You must admit, this is a campaign unlike any we've seen before. The incumbent Democratic president suddenly drops out and endorses his vice president. The Republican candidate survives two assassination attempts. Two back-to-back hurricanes wipe the presidential race off the front pages.

But history will show that one of the most crucial moments of the campaign is one that received little media attention. It happened on Oct. 3, when former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, once the third-highest ranking Republican in the House, walked out on stage in Ripon, Wisconsin - birthplace of the Republican Party - and endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Cheney made it clear. She wasn't suddenly becoming a Democrat. She was endorsing Harris as a conservative Republican, confirming to the crowd in Ripon what she'd first told an audience at Duke University: "As a conservative, and someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris."

Liz Cheney's not alone. She joins former Rep. Adam Kinzinger and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, both of whom endorsed Harris at the Democratic National Convention. Most importantly, she joins her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who announced he was voting for Harris because "in our nation's 248 year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump." Yes, Virginia, in this campaign, Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney are on the same side.

Cheney also joins 100 ex-Republican members of Congress, as well as officials of the Reagan, Bush and Trump administrations who signed a joint letter endorsing Harris and claiming Trump has "contempt for the norms of decent, ethical, and lawful behavior." And leading Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Mitt Romney and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan who, while not endorsing Harris, have said they will not vote for Trump.

For Kamala Harris, this is huge. First, because it's such a rare (for these days) display of political courage. Nothing triggers more verbal brickbats than criticizing a member of your own party. Second, because it's a powerful demonstration of patriotism. In essence, these Republicans are saying: "I'm an American first, a Republican second. Donald Trump's a threat to this country, so I'm putting country over party." USA! USA!

Most importantly, Dick and Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris serves as a "permission slip" for other Republicans to do the same thing. That's the message of a powerful ad aimed at Republican voters released this week by the Lincoln Project: George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney and Larry Hogan aren't voting for Donald Trump. Why should you?

In 2024, votes of disaffected Republicans may, in fact, prove to be Donald Trump's Achilles' heel, and Harris' magic wand. Back in April 2020, shortly after a group of former Republican campaign strategists launched the Lincoln Project, Steve Bannon, Trump's former aide, now in prison, warned that if they could convince only 3% to 5% of Republicans not to vote for Trump, Trump would be in trouble. They did, and he lost.

Today, they're still at it, except more so. In an interview, former top Republican campaign strategist and senior adviser to the Lincoln Project Stuart Stevens told me they've now expanded their goal to persuade 7% to 15% of Republicans not to vote for Trump, strategically targeting 900,000 Republican voters in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

This year, Stevens noted, there are three additional factors in their favor: suburban Republican women, unhappy with the Dobbs decision and the man responsible; hard-core Republican opponents of the old Soviet Union, unhappy with Trump's support for Vladimir Putin over Ukraine; and faith-based Republicans who believe character counts, unhappy with a serial adulterer paying hush money to a porn star. Stevens calls Cheney's endorsement an "accelerant" for a growing trend among Republican voters.

And that Republican outreach seems to be working. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released this week, found that 9% of self-described Republicans plan to vote for Kamala Harris in November - up from just 5% one month earlier.

Imagine. The woman who dared take on the king and lost her seat in Congress because of it may prove to be the key in blocking the king from returning to the throne. Shakespeare never wrote a better comedy.

(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The October surprise that should decide this election

It probably didn't change that many votes, but this week's vice presidential debate offered an interesting contrast. If slick, smooth, and slippery counts over wobbly, J.D. Vance won. If truth and common sense count over total baseless assertions (Wait? Donald Trump SAVED Obamacare?), Tim Walz won.

It's just too bad CBS News didn't schedule the debate one day later, after the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith's bombshell report on the crimes committed by Donald Trump around Jan. 6. Had they done so, that debate and this election would suddenly be over. Or should be.

On Wednesday, Oct. 2, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington released a 165-page brief filed by Smith which shows in great detail how Donald Trump conspired to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, acting in his own capacity as a candidate, not as president - and for which he must be held criminally responsible.

Smith's filing, of course, is in response to the Supreme Court's hyper-partisan 6-3 ruling on July 1, requiring the lower court to decide which actions by a president might be immune from prosecution and which ones not. Refusing to accept the results of an election and attempting to undo it, Smith argues, clearly are not.

"The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct," Smith writes at the top of his brief. "Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one."

We've seen much of the evidence in Smith's brief before - much of it mirrors the final report of the Special House Committee on Jan. 6- but there's also a lot of new stuff. Never has Trump's role to overturn the election - before, during, and after January 6 - been so clearly laid out.

At the White House on Jan. 6, when an aide told him that Vice President Mike Pence's life was in danger at the Capitol, Trump replied: "So what?" In an Oval Office meeting, when one of his lawyers told him his claims of widespread voter fraud would not hold up in court, Trump fired back: "The details don't matter." On Air Force One after the election, Trump was heard telling members of his family: "It doesn't matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell."

For the first time, Smith details nine different post-election meetings or phone calls Pence had with Trump in which the vice president informed Trump there was no evidence of massive fraud and urged him to accept reality. He encouraged Trump "not to look at the election as a loss - just an intermission." To which Trump replied: "I don't know, 2024 is so far off."

Smith goes on to chronicle everything Trump did to undermine the election and our democracy: claiming ahead of time the election was rigged; refusing to say he'd accept the outcome of the election; declaring he'd won before the votes were counted; falsely claiming massive fraud; calling up state election officials and strong-arming them to falsify vote totals; sending his goon squad of lawyers out to file (and lose) some 60 lawsuits alleging voter fraud; and pressuring his vice president to reject the Electoral College count submitted and certified by all 50 states.

All of which culminated in Trump's summoning his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, speaking at a campaign rally and urging the armed mob to march on the Capitol, then standing by and doing nothing while they stormed the Capitol and sent lawmakers running for their lives.

Trump took none of those actions in his capacity as president, Smith reminds us. It was all the work of a losing candidate, acting purely in his own interest, willing to do anything, even break the law, to cling to the presidency. "At its core," Smith concludes, "the defendant's scheme was a private criminal effort. In his capacity as a candidate he used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process."

And that should settle it once and for all. No other issue matters. Donald Trump committed treason. He used the powers of the presidency to try to overturn an election and destroy our democracy. That alone should disqualify him from ever running for office again. He should be in jail. The fact that so many Americans still support him is a stain on the soul of this nation.

(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. 

Only America's women can save us from Donald Trump

Who could ever forget that moment? On Aug. 6, 2015, Fox News Host Megyn Kelly kicked off the first Republican primary debate by asking candidate Donald Trump: "You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs,' and 'disgusting animals.' Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?" That question was relevant then, and it's even more relevant today.

Of course, Trump responded by calling Kelly "sick," "overrated," and "crazy," and alleged she was just in a foul mood because it was that time of the month: "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever..." All of which is classic Trump. For him, women are nothing but objects to be insulted, ridiculed, sexually abused or raped.

This campaign's no exception. Since she became the Democratic nominee, Trump has not engaged in any policy dispute with Kamala Harris. Instead, he's reverted to the same playbook: deliberately mispronouncing her name, calling her a "fascist," "communist," "Marxist," "radical left lunatic," and - get this! - accusing her of having more cognitive problems than Joe Biden. Note: Anyone who watched the Harris/Trump debate knows there was one candidate on stage with serious cognitive problems - and it wasn't Kamala Harris.

Donald Trump is the poster child of the "male chauvinist pig," where success or celebrityhood breeds serial philanderers, groping boors, and, worse, sexual predators. Trump is a sexist pig on steroids.

Long before he was elected president, Trump's first wife, filing for divorce, accused him of rape. He's been accused of sexual assault by at least 26 women. On the "Access Hollywood" tape, he famously bragged about grabbing women by their private parts. He's since been found liable by a jury and fined $88 million for raping and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll. And he's been convicted on 34 felony counts for covering up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

As a candidate for president, Trump took his personal war on women to the national level. He promised to nominate Supreme Court justices who'd overturn Roe v. Wade - and ever since they did so, he hasn't stopped bragging about it. "For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated," Trump trumpeted recently on Truth Social, "and I did it. And I'm proud to have done it. ... Nobody else was gonna get that done but me, and we did it. And we did something that was a miracle."

Ha! Trump may call it a "miracle," but for millions of American women it's been a disaster. Since the Dobbs decision, 14 states have effectively blocked all abortion services and three states have enacted a six-week ban - denying women access to health care, forcing many of them to bear the expense and stress of traveling to another state, and, according to ProPublica, resulting in the death of at least two women who couldn't get the medical care they needed.

For American women, another Trump term would be even worse. Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration prepared by the Heritage Foundation, calls the Dobbs decision "just the beginning" and advocates defunding Planned Parenthood, banning the mailing of abortion pills, removing the phrase "reproductive health" from all federal rules and regulations, and urging Congress to act to "protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America" - which is shorthand for a national abortion ban.

But now Donald Trump's having second thoughts. He realizes Dobbs is a political loser. He knows he's trailing Kamala Harris among women by 21 points, 58-37. So, he's suddenly trying to paint himself as women's savior. Campaigning in Pennsylvania last week, Trump said: "You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion."

I'm sorry. Apologies to any woman or man my next statement might offend. But anybody who believes that the man who ripped away from women the freedom to control their own bodies, a right they'd experienced for 50 years, is now going to be their "protector" - is an idiot.

There's only one answer. More women than men are registered to vote, and more women actually turn out to vote. This Nov. 5, more women must do so than ever before. We can't count on men to do it. Only America's women can save us from Donald Trump.

(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

This election is already rigged against Kamala Harris!

Sure, it's a cold day in Hell when I'd ever agree with Donald Trump on anything. But I must admit, he's right about this. He's right when he says the election is rigged. Except he's got it backward.

Yes, the 2024 election is rigged. But it's not rigged against Donald Trump. It's actually rigged in his favor - because of something we should have gotten rid of a long time ago, but still haven't. It's rigged against Kamala Harris - because of the Electoral College.

We may be heading to another electoral disaster. A repeat of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016, when the candidate who won the popular vote - by far! - did not win the White House. Already twice in this century, the winning candidate actually lost because of the Electoral College. Nothing could be more anti-democratic, with a small "d."

As Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia's highly regarded Center for Politics told me on my podcast (BillPressPod.com) this week, Kamala Harris is way ahead in the popular vote. She'll crush Donald Trump in the number of total votes cast. But she could still end up losing to Trump in the only count that matters: the Electoral College.

In today's political universe, winning the Electoral College comes down to so-called "battleground" states. The list of such states can change. Ohio was once considered a battleground state; now it's reliably red. So was Virginia, but now it's more dependably purple, if not blue. But all analysts agree that this year's "battleground states" are seven: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. That's where the election will be won or lost. That's where the candidates will be spending most of their time. It's almost a waste of their time to be campaigning anywhere else.

And the reason nobody's willing to call this race a slam dunk, despite Harris' big lead in the popular vote, is because, at this point, the polls in those seven states show Harris and Trump neck and neck. In the latest poll released this week by the New York Times, for example, Trump leads by just one point in Arizona and Georgia; Harris leads by one point in North Carolina; and she leads by two points in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Not enough for either side to feel good about.

Which means we're looking at a replay of 2020 where, despite the fact that 159 million Americans voted for president, the election was decided by the slimmest of margins in the battleground states. Case in point: Joe Biden edged out Donald Trump in Arizona and picked up that state's 11 electoral votes by only a 10,457 vote advantage.

The problem is, that affront to democracy - where a handful of voters in a handful of states decide the election for 330 million Americans - will continue, and only get worse, until we get rid of the Electoral College. At which point most people simply give up and say it's impossible because it would take a Constitutional Amendment.

Wrong! There's a much easier way to get rid of the Electoral College. Well, not to get rid of, but to get around it. It's called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact - an agreement among states to award all its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. Introduced in 2006, it has already been adopted by 17 states and the District of Columbia.

As of September 2024, the National Popular Vote is the law in six small states: Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia; nine medium-size states: Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington; and three big states: California, Illinois, and New York.

Added up, that's 209 electoral votes, just 61 votes shy - or 77 percent- of the magic 270 total necessary to win the presidency. So far there are no deep red states on board, but any combination of Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Nevada (6), Iowa (6), New Hampshire (4), and Alaska (3) would end the dominance of the Electoral College.

There are many steps necessary to save our democracy, but after electing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, one of the most important is to persuade another group of state legislatures to adopt the National Popular Vote - so we can dump the Electoral College once and for all and unite behind the principle that whichever candidate gets the most votes wins the election. How quaint.

(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. 

 Best thing for Republican Party: For Trump to lose big

It seems like it's been dragging on for three years - which it has! - but now, with Labor Day behind us, the 2024 presidential campaign is officially underway. And it's a totally different campaign than any of us expected, just two months ago.

So much has changed in so short a time. It was only on June 27 that Joe Biden totally blew his debate with Donald Trump. It was only on July 21 that Biden announced his decision to step down and pass the torch to Kamala Harris. And, since then, in just six short weeks, the world has turned upside down.

Instead of embarking on a rushed, divisive primary, Democrats quickly rallied behind Harris. She proved to be an outstanding candidate. She shot up in the polls. She made an excellent choice in selecting Tim Walz as her running mate. She gave a great acceptance speech at the convention. She's generated more excitement in the Democratic Party since Barack Obama's first campaign. And she now leads in every demographic group except old white men.

Which leads to a few observations on the state of the race today.

One. If the biggest problem for Democrats six weeks ago was despair, the biggest problem today is overconfidence. Kamala Harris may be slowly climbing up in the polls, but this campaign is far, far, from over. No matter how long the honeymoon lasts, no matter how many Republicans like Liz Cheney endorse her, this race is still too close to call.

God knows why, but some 40 percent to 45 percent of Americans will vote for Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does. When you factor in amnesia about what a disaster Trump's presidency was, plus bias against a woman, especially a Black woman, Kamala Harris could still lose this race and Donald Trump, as impossible as that is to believe, could still win it.

Which only underscores the most important message for Democrats that came out of the Chicago convention, first stressed by Michelle Obama and then picked up by every speaker that followed: Don't fret, don't worry, don't complain. Get off your butt and " Do something!" Kamala Harris can only win in November if every Democrat or non-Trump Republican talks to every friend, knocks on every door, makes every phone call, and writes every check possible between now and November 5.

Two. As I argued in last week's column, this election is not going to be waged over differences in policy, it's going to be decided on how people feel about two different people. Or, more to the point, how people feel about Donald Trump. Period. And, on that score, there was good news this week. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll shows Kamala Harris with a 46 percent favorable rating, compared to Trump's 33 percent. Even more troublesome for Trump: He's 25 percent underwater in favorability. While 33 percent like him, 58 percent of Americans say they don't like him - which is stunning for someone in the spotlight for the last eight years.

Of course, that has its downside. Confronted with those dismal favorability ratings, Trump campaign advisers privately admit they know they can't make Trump more likable. So their only hope is to make Kamala Harris more unlikable - through personal insults, lies, invective, and smears. It's the standard Trump playbook. It's going to get ugly.

Three. The most interesting new wrinkle on 2024 this week came from Jonathan Martin, politics bureau chief at Politico. In recent conversations with many Republican leaders, all publicly Trump-supporters, Martin was surprised to discover one common theme: in order to move beyond Trump and repair the Republican Party, they all privately hoped that Trump would lose!

"The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly," Martin wrote. "GOP leaders won't tell you that on the record. I just did." Note: They believe it's not only important that Harris win, but that she win big. The more decisively Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college, they told Martin, the less political oxygen Trump will have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, more importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party. May their dreams come true.

Four. Sixty days is a long way to go in politics. Anything could still happen. Next week's debate could be a game-changer. But at this point, looking at the direction things are going, it's better to be Kamala Harris than Donald Trump.

(C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.