Morning Report — The moment of truth

In today’s issue:

• Voters decide the country’s future
• Hurry up and wait for ’24 ballot tallies
• Netanyahu aide leaked sensitive info
• How to de-stress on Election Day

It’s Election Day.

After close to two years of campaigning, an eleventh-hour Democratic ticket switch and countless news cycles, voters are casting their ballots today in what pundits and politicos of all stripes have described as “the most consequential election of our lifetime.”

In the last hours before polls close, Vice President Harris and former President Trump are making one last pitch to voters, focusing on seven key swing states that will likely decide the outcome of the election. Despite razor-thin polling margins, both camps are projecting confidence.

Harris held her closing speech Monday night at a star-studded Philadelphia.

“America, we started this campaign 107 days ago and from the beginning, ours has not been a fight against something. It has been a fight for something,” she said. “Tonight, then we finish as we started — with optimism, with energy, with joy,”

Meanwhile, at a Michigan rally, the former president, whose speech veered from random asides to typical campaign pitches, cast a vote for Harris as a further step backwards for the country.

“If you vote for Lyin’ Kamala, you will have four more years of misery, failure and disaster our country may never recover from,” he said. “I don’t believe that our country can take any more of this.”

Harris and her supporters believe they have the edge in the final hours of the presidential campaign, after several weeks when the campaign felt it was on shaky ground and Trump gained momentum. The Hill’s Amie Parnes writes the Harris camp points to late-deciding voters who have been breaking toward them in the days before the election and a surprise Iowa poll that showed Harris ahead of Trump in a reliably red state.

They also argue their robust ground operation is primed to carry the vice president to victory, and that they will win a huge advantage with female voters. “The data is leaning in her direction, and she’s got the gait of a winner,” said Jamal Simmons, who served as Harris’s communications director until last year. “People are ready to turn the page on the Trump era.”

Those remarks reflect what dozens of Democrats — from strategists and political operatives to lawmakers — have been feeling since the summer, when Harris rose in polls after she became the nominee.

Harris will hold radio interviews today with stations in seven battleground states. “She’s going to sprint through the tape,” campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told reporters.

Trump, meanwhile, says it’s his election to lose, reports The Hill’s Brett Samuels. Despite recent off-message moments, his team thinks he’s done enough to win and that his core argument — that the Biden-Harris administration broke the economy and border and Trump will fix it — will carry him to victory. 

If he’s right, he’ll make history, becoming the first former president to lose office and then win it again since 1892. While Trump may have had a few bad news cycles recently, advisers and campaign aides have repeatedly noted he’s in a stronger position in the polls than he was during his previous two campaigns.

“They have an expression, I hate the expression actually, but it’s ours to lose. Does that make sense to you? It’s ours to lose,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina on Monday. “If we get everybody out and vote, there’s not a thing they can do.”

▪ The Hill: Controversial podcaster Joe Rogan on Monday endorsed Trump on the heels of an interview with billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk.

▪ Newsweek: Trump said Monday that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein may be one of his "favorite politicians.”

Voting is already well underway, and more than 78 million Americans have already made their choice for president and down ballot races. Opinion polls are tighter in more states than any election in memory. 

In the polling averages maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ, the margin separating Trump and Harris is less than 2 percentage points in six of the seven crucial swing states. In the Memo, The Hill’s Niall Stanage breaks down where each state stands.

▪ PBS News: What early voting data signals about this year’s election.

▪ CNN: Here are three takeaways from pre-election voting.

▪ The Hill: Jim Messina, former President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, said Sunday that early voting numbers are a “little scary” for Harris’s campaign.

SMART TAKE FROM THE HILL'S BOB CUSACK:

It’s impossible to predict this election, but one thing is for certain: The Monday morning quarterbacking will happen soon, and it will be intense.

If Harris loses, she will be second-guessed for being too cautious, selecting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate and not distancing herself more from President Biden. If Trump loses, Republicans will bemoan his lack of discipline, selecting Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate and not employing Nikki Haley on the campaign trail.

Should Trump have accepted Harris’s challenges for more debates? Should Harris have adopted a more aggressive media strategy? Why was Trump going to non-battleground states down the stretch of the election? Did Harris spend too much time on attacking Trump and not enough on the issues?

The presidential victor will be showered in praise while the loser will be excoriated — no matter how close the election turns out to be.

What’s next? Both Republicans and Democrats are at a crossroads as their parties map out directions for the next few years, writes The Hill’s Alexander Bolton. 

If Trump wins, he would secure his MAGA brand of politics and transformation of the GOP from the pro-trade, pro-immigration and pro-global involvement party, which Ronald Reagan epitomized in the 1980s, into the more populist, pro-tariff, anti-immigration movement it's become today. But if he loses, there would be a backlash from traditionalists who want to bring the party back to its roots. 

Likewise, on the Democratic side, if Harris loses and voters decisively reject the Biden administration's record, it will force Democrats to review whether they mismanaged and overstimulated the economy. It will also prompt calls within the party to get tougher on illegal immigration and crime or lawlessness, likely shifting power back to centrist and new Democrats who dominated the party in the 1990s. 

3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY:

▪ Boeing machinists voted Monday to end a strike that has hobbled the company for the past 53 days.

▪ Social media platform X made weekend changes that mean you can block users, but they will still see your public posts unless you make your account private. 

▪ Civic lessons went the way of cursive handwriting in many public schools, but mock presidential elections were alive and well in classrooms this fall, just as many high school students cast their first ballots. 

LEADING THE DAY  

© The Associated Press | David Goldman 

Election watchers expect we’ll know the new president-elect and state of play in the Senate well before House races are sorted out. Savvy analysts in both parties expect the House majority to be narrow, for either party. Why might the whole process take weeks to complete? A handful of toss-up seats in key states take longer to tabulate, including in California. 

The Hill: The University of Virginia Center for Politics’ Sabato’s Crystal Ball election rating team predicted Monday that House races come down to “218 seats Safe, Likely, or Leaning Democratic, and 217 Safe, Likely, or Leaning Republican.”

Here are some key counties in swing states to watch today as presidential ballots are counted. 

With the Harris-Trump contest in mind, The New York Times offers insights about how long the seven swing states will take to tally ballots. For example, Georgia and North Carolina are expected to count ballots rapidly. But Arizona could take days.

Former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard (D) thinks changes in his state allow early ballots to be processed in ways that speed up Election Day counting. “In Michigan, we will know by midnight,” he told Puck’s “Somebody’s Gotta Win” podcast last week, forecasting a Harris victory by 3 points. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) suggested during the same discussion, released Monday, that Philadelphia is likely to finish ballot counting by Wednesday or Thursday. Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes, cannot by law begin opening and counting absentee ballots until 7 a.m. today, when election officials are also managing in-person voting. 

Delays open doors for amplified election mistrust, conspiracy theories, misinformation and sprints to courts. Because of post-2020 legal changes across the country, many election results are likely to take longer to determine than in 2020 — when Biden officially surpassed the necessary Electoral College votes on Saturday, four days after Election Day.

The Hill: Pundit predictions for 2024 elections: Who will win?

Judge rules in a gray area of election law: A Pennsylvania judge Monday ruled that billionaire Musk can continue a political action committee’s $1-million-a-day giveaway to registered voters, declining to issue an injunction against the Musk-controlled America PAC. Musk’s lawyer argued Monday that his client’s giveaway was not an "illegal lottery," as alleged in a lawsuit by the Philadelphia district attorney, who sought to block the contest ahead of Election Day. It’s a symbolic win for the politically active billionaire, since Election Day arrived. In total, the PAC awarded 17 checks of $1 million each. Trump praised Musk while campaigning in Reading, Pa., on Monday.

 2024 CAMPAIGN ROUNDUP:

For big donors, party invites: On election night, Harris (in Washington) and Trump (in South Florida) plan posh parties and have invited their top political contributors to hear either victory or concession speeches. 

Trump and Harris flouted bipartisan tradition by withholding information about top donors known as bundlers.

The FBI election threat command center in Washington today is staffed with as many as 80 agents and officials from 12 federal agencies to assess and respond to violence, vandalism and other disruptions this week (or beyond). The bureau says the overall threat level has not increased dramatically from 2020 levels. 

WHERE AND WHEN

• The House will convene for a pro forma session at 5 p.m. The Senate will hold a pro forma session Wednesday at noon. 
  
• The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 1:30 p.m.
  
• Candidate schedules: Harris today will do radio interviews with stations in seven battleground states while in Washington to await election returns. She and her campaign plan an evening event at her alma mater, Howard University. Today, the Trump campaign plans an election watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in Florida and a smaller gathering at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and family members. Walz will headline a political event in Harrisburg, Pa., this morning.

ZOOM IN

© The Associated Press | J. Scott Applewhite

THE SUPREME COURT announced Monday it will take up the fight over Louisiana’s congressional map, which has erupted into a messy legal battle over how to fix a racially gerrymandered design. The court’s decision will not impact today’s elections, as the justices previously allowed the Legislature’s new map that includes a second majority-Black district to move forward until they resolve the case.

Louisiana’s redistricting fight began after the 2020 census, when the Republican-led Legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto to approve a new congressional map (The Hill).

▪ CBS News: What role could the Supreme Court play in the election?

▪ The Hill: The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal from several Trump allies challenging how Biden removed them from military advisory boards. 

▪ CNN: The Supreme Court ordered further review of Alabama’s request to execute an inmate who courts said has an intellectual disability.

ELSEWHERE

© The Associated Press | Pamela Smith

ISRAELI AUTHORITIES ARE INVESTIGATING a civilian who has been working over the past year in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office and is suspected of illegally obtaining and leaking classified documents to the media. An Israeli court identified the central suspect in the case as Eliezer Feldstein, reported to have been one of the prime minister’s media advisers.

The suspected leaks may have harmed efforts to free hostages held by Hamas in order, critics say, to give Netanyahu public cover for failing to agree to a cease-fire deal. The scandal engulfed the prime minister Monday and sent shock waves across the country.

The firestorm has enraged Netanyahu's political opponents and families of the hostages. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing and distanced himself from the case, but critics have alleged that the Israeli leader put hostages' lives and national security at risk to buttress his hard-line position in stalled cease-fire talks by leaking Gaza documents to friendly media outlets (NBC News and The New York Times).

“It’s left me yet again disappointed but not surprised by this government,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son, Sagui, was taken hostage by Hamas. “I feel utterly betrayed, not just as a hostage father but as an Israeli citizen.”

▪ The Washington Post: Israeli strikes in eastern Lebanon are hitting civilians without warning.

▪ Axios: The U.S. and Saudi Arabia are discussing a possible security agreement that wouldn't involve a broader deal with Israel.

▪ Bloomberg News: Ukraine said it fought North Korean troops for the first time since they were sent into Russia’s Kursk region. Western allies have called the move an escalation of the Kremlin’s war.

OPINION 

■ At my Arab American parents’ dinner table, debating the Trump-Harris ballot, by Khalil AlHajal, deputy opinion editor, Detroit Free Press.

■ You can trust the vote count, by Brad Raffensperger and Deidre Henderson, opinion contributors, The Wall Street Journal.

THE CLOSER

© The Associated Press | David Goldman

And finally … Stressed about the election? You’re not alone.

A majority of Americans report election-related stress and anxiety. According to the APA’s latest Stress in America survey, a majority of adults, 77 percent, said the future of the nation is a “significant source of stress in their lives.”

And 69 percent of U.S. adults polled in August specifically cited the presidential election as a stressor. There’s a scientific reason for heightened stress levels, Bryan Sexton, a psychologist and the director of the Duke Center for the Advancement of Well-being Science, told NBC News.

“Our brains are basically threat detectors,” Sexton said. “If you’re feeling stressed, it simply means you’re paying attention.”

But what can you do to lower your heart rate? Get outside — for a walk, or to exercise — and limit time spent checking the news and social media, among other things. Here are some tricks to help you (and the kids in your lives) find some peace as you wait for results to come in.

Reuters: America on edge: How voters are dealing with election stress.

Stay Engaged 

We want to hear from you! Email: Alexis Simendinger (asimendinger@thehill.com) and Kristina Karisch (kkarisch@thehill.com). Follow us on social platform X: (@asimendinger and @kristinakarisch) and suggest this newsletter to friends!