Harris campaign targets Gen Z voters in the final stretch of the election
Harris’ campaign is launching an early voting push targeting students on battleground state college campuses. The effort consists of concerts, block parties and tailgates, in addition to a new seven-figure targeted ad buy focused primarily on reaching students through social media platforms.
The ad buy will geographically target students in battleground states across platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube Shorts. Some of the ads, according to the campaign, are designed to mirror popular social media trends.
The “Vote for Our Future” tour will put the campaign’s principals alongside high-profile surrogates working to mobilize young voters across the battlegrounds, not just engaging the students, but also encouraging them to register to vote and vote early.
John Kelly, who was the White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, is speaking out about what he sees as the dangers of a second Trump term. In a series of interviews with The New York Times, he sharply criticized Trump, saying he fits “the definition of a fascist.” NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for “TODAY.”
MoveOn launches ‘brat’-inspired ad targeting young voters
The progressive organization MoveOn said today it’s spending $250,000 on a Charli XCX-inspired ad targeting young, infrequent voters in a get-out-the-vote effort.
The 15-second digital ad, first shared with NBC News, features Billie Eilish spoofing Charli XCX’s song “Guess” off the artist’s rereleased “brat” album. It will run across Meta platforms as a video and a gif in key battleground states.
“We have been reaching beyond traditional GOTV methods to remind young people their vote is their power and can affect our daily lives 365 days of the year,” MoveOn spokesperson Britt Jacovich said in a statement.
MoveOn said the ad is part of a $1.2 million digital campaign in support of the Harris-Walz ticket and key congressional races and targets 1.63 million so-called surge voters — people who are new and vote infrequently, lean Democratic, skew younger and cast their first ballot after the 2016 election.
Vance emerges as Trump’s explainer-in-chief
Vance’s willingness to regularly take questions from mainstream news outlets has added an unofficial duty to his role as Trump’s running mate: explainer-in-chief.
In interviews, at news conferences and while speaking with reporters on his campaign plane, Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, often finds himself having to defend, decode or “well, actually” whatever provocative Trump comment made most recently.
That time Trump questioned whether Harris is really Black? “I think he pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris,” Vance contended.
When Trump disparaged Detroit, a majority-Black city in battleground Michigan? Trump, Vance said, “was just talking honestly about the fact that Detroit has been left behind.”
And when Trump name-dropped a Democratic congressman when he warned about an “enemy within” and stoked fears of chaos justifying military intervention on Election Day? “The enemy within,” Vance offered, “are people that Kamala Harris let into this country unvetted, unchecked and undocumented.”
Obama urges young men not to give up on the political process in new podcast with NBA players
Former President Barack Obama made a direct plea for young men not to get frustrated at the slow pace of political progress as he made the case to support Harris for president on the inaugural episode of a new podcast hosted by NBA players.
“A lot of young people — a lot of young men — they get frustrated, and they say, ‘Well, nothing’s happened,’” Obama told NBA All-Star Tyrese Halliburton, 24, and producer Tommy Alter in a clip first shared with NBC News. “But let’s say — when I was president I didn’t cure racism, I didn’t eliminate poverty. But 50 million people got health insurance. That didn’t happen before, and that saved lives and made people’s lives better.”
Obama added that the reason to vote is that there is somebody “who can see you, knows your life, cares about you,” who will be making “a million decisions” that will hopefully “make your lives a little bit better each year.”
The podcast, “The Young Man and the Three,” is a rebrand of a show that was called “The Old Man and the Three,” which had more than a million YouTube subscribers, with an overwhelming young and male audience.
Analysis: How Harris and Trump are making their closing arguments
Given the tumultuous nature of the Trump era in general and the twists and turns that of the 2024 campaign specifically, it’s hard to believe we are most likely at the end game of this historic election cycle and (knock on wood) it’s ending more normally than any campaign featuring Donald Trump has ended so far.
I accept that the phrase “so far” is doing a lot of work in the above paragraph — and to be clear, I’m talking about campaign-shaking events, not Trump’s penchant for crude or uncomfortable remarks. Clearly, something unforeseen can still happen, but I’m not sure we’ll have any new event that would dramatically affect either candidate’s vote share in this late stage of the race. But if you aren’t prepared for the unexpected in politics anymore, then you haven’t been paying attention!
But what has been different — so far! — about this campaign in these last few weeks is how semi-, sorta, kinda conventionally both campaigns are behaving.
For one thing, the campaigns appear to agree on who the final persuadable voter is: a Republican or Republican-leaning independent who doesn’t like Trump personally but is skeptical of Vice President Kamala Harris’ perceived liberal politics.
In a polarized nation, local governments are oases of compromise and community, study finds
Local governments are uniquely able to combat growing national polarization, according to a new study out today from the nonprofit research organization CivicPulse and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The study, which involved interviews with more than 1,400 local elected policymakers and local civil service leaders, found that 87% of those surveyed said political polarization negatively affects the country “a great deal” or “a lot.” But just 31% of local officials said that political polarization negatively impacts their local communities to that extent.
“Political polarization, which is dominating the media at the national level, really is not dominating life at the local level at all,” Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund supporting research and education, told NBC News about the report.
Dividing responses by population size, the survey found that local officials from smaller communities see fewer negative effects from polarization than those from larger communities. While 46% of officials from communities with 50,000 or more residents said their community is negatively affected “a lot” or “a great deal” by polarization, just 28% of local officials from communities with 1,000 to 10,000 residents said the same.
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