Tom Barrett, a Republican vying for a Michigan congressional seat, is facing calls for an investigation after an ad from his campaign incorrectly listed Election Day as Nov. 6 in a Black-owned Michigan newspaper.

In a complaint filed Sunday with the state attorney general, the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus accused Barrett’s campaign of misleading Black voters to suppress turnout — something the group of Black state lawmakers said could violate a Michigan law that prohibits intentionally spreading misinformation about the election process to deter an individual from voting.

“At best, Tom Barrett and his Campaign have committed a shocking oversight which will undoubtedly lead to confusion by Black voters in Lansing,” states the complaint, which calls on the attorney general as well as a local county prosecutor to launch a probe. “And, at worst, this ad could be part of an intentional strategy to ‘deter’ Black voters by deceiving them into showing up to vote on the day after the 2024 election.”

Barrett’s campaign has acknowledged the mistake, blaming it on a “proofing error” that was not intended to suppress turnout.

The complaint is the latest twist in what is shaping up to be one of the closest and most expensive House campaigns in the nation — and one that could help decide which party controls the House next year.

The race pits two former state senators — Democrat Curtis Hertel and Barrett — in a bid to fill the seat left vacant by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who is running for Senate. It marks Barrett’s second attempt at winning the seat after losing by five percentage points to Slotkin in 2022.

In an effort “to reach every community,” Barrett’s campaign blitz this year has included a slew of meetings with local leaders, resources dedicated to urban radio and direct mail, as well as print ads, said Jason Roe, a campaign spokesman. The materials emphasize Barrett’s 22-year service as an Army helicopter pilot — and most have a banner calling on voters to head to the polls on Nov. 5, the correct date for Election Day.

But the full-page ad that appeared in the Oct. 2 issue of the Michigan Bulletin — a Lansing-based, Black-owned alternative weekly publication — is instead splashed with the phrase “On November 6 VOTE FOR TOM BARRETT.”

In a statement to The Washington Post, Roe said “this was nothing but a proofing error” that is inconsistent with the campaign’s other advertisements aimed at Black voters — including mailers that were sent on Oct. 2 and Oct. 9 that include the correct date for the election.

“Our campaign has been committed to outreach to the Black community and Black leaders because it is important to Senator Barrett that every community be heard in this election,” Roe said. “… The goal is to earn more support from Black voters.”

Yet, the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus is not convinced the incorrect election date in Barrett’s ad was a mere oversight — and instead called it an “insidious campaign tactic [that] unfortunately appears to be part of a national trend” of election disinformation targeting Black voters.

“It strains credulity that this was a simple mistake,” the group wrote. “Tom Barrett and his Campaign placed two nearly identical ads in two different newspapers within a week of each other. The ad placed in the newspaper read predominantly by Black voters has the wrong election date; while the ad placed in the newspaper not read predominantly by Black voters has the correct election date.”

The state lawmakers also took issue with the campaign’s failure to promptly amend its ad. As of Monday — 12 days after it was first printed — the campaign has yet to publish a correction.

However, Roe said next week’s Bulletin edition will carry a revised ad — this time with the correct date.

At first, he would just talk about immigrants living in the country illegally.

Make him president again, Donald Trump told his audiences, and he would make sure that undocumented immigrants were uprooted and deported. When he ran in 2016, he focused mostly on those immigrants who were identified as criminals, an argument his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), elevated during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month. But, in part because Trump constantly exaggerates the scale of the undocumented immigrant population, his 2024 pitch now centers on something much more sweeping, intentionally targeting and expelling theoretical tens of millions of people.

His idea is to cobble together an ad hoc group of enforcers tasked with sweeping the country for targets.

“We will send elite squads of ICE, border patrol, and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest, and deport every last illegal alien gang member, until there is not a single one left,” he explained in a recent social media post, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies.

Described like that, it might look at a bit like the streets of D.C. in June 2020, when, in response to protests focused on the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, the Trump administration pulled in enforcers from various parts of the government, some of whom intentionally stripped off any identifying insignia. These were the demonstrations that prompted Trump to suggest that protesters be beaten or shot.

But the targets of this bespoke retributory force wouldn’t only be gang members. In an interview with Newsmax, for example, Trump said he would also seek to deport Haitian immigrants living in the country legally. Their ostensible offense involved nothing more than moving to a small town in Ohio (and some invented, racist claims about pets). Trump’s views on immigrants from Haiti are well-established, though, so it’s not hard to understand his proposal as a rite of purification rather than anything centered on broader benefits to the country.

On the campaign trail over the past few days, Trump has further expanded the universe of U.S. residents that he pledges to confront.

“You know, I always say: We have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un, you can say — but that’s — it’s going to be fine. If you have a smart president, no problem,” he said at a rally in Aurora, Colo., that itself was predicated on exaggerated claims about the dangers of immigrants. The bigger problem is “the enemy from within,” he continued. “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”

He reinforced that point in an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, perhaps the single most credulously pro-Trump voice in American media.

“We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries, because if you have a smart president, he can handle them pretty easily,” Trump said. He insisted that he had done so when in office previously.

“But the thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff,” he said of the California congressman and Senate candidate. He called Schiff “a total sleazebag” and then, explicitly, “the enemy from within.”

Importantly, this came soon after Bartiromo had asked Trump about the risk of violence emerging around the election. She reminded Trump about the purported threat posed by immigrants from China and debunked claims about murderers crossing the border. She mused that “these outside agitators [might] start up on Election Day.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroyed our country, by the way, totally destroying our country. The towns, the villages, they’re being inundated. But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day,” Trump said. “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

It’s not clear what Trump is talking about: A risk of violence on Election Day from the left? Protests in the event of his victory as were seen in 2016? Or simply that the “radical left” — a term he applies generously and without the burden of applicability — deserves to be treated like an actual enemy of America?

He and Bartiromo also talked about Elon Musk’s endorsement of his campaign. Bartiromo fawned over Musk and noted that the tech executive (and government contractor) has “said this will be the last election if Donald Trump doesn’t win. He’s very worried about freedom of speech, censorship.” (“Yes, yes,” Trump replied.) She asked the Republican candidate what he could do about that.

“The only thing you can do is to win,” Trump replied.

Hours before that interview aired on Sunday, Trump had offered a furious social media complaint about a new biographical movie focused on his life. He described the movie’s writer, Gabriel Sherman, as “a lowlife and talentless hack.”

“So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us,” Trump complained. There’s that word “scum” again, the one he used to describe the enemies of the country. And so much, it seems, for electing Trump as the surest way to protect the freedom of speech and block censorship.

Despite Vance’s claims on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday, Trump did, in fact, go after his political opponents when he was president from 2017 to 2021. The most obvious was Hillary Clinton, but we should not overlook that he was impeached for using the power of the U.S. government to try to tear down Joe Biden by way of Ukraine.

What would be different if he returns to power is that he would be unconstrained and view the construction of a punitive deportation force as part of his mandate. During his first term in office, he stretched the limits of his executive power to build part of the wall he had promised his voters, though on America’s dime, not Mexico’s. During a second term, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t quickly use what he learned in order to create that law-enforcement entity.

The only question, really, is how expansive its targeting of America’s “enemies” would be.

It is hard to overstate the extent to which it is hard to know what will happen in the presidential election set to conclude in about three weeks. National polling continues to show Vice President Kamala Harris with a slight advantage; The Washington Post’s average of swing state polling shows her leading in four of seven.

In none, though, is either candidate up by more than 2 points, meaning that each state should really be considered a toss-up. Harris could conceivably win all seven, as could Donald Trump. The national popular vote could be narrowly decided even while the electoral college sees a significant divide. Or the opposite could happen. Polling isn’t designed to offer a precise prediction of the outcome and so it doesn’t.

What will determine the next president, then, is who comes out to vote. This is a deeply superficial thing to say, of course, since it’s always true that voting depends on the voters. But sometimes, in some races, turnout levels aren’t going to be determinative to the results. In this race, they will be.

That context is important for considering new national polling conducted by Siena College Research Institute for the New York Times. National polls often present both top-line results and results for specific demographic groups: by age, by race, by gender. But splitting up the responses into smaller groups increases the margin of sampling error, making the results less reliable the more you slice.

To get a better sense of how two particular groups of Americans view the election — Black Americans and Hispanic Americans — the new Times-Siena polls focused specifically on those groups, meaning they offer a more accurate look at how Black and Hispanic voters view the race.

The central takeaway is that, as other polling has shown, Black and Hispanic voters are less supportive of Harris’s bid now than exit polls from 2020 suggest they were of Joe Biden’s bid four years ago. Contrary to one common explanation for that shift — that working-class Americans of color were moving to the right — the polls found no difference in views of the race between Black Americans with and without a college degree, and a relatively modest difference among Hispanics by college education. Instead, the biggest gaps were between younger and older members of each group and by gender.

There were 20-point differences in the margin of support for Harris among Black Americans under 30 and those ages 65 and over, the same as the difference between Black men and Black women. Among Hispanics, there were 30-point differences between young and old and between men and women.

Assuming these results reflect how those groups will vote in November — a big assumption that we will come back to — the margins Harris enjoys among Black Americans are much softer relative to 2020 than those among Hispanic voters. In 2020, exit polling showed Biden leading Trump by 75 points among Black voters; now, Harris leads by 63 points. Among Hispanic voters, exit polls had Biden up 33 points four years ago, though analysis conducted by the Pew Research Center (comparing post-election polling to voter records) showed a narrower, 21-point lead. Now, Harris leads by 19 points.

Usefully, the Times and Siena College also released a national poll in October 2020, letting us see how the race looked among racial groups then. (The margins of error were larger, though, since that poll didn’t drill down on the views of Black and Hispanic voters in the same way.) In 2020, the October Times-Siena poll underestimated Biden’s eventual support among Black voters and the support of White voters for Trump. The measured support among Black voters was close to both the exit polls and Pew’s analysis.

What’s striking, though, are the shifts among Black voters by gender. The 2020 exit polls showed lower support for Biden among both Black men and Black women than did Pew’s analysis. Relative to those exit polls, Harris’s support is down 9 points among Black men from Biden’s support and down 7 points among Black women. Those drops account for almost all of the shift in the vote margin; Harris leads Trump among both Black men and Black women by 10 fewer percentage points than Biden did in the exit polls.

How much support Harris actually gets from Black voters, then, will depend to a large extent on who comes out to vote. One in 10 likely Black male voters, for example, told the Siena College pollsters that they weren’t sure how they planned to vote. Harris gets 78 percent of the vote from everyone else — in line with Biden’s 2020 support. So if those Black men who are undecided simply don’t vote, the picture changes. Comparing polls to results is, necessarily, a comparison of apples to oranges.

We should keep that in mind, too, when we consider the divide among Black and Hispanic voters by age. Younger voters simply don’t vote as often. The Times-Siena poll focuses on likely voters, so these are voters the pollsters believe will cast a ballot, but lots of campaigns have been doomed by the idea that turnout among younger voters is their path to victory.

There’s another shift shown on the second chart above that is worth highlighting. In 2020, exit polling showed White women supporting Trump by an 11-point margin. Now, the Times-Siena national poll shows Harris with a slight lead within that group. Similar caveats apply; we’ll see who actually turns out to vote. A modest shift toward Harris among White women, though, is more electorally significant than a shift away among Black women. In 2020, after all, about 1 in 8 voters was Black, and the same number were Hispanic. Nearly a third were White women — more than the total turnout from Black and Hispanic voters. Twice as many White women as Black and Hispanic women combined voted that year.

Both campaigns need their voters to turn out by Election Day. That’s not new. What’s new is who “their voters” might be, at least relative to 2020 — and at least assuming that the trends captured in the Times-Siena polling actually measure Americans who are end up casting a vote.

For weeks, misinformation about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Hurricane Helene response has spread far and wide on social media platforms — with more than a helpful nudge from Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the relaxed moderation policies of Musk’s platform, X.

The real consequences of that have begun to show.

The Washington Post reported late Sunday that federal emergency responders were ordered evacuated from Rutherford County, N.C., on Saturday due to a reported threat from militia. An official with the U.S. Forest Service said the National Guard “had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA.”

Earlier in the day, a resident threatened FEMA personnel in a trailer in the same county, according to two volunteers with Cajun Navy, a relief organization. Former Forest Service official Riva Duncan also said people had been harassing federal employees who were delivering aid to the area, saying they didn’t want the help.

Ashe County, N.C., Sheriff Phil Howell cited “threats” made against FEMA employees in nearby counties — though not in his, he said — and said the officials had “paused their process as they are assessing the threats.”

Separately, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) told MSNBC on Sunday that “we had two counties [where] folks reported different militia groups attacking and threatening FEMA.”

The origin of the threats and how serious they have been isn’t yet known. The North Carolina National Guard has reportedly said it has no actual reports of encountering militia, though authorities in the state arrested an individual Saturday and charged him in connection with alleged threats made against FEMA.

But it’s clear that the situation has led to heightened tensions, and that has now delayed recovery efforts. And it’s easy to connect that to the volatile environment that social media misinformation has created in the areas most affected by Helene in western North Carolina. Both Musk and Trump have contributed to that.

It’s now the second time in a month that a Trump-fueled conspiracy theory has preceded apparent threats made in the relevant area — with the last one being Trump’s false claims about Haitian migrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Each time, local Republican officials have sought to combat the conspiracy theories and warned of the harm they could do.

Both instances reinforce the potential danger of Trump’s conspiratorial bent and willingness to deploy such misinformation and political tactics even in tense and tragic situations. Trump unleashed a torrent of similar misinformation early in the coronavirus pandemic and after the 2020 election as he sought to overturn the results — the latter of which culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Most prominent among the Helene conspiracy theories has been that FEMA has blocked materials and seized property from affected areas. Rutherford County is a focal point of such theories, with users falsely claiming that the government aimed to seize lithium deposits in Chimney Rock in Rutherford County.

Edwards last week cited that false claim at the very top of a news release seeking to debunk various conspiracy theories related to the hurricane. North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin (R) also prominently cited the theory while seeking to combat misinformation.

The government in neighboring Buncombe County reported last week that it was inundated with calls about FEMA purportedly rejecting donations and seizing property.

As far back as last week — before the most recent events — a nonprofit group warned of potential militia activity related to such claims. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue connected the conspiracy theories to “calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, or to shoot and/or harm FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.”

To be clear, it’s not just social media users promoting this underlying theory. It has also been Trump, Musk and prominent MAGA influencers.

They haven’t specifically cited the claims about lithium deposits, but they have promoted the idea that the government is blocking and seizing things. Musk on Oct. 4 passed along a claim from a SpaceX employee who claimed that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own.” Trump then reposted Musk’s X post on his Truth Social platform. Trump has also claimed without evidence that the hurricane response is deliberately withholding aid from Republican-leaning areas.

Those are among a battery of false claims Trump has made about the hurricane response, in a transparent effort to politically harm the Democrats atop the federal and state governments — including his 2024 election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Shortly after the hurricane hit, Trump claimed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) hadn’t been able to reach President Joe Biden, even though Kemp had already said he’d spoken to Biden. Trump has also falsely claimed FEMA funding was diverted to helping migrants.

It’s difficult to attach what we know of the apparent threats in North Carolina directly to Trump or even Musk, vs. others promoting such claims. The claim about seized materials has not been Trump’s most prominent conspiracy theory, even as he has clearly trafficked in it and made other false claims about FEMA.

We also don’t know much about the threats or how serious they might have been. After dozens of bomb threats in Springfield last month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said many of them had originated overseas — the implication being that foreign actors were seizing on the situation to stoke unrest, rather than that Trump’s claims spurred actual Americans to make such threats.

But regardless of the origin of the threats, it’s clear the underlying conspiracy theories are creating real problems on the ground and unnecessary confusion and fear in North Carolina. And as with the Jan. 6 insurrection, while Trump’s direct culpability might be an open question, it’s incontrovertible that he has made a tense situation worse with his misinformation.

He has seeded unwarranted distrust of FEMA with a series of false claims. And North Carolina is the latest to deal with the consequences.