Hi Intriguer. I heard this week that reaching a voter for the first time with a campaign message costs about $12. Think of that as the political version of the customer acquisition cost. American readers will be aware of just how annoying those fundraising text messages can be. But as the campaign goes on, maintaining contact with the voter, even if you know who they are and have all their information, gets more expensive. Keeping in contact with that voter all the way through to election day can cost up to $100 per potential voter. And that, my friends, is why campaigns are so keen to promote early voting. That’s pretty obvious when you think about it, but still, my mind was blown when I first heard it.

In other news, the Harris campaign said this morning that the Vice President won’t appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast after it was widely reported she would. Trump is sitting down with Rogan today. Harris’s campaign team said she backed out of the interview due to scheduling conflicts, but I think that excuse is rather weak sauce.

I wonder whether the campaign has some data that her public appearances are actually hurting her with potentially undecided voters? Rogan's audience skews heavily young and male, a demographic Harris desperately needs to reach, if not to win over, then at least to decrease the margin of her defeat among young men. I admit I’m confused by this one, so if anyone has any inside information on what’s going on, hit reply because I’d love to know more.

There are 12 days until the election. There’s been no change in the polls you need to pay attention to—the race remains a tie, which means both candidates could win, it could be close, or it might not be. I’ve included a quote from pollster Nate Silver explaining why at the bottom of the newsletter that I think is worth your time.

- John Fowler & Kristen Talman in Washington DC

Listen to this week’s podcast here, and if you’re not signed up for our flagship daily newsletter, International Intrigue, you can fix that here!

THE CONVERSATION

The campaigns’ closing arguments

A summary of this week’s conversation:

1. Harris has pivoted to calling Trump a fascist. Will it work? In an obvious shift in her campaign messaging, Kamala Harris has moved from projecting joy, patriotism, and excitement for a better future to calling Donald Trump a fascist. This week, we had:

• Trump’s former chief of staff and retired Marine Corps general John Kelly warn that “Trump would rule like a dictator”.

• The Atlantic broke news that Donald Trump allegedly said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

• Robert Paxton, a widely respected scholar of Vichy France and fascism, told the New York Times that he believes Trump’s MAGA movement has all the elements of fascism (though he doesn’t think calling it that is politically helpful for Harris).

• Vice President Harris, referring to former President Trump during a CNN town hall event on Wednesday, said Americans care about “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Will this obviously coordinated series of articles, interviews, and campaign messaging work? And what does it tell us about the state of the race?

On one hand, this tactic could have been long-planned. Harris’s campaign managers, David Plouffe, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, are two of the best to ever do it. Perhaps the whole strategy was to initially paint Kamala Harris as an empathetic, joyful warrior determined to turn the page on an era of divisive politics (remember the vibes at the DNC?) before pivoting late to remind any folks still on the fence just how terrible Donald Trump was and remains. After all, folks now seem to have far more rosy recollections of the Trump years than they did after he left office and had the highest ‘unfavorable’ rating of any president in history.

Or, perhaps the Harris campaign's internal polling doesn’t look good, and they’ve decided to go all in on the type of negative campaigning on Donald Trump that arguably won Joe Biden the White House in 2020. If she can’t persuade voters to vote for her by now, then she can at least depress them about the other guy enough so they don’t vote at all. From conversations we’ve had, Democrats are definitely worried about her chances, but then, when aren’t Democrats hand-wringing about their chances?

There’s a third possibility - Harris can’t figure out how to say anything else. We know that both campaigns are “flooding the zone” in the final days of the campaign. The Harris campaign wants to dominate news coverage and leverage its sizable fundraising advantage until election day, but she’s clearly not comfortable answering questions about herself and her prospective policies. As John noted in the introduction, does the Harris campaign have information that her public appearances are actually hurting her chances? If so, slamming Trump might be the only message she can deliver to have any hope on November 5.

2. Election interference and post-election vacuum. This week, the Office of National Intelligence (DNI) shared what might be its final report on foreign influence in the US election before November 5th. As expected, Russia, China, and Iran were highlighted as the biggest threats to the US election. But the report, which spans from election day to inauguration day, suggests that the real concern is what happens after the election but before the new president takes office. According to the DNI, these three countries have become more effective at spreading disinformation and sowing their brand of chaos, having learned from their experiences in the 2020 post-election, pre-inauguration period.

In that same vein, a recent blog post from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center highlighted how Russian operations now incorporate generative AI tools in their content creation while Iranian groups are expanding their capabilities for cyber-influence campaigns (while Brandon Wales, VP at Sentinel One at an Intrigue event on Thursday, there has been no cyber interference in the election thus far). We’ve said it before, but it’s worth reiterating that Russia, Iran, North Korea, Hungary, and a few others—aka the Confederacy of Chaos— all want Donald Trump to win, but more importantly, they want Americans to fight among themselves. Those countries are hoping to recreate the post-election vibes of 2020/21, but on steroids.

Interestingly, China has pivoted its attention toward various down-ballot races and congressional targets, almost certainly reflecting Beijing’s plan to break the bipartisan anti-China consensus in Washington. Helping China-sympathetic candidates win down-ballot elections is a tactic that has worked with varying degrees of success in Canada, Australia, and the UK but feels a tougher task in the US. That said, China is able to play the long game, and even if it manages to get candidates to simply ignore China during an election cycle, that’d be a win for China. Come to think of it… China’s strategy might already be working.

In slightly more surprising news this week that got John steaming mad, Donald Trump’s campaign accused the UK Labour government of “blatant foreign interference." Trump’s campaign filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against the UK government after Labour Party activists were spotted in swing districts canvassing for Kamala Harris. It is illegal for a foreign citizen to be paid to work in US elections, but the Labour Party insists that its officials were volunteers, and if the reports that they were provided flights and accommodation were true, then the Labour Party didn’t know anything about it.

To make matters worse, the UK Defence Secretary John Healey waved away concerns saying, "This is in the middle of an election campaign, that's the way that politics works." Yes, we know this kind of thing happens all the time (Australian Labor Party activists apparently helped a Bernie Sanders campaign in the past), and yes, we know that it’s not comparable to the Confederacy of Chaos’s election interference, but it is still a terrible look for the new UK Government. We don’t envy the UK diplomats tasked with building bridges with the US administration should Donald Trump be elected.

3. Roundup of other news: We also discussed a myriad of other news this week, including a new poll showing that former President Trump is slightly ahead with Arab American voters. John freely admits this is a blind spot for him—how could a voter who prioritizes Palestinian issues think Donald Trump would enact policies more favorable to Palestine than Kamala Harris?

We also discussed what the hell Elon Musk is playing at giving $1M per day to voters in swing states to vote for Donald Trump. Okay, that’s not quite what he’s doing, but let’s just call a spade a spade, because that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. It’s probably illegal, but that’s not going to stop Musk. Oh, and we also discussed the Wall Street Journal’s remarkable exclusive that Musk has been back-channeling Vladimir Putin and doing favors for Xi Jinping by turning off Starlink in Taiwan. This is a far bigger problem than we had time to discuss this week and probably warrants a whole podcast of its own!

We really recommend going and listening to our full conversation by subscribing to the podcast feed!

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS…

• President Joe Biden is speaking in Phoenix, Arizona, before heading to Wilmington, Delaware, in the evening.

• Vice President Kamala Harris is hosting a campaign rally in Houston, Texas, where music superstar Beyonce is set to perform.

• Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz is traveling to Navajo Nation and Phoenix on Saturday before heading to Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sunday

• Republican nominee Donald Trump will hold campaign rallies in Traverse City and Novi, Michigan, on Friday before heading to Pennsylvania and New York over the weekend.

• Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance is in North Carolina on Friday before heading south to Georgia on Saturday.

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in London meeting with Caretaker Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Azmi Mikati, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, and UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

WORLD VIEW

Here’s how papers around the world have reported on the US elections over the past week —

🇭🇰 Why US election winner might find North Korea its ‘most dangerous flashpoint’ with China - South China Morning Post, Hong Kong

• Intrigue’s take: As reports have emerged that North Korean soldiers might be deployed to fight with Russia against Ukraine, SCMP reports that the Korean Peninsula, instead of say Taiwan, is the “most dangerous flashpoint” in the US-China relationship, especially as North-South tensions have escalated in recent months.

🇬🇧 Foreign-born voters: 'The money in US politics absolutely scares me' - BBC, London, UK

• Intrigue’s take:  Talking to naturalized voters in the US, the BBC Washington Correspondent told the British network that their biggest concern is the money thrown around to buy favor in elections.

🇸🇦 Arab News-YouGov poll predicts huge Arab-American turnout in upcoming election, Palestine tops priorities - Arab News, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

• Intrigue’s take: In a poll that garnered significant online attention, the Saudi-based news site found that Arab-Americans handed former President Donald Trump a 2 percentage point lead over Vice President Harris. Many outlets are claiming that Arab-American voters are keen to “punish” Democrats for their handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

POLL OF THE DAY

PSA: This race really is 50/50 in all senses. We don’t know who’s going to win, and we don’t know if it will be close or a blowout. It’s almost like polling is a waste of time. From Nate Silver:

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Who would run Kamala Harris’s economy?

• Corporate America's leftward shift

• Opinion: Harris woos women but has lost men. It may cost her the election.

• Beyoncé set to perform at Houston rally for Harris

• Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.

• Ambiguity or madness? Where Harris and Trump stand on China

POLL