In your backyard
Whether it’s Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office next year, there are other races this November that will mean much more to most voters.
Republicans are all but ensured to win the Senate, meaning a Harris administration will struggle to push through her most ambitious plans.
Democrats aren’t on quite as clear a path to victory in the House, but no one would be surprised if they capitalized on Trump’s unpopularity and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) divided caucus and gave themselves their own razor-thin majority. Trump in the White House with a still-to-be-determined Senate leader is a powerful one-two punch, but if Democrats are holding the purse strings in the House, his movements are going to be fettered.
This week, the Washington Examiner is taking a look at some of the other races outside of Washington, D.C., that you should have on your radar. This morning, Investigative Reporter Barnini Chakraborty broke down four mayoral races in some of the country’s most important, and liberal, cities that are set to shake up millions of lives.
A sampling:
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed is trying to shed her progressive past and run to the center as her city tries to climb out of a crime-ridden, tourist-killing, post-pandemic rut. She is being blamed for allowing a mass exodus of businesses from the downtown area and is sticking around to try and reverse her fortunes.
A few hours north, in Portland, Oregon, voters have decided they want to wipe their city slate clean. The mayoral election is tied to a massive overhaul of the way the city will be run. Candidates fighting for their opportunity to take the reins of the untested system include three insiders, who are current city council members, and a stripper. Incumbent Mayor Ted Wheeler said he isn’t interested in seeking reelection.
Maryland has been a hot spot for election buzz this year. Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) looks like a rising Democratic star after his handling of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Former Gov. Larry Hogan is trying to make history and get elected to the Senate as a Republican — a bid that looked promising but is faltering down the stretch.
But Baltimore, a city that has been mired by scandal and crime but looks to be on the mend, is determining who it will entrust to keep the good times rolling. Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott is seeking reelection, something Baltimore mayors have struggled to win in the last two decades. His promise of reducing violent crime is appealing to voters in the city an April survey described as the deadliest large city in the United States.
Back out West, in Nevada, national Democrats look like they’ll keep control of a Senate seat that was thought to be competitive, and Harris appears to have distanced herself from Trump to take the swing out of the state.
What happens in Las Vegas, though, is a different story, and everyone will know about it. A mini political dynasty has already been upended with Mayor Carolyn Goodman not running for reelection. She has held the seat since 2011. Her husband, Oscar Goodman, was the mayor before her, running the city beginning in 1999.
Click here to read more about what the long slate of mayoral candidates are planning.
No more joy
Harris rode a wave of excitement to record fundraising and marginal leads over Trump when she replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. Those tides have ebbed, and the joy has shifted to danger in recent days.
Polling isn’t always in Harris’s favor. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Harris up by 0.9 points nationally but Trump beating Harris in all seven swing states.
Things are better now than they were with Biden at the helm, White House Reporter Naomi Lim wrote for us this morning, but better isn’t best, and with two weeks to go until Election Day, joy, morphing into fear, is turning into “existential dread.”
“The existential dread is real for non-Trump fans,” Democratic pollster Stefan Hankin told Naomi.
“The idea of a Romney presidency wasn’t keeping people up at night,” Hankin said. “It wasn’t this, ‘Holy s***, what the hell is going on?’”
Harris catching up to Trump and surpassing him in some areas while not completely separating herself is splitting how strategists feel about her candidacy. She has been saddled with complaints that she isn’t connecting with the Democratic base the same way Biden did.
There is an inevitable sense of unease in most elections. Pollsters took a massive credibility hit following the 2016 debacle that had convinced even Trump that he had essentially no chance of beating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Since then, models have been revamped, and while it’s still far from a perfect science, polls have been largely instructive rather than intrusive for political analysis.
And with basically every poll well within the margin of error, Democrats are torn about how to interpret Harris’s chances at victory over the next two weeks.
It might be endemic, as “worrying is just in the Democratic DNA,” one party strategist told Naomi.
Or it could be a useful prod to push on-the-fence voters to hop down and head to their polling place.
“I love the anxiety because it gets supporters off the couch and in the field working hard for victory,” Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), told Naomi.
Click here to read more about the fear seeping into Democrats as Election Day approaches.
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For your radar
Biden and the first lady will speak at a National Arts and Humanities reception at the White House at 5:30 p.m.
Harris will start her day in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with a campaign event at 11:40 a.m. She will travel to Oakland County, Michigan, for another event at 4:10 p.m., and she will close out her campaigning for the day in Brookfield, Wisconsin, with an event at 7 p.m.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 1:30 p.m.
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) will sit down for The View at 11 a.m. and will appear on The Daily Show at 11 p.m.
Trump will attend two campaign events in North Carolina, starting in Greenville at 3 p.m. and heading to Charlotte at 6:30 p.m.