needed to do, so we’re supporting her,” said Lou Ann McKimmy, one of the Democratic organizers.

“Most people in the county have her name on their birth certificate, their death certificate, their marriage certificates,” she said. “It’s local.”

Bracing for a long election night

Write-in campaigns are rare — and most typically fail. But there are noteworthy successes, as in 2010, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska won the general election as a write-in candidate after losing the Republican primary.

Guy isn’t running with a party affiliation, and she considers herself an independent now. Guy rolled her eyes as she said she voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. She liked that he wanted to keep American soldiers out of war but never believed he understood how average people lived, she said. She broke with her longtime party after Trump tried to overturn the results and said she plans to vote for Harris in November.

Guy will be responsible for supervising her own election, but she typically turns over many of the duties to her chief deputy, Connie Wing. Vote tallying this year may stretch well into the day after the election because workers will need to go through all the write-in ballots.

That unusual, long process could serve as a breeding ground for new false claims about how elections are conducted. Wing said she is braced for phone calls, sharply worded emails and requests for records.

“I’m ready for it,” Wing said. “I think at this point, I just expect it.”

Donald Trump and his allies have increasingly rallied around an explanation for his lopsided debate loss on Tuesday night: the lamestream media.

ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis’s move to fact-check Trump on a few occasions has engendered the most pushback. Trump and his allies have pitched the event as being “three on one” rather than a head-to-head clash with Vice President Kamala Harris. Even some conservative Trump critics have taken some issue, suggesting Harris should have been fact-checked, too.

It’s a difficult subject, and many moderators — like CNN’s in June — choose not to inject themselves in this way. For those interested in the debate over debate fact-checking, I’d point you to Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler’s thoughtful thread. (He correctly notes that there is no comparison between the amount of misinformation Trump puts out and that of Harris. And Muir’s and Davis’s fact checks avoided some pitfalls from the past.)

The early reviews of the moderators are now in. And at the moment, it seems unlikely this will help Trump too much as he tries to explain away the debate.

A post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters said by double digits that the moderators were “fair and unbiased.” While 43 percent said that, 29 percent said they were biased in Harris’s favor, and 4 percent said they were biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55 percent of Republicans saying the moderators were biased in Harris’s favor.

Those aren’t resounding numbers for the moderators, and many more voters felt that the moderators favored Harris than Trump. But those caveats deserve context.

The first thing to note is that this question was asked of all registered voters — not just debate-watchers. Many who offered no opinion might not have seen the debate. A clear majority of those offering an opinion said the moderators were “fair and unbiased,” and 6 in 10 chose an option other than that they were biased in Harris’s favor.

The other main point is that, while Republicans clearly saw bias, that’s largely baked in to such events at this point.

Republicans have for years — decades — perceived the mainstream media as being biased against their side, to the point where a Reuters/Ipsos poll in July showed 70 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “The mainstream media is biased and should be punished.”

And the new poll numbers are in line with how Republicans have responded to debates for years, as historic YouGov polling shows.

After the first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, 6 in 10 Republicans disapproved of NBC anchor Lester Holt’s moderating. After another debate, three-quarters rated CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz as only “fair” or “poor.” (Third-debate moderator Chris Wallace, then of Fox News, was the only moderator to get strong, bipartisan marks that year.)

By 2020, three-quarters of Republicans rated USA Today’s Susan Page as “fair” or “poor.” And after a particularly unwieldy debate, 8 in 10 called Wallace’s performance “fair” or “poor” — including a majority that said it was “poor.”

Perhaps the biggest clash between Trump and a debate moderator, though, came nine years ago — shortly after Trump launched his first campaign. Then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Trump some very tough questions at a GOP primary debate, including starting the debate by invoking his past disparaging remarks about women. (Trump went on to say Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever.”)

Trump wasn’t terribly popular with Republicans yet at this point, with only about half reviewing him favorably. But YouGov polling showed Republicans sided with him over the Fox News host.

These questions are all different from those asking whether the moderators were biased, and there are some nuances within them. But it’s evident that large numbers of Republicans more often than not take issue with debate moderators — even when there isn’t the same degree of pushback after the debate as there is now. That’s not to say anybody’s opinion is wrong; it’s just that this is typical.

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that Republicans appear predisposed to object. Polling last decade showed more than 7 in 10 Republicans went into debates anticipating bias against their side. And a 2016 YouGov poll showed Republicans said 52-30 that they don’t want moderators to fact-check the candidates. (By contrast, both Democrats and independents did want fact-checking.)

We do have one poll in which the exact same question was asked. It came after the June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, and relatively few people saw bias. YouGov polling showed 10 percent overall and 21 percent of Republicans thought CNN’s moderators were biased against Trump.

Of course, this was after a debate that not only involved no fact-checking, but also was a rout for Trump. There wasn’t really much to object to. And yet, nearly half as many Republicans saw bias (21 percent) as saw fairness and balance (44 percent).

The other key thing to note here is that, while most Republicans saw bias against Trump in Tuesday’s moderation, a significant number didn’t. Of those offering an opinion, about 3 in 10 didn’t perceive bias against Trump. If it was so evident that he was being railroaded, then you might expect a stronger response.

More negative responses could still come, as Trump and his allies continue to press the case. And if nothing else, the backlash could have a chilling effect on future moderators who might inject themselves into the debate as ABC’s did.

When President Joe Biden announced his decision not to seek reelection, The Washington Post’s average of polls (like those of other media outlets) began to shift toward the Democrats and to their new nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

What wasn’t clear, though, was where that movement would stop: Would Harris’s lead keep growing, giving her the sort of lead presidential politics hasn’t seen since 2008? Or was this more of a reversion to the recent norm, giving Harris a slight edge nationally and in swing states, one that might be eroded on Election Day?

By now, it seems clear that the situation is the latter. The Democratic convention is small enough in the rearview mirror that any effects are now baked into the numbers, as is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Republican nominee Donald Trump. Maybe those things canceled each other out; maybe neither had much effect. But the polls are about where they were a few weeks ago regardless; the national margin average shifted to Harris by less than 1 point.

In nine swing states tracked by The Post, Harris holds leads in six. If she wins those six states, she’ll secure 64 electoral votes to Trump’s 43 — giving her a narrow, 14-vote electoral college victory. But in three of those states, her advantage is less than three percentage points. In every state, the confidence interval in our average allows for either candidate to win.

One of Harris’s better recent polls was published Wednesday by Marquette University Law School. It showed Harris with a four-point lead in a state that has been decided by less than a percentage point in each of the past two presidential election cycles.

That can or will change. What’s perhaps more useful to consider, instead, is another part of the poll: the part in which Marquette tracked a jump in enthusiasm among Democratic voters. A month ago, 6 in 10 Democrats said they were very enthusiastic about voting in November. Now, 7 in 10 do. Among Republicans, about 6 in 10 expressed that level of enthusiasm in each poll.

This — enthusiasm, turnout — is the fundamental question moving forward. If polls continue to show slight advantages for Harris or Trump, their ability to get people to actually cast ballots can swing the results in the opposite direction.

Sure, Taylor Swift’s endorsement was a nice feather in Harris’s cap. But it was the singer’s encouragement for her fans to register and vote — a message many immediately took to heart — that may be most consequential. That pitch increases the number of (mostly) young (mostly) women who vote. They will probably vote (mostly) for Harris.

Early voting begins within a matter of days in a number of states, votes that can be banked by campaigns right away. Historically, Democrats are better at this. Anecdotally, they were better in Pennsylvania in 2020, helping Biden win. This year, Trump’s campaign has mostly abandoned a coordinated turnout operation, leaving it instead to outside groups that will not always be keeping Trump’s election at the top of their priority lists. But Democrats are better at turning out infrequent voters because Republican voters — often older and wealthier — generally need less prodding.

The challenge for political observers is that turnout is hard to predict. We can assume, for example, that a lot of voters will cast ballots in November (or before), motivated by a desire to protect access to abortion. But this is hard to measure. Yes, surges of those voters helped shift ballot initiative results and some elections. Will that pattern hold for a high-turnout presidential race? Will other issues emerge that tamp down on or spur new enthusiasm on one side or the other?

It’s also possible, of course, that the polls aren’t done moving. Harris’s rise has stalled, but her strong performance in the debate could inject a bit more movement in her direction. Maybe the Swift endorsement adds a percentage point somewhere, too — who knows?

The safe assumption, though, is that Election Day will arrive with national and state polls looking something like the way they do today. In which case the next president of the United States will probably be decided by who decides to vote more than how Americans view the candidates.

Lenny Bronner contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump has traveled the country this week accompanied by far-right activist Laura Loomer, unnerving some GOP allies with his increasing embrace of a provocateur with a history of espousing conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric.

“The history of statements by Ms. Loomer are beyond disturbing,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in an interview Thursday. “I hope this problem gets resolved. I think we should be talking about things that people are concerned about, and this issue, I think, doesn’t help the cause.”

Loomer most notably joined Trump as he made multiple stops Wednesday to mark the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, standing nearby as Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), met with firefighters in New York City. Just last year, Loomer posted a video on X that called the 9/11 assault on the United States an “inside job.”

A few days earlier, Loomer launched a racist attack against Trump’s Democratic opponent in the November election, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Indian American. If Harris wins, Loomer wrote, the White House “will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” In July, Loomer baselessly called Harris a “drug using prostitute.”

In addition to joining Trump in New York, Loomer was seen getting off his plane the day before in Philadelphia prior to his debate with Harris there. And after she visited New York with Trump, Loomer headed with him to Shanksville, Pa., for ceremonies commemorating 9/11.

Loomer emphasized this week that she does “not work” for Trump, but the campaign has declined to say why she has been traveling with him amid increasing harsh scrutiny from Democrats and some Republicans.

Trump repeatedly has pushed debunked claims and conspiracy theories, including peddling the lie that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and amplified falsehoods from the deep recesses of the internet. Loomer regularly espouses conspiracy theories — including claims that both the 2018 school massacres in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., were staged. Loomer, 31, has provided plenty of fodder for the Republican presidential nominee.

Loomer said Thursday afternoon she stands by “everything I have said.” A former two-time congressional candidate, Loomer previously gained notoriety for her strident anti-Muslim rhetoric, once labeling herself a “proud Islamophobe.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Trump loyalist who has long feuded with Loomer, told reporters Thursday that Loomer’s “rhetoric and hateful tone” are a “huge problem” for Republicans. The congresswoman previously spoke out against Loomer last year when reports surfaced that Trump wanted to hire her for his campaign; he ultimately decided against it.

“[Loomer’s rhetoric] doesn’t represent MAGA as a whole. It doesn’t represent who we are as Republicans,” Greene said Thursday, adding that she does not think Loomer “has the experience or the right mentality to advise a very important presidential election.”

Loomer, on social media, quickly lashed out at Graham and Greene after their comments criticizing her presence in Trump’s entourage.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Loomer’s association with Trump, but at the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “No leader should ever associate with someone who spreads this kind of ugliness, this kind of racist poison.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference that Loomer’s attendance at Trump’s 9/11 stops should “shock the conscience of all decent Americans.”

“It was shocking and irresponsible and offensive to the thousands of people who lost their lives on Sept. 11, including hundreds of brave first responders, members of the NYPD, FDNY and others, who raced toward the danger in order to help people escape the danger — and lost their lives as a result of it,” Jeffries said, adding that Trump “is a conspiracy theory-peddling racial arsonist and pathological liar.”

Trump’s campaign did not directly respond to questions about Loomer’s latest involvement in the campaign, instead seeking to emphasize the 9/11 anniversary.

“The day wasn’t about anyone other than the souls who are no longer with us, their families, and the heroes who courageously stepped up to save their fellow Americans on that fateful day,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a statement.

Graham said he has not gotten clarity on what role Loomer is playing in the campaign. He added that he was not previously aware of all her statements and that “some of the stuff is just cruel,” citing Loomer’s personal attacks on Claudia Conway, the daughter of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Loomer first gained national notoriety as an undercover agent for Project Veritas, focusing her efforts in infiltrating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She left the group in 2017 to do stunts under her own name, such as chaining herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters and leading a group of undocumented immigrants to hop the fence at a Napa, Calif., home owned by former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Loomer ran for Congress in Florida twice, in 2020 and 2022, and lost both times. Her anti-Muslim rhetoric, among other alleged terms-of-use violations, have led Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Uber, Venmo, PayPal, GoFundMe and Cash App to all ban her, Loomer claims.

Loomer fashioned herself as social media warrior for Trump during the 2024 Republican presidential primary, crusading against one of his rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. She repeatedly accused DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, of using her breast cancer diagnosis to generate sympathy from voters.

These days, Loomer identifies as an investigative journalist in service of Trump’s reelection.

“I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything,” she told The Washington Post last March. She says she’d been in talks to work for Trump’s reelection campaign in the spring of 2023.

The New York Times reported that Trump wanted to hire her; a backlash from Trump loyalists ensued, including a fierce rebuke from Greene. No job ultimately materialized — an outcome for which Loomer holds Greene responsible.

The lack of formal campaign employment, however, put little distance between Loomer and the former president. Trump invited Loomer to his private balcony at his Bedminster golf course last summer, and she has made several trips on Trump Force One with the former president, joining him and his campaign team on flights to rallies throughout the Republican primary. At a rally in Iowa last January, Trump told the gathered crowd that Loomer was a “very important person, politically.” In March, he called her out as a “woman with courage” at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.

“The great Laura Loomer — some of you know Laura — she’s fantastic person, great woman,” Trump said during a July speech in Nashville.

Trump routinely reposts Loomer’s content to his Truth Social account. She supplied the first post the former president ever made questioning Harris’s racial identity: a graphic that compared a headline from Harris’s historic U.S. Senate win in 2016, which noted her as the “first Indian-American U.S. Senator,” and one from 2020, which noted she was the “first Black woman” to be selected as a presidential running mate. A friend had made the graphic for her; Loomer thinks she was “probably” the first person to bring Harris’s racial identity to Trump’s attention. Later that week, he raised the issue at the National Association of Black Journalists’ conference in Chicago.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said in July. “I did not know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”

Loomer has also amplified the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town are abducting and eating pets, a claim that Trump echoed in his Tuesday debate against Harris.

Loomer’s recent attack on Harris over her Indian heritage comes at a time when Harris is not the only Indian American playing a prominent role in the presidential race. Vance’s wife, lawyer Usha Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

A Vance spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Loomer post saying the White House would smell like curry if Harris wins.

Greene responded Wednesday on X, calling Loomer’s post “appalling and extremely racist.” The congresswoman told reporters Thursday that she usually tries to ignore Loomer’s posts, but the attack on Harris as an Indian American “bothered me so much.”

Graham called the attack “abhorrent.” He said he spoke Thursday morning with Greene about the matter and that she is “very concerned about the political impact this will have in Georgia,” a battleground state that is home to one of the largest Indian American populations in the country.

Kara Voght and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.

Almost immediately after the presidential debate ended Tuesday, former president Donald Trump proclaimed victory.

This was inevitable, certainly. He did the same thing after debating President Joe Biden in June, but that was at least a contest in which he was obviously the more successful participant. On Tuesday, he was not — but then, he hadn’t been in any of his presidential debates in 2016 or 2020 either. And after those ones he generally did what he did Tuesday, lifting up garbage online “polls” in which his supporters were able to overwhelmingly declare him victorious. Actual polls, reliable ones, offer a different assessment.

Late Wednesday night, Trump moved on to broadly declaring himself successful.

“People are just starting to give me credit for having a GREAT DEBATE. The Voters and Voter Polls showed it, but the Fake News Media wasn’t giving the credit that was due,” his social media post read. “Now they are seeing the results with independent Voters, Evangelicals, and more — and saying, WOW!”

This has not been my impression. I was curious, though, where the claim about evangelicals came from. The answer, happily, came from scrolling down a bit in Trump’s feed.

Shortly before that post, he had reposted something from journalist David Brody. Brody pointed to data from Pew Research Center showing that, as he put it, Trump was “up 82%_16%.”

“That’s a PHENOMENAL number,” Brody added, “and it should go higher from there because voter education & GOTV programs haven’t even hit their full effect yet. Some of the growth doesn’t show up until Election Day.”

This is not the assumption I would make. Trump is a well-known entity in general but particularly among White evangelical Protestants. It’s unlikely that many of them are going to start shifting toward him or away from Vice President Kamala Harris over the next few weeks.

Nor is the Pew number particularly “phenomenal.” Pew has also developed estimates of support by religion over the past two presidential elections. In 2016, Trump won White evangelical Protestants by 77 percent to 16 percent. In 2020, it was 84 percent to 15 percent. The poll’s 82 percent to 16 percent is squarely in line with 2020 (if slightly worse to a non-statistically significant degree).

That level of support, though, reflects how important the evangelical vote was to Trump’s success. In 2016, evangelical voters made up about a third of Trump’s total support. Four years later, they made up a bit more. In neither election was that support enough to give Trump a popular-vote victory.

Trump’s Democratic opponents, meanwhile, have fared better among those who aren’t religious — either unaffiliated with a religion or explicitly nonreligious. In 2020, those voters made up about as much of Biden’s support as evangelicals made up Trump’s.

Research from PRRI has identified how central the support of White Christians is to Trump’s political base. The organization’s recently published census of religious identity shows the long-term problem for Trump and Republicans more broadly: The percentage of White Christians (including evangelicals) is sliding, while the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans is rising. This slide is tightly integrated into Trump’s political rhetoric.

In 2016 and 2020, about a fifth of the presidential electorate identified as White evangelical Protestants — overperforming their presence in the population. In those same elections, about a quarter of voters were unaffiliated, agnostic or atheist.

One takeaway here is that Trump is, once again, misreading polls. The Pew poll that Brody highlighted was completed Sept. 2, more than a week before the debate. It does not in any way have people saying “WOW” about how impressed evangelicals were with that encounter.

Another takeaway is that Trump continues to understand that his political future depends on those religious voters.

Speaking to television host Phil McGraw this month, Trump suggested that his survival after coming under fire during a rally in Pennsylvania two months ago was a sign of divine intervention. Asked by McGraw if he thought there was a reason he lived, Trump said that “the only thing I can think is that God loves our country. And he thinks we’re going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back.”

The attack has frequently been presented in religious terms by his supporters, from almost the moment that it occurred. A giant flag draped behind the stage where he spoke was briefly tangled before the attack unfolded, for example; his supporters now suggest that its appearance, vaguely resembling an angel, was a sign of providence. Even when he was president, most evangelicals said they thought Trump was selected by God to serve. To many of them, the assassination attempt merely demonstrates it.

The religious aspect is unquestionably one reason that Trump and his allies seek to keep the assassination attempt at the forefront of the public’s attention. During the debate, Trump used the shooting to imply that Harris and President Joe Biden were somehow responsible (a claim for which there’s no evidence). But more broadly, his supporters insist that the incident has been under-discussed in part because they see it as essential to the election, which in turn is in part because they think that Trump’s survival is a sign that God intended to preserve him. (What this says about God’s view of the man who was killed is left unexplored.)

Trump is not particularly religious himself (to force the word “particularly” to play a role of significant understatement). But he knows both that his base is strongly religious and that they are concerned about the status of religion in American society. He’s drawn strength from this symbiotic relationship since 2015. And now, in his time of emotional need — convincing himself that the debate went well — he again enlists his religious supporters in his defense.

Former president Donald Trump appeared to close the door to another debate on Thursday, declaring on social media that the first two covered enough ground.

“THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE,” Trump said on Thursday.

Trump has defended his performance since the debate on Tuesday, even as some of his allies and campaign aides have conceded privately that the evening did not go as they had hoped. While Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign immediately called for a second debate, Trump questioned the need for a rematch Wednesday, insisting that he’d won. Polls however largely show that Trump lost the debate.

Harris began her campaign rally in Charlotte Thursday by arguing for a second debate: “I believe we owe it to the voters to have another debate. Because this election and what is at stake could not be more important,” she said.

She argued that she had spoken about issues Americans care about, “like bringing down the cost of living, investing in America, small businesses, protecting reproductive freedom and keeping our nation safe and secure.” Trump, she added, shared no plans for addressing the needs of the American people because “it’s all about him, it’s not about you.”

In several Truth Social posts this week, Trump continued to insist that he won the debate against Harris and criticized ABC News, which hosted Tuesday night’s debate.

The Trump campaign has encouraged others to say publicly that the Republican nominee dominated the debate. Privately though, many campaign aides acknowledge it was not his best night.

During the debate, Harris repeatedly goaded Trump, including on crowd sizes at his rallies, adding that his supporters often leave early out of boredom. That exchange led to Trump defending his rallies before repeating a false claim that immigrants in Ohio are eating other residents’ pets — an online rumor local officials have denied.

Trump advisers said on Tuesday that they wanted another debate. In the spin room, spokesman Brian Hughes said the campaign had wanted a debate on NBC News later this month. One sign that Trump might’ve thought Harris performed better in the debate was that he visited the spin room to address reporters immediately afterward. After the last debate, he decided he did so well that he didn’t need to go to the spin room. Trump previously proposed debating Harris on Fox News and NBC News.

Harris tried on Thursday to build on the momentum from her debate performance in Philadelphia, taking her campaign to North Carolina as she set her sights on a state that has been an elusive target for Democrats since Barack Obama won it in 2008.

In Charlotte and later in Greensboro, Harris unveiled her new slogan — “A New Way Forward” — to amplify her argument that she would offer a “new generation of leadership” after a decade dominated by Trump’s divisive politics.

Still, polls have shown that Harris is struggling to present herself as the candidate of “change” as a sitting vice president who has championed the policies of President Joe Biden during the past 3½ years in the White House. The Trump campaign has criticized Harris’s debate performance as lacking policy specifics.

In an attempt to prove she’s a candidate who can provide change, Harris argued in Charlotte and during Tuesday’s debate that she would restore Americans’ sense of optimism and improve their everyday lives. On the flip side, Trump has a far more negative view of the country and is fixated on himself, her new ad released this week states.

In Charlotte, huge signs bearing Harris’s “A New Way Forward” slogan were hanging from the ceiling flanked by giant American flags. Many sections of the arena were draped in red, white and blue bunting. Many in the predominantly female crowd many wore green stickers — a nod to Brat summer — that said “We’re not going back.”