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Oof: Kamala Harris refers to "a Harris administration together with Joe Biden" at roundtable

A leftover from yesterday. You can tell that she realized her mistake instantly and tried to undo it, but the salvage attempt made it worse. “A Harris administration together with Joe Biden as president” reminds me of “Puppet Show and Spinal Tap.”

At least you get a bigger dressing room than the puppets, Joe.

Vice President Harris is going to be measuring the drapes in the Oval Office on day one, isn’t she?

“Joe better hire a food taster,” replied Jon Gabriel of Ricochet. Given that Trump’s core argument against Biden is that he’ll be muscled by the left-wingers around him, it’s hard to think of a more unfortunate gaffe than his left-wing VP accidentally placing herself at the top ticket.

I suppose “Joe couldn’t be here, he’s taking a mid-afternoon nap” would have been worse.

She made these comments to a roundtable of small-business owners in Arizona, a state where the Latino vote could be decisive. The more pieces like this that I read, the more bullish on Trump’s chances I get.

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton easily took Hispanic voters. She was ahead with them by 37 points in an average of the final pre-election polls.

Biden is winning Hispanics right now, but just by 28 points in an average of live interview polls taken over the last few months. Because I’ve averaged nearly 20 polls, we can feel confident that this shift in the Hispanic vote is real. Moreover, it’s quite consistent with an earlier June analysis I conducted that had Biden winning Hispanics by less than 30 points…

An average of live interview non-partisan Florida polls taken since the summer gives Biden just a six-point lead with Hispanics. That’s down considerably from the 21-point advantage Clinton had with them in the final pre-election polls in 2016.

Commensurate with Trump’s gains among Hispanics, the Cook Political Report recently moved Florida from “lean Democrat” to “toss-up” and Nevada from “likely Democrat” to “lean Democrat.” Jon Ralston, the dean of Nevada political reporting, told CPR he thinks Dems remain favored there because their turnout machine has been hobbled thus far by COVID but will ramp up in time for the election. But Trump’s inroads with Hispanics are making things interesting in a state that went for Clinton by less than three points in 2016. The latest poll of Nevada had Biden ahead by just four.

Florida’s the real proving ground for Trump’s surge among Latinos, though. He has no shot at a second term without winning it and Biden led comfortably there over the summer. Two polls published over the past week have the state tied now, though, and Biden’s lead in the RCP average is down to a single point. Given how pollsters have underestimated Republican strength in the state over the last two cycles, if the vote were held today Trump would be favored there — again, thanks in part to Hispanics.

In a county where more than half of the residents are born outside the mainland U.S. — mostly in Latin America — Trump has outspent Joe Biden’s campaign by about $4 million on TV in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale media market, much of it on Spanish-language ads. The president’s conservative allies have dominated Spanish-language social media and WhatsApp messaging to Spanish-speakers. And the Miami-Dade County GOP has fielded candidates in five key local races, all of whom are Cuban-American, which could help turn out the pro-Trump Republican vote…

“They’re not hearing enough from the Biden campaign, and I think the Biden camp has seen that and beefed up their programming the last two weeks to head into the general,” said Ricky Junquera, a state House candidate and vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. “I’m sure they’ve obviously identified that’s a problem and they need to correct that quickly.”…

Odio calculated this summer that Trump, who had lost Cuban-American support in 2016 relative to other Republicans, made up so much lost ground since then that, if the 2016 election were held under current conditions, he would’ve added 90,000 net votes to his total statewide margin of 112,911 over Clinton.

It’s going to be surreal if Trump, the anti-immigration candidate, wins Florida by a bigger margin this time thanks to support from Latinos. But nearly as surreal is the fact that Biden continues to lead him in most swing states because he’s poaching votes from one of Trump’s core constituencies as well: Whites. A new CNN poll out today has him up 10 points in extremely white Wisconsin, and Michigan has been so reliably pro-Biden during the campaign thus far that it’s an open question if Trump will even contest the state in the home stretch. That is, Trump may overperform in states where the Latino vote matters — winning Florida, holding on in Texas and Arizona despite Biden overperforming Clinton there — while losing the presidency anyway because too many older whites in his Rust Belt base decided to switch to the Democrat this time. I’m more bullish lately on his chances just because there’s a chance that some of those wayward white votes will come home to him, especially if the pandemic’s second wave is lighter than anticipated and more urban violence in October brings some suburbanites back to the “law and order” candidate. But he’s running out of time.

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