Weeks to Election Day. Here’s what to watch
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
(CNN) — It’s officially the home stretch of the 2024 presidential election, an affair that has felt bonkers for months.
Americans witnessed the sitting Democratic president drop out of the race, the Republican nominee narrowly escape an assassination attempt and the rise of the first woman of color on a national ticket.
How are the candidates and their allies spending money and time?
Money isn’t everything in politics, but it’s certainly not nothing. Where the campaigns – and the super PACs that support them – spend money is, if nothing else, a good indicator of where they see opportunity.
Vice President Kamala Harris has a big cash advantage after some massive fundraising. Ads pushing her candidacy are focused on labeling former President Donald Trump as “unhinged.”
About a third of ad spending on behalf of Trump was focused on LGBTQ rights and Harris’ comments in 2019 regarding providing gender transition surgery for prison inmates. It’s not an issue that affects many people, but Trump’s allies are making a calculated bet that it can be effective as a wedge.
Trump is also getting help from tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is spending tens of millions to help Republicans’ ground game and is also aerating conspiracy theories on the social media platform X.
The two campaigns are crisscrossing the seven battleground states thought to be competitive enough that either side can win them. Harris is on defense in the Rust Belt “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. If she can win them, she’ll win the White House. But polling is close in all three.
It’s also close in the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, which President Joe Biden won in 2020. A surprise this year is Trump’s focus on North Carolina, another Sun Belt state, which no Democrat has won since Barack Obama in 2008.
How are the two sides getting out the vote?
The policy proposals have been rolled out, and the candidates have tried to define each other. Now it’s time to get voters to the polls or the mailbox.
Voting early and by mail is already underway in much of the country, although mail-in voting is not expected to reach the same level as it did in the Covid-19 pandemic election of 2020. Trump remains a mail-voting skeptic, but Republicans are embracing the practice in key states this year in an effort to keep pace with Democrats.
Some Republicans are raising questions about other elements of Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy, as CNN’s Steve Contorno and Fredreka Schouten report. Instead of knocking on doors in key states, Trump’s allies are using funding from Musk to do some nontraditional things.
Contorno and Schouten write:
Targeting irregular voters, teaching supporters to surveil polling places and bombarding states with voting-related lawsuits – this is the machine the Trump campaign has built for an election that many expect to hinge on just tens of thousands of ballots cast across seven battleground states. It’s a gamble, Trump’s campaign internally acknowledges, but one that they insist is built on data they have collected over nearly a decade and tested for the past six months.
Who is on the campaign trail?
Harris has supporters to the left and supporters to the right.
High-profile backers like Obama, the popular former Democratic president, are hitting the trail to appeal to the party’s base. Per CNN’s reporting, Obama plans a 27-day blitz for Harris. He’ll appear at events and lend his name to emails and fundraising materials.
Meanwhile, disaffected anti-Trump Republicans like former Rep. Liz Cheney are campaigning for Harris to appeal to moderates, independents and even Republicans who want to move on from Trump.
Trump gets bold-face support from Musk but has fewer surrogates he can turn to. Former Republican President George W. Bush is not a vocal supporter, and his vice president, Dick Cheney, has said he will vote for Harris. The party has changed so much that Bush and Cheney probably wouldn’t be welcome at a Trump rally.
Are you registered to vote?
Take a moment and think about your own situation. Are you registered to vote? Do you know how you’ll go about voting? Many states allow some kind of same-day voting registration, but not all. Check out CNN’s voter handbook for information on your state.
What happens after Election Day?
It’s weeks to Election Day, but that’s a little bit of a misnomer. So many Americans are already voting that Election Day is arguably here right now. Plus, the counting of mail-in votes and the potential for recounts in consequential states mean that we likely won’t know who won the election soon after polls close on November 5.
In non-2024 developments, Trump faces sentencing for his conviction on falsifying business records in New York with regard to 2016 hush money payments on November 26.
No matter what happens with the 2024 election, Trump is unlikely to accept the results if Harris wins. His allies are preparing for a legal fight after Election Day to contest votes and potentially the certification of election results, which must be completed by December 11 for electors to gather in state capitals and officially cast electoral votes on December 17.
Then, as everyone should remember from 2020, the electoral votes are meant to be counted in Congress, this time with Vice President Harris presiding, on January 6, 2025. The new president takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.
This headline and story have been updated with additional details.
The-CNN-Wire
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