Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to the biggest developments in a 2024 election in which it’s time to put pen to paper … ballots.

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The big moment

Let the voting begin! The first 2024 presidential ballots are set to go out Friday in North Carolina. And in exactly two months’ time — Nov. 5 — voters will be taking to the polls to decide our next president, control of two very tight chambers of Congress, and many other races and issues.

In other words, it’s getting real. Combine that with Tuesday’s debate, and the 2024 election is truly kicking into full gear.

So I thought it time for a good, considered think on where we stand. Here’s where I’ve landed.

The presidential race is more or less a toss-up, with a slight edge to Harris

There is no question that Vice President Kamala Harris has gained significant ground for the Democratic ticket since entering the race. She’s taken a slight lead over Donald Trump in most national polls, and The Washington Post’s polling averages show she’s gained between 3.7 points and 4.7 points on the margin in each of the seven key swing states.

But it seems the race has settled into a more static phase, with no significant Harris bounce out of the Democratic National Convention two weeks ago. And currently both Harris and Trump lead in three swing states, while Nevada is more or less a tie.

So why might I give a slight edge to Harris? Because she holds the only advantages outside a point — in both Pennsylvania (3 points) and Wisconsin (4 points). If she wins those and all the non-swing states break as expected, she’s at 254 electoral votes. Given the winner needs 270 electoral votes, she could close the deal with a win in North Carolina or Georgia (each of which have 16 electoral votes) or a win in Michigan (15 electoral votes) and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. (That state awards electoral votes to the winner of each district, and the Omaha-based district is very competitive.)

Trump, meanwhile, doesn’t have as obvious a defined path with these numbers — he leads in only one swing state by a full point. His ad reservations suggest he might be betting hard on Pennsylvania and Georgia, which could combine with traditionally red North Carolina to give him 270. But Pennsylvania is looking tougher, and if he doesn’t win that, the math becomes much more difficult.

The debate is a major inflection point

The contrarian political analysts out there who like to talk about how debates don’t really matter were served a reality check on June 27, as President Joe Biden’s performance ultimately led to his withdrawal and completely recast the 2024 race.

The stakes in Tuesday’s debate may not be as big. But in a race that is really still settling and with voters still learning about Harris, it looms larger than most.

Harris gave her first major interview last week, and it went fine. But her perceived history of somewhat unsteady public performances and the fact that the interview took so long to take shape make how she’ll do an open question. Certainly, the fact that her campaign wasn’t leaping to put her in front of reporters to take questions might suggest they see risk in a more freewheeling session.

With Trump, we more or less know what we’re going to get. With Harris, it’s about how she handles the contrast and jousting with Trump, and whether she can live up to the increasingly positive image Americans have of her.

The crucial motivation factor

As any good political skeptic will tell you, the polls have been off before. In both 2016 and 2020, they undersold Trump’s ultimate vote shares; in 2012, Barack Obama slightly over-performed them. (Our polling averages tool shows you how the current race would change with the same-sized polling misses.)

Some of this is polls being slightly wrong. But some of it is that people who decide late can break strongly one way or another, and it’s difficult to gauge precisely who will turn out.

For now, Democrats see the more encouraging signs on this front. Their enthusiasm has suddenly surpassed Republicans’ and reached 2008 (read: Obama) levels. What’s more, fear is a powerful motivator, and Trump seems to loom larger as a boogeyman than Harris; CNN swing-state polling this week showed nearly half of voters see Trump as a “threat to the country,” compared with less than 4 in 10 for Harris.

These things can change. But if you combine these measures with Democrats’ apparent financial advantage — more on this later — they benefit from some real intangibles when it comes to getting their voters to the soon-to-open polls.

The Senate favors the GOP, the House is a toss-up — and who knows what’ll happen

Even if Harris does win, there’s a good chance she will be inaugurated after Senate control is handed over to Republicans. And if she loses, the Senate is in all likelihood gone. Such is the state of the difficult 2024 map for Democrats.

As things stand, they probably need to hold seats in both Ohio (which Trump won by eight points in 2020) and Montana (which Trump won by 16). And then they would need to run the table in the swing states.

The good news for them is they lead in just about every poll in all those states except Montana. That makes that state the most likely tipping point. As for how it’ll tip? Republican Tim Sheehy has led Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) by single digits in almost all of the polls, but Sheehy has also been the subject of a series of potentially damaging revelations about his personal life and past comments.

The Republican-controlled House is also very much up for grabs, and we have precious little polling on key races. But Democrats need to pick up only around four seats, which is doable in a close race. And the best measure we have now — the “generic ballot” — shows Democrats with one of their biggest advantages of the last two years: 2.4 points.

Harris’s money edge appears to grow

The big news Thursday on the presidential campaign trail was that Harris has greatly extended her fundraising advantage over Trump.

While Trump announced his campaign and affiliated entities raised $130 million in August, Harris’s campaign raised more than $300 million, per NBC News.

Harris more than doubling up Trump continues a trend from July, when she raised massive amounts shortly after entering the race.

Driving home Harris’s financial advantage: Her campaign has reserved significantly more ad time for the final two months of the campaign across the swing states, while Trump’s reservations as of this week focused extensively on two states: Georgia and Pennsylvania.

How Trump critics’ endorsements are breaking down

Former congresswoman and House Jan. 6 committee co-chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on Wednesday took a much-anticipated step in saying she’ll vote for Harris over Trump.

Cheney has long criticized Trump in stark terms, but there was some question as to whether she’d back his opponent. After all, Cheney back in 2020 labeled Harris a “radical liberal.”

The endorsement comes amid real discord on the “Never Trump” right about whether supporting and advocating for Harris is the answer or a bridge too far. And given that discussion, I thought it worth recapping where some key Republican Trump critics have come down thus far.

Backing Harris: Cheney, former congressman and Jan. 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, former congresswoman Barbara Comstock (Va.).

Not backing Trump (but hasn’t endorsed Harris): former vice president Mike Pence, former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, former national security adviser John Bolton, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), Sen. Bill Cassidy (La.), Sen. Todd Young (Ind.), former senator Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.), former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

Backing Trump: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, former senator Richard Burr (N.C.), former Arizona governor Doug Ducey.

A momentous number

1 in 5

That’s the percentage of Trump voters who said they planned to vote by mail or drop off an absentee ballot in the 2024 election, according to an Economist/YouGov poll this week.

Why is that significant? Because it’s less than half the percentage of Harris voters who planned to do the same.

Republicans have been trying to get their voters to bank more votes before Election Day, but they’ve been undercut by Trump’s frequent comments about the purported dangers and unreliability of mail voting.

These numbers suggest pre-Election Day voting — whether by mail or in-person early voting — could look a lot like it did in 2020. The YouGov data showed the percentage of Trump voters planning to vote on Election Day outpacing Harris voters by 20 points. The gap in 2020: 20 points.

Take a moment to read:

• “The fear factor is now hurting Trump” (Washington Post)
• “The 2 key states that could decide the 2024 election” (Washington Post)
• “Trump and Harris’s first presidential debate is Tuesday. Here’s what to know.” (Washington Post)
• “Republicans Seize on False Theories About Immigrant Voting” (New York Times)
• “Antiabortion groups blast Trump’s recent appointments: ‘Totally concerning’” (Politico)
• “If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big” (Politico)

Former president Donald Trump gave a confusing answer Thursday when asked about making child care more affordable, suggesting the costs would be brought down by his proposed tariffs on foreign nations.

Trump made the comment during an appearance at the Economic Club of New York, where a panelist asked him what legislation he would prioritize to reduce the cost of child care.

After saying he “would do that” and calling it a “very important issue,” Trump pivoted to pitching “taxing foreign nations at levels they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to very quickly.” Trump has long discussed slapping tariffs of at least 10 percent on imports, raising concerns of a trade war if he returns to the White House.

The Republican presidential nominee suggested in New York that the revenue from such tariffs would somehow be so large that the cost of child care would no longer be a concern for the United States.

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care,” Trump said, without elaborating on how the tariff revenue would lower child-care costs.

Trump went on to suggest that the tariffs would generate trillions of dollars for the country to address a range of its needs. Child care, he added, would be “not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people,” Trump said.

While a 10 percent tariff on all imports could raise as much as $3 trillion over a decade, exceeding the cost of most national child-care proposals, it could also touch off an international trade war that threatens to raise other costs.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign on X shared a video clip of Trump’s remarks without commentary. A Trump campaign account took issue with the transcript that the Harris campaign provided in its post but otherwise reiterated Trump’s remarks suggesting that higher tariffs would make child-care costs a nonissue.

Trump’s comments have come as both parties have increasingly vied to show they want to bring down the costs of caring for families. Both Harris and Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have proposed expanding the child tax credit in different ways.

Speaking more broadly during the New York City event, Trump promised to lead a “national economic renaissance.” He said Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who has endorsed Trump, will lead a commission to audit federal spending and regulations.

One of the more humorous parts of Donald Trump’s hours-long conversation with Elon Musk last month was the way in which the two ideological and stylistic allies disagreed on inflation.

“Inflation was caused by oil,” the former president said at one point in the rambling discussion. This is a reiteration of a point Trump makes regularly on the campaign trail, one suggesting that higher oil prices a few years ago were fundamentally President Joe Biden’s fault to suggest that the country needs more oil production. (Energy prices did push other prices higher, but oil production in the United States has hit new highs under Biden and is not tightly correlated to gas prices.)

The business leader, though, had different desired outcomes. And, so, he offered a different root cause.

“A lot of people just don’t understand where inflation comes from,” Musk said — after Trump had offered his assessment of where inflation comes from. “Inflation comes from government overspending because the checks never bounce when it’s written by the government.”

Trump didn’t cede the point but he didn’t debate it. And, later, when Musk again insisted that spending was the cause of inflation, Trump agreed to the executive’s proposal for the creation of “a government efficiency commission that tries to make the spending sensible.”

And why not? Musk had already endorsed Trump, and news reports indicated that he planned to spend millions to boost his candidacy. Trump had already flipped his view of electric vehicles in a nod to the Tesla CEO; why not acquiesce here, too?

Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump indicated that this whole commission idea wasn’t simply one of dozens of similar riffs during his chat with Musk.

“At the suggestion of Elon Musk,” he began, then hopping into a little aside about how smart Musk was for endorsing him, “I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms.”

What’s more, he said, Musk would be in charge of the thing. And “as the first order of business,” Trump said, “this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. This will save trillions of dollars.”

“Trillions,” he reiterated. “It’s massive. For the same service that you have right now.”

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein notes a few problems with this idea, including the alleged scale (in a federal budget that included $6 trillion in total spending last fiscal year) and the idea that nothing would be affected as a result. But there’s another thing worth considering here: Is Musk really the guy you want to put in charge of overhauling the government?

After all, we do have some recent evidence about what it looks like when Musk is given sweeping power to overhaul an institution not of his making. His purchase of Twitter in 2022 (after an abandoned attempt to renege on the idea) offers several hints that this is perhaps not Musk’s forte.

One thing that Musk did in his efforts to restore the profitability of Twitter was to cut a significant source of cost: employees. The company went from about 8,000 employees at the time he bought it to fewer than 2,000. Apply that math to the federal government, and you end up with more than 2.4 million people out of work. That’s an eighth of the job losses recorded between March and April 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic kicked in. The result would probably not be “the same service that you have right now.”

Musk achieved that cut in workforce by overhauling how Twitter worked. Moderation teams were slashed as Musk welcomed back people banned for abuse and hate speech. Internal critics of Musk’s plan found themselves newly unemployed. Asked to apply the same approach to the government, perhaps Musk could push for the ouster of public safety teams — farewell TSA and Border Patrol! — and the firing of any employees critical of Trump’s presidency. (Trump would not balk at that latter idea.)

One result of those changes is that advertisers were less enthusiastic about paying Twitter to run their ads. Luckily for the government (and for Trump), taxpayers wouldn’t have an opportunity to voluntarily stop paying their income taxes. But perhaps Musk would seek to increase revenue by suddenly deciding on new monthly fees for basic services, the way he did at his social media company.

Twitter, of course, is no longer Twitter but “X.” One could ostensibly make the argument that changing the name of the U.S. to something punchier — perhaps a James David Vance-ian “USA”? — could cut costs. (Less ink on print jobs, for example.) But we can assume that even in Musk’s hands, the country’s name would be safe.

But perhaps not its center of operations. Musk recently announced that he was moving Twitter/X out of its headquarters in San Francisco and to Texas, partly a melodramatic response to new state laws he presents as unacceptably liberal. It’s also clearly in part because he wants to pay lower corporate tax rates. To save money.

Perhaps his commission would propose something similar. Why stay in D.C., where all the elites live? Why not decamp for somewhere cheaper like, say, Kansas? It’s easy to see how this overlaps nicely with an effort to reduce the number of people working for the federal government. (Trump tried something like this, too, which went over about as you would expect.)

And, while he’s at it, why not mirror his rash decision to pack up then-Twitter’s servers into trucks and move them from California to Oregon? If you’re suddenly relocating the nation’s capital to the outskirts of Lawrence, why not do it on the cheap, throwing stuff into a fleet of Cybertrucks — each of which could presumably fit at least two filing cabinets — and moving it yourself? It’s certainly cheaper.

This is all admittedly hyperbolic, but it’s also premature. We should not assume that, if reelected, Trump will actually create any such commission nor that it would work as constituted. (Remember his abandoned “voter fraud” commission?) And if he does, there’s no reason to think that Musk’s approach would exactly mirror his handling of the social media company.

There is one thing we can confidently predict (besides that there are not trillions in waste to be sliced without downstream effects). It’s that programs that put money in Musk’s pocket — the Pentagon’s support for Starlink, for example — will probably not be found to be ones that involve wasteful spending.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who recently endorsed Donald Trump, called on his supporters Thursday to vote for the Republican nominee no matter where they live, reversing instructions he gave two weeks ago when he encouraged voters to still vote for Kennedy if they lived in uncompetitive states.

“No matter what state you live in, I urge you to vote for Donald Trump,” he wrote in a fundraising email. “The reason is that is the only way we can get me and everything I stand for into Washington D.C. and fulfill the mission that motivated my campaign.”

The new message comes as he has expanded the list of Republican-leaning states where he seeks to remove his name from the ballot, even as he continues to fight to add his name to ballots in blue states where Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is expected to win.

Kennedy previously said he would only remove his name from about 10 battleground states where his presence could make him a spoiler that benefits Harris and hurts Trump. “If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. In red states, the same will apply,” he said on Aug. 23.

Since then he has removed his name from the ballots in Ohio, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Utah and Wyoming — all Republican-leaning states where the presidential race is not competitive — while ending his bid to achieve ballot access in the ruby-red state of North Dakota. His campaign says he may seek to remove his name from other safe Republican states in the coming days.

At the same time, Kennedy’s suspended campaign continues to fight to be on the ballot in New York, Oregon, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — Democratic bastions where Harris is expected to win easily. He also plans to remain on the ballot in other blue states like Hawaii and California, as well as Alaska, where Trump is expected to win, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the campaign manager for Kennedy’s suspended presidential bid, said in an interview Thursday.

She said the list of states where he would seek to leave the ballot remains a work in progress. Robert Kennedy had grown increasingly concerned in recent days about the consequences of a Harris victory, including its impact on his ability to run again in 2028, she added. He worried that the media coverage of his exit from the race could lead to him taking votes away from Trump in even more conservative states.

“The scope of states in which his presence might draw enough support to inadvertently boost Harris has expanded,” Fox Kennedy said. “It’s precautionary, but the endurance of free speech is too crucial to play political dice.”

Trump campaign advisers have encouraged Kennedy to remove his name from the ballot “wherever he can,” said a Trump campaign official familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy. Down-ballot Republican strategists have been divided on whether Kennedy’s presence on the ballot in states like Texas and Ohio where Trump is all but certain to win could affect key GOP Senate campaigns.

Kennedy has had mixed success in getting off ballots in the core battleground states where Harris, Trump and their allies have been advertising. Officials in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina have declined Kennedy’s requests to drop his name from ballots, though the legal fights are ongoing. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada authorities have indicated that he will not be on ballots in those states. He has also removed his name in New Hampshire, Maine and Virginia, where Trump has his campaign headquarters.

Kennedy’s decision last month to suspend his campaign and embrace Trump followed weeks of courtship between the two men that began in the hours after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump. The former president has invited Kennedy to be a part of his transition team if he wins, and has suggested that Kennedy could have a role advising on policy in a second term.

“There is no deal in terms of me getting a particular post,” Kennedy said in an Aug. 30 appearance on the All-In podcast. “There is just an understanding there would be some kind of co-governance.”

When he announced his decision to suspend his campaign, he told his supporters they would be able to vote for him in states where the presidential election was not in doubt. He encouraged supporters in most of the country to still vote for him, as long as they did not live in 10 states where he believed he could spoil the election for Trump.

Kennedy argued on Aug. 26 that, if enough people vote for him, it’s possible that neither Harris nor Trump would win the 270 electoral votes needed to win election. “In fact, today our polling shows them tying it 269 to 269, and I could conceivably still end up in the White House in a contingent election,” he said.

There is no recent precedent for an independent candidate for president endorsing a major-party competitor while also continuing to try to gather votes for himself, said Richard Winger, the publisher of Ballot Access News. There have been cases in the past of presidential candidates being put on ballots without their consent, like U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was on the ballot in seven states in 1952, or former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who was on the ballot in two states in 2008, Winger said.

Kennedy has argued that he should be able to decide where he gets to be on the ballot, even though he supports another candidate. “I think that I ought to be able to be on the ballots where I want to be on, and not be on the ballots where I don’t want to be on,” Kennedy said in a recent appearance on NewsNation.

Democrats have accused Kennedy of “playing games with our democracy” to benefit Trump.

“RFK Jr.’s manipulation of the system to get on the ballot where it helps Trump and off the ballot where it hurts is unprecedented and undemocratic,” Democratic National Committee adviser Adrienne Watson said in a statement. “In the process, he’s creating a logistical nightmare for states.”

Kennedy plans to travel the country over the coming weeks to support Trump and the issues he has focused on, including reforms to U.S. food regulations. Fox Kennedy said he has events planned with former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who also endorsed Trump last month, as well as other events with Calley Means, a healthy food activist whom Kennedy credits with brokering his introduction to Trump.

“This isn’t about splitting votes or sending mixed signals,” Kennedy wrote in the fundraising email Thursday. “It’s about creating a united front that will carry us through these turbulent times and restore integrity to our government.”

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear Thursday that he does not intend to continue into another Democratic administration, saying that he looks forward to having a lot more time with his kids very soon.

The acknowledgment — not a surprise, but still the first public acknowledgment of his plans — is another indicator that a Kamala Harris presidency would probably have a different foreign policy team from that of President Joe Biden. Harris has indicated she would generally continue Biden’s approach to international affairs, but she has also struck a more critical tone toward the Israeli government and civilian deaths in Gaza.

Asked at a news conference whether he would serve in a Harris administration if requested, Blinken said: “As to my own future, all I’m looking at right now is the balance of this administration and January. And I can tell you from having spent some time over the last week on … break with my kids, I will relish having a lot more time with them.”

Top U.S. diplomats rarely serve more than a single term, partly because of the grueling nature of the job. Blinken — who has two young children — spends about half of his time on the road, bouncing from time zone to time zone.

Although he has served in foreign policy roles across multiple Democratic administrations, Blinken has worked most closely over his career with Biden, who hired him when he was the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and took him along when he became vice president.