Kamala enters the Fox den

Vice President Kamala Harris will finally sit down with Fox News this evening after months of pundits justifiably criticizing her campaign for mostly avoiding challenging media. Chief political anchor Bret Baier will conduct the interview, which will air during his show in the 6 p.m. hour. It will be a thirty-minute live-to-tape sit-down and will run in its entirety with no edits and no commercial breaks. 

Based on recent appearances, this could end quite poorly for Kamala. The Democratic nominee struggled to justify the Biden-Harris immigration policy during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the network felt the need to edit out a word salad answer about her relationship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even her friendly chat with the ladies of ABC’s The View saw her step on a landmine as Harris said she wouldn’t have done anything differently in the past four years as vice president. 

Harris defended coming across as “scripted” in an audio town hall with radio host Charlemagne Tha God, spinning it as “discipline,” but repeating canned lines is unlikely to work with Baier, who is reputed for pushing back on members of both political parties. Harris spokesman Ian Sams says she is “looking forward to talking and answering tough questions” while Baier has given us some insight into his thought process heading into the interview. He said he will ask about “things that matter” to voters, including the economy and immigration — and he has previously criticized the vice president for not being clear about how her positions have changed since her presidential run in 2019.

There is plenty of fodder to ask about on immigration, as this week, while on the campaign trail for Harris, former president Bill Clinton admitted that Georgia nursing student Laken Riley likely wouldn’t have been killed by an illegal alien if proper vetting were taking place at the southern border. He also indicated that he believes the Senate’s “bipartisan” border bill would solve that problem, even though it doesn’t change any vetting processes and provides fairly minimal limitations on asylum and parole.

“The subtext here of course is that regardless of whether the oft-cited Lankford immigration bill had come to pass (it was a non-starter that got only two GOP votes), you already had three-plus years of border crossings with more than 10 million migrants pouring into the United States,” my colleague Ben Domenech wrote. 

Harris also rejected the label of “border czar,” a symbolic title she received from the media when President Joe Biden put her in charge of managing root causes of the border crisis. She said “fact checkers” made it clear she was not the border czar and in a Univision town hall last week shied away from a question about mass deportation, a position supported by a majority of Americans. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar 

SPACE SUIT Elon Musk’s SpaceX is suing California for political bias, with the billionaire CEO claiming members of the California Coastal Commission blocked Musk from launching more rockets from a US air base in the state because they opposed his endorsement of Donald Trump. 

F-B-EYE ROLL The FBI quietly revised its 2022 violent crime data, revealing that violent crime actually went up that year instead of down, as previously claimed. Former president Donald Trump was fact-checked by ABC’s moderators during September’s presidential debate when he claimed crime was on the rise. 

CLIMATE CRISIS A climate advisor for Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that her boss does not want to expand fracking despite the candidate bragging about the Inflation Reduction Act opening new leases for fracking. Climate engagement director Camila Thorndike claimed that while Harris opposes a fracking ban, she does not want the practice to become more widespread. 

More Project 2025 drama 

When you’re in a hole, you’re supposed to stop digging. That advice apparently hasn’t landed with the architects of one of the Democratic Party’s favorite 2024 boogeymen.

Paul Dans, former director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, lashed out at Heritage president Kevin Roberts, condemning his “violent rhetoric” in an interview. Roberts found himself in hot water for calling for a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be,” prior to multiple assassination attempts against former president Donald Trump.

Roberts has since toned down his rhetoric, but Dans maintained that “there’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank. And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

In the months since Roberts’s viral remarks, the entire Democratic Party has seized on Project 2025, aiming to turn it into an albatross to hang around the necks of Donald Trump and his ticket-mates across the country — even though he and his team have denounced the efforts, designed to staff an incoming administration, at virtually every opportunity.

Dans viewed the attempts on Trump’s life as an opportunity for both sides to tamp down their rhetoric. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts,” he said.

Project 2025’s utility to a potentially incoming Trump administration remains to be seen. Howard Lutnick, one of the co-chairs of the transition, recently said that any résumés it receives from the effort are viewed as “radioactive.” One former Trump official told Politico that “clearly people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted.” Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has been leading the efforts to prevent appointees viewed as disloyal to his father from joining a second term.

It’s not uncommon for presidential transitions to make rankings of priority appointments; just don’t expect Project 2025 to get any special favors from Trump.

–Cockburn

Georgia smashes early vote 

If voter turnout has been a concern for any politically minded person observing this year’s presidential race, what happened in Georgia yesterday ought to put such fears to rest: a record-setting 328,000 ballots were cast on the first day of early voting, making the Peach State’s previous record of 136,000 ballots cast in 2020 look like a blip on the radar.

Gabriel Sterling, COO in the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State, noted on X that these numbers account for a 123 percent increase over the old record.

President Joe Biden won Georgia last time, “by a razor-thin margin,” per the Hill, which also reports Trump currently leads Harris 48.3 percent to 47 percent in Georgia, according to Hill polling.

At a Georgia rally, Trump encouraged supporters to send in their ballots immediately or to vote in person if they can, and to get everyone they know to vote over the course of the next twenty-one days.  “We can’t lose this country,” which will happen if Harris wins, Trump alleged.

Former president Jimmy Carter, who has been in hospice care for the past year and a half, showed up in his rolling bed Tuesday to cast his vote for Harris. Carter’s son said that his father is “interested in politics and the war in Gaza” and was more excited to vote for Harris than he was for his 100th birthday. 

Axios and Forbes report that nationally, Harris holds a slight lead over Trump, whereas NBC News polling indicates a “dead heat” and NPR reports that “polls move in Trump’s direction.”

–Teresa Mull