As Republican candidates regularly turn any question into a hit on immigration, the presidential campaigns are overlooking the disturbing conditions migrants face in detention facilities that fail to meet government standards.

Because of those deficiencies, a new federal watchdog report says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is hindered in its “ability to maintain a safe and secure environment for staff and detainees.”

Although unannounced inspections by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found ICE “generally complied” with established standards, the office found troubling conditions and practices in a substantial number of institutions. The inspections of 17 facilities, out of about 110, were conducted from fiscal 2020 to 2023.

“Our analysis indicates that regardless of time, location, detainee population, and facility type, ICE and facility staff have struggled to comply with aspects of detention standards,” the inspector general’s office wrote. It added, “We found repeated instances of noncompliance in the areas of environmental and safety conditions, [special management units], staff-detainee communication, medical specialty and chronic care, medical staffing shortages, and the grievance system.”

Among the inspector general’s findings:

● Fifty-nine percent of the facilities did not fully comply with “medical care standards, like dental and chronic care, and medical staffing.” Staffing shortages threatened “timely sick call responses, medication refills, and the level of care detainees received for suicide watch, dental, optometry, and chronic care.”

● Seventy-one percent of the facilities “did not consistently provide required care for detainees in segregation,” including access to recreation, laundry and commissary services.

● Eighty-two percent were deficient in their communication practices, including delayed responses to inmates, responses in languages they don’t understand, missing requests in detainees’ files and inconsistent visitation schedules. Furthermore, more than three-quarters “did not comply with all grievance system standards,” like timely responses to grievances.

● Thirty-five percent violated environmental health and safety standards, including by breaking sanitation protocols, or by having broken toilets and sinks, mold and leaking water.

Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari sent the memo on the report to Homeland Security on Sept. 24. Unrelated to the detention facilities findings, a report last week by an independent panel of inspectors general to President Joe Biden urged him to discipline Cuffari for providing misleading information to the Senate during his nomination process and other misconduct. He previously called the investigation unfounded.

John Gihon, chairman of the American Immigration Lawyers Association national ICE liaison committee, said the organization “is extremely disappointed” by the report’s findings, “but not really surprised. … All these sort of things seem to be a systematic problem across the United States.”

About 37,400 migrants are being held in more than 100 facilities, including those owned by the federal government, private prisons, and state and local facilities. Gihon said the problems are long-standing, no matter who operates the facilities or which political party is in control.

“It seems to be across the board,” he said. “This has been a problem for years.”

Gihon added, however, “that we find more problems and more systemic issues within the private prison system” than in ICE facilities.

In addition to having problems affecting detainees and staff, eight of the 17 inspected facilities paid a total of $160 million from 2020 to 2023 for space they don’t use, because ICE guarantees minimum payments to private contractors and state and local governments to house inmates.

“Although ICE must acquire and maintain enough bed space to satisfy demand for population surges and must adjust for health and safety requirements,” the inspector general reported, “it must also strive for balance to avoid wasting funds on empty beds.”

Although the report covers the three fiscal years beginning Oct. 1, 2019, more than 15 months before Republican President Donald Trump left office, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, blamed Democrats in the White House for the empty beds and for not requesting more space, saying they have “consistently requested fewer ICE detention beds than the Trump administration, and then failed to use all the ICE beds funded by Congress.”

“This represents a massive waste of taxpayer resources,” Green added by email, “and a fundamental failure by the Biden-Harris administration to enforce the long-standing immigration laws they swore to uphold.” The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which favors stronger immigration restrictions, agreed, adding, “in FAIR’s view, the objective should be to keep aliens in detention facilities for as little time as possible by quickly deporting those who have no legal right to stay here.”

With a more compassionate approach, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (Miss.), the committee’s top Democrat, focused on the difficult plight migrants and employees face. “After the Office of the Inspector General inspected over a dozen ICE facilities in recent years, it’s clear ICE must do more to ensure its facilities are fully following detention standards,” he said. “We need to make sure migrants in our care are treated humanely, and the safety of both detainees and staff is prioritized.”

The inspector general’s office said ICE management chose to forgo a formal response to the report, which made no recommendations.

In a statement to The Post, ICE spokesperson Jeff Carter said, “ICE remains committed to enhancing civil detention operations to ensure noncitizens are treated humanely, protected from harm, provided appropriate medical and mental health care, and receive the rights and protections to which they are entitled.”

When clients tell Mercury Public Affairs, a consulting and lobbying shop with 18 offices worldwide, that they’re concerned about Donald Trump’s possible return to office, the firm has just the person to ease their nerves: Bryan Lanza.

Lanza, a Mercury partner and longtime Republican strategist, is well-suited to the task. In between client breakfasts in far-flung parts of the world, he serves as a senior adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign. So he’s a natural person to help clients understand how Trump’s positions on tariffs and other hot-button issues might play out in a second term, according to two Mercury colleagues who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business dealings.

“He gives them assurances that there will be life after Nov. 5,” said one of the colleagues, referring to Election Day.

Lanza declined to comment through a Mercury spokesman. A Trump spokesman did not respond to questions.

Eight years after Trump entered politics promising to reduce the influence of Washington lobbyists — to “drain the swamp,” as he put it — advocates for corporate interests, including companies based in China and other foreign countries denounced by Trump, now sit at virtually every level of his campaign. Lobbyists are represented among high-level staff, informal advisers and party faithful who planned the summer convention in Milwaukee, as people with access to Trump or insight into his at-times erratic decision-making turn that knowledge into moneymaking opportunities.

Trump’s de facto campaign manager, Susie Wiles, is a Mercury partner alongside Lanza — and one of at least five people advising Trump who have advocated for tobacco, vaping or cannabis interests in recent years, according to lobbying disclosures and interviews.

At least two people close to the campaign have advocated for Chinese-owned TikTok. One of them, former Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway, served not as a registered lobbyist, according to people familiar with the arrangement, but as a consultant for Club for Growth, the conservative group whose biggest donor is invested in TikTok’s parent company. The other, David Urban, is a veteran of Trump’s two previous campaigns and still travels frequently with the former president — and has registered to lobby for the company. He now works for BGR Group, a prominent lobbying firm with foreign clients including India. He declined to comment.

Trump’s position on these issues has shifted notably. A longtime smoking critic who used his time in office to crack down on e-cigarettes, Trump now presents himself as a savior of vaping. Earlier this year, he also reversed his position on TikTok, joining the app he previously sought to ban.

On Thursday, the Trump campaign invited a range of Washington lobbyists and others to a fundraiser with a top campaign official, Chris LaCivita, as the event’s featured guest. Ticket prices went from $500 to $10,000, according to a copy of the invitation reviewed by The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the expression “drain the swamp,” a ubiquitous line in Trump’s speeches and online posts when he first ran for president, has all but faded away. A Washington Post analysis found that Trump has used the metaphor just 59 times on Truth Social, his social media site, in the past two years — fewer times than he wrote about it on Twitter in October 2016 alone.

The rallying cry has also morphed from its original meaning — no longer just a criticism of special interests but an expression of grievance with government prosecutors who’ve charged him with wide-ranging crimes over the last two years. Trump and his allies have introduced a new hashtag, #NewHoaxSameSwamp.

Some of the key people advising Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, also have corporate ties. Her brother-in-law and campaign confidant, Tony West, is Uber’s chief legal officer. David Plouffe, a top adviser, previously also worked for the ride-hailing company.

But some of the people around Harris have taken steps to avoid potential conflicts of interest; West, for instance, has taken a leave of absence from Uber.

“The issue of political operatives who also have corporate clients is not unique to Donald Trump,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. “What is different about Trump is his accessibility, including through his club, Mar-a-Lago, and his utter lack of concern for conflicts of interest.”

Trump, said Weissman, didn’t drain the swamp. “He flooded the swamp.”

‘That system is wrong’

Trump never liked the metaphor: “Drain the swamp.”

“I hated it,” he said on the campaign trail in October 2016. “I said, ‘This is a hokey expression.’”

But he understood how to harness anger at elites — and to present himself as a challenge to “special interests, lobbyists, donors,” as he rattled off supposed swamp dwellers during a Republican primary debate that year.

“They make large contributions to politicians and they have total control over those politicians,” he said. “And frankly, I know the system better than anybody else and I’m the only one up here that’s going to be able to fix that system, because that system is wrong.”

And when Trump realized his audience loved the phrase “drain the swamp,” he quickly made it part of his standard stump speech.

“I put it in one speech; the place went crazy,” he recalled in 2016. “I said, ‘I’m starting to like that expression.’”

He added, “I had no idea the swamp was that dirty, that disgusting and that deep.”

He quickly learned. Both the number of registered lobbyists and the amount of money spent on them increased during Trump’s presidency, according to data collected by OpenSecrets, the nonprofit watchdog group. A tally by the Associated Press found that Trump put more former lobbyists in Cabinet-level posts in his first three years in office than his two most recent predecessors did in eight.

Meanwhile, he rebuffed calls to sell his international company and put his assets in a blind trust. He then proceeded to receive at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments while he was in office, including from China and Saudi Arabia, according to a report issued earlier this year by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

By 2020, Trump had abandoned any pretense that he was self-funding his own political operation, as he had promised to do in 2016, instead holding high-dollar donor dinners where contributors lobbied directly on policy. The interactions grew more brazen this cycle, with Trump asking oil executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign during a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago this spring in which he vowed to undo environmental regulations put in place by President Joe Biden.

Fossil fuels have been a reliable source of business for lobbyists with leadership roles on the Trump campaign. Among them is Wiles, a veteran Florida-based consultant who ran his two prior campaigns in that state and took over his whole political operation in 2021. In between, she lobbied for companies in the coal and liquefied natural gas business, disclosures show.

Wiles joined Mercury in 2022, saying the firm would be her “corporate home.” The hire caused internal strife at Mercury, a bipartisan shop, where some Democrats blanched at the association with such a high-profile Trump operative, according to people at the firm.

Officially, Wiles is Trump’s co-campaign manager, but she manages the day-to-day operation of his campaign and is widely viewed as his top adviser. She has told others on the campaign that she has stepped back from her work at Mercury this year, though she has not formally taken a leave of absence from the firm, according to two Mercury colleagues.

Wiles registered to lobby for just one client in the first quarter of the year. The client, Swisher, is a Jacksonville, Fla.-based tobacco company and maker of Swisher Sweets, the popular flavored cigars. Wiles has maintained that it hasn’t influenced Trump’s position on nicotine-related issues and that she has not been involved in policy conversations on the issue, people who have spoken to her said.

Last month, Trump vowed on social media to “save” vaping after a private meeting with a leading vaping lobbyist working with Kellyanne Conway, who managed the final stretch of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Conway, who has no formal role on the 2024 campaign but remains a trusted confidante of the former president, arranged and attended the Mar-a-Lago meeting with the lobbyist, who has paid her for polling and consulting. Conway declined to comment.

Trump’s ties to Big Tobacco go deeper. The largest corporate donor to the primary super PAC supporting Trump’s presidential bid is a subsidiary of Reynolds American. One of the tobacco company’s lobbyists is Brian Ballard, a close associate of the former president who suggested the company donate to Trump’s political efforts, according to people familiar with the discussions. Ballard attended a lengthy meeting between Trump and Reynolds executives earlier this year in New York, said one of the people.

Ballard has been the campaign’s most prodigious fundraiser, bundling more than $50 million for Trump, according to campaign advisers. In turn, he has taken clients to meet with Trump at his clubs or residences, they say. Ballard declined to comment.

Ballard co-chaired the host committee of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, which was later moved to the White House because of the coronavirus. The chairman of the 2024 host committee in Milwaukee was Reince Priebus, the onetime White House chief of staff under Trump and now the president of the Wisconsin-based law firm Michael Best.

Priebus was given a luxury box at the convention and entertained donors and clients throughout the week, people familiar with the event said.

Priebus has expanded his firm’s lobbying arm, according to people familiar with his activity, as clients seek representation from a GOP heavyweight. Among the firm’s new clients this year is a cryptocurrency company called Ripple Labs, which was a corporate sponsor of the RNC host committee. Ripple also sponsored the Democratic convention, according to a company spokeswoman.

Another new client of Priebus’s firm is ITG Brands, the third-largest tobacco company in the United States, which signed Priebus’s firm to lobby on regulation of tobacco products and vaping technology, lobbying disclosures show. Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Tremendous opportunities’

Lanza may not be the most high-profile Trump whisperer with one foot planted in the private sector. But he epitomizes the way access to the former president appears to enhance international business opportunities.

Lanza came up in conservative politics, as a Republican aide in the California state legislature and then as communications director for Citizens United, the advocacy group run by David Bossie, who became Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016. Lanza served as a spokesman for the campaign that year — and then for Trump’s transition team.

Soon after, in February 2017, he joined Mercury. Among his early clients was ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications giant that undertook a wide-ranging lobbying campaign in April 2018 to fend off crippling American sanctions, according to filings with the Justice Department. In the filings, required because the electronics maker is partially state-owned, Mercury acknowledged that “the work done under this arrangement may inure to the benefit of the People’s Republic of China.”

The work succeeded. In a pair of tweets in May, Trump wrote that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping were “working together” to bring ZTE “back into business, fast,” touting his “personal relationship with President Xi” and instructing the Commerce Department to “get it done.” And in July 2018, the Commerce Department lifted its ban preventing the firm from acquiring American-made parts and software, saying ZTE had fulfilled its obligations under a settlement agreement.

The same year, Lanza signed up to help other foreign entities navigate U.S. sanctions, leveraging his extensive network in the Trump administration. He urged U.S. officials to allow the Russian energy and aluminum company EN+ to reduce the ownership stake of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian tycoon close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in exchange for relief from U.S. sanctions. And he was part of a Mercury team advocating for Hikvision, the Chinese surveillance firm, when it came under threat of being blacklisted by the Trump administration. Trump issued an executive order in 2020 preventing U.S. investment in the company.

In November 2020, days after the presidential election, Lanza dispensed his advice to Chinese firms doing business in the United States as part of an online panel convened by the China General Chamber of Commerce-USA, a New York-based nonprofit chaired by the Bank of China’s U.S. president.

“China has earned the right to be here,” Lanza said, according to a recording of the panel discussion. “They’ve created their own manufacturing base. Some would say at our expense, and that we let them do it, but they still created it for themselves.”

Lanza offered a measure of criticism of Trump during the event, saying he felt the effects of the president’s anti-China rhetoric personally. “I have an Asian son, and so I see how the tone of the president over the last four years is going to affect him,” he said.

He also predicted that Trump would run again for the presidency and would base his 2024 campaign on the argument that Democrats were soft on China. Chinese firms, he said, would need to find effective advocates.

“You have to get in there early,” Lanza said. “But I do think there are going to be tremendous opportunities there.”

By this fall, Lanza had reconnected with the Trump campaign. As a senior adviser, he leads the former president’s surrogate operation and appears on cable news to promote Trump’s candidacy.

At the same time, he maintains a humming lobbying business. This year, he has represented Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, and Camel Energy, a Chinese battery recycling and manufacturing company with a major research-and-development facility in Ann Arbor, Mich., lobbying disclosures show.

Other international clients include a Nigerian oil and gas company, a Croatian natural gas trader and an Andorran business behind a bank designated in 2015, in since-withdrawn findings by the U.S. Treasury Department, a “primary money laundering concern.”

Mercury colleagues described Lanza as a prodigious business developer, constantly scheduling meals in foreign capitals, as well as a trusted voice inside the firm. Recently, they said, he’s often asked how Trump would react to a given policy or initiative.

Last month, Lanza appeared on CNN to tout recent statements by the former president signaling support for the cannabis industry, previewing, “He’s going to probably be putting out something more.”

“There’s a reason Donald Trump is moving in this direction,” Lanza added, saying, “We’ve never had a Republican president supportive of medical marijuana at the presidential level. I wouldn’t be surprised if his administration even moves further along.”

Five days later, Lanza was proved right, when Trump wrote on social media that he supports loosening federal marijuana rules and said he would vote for a Florida ballot measure seeking to legalize the drug for adult use.

What Lanza did not tell CNN viewers was that he was part of a Mercury team that took at least $40,000 from a cannabis trade group several years ago to lobby the Trump administration, as federal filings show.

The subject of the lobbying: federal cannabis policy.

Adriana Navarro and Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

Polls are coming fast and furious now, with just over three weeks remaining before the November election. The Wall Street Journal released a set on Friday morning, evaluating how voters in swing states viewed the candidacies of Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. As with most other such polls, views were divided.

The Journal poll also offered up a series of issues for which respondents were asked to pick the better candidates. The responses comported with what we’ve seen elsewhere: Harris has an advantage on health care; Trump on the economy. The biggest gap between the candidates was on immigration, where Trump had a 16-point edge.

That Trump is advantaged on immigration is also not new. He has enjoyed similar advantages consistently since the campaign began, one reason that he focuses so relentlessly on the issue in speeches and interviews. It’s worth noting, though, that other polling released this week suggests that Americans actually prefer the immigration proposals Harris has put forward.

Yahoo News on Wednesday published the results of a poll conducted by YouGov. In addition to asking respondents to evaluate policy proposals, it presented each candidate’s central argument on immigration in the form of quotes — unattributed quotes — from campaign speeches. Two-thirds of Americans agree with Harris’s framing of the issue as multipronged; just under half agreed with Trump’s more apocalyptic and hyperbolic articulation.

Even among Republicans, a majority agreed with Harris’s way of articulating the appropriate response.

YouGov also presented eight policy proposals that had been embraced by the candidates. Four came from the bipartisan border legislation that Harris has endorsed and that (as she frequently notes) Trump was instrumental in killing. Three come from Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The last suggested that undocumented immigrants be given a pathway to citizenship, something that earns a subtle reference on Harris’s campaign website.

The four proposals from the immigration bill endorsed by Harris were the four most-popular proposals overall, although “making it easier to expel immigrants” was about as popular as several other proposals. Three of the four least-popular proposals were Trump’s, including his pledge to round up, detain and deport millions of immigrants (though that was one of the ideas that was viewed about the same as “making it easier”).

So on ideology (as indicated by the question about campaign rhetoric) and on policy (as indicated on the chart above), Harris seems to have an advantage. But on the broader question of “immigration,” she continues to trail Trump.

One reason is that Harris is given more blame for the situation at the border than is Trump. Harris is vice president, meaning her power is necessarily more limited than that of President Joe Biden. It’s likely that her assumption of an immigration-related role within the administration — a move hyped by Trump (again hyperbolically) to suggest that she was centrally responsible for the border — drives a lot of this perception.

That Trump was president and didn’t build the wall the first time around, despite his promises, doesn’t spur nearly as much blame from Americans.

Part of what’s at play, clearly, is that a lot of voters simply view Trump as “tough on the border” and Harris as “not.” Fully three-quarters of respondents in the Yahoo-YouGov poll say that the border is a major problem or a crisis, and major problems and crises are not the sorts of things for which people appreciate nuanced responses.

It’s also probably the case that respondents simply don’t associate the proposals included in the bipartisan legislation with Harris, while they may associate her with proposals such as pathways to citizenship. On the flip side, of course, there is an ongoing under-appreciation of the destabilizing, arbitrary effects of a policy of mass deportation — advantaging Trump.

The border is seen as a crisis and Trump projects a blunt image of toughness, a vibe that effectively neutralizes Harris’s advantage on policy. The Yahoo-YouGov poll also asked respondents who they thought would do a better job handling immigration. These are the same people who preferred Harris’s broad approach and her specific endorsed policies, mind you.

Trump was preferred on immigration by 15 points.

Donald Trump is leaning into a nativist, anti-immigrant message in the final stage of his third presidential campaign, advancing a closing argument centered on fearmongering, falsehoods and stereotypes about migrants as polls show his edge on economic issues fading.

In recent days, the former president has suggested that “bad genes” are to blame for people in the country illegally who have committed murders, reprised his warnings about a migrant “invasion” and suggested Vice President Kamala Harris’s handling of border issues shows she is “mentally impaired.”

He will campaign in Aurora, Colo., on Friday, after promoting false claims about Venezuelan gangs taking over residential buildings in the Denver suburb.

Illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down significantly this year after the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum, and most experts say that immigration has boosted the U.S. economy. But polls show Trump has a clear advantage on the issues of immigration and border security, and the former president and his allies are wagering that his false and exaggerated claims about migrants will excite his base and propel him to victory.

Trump’s critics are alarmed by his tactics and warn that they stoke racial divisions and fear of migrants.

“He doesn’t even respect us,” Marisela Sandoval, 39, a unionized Las Vegas hospital worker who was born in Dallas and grew up in Mexico, said in a recent interview when asked about Trump’s rhetoric. “It’s just so much hating against immigrants. It’s dangerous. So disrespectful.”

His base, however, is elated.

“Today I make you this promise: I will liberate Wisconsin and our entire nation from this mass migration invasion of murderers, child predators, drug dealers, gang members and thugs. It’ll be liberated,” Trump said before a crowd of thousands at a rally in Juneau, Wis., over the weekend.

The crowd roared. “Trump! Trump! Trump!” they cheered, offering the loudest standing ovation of the rally.

Trump has frequently used dehumanizing language to describe migrants, referring to them as “savage criminals” and “animals.” He has said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and he has promoted false claims about migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and bankrupting the small Pennsylvania town of Charleroi. His ads mentioning immigration frequently refer to migrants as “illegals” and include ominous imagery of people flooding the U.S.-Mexico border.

The ex-president has long relied on incendiary rhetoric against immigrants as a political tactic, dating back to the launch of his first presidential campaign in 2015. Since then, he has further sharpened those attacks and leaned even harder on immigration — which has been a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, as it was in 2016 — as polls have shown that he is losing his edge on the economy.

Trump himself has suggested the border is a bigger issue than the economy.

“I know they do all these polls, and the polls say it’s the economy,” he said at the Juneau rally, “And the polls say very strongly it’s inflation, and I can understand it a little bit. To me, it’s the horrible people that we’re allowing into our country that are destroying our country.”

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement that Trump remains focused on both the economy and immigration, which poll as top-of-mind for voters.

“Day in and day out, President Trump focuses on the issues that matter most to Americans: inflation hurting their pocketbooks and illegal immigration invading their country,” Leavitt said. “He will continue to discuss both issues over the next 26 days.”

At recent campaign stops, Trump has distorted official Homeland Security Department statistics on undocumented immigrants with homicide convictions, falsely claiming that the Biden administration “released” them when, in reality, the government numbers Trump is citing span decades and include people who are serving time in state and federal prisons.

His promises to expel undocumented immigrants — and many people who are legally present in the United States — have drawn some of the largest cheers at his rallies. During the Juneau rally, cheers erupted again as Trump promised to end “the invasion of savage criminals” and begin the “the largest deportation in American history” on his first day in office.

He repeatedly leaned on fear tactics in his remarks, saying that Harris, if elected, will “inundate your towns with illegal alien criminals” and “even if they haven’t arrived yet, they will be.”

Greg Fredrick, 57, who attended the Juneau rally, agrees with the former president’s concern about migrants spreading across the country.

“In Dodge County, we’re not feeling it, but other spots are, and it will come this way,” said Fredrick, a contractor in the township of Lebanon. “We need to seal the border up. It’s horrible.”

Fredrick raised concern over the number of illegal border crossings by migrants coming from China and other nations not typically known to come to the United States through the southern border. “Something’s fishy with that. It’s not right,” he said, adding he’s worried another terrorist attack could be coming without more border security. “Something bad’s going to happen,” he said.

Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), often blame immigrants for the country’s problems. Trump has claimed that migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are taking “Black and Hispanic jobs,” a characterization that many Americans have found offensive and economists said was false. And Vance has called illegal migration “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” arguing that migrants are competing with Americans for limited homes — a claim that has been debunked by economists and housing experts.

“If Kamala is reelected, your town, and every town just like it, all across Wisconsin and all across our country — the heartland, the coast, it doesn’t matter — will be transformed into a third-world hellhole,” Trump said during an event in Prairie du Chien, Wis.

A Fox News poll last month found that 51 percent of registered voters favor Trump on the economy, compared with 46 percent who favor Harris. That’s compared with a 15-point advantage that Trump had over Biden in March.

Inflation dropped in September to its lowest level in more than three years, and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates last month for the first time in more than four years. But many Americans continue to express concerns about the cost of living.

Democratic strategists beat back potentially catastrophic third-party threats this year with a campaign to force attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the race and prevent a presidential bid by the moderate group No Labels.

But advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris still say the final outcome in key swing states could hinge on the remaining independent and third-party contenders, who are collectively drawing about 5 percent of the vote in public polls.

In response, the Democratic National Committee on Friday launched its first television ad targeting the candidacy of Jill Stein, the perennial Green Party candidate who has been registering at about 1 percent of the vote in the northern swing states.

The ad will run on televisions in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, along with national broadcasts on cable news. The DNC did not announce how much money would be put behind the spot.

Over an image of Stein that morphs into an image of Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump, the ad describes Stein’s role in the 2016 election as a “spoiler” who helped Trump become president and refers to legal help that her campaign has received indirectly from Republican operatives. It also quotes Trump praising her.

“Jill Stein, I like her very much,” Trump said at a June rally in Philadelphia. “You know why? She takes 100 percent from them.”

“Just like in 2016, Jill Stein can’t win the presidency, but she will help decide who does,” DNC adviser Ramsey Reid said in a statement. “It’s crucial voters know that a vote for anyone other than Kamala Harris is a vote for Donald Trump.”

The ads come as Stein has described keeping Harris from the White House as one of the goals of her campaign. On Wednesday, she accepted the endorsement in Michigan of Abandon Harris, a Muslim American group organized to oppose U.S. support of Israel’s military.

Before she spoke, one of the group’s leaders, Hassan Abdel Salam, said their goal was to bring about “failure for the vice president, the loss of Michigan and the loss of the White House” because of the Biden administration’s Israel policy.

Stein, in her remarks at the event, said she still hoped to win the White House. But she also defined victory for her campaign in much more modest terms, saying her campaign can also win by denying either of the major party candidates, Trump or Harris, victory because of their support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon.

She continues to campaign on other liberal issues, including efforts to reverse climate change, fight income inequality and improve access to ballot box for minor-party candidates.

“The Kamala Harris campaign is looking for a scapegoat,” Stein said Thursday in an interview, about the Harris campaign’s concern about her candidacy. “They could change their policy right now. The problem is they would rather lose the election than end the genocide.”

Stein is one of three independent candidates who have been registering at least 1 percent in recent public polls, along with the left-leaning scholar Cornel West, who is running on a “truth, justice and love” platform, and libertarian candidate Chase Oliver.

In a razor-thin major party result, any third-party votes could prove decisive. But pollsters say it is more complicated to divine whether voters for third-party candidates are directly pulling votes away from either major party candidate. Democratic strategists say they do not believe all of the supporters of Stein or West are available as potential Harris voters, just as not all supporters of Oliver are potential Trump voters. Many voters are motivated primarily by their opposition to both major parties.

Clear Choice, a super PAC founded to help minimize the harm third-party and independent candidates do to Democrats, calculated through polling at the start of the year that Democrats were losing two to three percentage points in support because of the minor candidates in the race. They now calculate the damage is less than a percentage point.

“The third-party penalty for Democrats that existed for almost the entire cycle has been pretty deflated at this point,” said Pete Kavanaugh, the founder of Clear Choice. “Oliver is generally becoming as big a problem for Trump as Stein and West are for Harris.”

In late 2023, hypothetical political polls of the presidential contest that included Trump, Biden, Kennedy, West and Stein repeatedly showed that third-party and independent candidates were drawing as many as 1 in 5 voters nationally. But those numbers began to fall after the end of the Republican primaries, as voters focused more on the choice before them.

In a Washington Post average of June polls ending before the Biden-Trump debate, Trump had 41 percent support, Biden had 40 percent support, Kennedy had 7 percent, West 1 percent, Stein 1 percent and Oliver 1 percent. The third-party total was 10 percent. An average of 7 percent were not sure or undecided, 1 percent said “other” and 3 percent said they would not vote.

In a Post average since the Sept. 10 Harris-Trump debate, Trump had 46 percent support, Harris had 48 percent support, Kennedy had 2 percent, West 1 percent, Stein 1 percent and Oliver 1 percent. The third-party total was 5 percent. An average of 3 percent were not sure or undecided, 1 percent said “other,” and 1 percent would not vote.

Kennedy endorsed Trump in August, but he remains an option on the ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan. West is on the ballot in Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin, while still fighting for ballot access in Pennsylvania. West will also appear on the ballot in Georgia, but the Supreme Court in that state has ruled votes for him will not be counted in the election.

Edwin DeJesus, a co-campaign manager for West, said West supporters should vote for him anyway in Georgia and write in West’s name in states where he does not appear on the ballot. “If you fill in Cornel West on the ballot, that is a vote that counts,” DeJesus said.

Stein will appear on six of the seven major swing states being contested by Trump and Harris, with Nevada being the exception. Oliver will appear on all seven.

The Abandon Harris coalition is just one part of the Muslim American community’s protest of U.S. policy toward Israel in the election year. Another group, the Uncommitted National Movement, which encouraged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” as a protest of Biden’s Gaza policy during the primary, has declined to endorse or oppose Harris in the general election.

The group’s leaders have also urged voters to vote against Trump and warned that support for a third-party candidate could help elect him again.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

There’s a throughline between two New York Times stories released Friday that needs to be drawn.

In one, reporters detail how Elon Musk is using his fortune and social media platform (X, once known as Twitter) to benefit former president Donald Trump’s campaign. In the other, the paper details how Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), refused to acknowledge that Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020.

And the throughline is that Vance is pretending Trump’s loss was driven by something that his own campaign with Trump actually did.

Vance sat down for an interview with the Times during which he was asked the same question that came up in the vice-presidential debate: Did Trump lose in 2020? This question has been portrayed as a “gotcha,” an unfair attempt to knock Republicans back on their heels. But it’s actually a very useful proxy for a question that nearly any Republican would otherwise sidestep, one centered on their willingness to prevent Trump from attempting to subvert the results in 2024. If they can’t say Trump lost the 2020 election even now, we can’t be confident they’re going to oppose Trump should he attempt similar machinations later this year.

Vance couldn’t say Trump lost. Instead, he reverted to a version of the same response he presented during that debate.

“Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” he was asked.

“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes?” he replied.

This is his parry, the idea that one couldn’t say the 2020 election was fair because there was an effort to censor this determinative story. It is, as we’ve noted in the past, a way for people unwilling to echo Trump’s wilder election-fraud claims to instead point to something less easily falsifiable, this idea that anti-Trump forces put their thumbs on the scales.

But what Vance says here is falsifiable. It is not the case that tech companies censoring a story — specifically, a New York Post story about an email attributed to a laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter — cost Trump the election.

This, too, has been explored at length in the past, but it should immediately fail the smell test anyway. The 2020 election was a referendum on Trump, on his presidency and particularly on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It is ridiculous to suggest that this would have changed had Twitter (as it was then known) not briefly limited the sharing of a New York Post story about how one of Hunter Biden’s business partners sent him an email thanking him for getting him in the room with his father.

The “independent studies” which Vance mentioned presumably refer to one poll conducted on behalf of the right-wing Media Research Center after the election. It presented respondents with a sweeping claim linking Biden to foreign business interests, asking whether awareness of that purported link would have led people to reconsider their votes. A chunk of self-reported Biden voters said they would have.

Setting aside the vast inaccuracies inherent in having people assess what they would have done had the conditions of their decision-making been slightly different, the question didn’t even center on the New York Post story! It was about purported Chinese investors and used the same “Biden family” framing on which the failed Republican impeachment probe depended.

On the right, though, this poll became “people would have voted Trump if they knew about Hunter Biden” and then “the left” — here represented by Silicon Valley liberals — “censoring the Hunter Biden story handed Biden the election.” Despite that “censorship” — driven by concerns that the information was the product of a Russian interference effort — lasting only a brief period and almost certainly helping draw more attention to the story.

And now the throughline: The Times’s Elon Musk story notes that the Trump campaign had a direct hand in now-X limiting a story about Vance.

Hackers linked to Iran reportedly obtained the briefing book compiled as Trump was vetting potential running mates. (His former vice president, Mike Pence, needed to be replaced on the ticket for noteworthy reasons.) The hackers shopped the briefing book around, finding few takers.

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein bit, however, publishing the document on his website. And in short order, X banned Klippenstein’s account, purportedly because the linked document included personal information about Vance.

But also because the Trump campaign wanted it to be limited, according to the Times’s Elon Musk story.

“After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month,” the story notes, “the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.”

In 2020, Twitter blocked the New York Post story after warnings from the federal government — then run by Donald Trump! — that foreign actors might disseminate stolen information. They soon lifted that limit. In 2024, X blocked Klippenstein’s story in coordination with the Trump campaign.

The former, Vance identifies as an unfair attempt to harm Trump, one that purportedly cost him the election. The latter? It seems unlikely he’ll be similarly incensed.

It is not the case that the vetting document published by Klippenstein would have shifted the election any more than it was the case that the block on the New York Post story did. But here we see how the same action, taken at different times and with different motivations, are presented in starkly different terms.

And at each point, in service to Trump’s ambitions.