A month from tomorrow, the nation will chart its the course for the next four years. It may take a week after Election Day before some of the closer states make a call, but seeing how both campaigns are running down the closing stretch tells me election might not actually be as close as regime media will have you believe. 

The national polling average at Real Clear Politics hasn't budged in over a week. They have Harris leading in the popular vote by 2.2%. The problem with that, of course, is that on October 6, 2020, Joe Biden held a full 9-point advantage in the average of polls over Donald Trump, and finished on Election Day winning by 4.5% in the popular vote, and the Electoral College by a combined 43,000 votes between the states of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are 6.8% behind where Joe Biden was at this stage of the game. Harris/Walz are 2 points behind where Hillary Clinton was at this time in 2016, and Hillary lost. 

In the Battleground states, Donald Trump is either tied or up a tenth or two in the RCP Battleground averages, but in the all-important individual swing state polls, Trump has maintained a fairly comfortable lead in Arizona, leading, albeit within margin of error in Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley indicated their internals, and you should take that with the appropriate grain of salt, show a possible November map that looks like this. 

NEW: RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said that their internals have Trump leading in AZ outside the MOE. Leading in PA, GA, NV, & NC. MI, WI, & MN are virtual ties.

Here's what that map looks like. pic.twitter.com/AulK1drckv

— David D. Chapman (@davidchapman141) October 5, 2024

If the RNC internals show Trump ahead in Pennsylvania, you certainly would be cautious to argue it's probably closer than that. The RCP average out of the Keystone State shows it a straight-up tie. If you look at the compilation of polls that make up the composite average, 13 of them, in fact, six show ties, four report Trump with a lead, and three have Harris with a lead. The only current poll that's keeping the average a tie is the Bloomberg poll, clearly an outlier, with Harris ahead by five. Nothing else is in that ballpart. Take Bloomberg out of the mix, and Trump's ahead in the average, squaring more closely with what Whatley's internals are saying. 

Of course, if Trump wins in Pennsylvania and holds the Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, everything else is academic at this point. With all this data as a backdrop, what's going on with each campaign as October gets underway? 

Donald Trump made his triumphant return on Sunday to Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the first assassination attempt on his life. He said he'd return, and the reception for him was massive. Here's what it looked like on the ground a full seven hours before the former President took the stage. 

Seven hours ahead of when Trump is scheduled to speak, this is the line for his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, at the same venue where the assassination attempt in July took place pic.twitter.com/gkizBto4zm

— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) October 5, 2024

Here's a shot of the crowd still forming as Trump's plane was on final approach into Pittsburgh.

NEW: Tens of thousands of people gather in Butler, Pennsylvania for Trump’s return after he was nearly assass*nated on July 13.

Elon Musk is expected to speak at the rally along with JD Vance. pic.twitter.com/GZZ03BlMQr

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 5, 2024

Once he took the stage, he began, as promised, exactly where he left off. 

So, as I was saying….
Amazing start to Buttler, PA take two.
🤣🤣🤣pic.twitter.com/M85hWA341L

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 5, 2024

Love him or hate him, there simply is no political force like Donald Trump in American politics right now. Support seems to be galvanizing for him, and he appears to be peaking at exactly the right time, especially as states are beginning early voting. And speaking of early voting, in the Commonwealth of Virginia: 

Early Voting Increase In Virginia
🟥 It's a red flag for Harris & Dems 🟥

Slow early voting has been a worry for Dems but with turnout surging in GOP counties its now a huge issue
Friday turnout Vs week before
⚪Statewide +35%
🔵Strong Harris Counties +18%
🔴Strong Trump + 57%!!

— Election2024 Updates (@MadAboutSkin01) October 5, 2024

Trump's turnout in early voting is surging. Harris is up from a week ago, but not with nearly the energy as on the Republican side, where same-day voting historically favors the GOP. This is a big danger sign for Democrats if this happens in other states. In Pennsylvania, early voting requests compared to four years ago are fairly static, except the Democrats are a little off their 2020 pace, while Republicans are a little ahead of where they were last time. 

Pennsylvania early vote update 9/27

Requests:
🔴373,832 (26.5% | v. 25.1% '20, 21.1% '22)
🔵881,270 (62.5% | v. 63.0% '20, 68.6% '22)

Daily requests average this week:
🔴34% (so trending up from historical average)
🔵50% (so trending down from historical average) pic.twitter.com/yqyyv5COu9

— Upper Providence Township GOP (@UPTGOP) September 27, 2024

Donald Trump is scheduled to hold rallies this week in Juneau, Wisconsin, and two in Pennsylvania - Reading and Scranton. J.D. Vance is set to hold two rallies, one in Detroit, and the other in Johnstown, PA. Both will do several media interviews along the way. How about the Harris/Walz show? 

Saturday Night Live, for the second week in a row, couldn't pass up the opportunity to mock what we all saw last Tuesday night on a New York CBS soundstage - Tim Walz isn't helping Kamala Harris one little bit, and that the rhetoric and mannerisms of Kamala Harris is leading even lefty writers at SNL to wonder if Kamala Harris might need an intervention. 

Kamala Harris reacts to Tim Walz’s disastrous debate on SNL. ☠️ pic.twitter.com/Pul0EGCsuo

— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) October 6, 2024

Yes, Walz is no darn good at this campaigning stuff, and we'll get to more examples of that in a bit, but portraying Kamala as the chardonnay candidate is not what the Harris camp wants circulating into the country's bloodstream as Americans head to the polls. 

My colleagues here at Hot Air have done a great job capturing the eye-popping remarks out of the Vice President just in the last few days alone. I'm only overlapping here so that you have a good compendium of how bad a weekend it's been for her. 

At a Michigan rally, it appeared that her teleprompter went out right at the beginning of her speech. You can see the look on her face as the words she was supposed to read were not present, and her rhetorical needle stuck. 



Ah, yes, the virtues of 32. 32 is the number of black squares and white squares in chess, a game you know in your heart where you can get to checkmate against Harris in 10 moves or less. In Jewish mysticism, there are 32 Kabbalistic paths to wisdom, or 32 paths which remain untraveled to Kamala Harris. Here's the problem with this. She's given this stump speech a hundred times. It's her stump speech. It's the same speech, almost word for word, every time. 

Sometimes, the speech has an accent, particularly if it's in front of a Southern and/or largely Black audience. 

Sometimes, the accent is missing. 

If her teleprompter goes out, as it has for Donald Trump at times during his rallies over the years, she has zero ability to wing it. She doesn't know her own plan or her own message well enough to recite it from memory. Trump can and has done this several times. He knows the message he wants to deliver - energy, economy, immigration, Israel, crime. Kamala cannot do this. She is clueless when her electronic cue card goes out on her. Imagine how she'd be when a crisis hit the White House and there were no script for her to follow.  

She prerecorded an interview for 60 Minutes that aired Sunday night with Bill Whitaker. 

I defy you to explain any coherent thought embedded in that statement. On foreign policy, she's a lightweight. Nobody takes her seriously, because she has zero understanding of anything outside her primary objective - becoming president. All she knows is that her own polling indicates she's losing ground in Michigan, and so she has to stab Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the back...again. And in addition to not supporting our only ally in the Middle East, she feels the need to throw our money at the problem to appease skeptics in her own political base. 

The people of Lebanon are facing an increasingly dire humanitarian situation. I am concerned about the security and well-being of civilians suffering in Lebanon and will continue working to help meet the needs of all civilians there.

To that end, the United States will provide…

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) October 5, 2024

The lack of self-awareness here is phenomenal. $750 is all you get if you're an American who has been wiped out after Hurricane Helene, but hundreds of millions will continue to flow out of the country to a group of people that voted for terrorists to run Gaza and Lebanon. 

On foreign policy, friends of Israel don't trust her, because she qualifies her support nearly every time. Anti-Israeli voices on the Democratic left, particularly in Dearborn, Michigan, don't trust her, because she's been two-faced on the subject for the past year. On domestic issues, business leaders don't trust her, because they believe she doesn't know anything. And it's not just me saying that. Here's Andrea Mitchell on the panel of Sunday's Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.

If one is a baseball player and finds himself in the Major Leagues and has a hitting weakness, he'd better be a phenom defensively or be a heck of a pitcher, or he's not going to stay in the Bigs very long. Kamala can't do the political equivalent of throw, catch, run, hit, or pitch. Hall of Fame Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda use to describe outfield Raul Mondesi as a 5-tool player because of his abilities in the batter's box, on the basepaths, and in the field. Kamala Harris, by contrast, is a 1-tool player. She has ambition for higher office. Thus endeth the list of skill sets she brings to her job application for president.

Kamala appeared on a podcast entitled 'Call Her Daddy' with Alex Cooper. Here's her rationale for appearing. 



Two episodes prior to the one featuring Harris, the subject matter was the art of female-to-male oral gratification. Insert your Willie Brown joke here. There are dozens. It's not a serious podcast, and Harris is not a serious candidate if this is the level of interview she has to accept in order to stay out of harm's way. Coming up this week are appearances on ABC's The View, the Howard Stern Sirius/XM show, and CBS' Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Not one of them is a journalist, and none of those venues will offer the country anything other than softball settings in which to make her seem like the cool choice.

Her running mate, Tim Walz, did venture into harm's way, showing up on Fox News Sunday w/Shannon Bream. He also tried to perpetuate the misreporting of the death of Amber Thurman in Georgia, and Bream stopped him cold. 

It was not a great answer, but it didn't seem to slow Walz at all. Even after getting fact-checked to his face that he's lying about the circumstances around the death of Thurman, he took to X a couple hours later, and continued the lie as if he'd never been called out on the lie by Bream. 

Amber Thurman died because she lived in a state with a Trump abortion ban.

Your life and your rights shouldn't be determined by geography. pic.twitter.com/uU0jqbvdW3

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) October 6, 2024

Bream also brought up the many lies about Walz' bio he's told, and he fumbled that question as well. 

With regards to the federal response to Hurricane Helene, especially in Western North Carolina, Harris finally showed up for a photo op in order to make it look and sound like she was up to speed. 

Mel Brooks in 1974 as Governor William J. Lepetomane in Blazing Saddles was about as up to speed, but he at least was more animated about it. 

During her photo op, she worked a relief line with some of the locals, who let her know that unlike the Little River Band song, help is definitely not on the way. Look at the face Kamala gives her. 

Again, Harris has no earthly idea what she's doing now as a candidate, much less how to do the job for which she so desperately pines. She cannot think on her feet. She has no winsome charm about her to demonstrate that she's got humility to admit knowing what she doesn't know and promising to surround herself with experts. Everything involving Kamala Harris is scripted and fake. She's every B-movie about the crazy hijinx that ensue when the lead character assumes a false identity and goes with it, except this isn't a Nora Ephron script. It's real life, with real world catastrophic results if we elect someone totally unprepared for the hardest job in the world. 

A month from tomorrow. If you happen to be one of those precious few who have honestly not decided for whom to cast your ballot for president, ask yourself one question. If Kamala Harris is floundering this badly now as vice president, showing this much incompetence as a candidate for the presidency, do you really want to entrust her with running the government and setting foreign policy for four years?