Welcome to the online version of From the Political Bureauan evening newsletter featuring the latest reporting and analysis from the NBC News Politics team from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.
In today’s edition, we’re providing an overview of our latest poll, which shows how Gen Z voters view the presidential race in the final days. Plus, national political reporter Ben Kamisar looks at the explosion of foreign spending this election cycle. And senior political reporter Jonathan Allen explains what the location of Kamala Harris’ closing argument reveals.
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Gen Z’s gender gap: Women have the advantage for Harris, while men are divided
By Stephanie Perry, Marc Trussler and Mara Haeger
According to the latest NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z Poll powered by SurveyMonkey, half of registered voters under 30 plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and a third are lining up with former President Donald Trump.
And among young voters who say they will vote in November’s presidential election, Harris leads 56%-36%, a 20-point lead. With some young voters leaning toward other candidates on the ballot besides Harris and Trump, that’s just shy of the 24-point margin that President Joe Biden enjoyed in 2020 among voters under 30 (60%-36%), according to the exit poll from NBC News.
However, within Generation Z there are notable divisions between different groups – and the gender gap is particularly large.
Young women said they will vote for Harris over Trump by a 33-point margin. The young men were essentially even, with Harris holding a two-point lead.
Men (46%) were more likely to say Trump has the right temperament to be president, compared to women (30%). Reflecting that, women (65%) were more likely to say Harris has the right temperament than men (55%).
The gender differences were reflected in the issues that young voters say are most important to their voting behavior. While inflation and the cost of living were the top issues among both men (35%) and women (29%), they differed on what came next: 13% of women chose abortion, compared to 4% of the men. Among men, 13% cited threats to democracy as their top topic, compared to 9% of women who chose this topic.
There were also large gender differences on the role abortion policy will play in the choice of a candidate. Just under half of young women (48%) said they would only vote for a candidate who shared their views on abortion, compared to 36% of men.
Read more from the poll →
📊More figures: A national CNBC poll of all registered voters shows Trump at 48% and Harris at 46%, a two-point difference that is within the margin of error.
Outside spending eclipses $1 billion in the presidential race, setting a new record
By Ben Kamisar
Outside groups have poured an astonishing $1.1 billion into the presidential race with less than two weeks to go before Election Day, an NBC News analysis shows, surpassing the record set in the 2020 election.
The figure includes spending by super PACs and other groups not directly tied to the candidates’ and party committees’ campaigns during the primary and general election campaigns.
To put the current level of external spending into perspective, at more than $1 billion, it dwarfs the gross domestic product of more than a dozen countries.
The frenetic pace is already beyond where things were at this point four years ago, when more than $910 million in independent expenditures had been made as of Oct. 24. In total, more than $1 billion was spent in the 2020 presidential election.
Kamala Harris, whose presidential bid is only months old after an unprecedented summer shift at the top of the Democratic ticket, has been the subject of more than two-thirds of total outside spending this cycle.
Read more from Ben →
What the location of Harris’ closing speech reveals
By Jonathan Allen
Whatever Kamala Harris says in her closing address to the nation on Tuesday, she will send the message that Donald Trump is simply unfit for the office they both seek.
Her choice of location, the Ellipse at the foot of the White House, is where Trump rallied his supporters on January 6, 2021, urging them to march to the Capitol. In a small dining room next to the Oval Office, he watched silently as a mob ransacked the Capitol in a vain attempt to reverse his defeat.
Since then, Democrats have grappled with the tension between their core belief that voters should reject Trump because they have concluded he poses an existential threat to the republic, and polls show that many voters are focusing on more tangible issues like abortion, inflation and immigration.
Some voters say they feel they don’t know enough about what Harris would do on key policy issues. It’s a double-edged sword, because that means she hasn’t closed the deal within two weeks of Election Day, but has room to do so, at least in theory. And yet it’s not clear whether she can do anything to satisfy those voters.
Harris is likely to make a final pitch to them, which aims to put the finishing touches on her agenda, an attempt to convert late voters with a positive message about her own policy plans. But by her choice of location alone, she is more clearly trying to undermine her base and turn swing voters against Trump.
As her popularity rose in the weeks after she took control of the Democratic Party, Harris turned away from the advocacy for democracy that had been the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s platform. Now that she is completing the homestretch neck and neck with Trump, she is returning to it.
If she wins, the Ellipse speech will undoubtedly figure prominently in the narration of Harris’ unlikely and historic victory, a moment when she seized the opportunity to defend democracy. If she loses, it could be seen as a final missed opportunity to focus on issues that more directly affect voters’ daily lives.
🕘 Closing time: Harris also enlists some of the Democratic Party’s biggest stars to help her with her closing arguments. Monica Alba, Carol E. Lee and Yamiche Alcindor report that Harris will appear with former President Barack Obama in Georgia on Thursday and with former first lady Michelle Obama in Michigan on Saturday, the first time she will campaign with the Obamas this cycle.
But one prominent Democrat Harris has yet to sign up and that is Hillary Clinton. The decision underlines Harris’s lack of emphasis on the historic potential of her candidacy in her pitch to voters, a stark contrast to Clinton’s approach in her 2016 campaign, write Monica Alba, Yamiche Alcindor and Gary Grumbach.
As for Trump, his campaign is focused on immigration, inflation and foreign policy in the final days of the race. But as Jonathan Allen and Katherine Doyle note, Trump himself is ramping up the personal attacks on Harris.
🗞️Today’s top stories
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🔵 Harris on the road: Harris called Trump a “fascist” at a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania as she loudly told voters he is unfit for office. Read more →
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🔴Trump on the road: Trump’s team has pushed him to embrace town hall-style events in an effort to narrow the gender gap, many of which are moderated by women. Read more →
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🔴Trump on the road, continued: Trump said that if elected, he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of taking the oath of office. Read more →
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👀 Vision for 2025: Harris’ team is quietly considering potential nominees for attorney general if she wins. Read more →
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🧀 WOW: Shawn Reilly, the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin, a former Republican, announced his support for Harris. The city is part of the suburban WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) around Milwaukee, which have long been a Republican Party stronghold, but Democrats have made some recent gains. Read more →
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🗳️ Keys to the Keystone State: The NBC News Decision Desk explains how Democrats’ voter registration advantage has eroded in Pennsylvania, and what it could mean for the election. Read more →
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🎰 Raising the bar: A GOP super PAC is on the air during the Senate race in Nevada, the group’s first expenditure in a race in which the party’s Senate candidate has trailed Trump in recent polls. Read more →
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🤠Texas hold’em: And in Texas, a Democratic super PAC is launching a TV ad buy to target Democratic Rep. Colin Allred at the last minute to strengthen his race against Republican Senator Ted Cruz. Read more →
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📺 On the air: Future Forward, a Democratic super PAC backing Harris, has quietly spent millions of dollars on Spanish-language ads targeting Latino voters. Read more →
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🎤Cowboy Carter: Beyoncé will appear with Harris at a campaign event in Houston on Friday and is expected to perform. Read more →
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🏈 The steel curtain: Former Pittsburgh Steelers players face off in the Harris-Trump showdown in a key battleground. Read more →
For now, that all comes from the Political Bureau. If you have any feedback – like it or not – please email us at politicsnieuwsbrief@nbcuni.com
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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
