Morning Report — Harris appeals to GOP critics of Trump; Trump courts Latinos

In today’s issue:

• Harris faces Fox News, Trump on Univision
• Distrust of news media stokes election myths 
• Tech world eyes nuclear energy to fuel AI
• Israel strikes in and around Beirut

Vice President Harris and former President Trump are racing toward the Election Day finish line, stacking their schedules as they work the airwaves — and the voters.

Both candidates have spent the past few days attempting to peel away support from the other’s political base. Trump taped a Univision town hall, aiming to win over Latino voters, and Harris has worked to appeal to Republicans skeptical of Trump.

During a contentious Wednesday interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Harris was pressed to explain her border security record and the Biden administration’s decision to end a Trump-era policy that forced potential asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico to wait out the results of their case in U.S. immigration court. Baier asked the vice president about her past support to spend taxpayer dollars on gender-affirming care for prison inmates.

Harris noted that the first proposed piece of legislation President Biden put forward after being sworn in was an immigration bill. She went on to hit Trump for opposing a bipartisan border security proposal earlier this year, saying her opponent would “prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem, and in this election, this is rightly a discussion the American people want to have.”

Harris sought to distance herself from her former running mate when asked what differences there would be between the Biden administration and her own.

“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” she said.

The Hill: Key takeaways from Harris’s Fox News interview.

Trump’s town hall event aired Wednesday on Univision. In the hour, the former president minimized the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, avoided questions and repeated false claims of migrants eating pets in Ohio. Meanwhile, Trump's threat to use the military against enemies "from within the country" and "radical-left lunatics," as he called Rep. Adam Schiff (D), is putting Republican candidates in a tough spot. 

While Trump and Republicans are winning on the economy and immigration/border security, they're losing on the issue of "democracy," writes The Hill’s Alexander Bolton. GOP strategists worry Trump's language could push independents and moderate and traditional Republicans over to Harris in the last weeks of the campaign. 

▪ The Hill: Key takeaways from Trump’s town hall.

▪ NBC News: The judge in Trump's Jan. 6 case rejected a “strained” argument about his false 2020 election claims.

The former president appealed to another key demographic — women — at a Tuesday Fox News town hall in Georgia, where he escalated attacks on Harris and Democrats and called himself the “father of IVF,” his latest attempt to make up for the GOP’s struggle to message around in vitro fertilization. 

Harris, meanwhile, urged voters not to be distracted by Trump’s choice of words. 

“The reality is, his actions have been very harmful to women and families in America,” she told reporters.

Despite the vice president’s messaging blitz, Harris’s momentum in the polls seems to have plateaued, writes The Hill’s Amie Parnes. Harris still has a narrow edge over Trump nationally and in several battleground states. While most polls are within the margin of error, some Democrats say there is growing fear that this election could go sideways for them. 

“We should be on an upward trajectory,” said one Democratic strategist. “That’s the sign of a campaign that’s on its way to winning. The fact that we’re not is troublesome to say the least.”

SMART TAKE FROM THE HILL'S BOB CUSACK:

The media's reputation has taken a beating in recent years for a variety of reasons. 

Some smug members of the Fourth Estate have gotten away from delivering the news and like to tell people how to think. The press also should be more transparent. For example, why won't CBS release an unedited transcript of its (thorough and professional) interview of Harris? Eight-five percent of those recently surveyed think the network should. Not surprisingly, trust in the media has hit historic lows. 

But let’s be loud and clear — the conspiracy theories of 2024 are absolutely crazy.

There have been accusations Harris used a teleprompter during a Univision town hall earlier this month as well as an earpiece during her debate with Trump last month. Bret Baier of Fox News took to social platform X earlier this week to refute allegations that he was letting Harris see his questions before their highly anticipated interview. 

Most members of the media are trying to deliver the news in a fair way. Like any other industry, there are bad apples. However, that is no excuse to embrace and spread lies. 

IN OTHER CAMPAIGN NEWS: Federal candidates have now submitted their reports for what was the final full fundraising quarter before Election Day, giving a picture of their financial status with just three weeks to go. Here’s what we learned from the third-quarter filings.

In Georgia, a local judge on Wednesday delivered a ruling that rejected multiple new election rules in the state, describing them as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”

Democratic Party activists have been on a mission to flip all of Texas’s urban counties — once Republican bulwarks — as they look to chip away at the GOP’s decades-long hold on the state.

Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.

The destruction that hurricanes Helene and Milton wreaked across the Southeast has driven a “real uptick” in voter interest on climate change, according to Harris’s new climate engagement director.

3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY:

▪ Former President Jimmy Carter at age 100 got his wish and cast his ballot in Georgia for Harris. Early voting began Tuesday in the Peach State.

▪ The nation’s suddenly scarce IV fluid, manufactured in areas hit by recent hurricanes and needed in hospitals, exposed the vulnerability of the nation’s supply chain for critical medical needs.

▪ How Asheville, N.C., residents survive without running water, weeks after Hurricane Helene.

LEADING THE DAY

© The Associated Press | Paul Sancya

Morning Report’s Alexis Simendinger on Wednesday asked Jacob Nelson, associate professor at the University of Utah’s department of communications, about public misgivings about the news media as voters choose the next president. Nelson is a former journalist who writes about news reporting and news consumers. He’s working on a book about public distrust of journalism, healthcare and higher education (the following was edited for length).

Q: We’ve seen examples of public suspicions about the news media during this election cycle: calls for CBS News to release a transcript of Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview to compare with video; false social media assertions that Fox News would slip questions to Harris ahead of Wednesday’s interview; suggestions that Univision allowed Harris to use a teleprompter during a live town hall interview a week ago, denied by Univision; and a conspiracy theory that Harris used earpieces disguised as earrings to get prompts from her team during an ABC News debate with Trump.

Where are these suspicions coming from?

Nelson: The first thing I’d say is that none of those surprise me, based on what I learned in the research that I’ve done. I did a study a few years ago where I interviewed people on both sides of the political spectrum, basically to ask them about their views of journalism and to describe their interactions with news media. And what I found is that people have a great deal of skepticism, and it’s not even necessarily a partisan issue. It’s not just people saying, ‘I distrust the news that I feel that is telling me the opposite of my political beliefs.’ It’s, ‘I distrust the news media because I think journalists do not have the public’s interests at heart.’ They [say the media] are trying to manipulate the public for political reasons, or more often what I hear is for profit reasons.

So, each of these examples is the consequence of that mistrust. What you see is people reacting to the news and feeling that because of that deep mistrust, they haveto do their own research to essentially fact-check the news media. That’s exactly what we’re seeing right now. In my research, some people think they have to be distrustful of the media in order to not be perceived as ignorant, in a way, to not be made a sucker.

Q: These instances I mentioned were aimed at Harris. Is it the case that Trump and members of his party are the ones primarily alleging news media bias and plots?

Nelson: I do think — and I believe that research shows this as well — that there is a relationship between when leaders or political elites or people who have a great deal of influence are making accusations that the media are in cahoots with a politician or they are working to bolster someone against someone else, that does have an impact. If people are all-in on Donald Trump and Trump says ‘the media are biased against me,’ people will listen to that.

However, I think the reason why that message is so compelling — the reason so many people listen to Trump say, ‘Look at what “60 Minutes” did and look at how obviously this shows that journalists are all-in for Kamala Harris’ — is because they are already so distrustful of the news media. If people were more willing to trust journalists, you wouldn’t see that message resonate as strongly as it has.

Q: Looking at a recent Gallup survey on this topic, which found trust in the media sinking ever lower, it seems mainstream news organizations have not corrected a decades-old problem, despite efforts at transparency and fact checking and other techniques. What, based on your research, are journalists getting wrong? 

Nelson: It’s really hard to know what journalists should be doing. I think that part of the issue is that it’s really hard to verify, to empirically demonstrate the efficacy of any of these attempts to improve trust because there are so many other variables out there that might be influencing how people feel about the news.

A big part of this is widespread distrust of institutions broadly. It’s not just about journalism. People frame this as something journalists alone should try to solve, or even that journalists have the agency to solve on their own. I think that might be suggesting that journalists have perhaps more power in this situation than they might actually have.

And you are seeing a pretty big argument within journalism about the right approaches. Some say, ‘We should really double down on objectivity and neutrality and really try as hard as we can, even harder than before, to ensure that nothing we do, nothing our journalists say or do, gives the impression that we’re biased in favor of one politician over another.’ And then you have people saying, ‘No one buys that approach anymore. No one buys this voice-from-nowhere approach, this sort of buttoned-up, professional, I’m-just-here-to-do-my-job approach.’ People want quote-unquote authenticity. They want genuine warts and all, ‘Here are my views on everything, and that’s why you should trust me because I’m giving you my whole self.’ I think all of [Trump’s] followers might use ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’ as adjectives to describe him. Some might say that’s what journalism should be doing more: advocating for more quote-unquote authenticity in whatever form that might take.

Q: In a few weeks, the outcome of the presidential election could be narrow, or in limbo, or contested, and perhaps split between the popular vote and the Electoral College tally. What worries you about Nov. 5 in terms of mistrust of news coverage about the presidential winner and loser?

Nelson: What worries me will not surprise you. We will see exactly what we thought during the pandemic, which is that in the absence of certainty coming from the experts, in the absence of certainty coming from election officials — and then, as a result, coming from journalists who are using sources to inform their reporting — there will be people filling in that vacuum with misinformation. Members of the public — who increasingly seem to feel that they are equipped to quote-unquote do their own research, to fact-check what they are learning in the mass media, in journalism, from experts — will be primed to embrace falsehoods. Those falsehoods will be more prevalent, perhaps —­ especially if the election is as close as it seems like it's going to be — than actual concrete information about the election.

People, I think, will be cynically taking advantage of those opportunities. I am sure that Trump and his supporters will be doing what they can to elevate the exposure that people have to that misinformation if it makes them look better, if it seems like it’s going to increase public support for the idea that he won the election if, in fact, it’s still unknown, or, in fact, if he lost the election. I guess my greatest fear is that when the election is resolved, hopefully people accept those results regardless of when that resolution comes. But I think the real fear that I’m sure many people have right now is that there will be even more widespread rejection of those results than what we saw in 2020.  

Read more: How the fact-checking industry is dealing with a deluge of lies.

WHERE AND WHEN

• The House will convene a pro forma session Friday at 10:30 a.m. The Senate will hold a pro forma session Friday at 11 a.m.
  
• The president departs the White House this morning for Berlin, where he will meet Friday with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
  
• Candidate schedules this week: Harris today will campaign in Milwaukee; La Crosse, Wis.; and Green Bay, Wis. On Friday, Harris will be in Grand Rapids, Mich., in the afternoon and Oakland County, Mich., in the evening. On Saturday, Harris will return to Detroit and Atlanta. Sunday is the vice president’s 60th birthday. On Friday, Trump will hold a rally in Detroit at 7 p.m. On Saturday, Trump will hold a 6 p.m. campaign event in Latrobe, Pa. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will campaign today in Durham, N.C., accompanied by former President Clinton. On Saturday, Walz will headline a campaign reception in Illinois and campaign during a rally in Omaha, Neb., and join a campaign reception there. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) today will campaign in Pittsburgh at 12:30 p.m.  

ZOOM IN

© The Associated Press | Mike Stewart

NUCLEAR ENERGY is experiencing a renaissance as tech companies seek to meet vast energy demands tied to artificial intelligence without abandoning their environmental goals, write The Hill’s Rachel Frazin and Julia Shapero. Matt Crozat, executive director of strategy and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group that represents the industry, said that nuclear energy is a particularly good fit for tech companies because one plant can produce a lot of power at a time, which is needed to keep AI running. 

“It takes a lot of energy to run big data centers, and so being able to think in bigger chunks of carbon-free power, like a nuclear station, begins to make sense,” Crozat said. “If these were very small or niche applications, you might not have the same need.”

Amazon announced Wednesday that its subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is investing more than $500 million in nuclear power. The cloud computing operation has a massive need for clean energy as it expands into generative AI and the company pledges to eventually hit net-zero carbon emissions.

The announcement comes days after search giant Google unveiled a similar plan. According to a study by Goldman Sachs, one query on ChatGPT uses almost 10 times as much electricity as a Google search. Microsoft, meanwhile, agreed to pay an energy company to revive the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that a third of the country’s nuclear power plants were discussing deals with tech companies to supply electricity for data centers.

ELSEWHERE

© The Associated Press | Mohammed Zaatari

AN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE destroyed the municipal headquarters of a major town in south Lebanon on Wednesday, killing 16 people including the mayor. It marked the biggest attack on an official Lebanese state building since the Israeli air campaign began. Lebanese officials denounced the attack as proof that Israel's campaign against Hezbollah was now shifting to target the Lebanese state.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, meanwhile, said Israel would not halt its assault on Hezbollah to allow negotiations.

“Hezbollah is in great distress,” he said, according to a statement from his office. “We will hold negotiations only under fire. I said this on day one, I said it in Gaza and I am saying it here.”

The strikes in south Lebanon and around Beirut were Israel’s first attacks near the capital in days, and came after the U.S. said it had expressed concerns about the scale of Israel’s bombardment.

▪ The New York Times: Where a million desperate people are finding shelter in Lebanon. Schools, clubs and parks have become places of refuge as the displaced seek safety amid Israeli bombings.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: Israel said it was aiming at Hezbollah. Its strike also killed dozens of civilians.

BIDEN ARRIVES IN GERMANY today after postponing travel because of Hurricane Milton. Over the course of two days in Berlin, Biden will participate in a leaders-level summit of the European Quad — Germany, France and the United Kingdom — to discuss support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia, and efforts to stabilize escalating conflicts in the Middle East. 

▪ The Hill: Russian efforts to influence Moldova’s Oct. 20 elections have reached unprecedented levels, with Moscow allegedly spending up to hundreds of millions of dollars on buying votes, pumping out AI-generated deepfake videos, and boosting the campaigns of Kremlin-favored candidates.

▪ Reuters: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unveiled his much-anticipated "victory plan" on Wednesday, calling on his allies to take urgent steps to bolster Kyiv at a precarious moment in a bid to end the war with Russia next year.

▪ The Washington Post: Italy on Wednesday passed the West’s most restrictive law against international surrogacy, threatening would-be parents with jail time and severe fines in a move that critics say will chiefly target same-sex couples.

OPINION 

■ When patriarchy trumps race, by Charles M. Blow, columnist, The New York Times.

■ China test drives a Taiwan blockade, by The Wall Street Journal editorial board.

THE CLOSER 

© The Associated Press | Jacquelyn Martin

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