Trump’s Child Care Plan Is Nonsensical

On Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald Trump was asked a question about whether he would commit to making child care more affordable. In a two-minute response, he offered a pile of nonsense. Here’s a brief snippet that honestly I didn’t even know how to punctuate properly:

We had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think, when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because the child care is child care, couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them doing business with us.

Apparently, what he’s saying here is that he would make child care more affordable by raising tariffs on imports, though he did not explain how that would work.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, also answered a question about child care expenses this week, from the conservative media founder Charlie Kirk. While Vance originally suggested that extended family should help care for children — an answer that left much to be desired — he elaborated on X, outlining a more substantive, realistic set of policies.

Credit where it’s due: I think a $5,000 child tax credit, which Vance has endorsed, is a good idea. It’s worth noting, however, that Vance skipped a recent vote for a bill that would have expanded the child tax credit, so, his commitment to the policy is questionable.

His other argument, about there being a “broken educational pathway” that makes it difficult for young people to become child care providers, is more complicated. Licensing requirements vary by state, and some states have negligible formal requirements for child care workers. At the least, there should certainly be some kind of formal training in early childhood development and basic safety, including CPR.

It is a positive sign, overall, that child care is an issue that’s front and center — new polling from the First Five Years Fund shows that 89 percent of voters “want candidates to have a plan or policies ready to help working parents afford high-quality child care.” Vance is at least engaging with real-world policy — a bare minimum for a serious candidate — while Trump is off in La La Land with Marco and Ivanka. It’s an understatement to say this isn’t a priority for him, and it probably wouldn’t be in a second Trump term.

For nearly a year, Mayor Eric Adams of New York has mostly swatted away questions about the flurry of federal investigations surrounding him.

On Thursday, however, the news that federal agents had seized the phones of several top Adams officials changed everything. The action suggests that there are now three investigations into officials of Adams’s campaign or administration by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

One appears to focus on the city’s police commissioner, Edward Caban. Federal officials have seized his phone.

Of interest to federal investigators in a separate investigation is the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks; First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright; and her partner David Banks, the city’s schools chancellor and a brother of Philip Banks. Federal investigators have also searched the home of a third Banks brother, Terence Banks, who is a consultant.

In a previously known case, the U.S. attorney’s office is investigating whether Adams or his campaign aides accepted illegal foreign donations from Turkish officials in exchange for special favors at City Hall.

None of these officials has been charged with a crime, and seizure of a phone is far from a criminal accusation. But this is not business as usual in New York’s government. Federal investigators had examined former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fund-raising activities but cleared him of criminal wrongdoing. They never seized his phone, something federal investigators did in Adams’s case. The last time the city faced the possibility of a looming scandal this great was arguably in 1986, when several officials in the administration of Mayor Ed Koch were convicted or forced to resign amid a bribery scheme involving parking violations.

New York deserves an explanation from Adams, something more than the simplistic “stay focused” he has offered as a response. He has yet to describe how his administration can properly serve the city while its core leadership is under severe federal scrutiny.

Two of the officials involved — the schools chancellor and the police commissioner — oversee the most essential parts of New York City government, including the education of nearly a million children. The public needs assurances that city government will continue to function despite the investigations, and in its best interest.

The gathering clouds over Adams’s City Hall are now too ominous to ignore.

Pull up, pull up!

Friday morning’s employment report was highly anticipated; many people thought it would make the difference between a quarter-point and a half-point interest rate cut at the Federal Reserve’s next meeting.

In the event, the report was meh — a soft but not disastrous reading on employment but no further rise in unemployment. In themselves, these numbers pretty much let economic analysts believe whatever they want to believe.

But the August report was only one of five major releases since last Friday, and the combined message of these reports was: Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

Last Friday we got the latest numbers on the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. It’s running slightly above 2 percent, the target rate, but we know that this small overshoot largely reflects measured housing costs, which are a lagging indicator.

On Wednesday we got two reports. One, on job openings, showed a labor market that is continuing to weaken and is now a bit looser than it was before the pandemic. The other was the Beige Book, an informal survey by regional Federal Reserve banks, which showed a weakening economy with low inflation.

And on Thursday we got data on productivity and unit labor costs. Labor costs tend to be the stickiest, hardest-to-cure piece of inflation, but they’re up only 0.4 percent over the past year, thanks to muted wage growth and high productivity growth.

Put these five reports together, and they tell us two things.

First, we’ve won the war on inflation — and we did it without a recession or a large rise in unemployment. The pessimists and prophets of stagflation were completely wrong.

Second, the Biden boom — and yes, it was a boom, with remarkable growth in both G.D.P. and employment — is losing steam. Things had to level off eventually, but the deceleration is striking. The Fed has been trying to steer between two risks: the risk of cutting too fast and reigniting inflation and the risk of cutting too slowly and allowing the economy to slide into recession. Well, the balance of risks has clearly shifted: There’s now much more danger of doing too little than of doing too much.

So the Fed should do the full half-point cut. We’ve achieved our soft landing; don’t ruin it by moving too slowly to pull the plane’s nose up.

Over this last terrible weekend, as the Goldberg-Polin family buried their son and brother, Hersh, in Jerusalem, 330 days after his abduction by Hamas into Gaza, I thought of the efforts of his mother, Rachel Goldberg, to make Hersh a presence for audiences the world over, bringing us into her home. We knew his soccer team, his love of music and atlases and world travel. We learned of his dry, sarcastic humor, how he was witty without being mean. How he was kind. We knew the family and saw ourselves in their story.

The intensity of public mourning for Hersh is a testament to both mother and child, both connected and disconnected from the reality of being the grieving parent. The exceptional work that Ms. Goldberg did to make Hersh personify a family’s suffering is a window into the depth of responsibility we all feel to our children, outside of politics, of nationality, of identity. The sense that we are in control, that we can fix things for our kids, that we must. It is connected, in this case, to a sense of Jewish community. But it is also connected to personality — Ms. Goldberg’s; that of her husband, Jon Polin; and Hersh’s. It’s connected to our sense of self.

Watching Ms. Goldberg pursue her son’s freedom, and that of all the hostages, day after day after day, I long felt that there was something akin to the cancer parent in pursuit of an elusive cure. The idea that the sheer force of will as a mother can change the story line. Ms. Goldberg put that struggle before the world, cut herself open for all of us, insisted that the world invest as much as she did in her son’s return.

During our very first conversation, on Oct. 11, Ms. Goldberg told me the story she would go on to tell leaders the world over — about her son and his capture, the joy he brought her, the joy she wanted to regain. At the end, she stopped me suddenly; she wanted to say she had read my articles about Orli, the daughter I lost to cancer six months earlier. “I feel for you and the experiences that you’ve walked through,” she said that day, five days into her son’s captivity, as Hersh’s life and hers hung in the balance. “And I just wanted to mention, you know, one day, we could be friends waiting to happen.”

Not everyone can summon that kind of empathy and that kind of will. Certainly not in that kind of moment. As Douglas Emhoff, the second gentleman, said in remarks Monday night at a vigil in Washington for the hostages: “I don’t know that I would be as strong as Rachel and Jon if I were in their shoes. But right now, we all need to find that strength.”

Donald Trump’s latest economic idea, unveiled Thursday, is that he wants the United States to have a sovereign wealth fund “to invest in great national endeavors for the benefit of all of the American people.” But there are some big problems with this vision.

One is that a sovereign wealth fund — a government-controlled investment vehicle — is more than a little socialist. That’s not on message for Trump, who also said Thursday that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “embraces Marxism, communism and fascism.”

Another problem for Trump is that it’s not at all clear where the federal government would get enough money to build a big fund. (He, of course, wants the world’s biggest.)

The world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds are controlled by countries that built their funds with money from massive trade surpluses: Norway, China, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Trump said the money for the fund would come from the high tariffs he wants to impose on America’s trading partners and “other intelligent things,” which he didn’t specify.

“Other countries have wealth funds,” Trump said. “We have nothing.”

He said he envisioned the fund investing in highways, airports, manufacturing hubs, defense capabilities and medical research. That sounds like a step or two beyond anything the Biden administration has done on industrial policy.

More important, Americans might not be thrilled that tariffs — essentially sales taxes on imported goods — are going into what might seem like a slush fund. Trump didn’t talk about who would control the fund; the Constitution says no funds can be spent out of the Treasury except by congressional appropriation.

Trump told the Economic Club of New York audience that he would talk over his ideas with John Paulson, a billionaire investor who sat on the dais with him. When I asked Paulson about that afterward, he said he didn’t hear Trump mention him but did support the creation of a sovereign wealth fund.

“Chutzpah” is an indispensable Yiddish word. It translates roughly as “gall” or “nerve,” but it is illustrated most accurately by the parable of the man who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

That was all I could think of as I followed Donald Trump’s lawyers on Thursday morning, throwing their client on the mercy of the Federal District Court in Washington, where he is being prosecuted for multiple crimes related to the Capitol insurrection he incited on Jan. 6, 2021.

Thursday’s hearing, before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, was being held to determine next steps in the case after the Supreme Court’s shocking ruling in July granting broad presidential immunity for almost all official acts. Having refiled the four-count indictment against Trump to comply with that ruling, prosecutors were eager to move ahead and file briefs on the question of which of Trump’s acts on and around Jan. 6 count as official. But John Lauro, on the defense team, insisted that any forward motion in the case would be “enormously prejudicial” to the former president, given the “sensitive” pre-election period the nation is in. “There’s something unseemly about a rush to judgment,” he said.

Forgive me for spitting out my glass of milk, but are you kidding me? Babies have been conceived and born in the time since the Jan. 6 case last achieved any forward motion. That was back in December 2023, when Trump stopped the case in its tracks by appealing on the ground of presidential immunity. It was and is an absurd claim, devoid of any historical or constitutional support, and yet with the help of the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority, half of which he put on the bench, Trump managed to drag out litigation over the matter until July, when he won a more sweeping victory than anyone, including his own lawyers, expected.

Now that the delay has put this stage of the case just a few weeks before the election, he is arguing, in effect, that he should be immune even from due process, lest voters learn more about his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election before they cast their ballots in 2024.

Chutkan was having none of it and made it clear there would be no special privileges for a presidential candidate. When Lauro said, “We’re talking about the presidency of the United States,” the judge responded, “I’m not talking about the presidency; I’m talking about a four-count indictment.”

Good for her. If anyone is politicizing this prosecution, it’s Trump, who considers gaming the legal system as his birthright.

This trial should have started and finished months ago, giving the American people a verdict in one of the most consequential prosecutions in the nation’s history. Instead, Chutkan is left to clean up the mess the Supreme Court, at Trump’s request, left her.

Anthony Fauci recently disclosed that he was hospitalized after catching the dreaded mosquito-borne West Nile virus, telling Stat News, “I really felt like I’d been hit by a truck.”

Well, mosquitoes suck. And mosquito-borne illnesses — malaria, yellow fever — have long sucked for humanity. Cases of eastern equine encephalitis, another mosquito-borne illness, have recently popped up in Massachusetts. Some outdoor events in high-risk areas, such as Oktoberfest celebrations in Vermont, are being canceled.

Mosquito-borne diseases like these are widening their range partly because of climate change, but they’re still relatively rare in the United States.

This wasn’t always the case. Yellow fever, for example, caused multiple major epidemics in the United States, changing the course of history. But advances in science led to better understanding of its transmission and the development of a vaccine, as well as a public health response to eradicate mosquitoes in urban areas. The United States hasn’t had a major yellow fever outbreak since the one in New Orleans in 1905. And that history also points to what Americans need to do now, when faced with other mosquito-borne illnesses: We need a widespread public health response to eradicate mosquitoes in more densely populated areas and to place a renewed focus on developing new vaccines.

In addition, the best individual defenses are to use nets and screens to keep mosquitoes from entering indoors, to properly cover up as much as possible when outside — stuff those hiking pants into socks! — and to use a proper insect repellent. In many studies, DEET, Picaridin and PMD top lists of effectiveness.

I personally stick with DEET — it’s been around the longest, and thus is most studied. Yes, DEET has an unpleasant odor at first, but I’d rather smell that than contract a mosquito- or tick-borne illness, like Lyme. (Picaridin seems like a good alternative, too, and lacks the odor.)

With time, I do truly hope that we will develop new vaccines. It’s easy to forget what it took for past successes against terrible illnesses, but the price of public health is constant vigilance.

When the stock market has a bad day, as it did on Tuesday, experts come out of the woodwork to explain why “stocks fell.” A big move in the major stock indexes seems to require a big macroeconomic explanation, such as worries about economic growth.

In fact, by my calculation, more than a quarter of the decline in the S&P 500 stock index on Tuesday was caused by concerns about a single company, Nvidia, which supplies chips for artificial intelligence and other uses.

Nvidia lost $279 billion in market value on Tuesday, which was the biggest dollar loss for one company in one day in market history. Its sharp drop wasn’t mainly because of economic jitters. Traders seemed to be reacting to a report by Bloomberg that the Justice Department sent the company a subpoena as part of an investigation into whether it violated antitrust laws.

Looking slightly more broadly at Tuesday’s bad day, more than half of the S&P 500’s decline was accounted for by eight tech stocks. Aside from Nvidia, they were Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms (the parent of Facebook), Broadcom, and two classes of shares in Alphabet (the parent of Google).

The “stocks fell” story about Tuesday is complicated by the performance of Berkshire Hathaway, among the 10 most valuable companies in the S&P 500. Its shares bucked the trend and rose fractionally (0.2 percent). Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, does own a lot of Apple stock, but otherwise, it’s light on tech. Its holdings include Geico and Burlington Northern.

There are legitimate reasons to worry that economic weakness will hurt corporate profits and cause stock prices to fall from their elevated valuations. But that doesn’t seem to be primarily what happened on Tuesday.

Historical memory is bound to shape the first reaction to the powerful showing of a far-right party in two German state elections on Sunday. Nonetheless, there is nothing specifically German in the appeal of populism and extremism, especially among populations confused and threatened by a complex, unstable and vaguely threatening world. It’s endemic in the former Soviet satellites, but familiar, too, in the most venerable democracies.

It was populism and extremism that won in Sunday’s elections in the neighboring states of Thuringia and Saxony, both in what was formerly East Germany. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, anti-European Union party that has been formally branded extremist in both states, came in first in Thuringia and second in Saxony, while a strange left-conservative populist hybrid, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, known by its German initials, B.S.W., and named after the former Communist who formed it a few months ago, came in third in both.

That raises some problems, and many questions.

The immediate problem will be how to form governments in the two states. B.S.W., like every other party, has declared that it will not join in any coalition with AfD, so the center-right Christian Democratic Union, the only mainstream party to make a respectable showing in either state, will probably have to try to form coalition governments with B.S.W. and other left-wing parties. It won’t be easy.

One immediate question is what the results might mean for Germany’s critical support for Ukraine. Though at opposite ends of the political spectrum, AfD and B.S.W. have almost indistinguishable positions on the resentments they feed on, including immigration and Ukraine. Both are friendly to Russia and against supporting Ukraine. German foreign policy is shaped by the federal government, which is not likely to reduce Germany’s military or political support for Ukraine anytime soon. But a signal has been sent.

The rapid rise of the AfD in eastern Germany also raises inevitable anxieties born of history: Is Nazism coming back? The leader of the AfD, Björn Höcke, has not helped with his repeated use of Nazi rhetoric in his speeches, and many Germans have demanded that AfD be banned.

Another question, though, is whether extremism and populism are unique to Germany. Many former East European populations — those of Poland and Hungary come to mind — still nurture a resentment over the perception that they are somehow second-class members of Western society, that their way of life is threatened by alien social norms imposed by a distant European Union and by alien immigrants. And populism is hardly unfamiliar in Western democracies like France, Britain, and thanks to the MAGA movement, the United States.

In eastern Germany, that sense is intensified by the fact that the West is the same country. Thuringia was one of the states most devastated by the collapse of industries that followed the reunification of Germany, and though its economy has rebounded somewhat, it still suffers from a westward exodus, especially of young women. The AfD party successfully targeted young men with messages like: “Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That’s the way to find a girlfriend!”

A new TV ad from Donald Trump’s campaign shows how desperate he is to tie Kamala Harris to President Biden’s economic policies, and how far he is willing to stretch the truth to make that point to voters who just aren’t buying it.

The ad, titled “The Debate We’ve All Been Waiting For: Harris vs. Harris,” shows Harris talking on a TV screen about high prices.

“Everyday prices are too high,” she says. “Food, rent, gas, back-to-school clothes.”

Then, on another TV screen beside the first one, she says, “That’s called Bidenomics.”

This goes on a few times, with Harris talking about the price of ground beef and housing, skillfully edited with a clip of her saying, “Bidenomics is working,” as if part of the same sentence.

But of course these remarks were not made at the same event, or even in the same year. She was talking about the high prices caused by the pandemic at an event last month in Raleigh, N.C., where she acknowledged the financial pressure of inflation on middle-class families and unveiled an economic plan to address it.

The clips about Bidenomics were from a speech in Washington in August of 2023, where she was promoting the good news from the monthly jobs report that had come out that day. The full context of her remarks:

And as today’s jobs numbers make clear: Bidenomics is working. Last month, we created 187,000 new jobs. That means today — yeah, go ahead and clap. I don’t want to step on the applause. That means, today, 187,000 more Americans are able to go to work, to provide for their family and invest in their future. Today’s numbers reflect the point that President Biden has made many times: America’s economy is strong and experiencing stable and steady growth. In fact, since we took office, we have created more than 13 million new jobs. In two and a half years, we have created more jobs — more new jobs than any other administration has created in four.

Harris, now running her own campaign, won’t be using the word Bidenomics anymore; it will be uttered only by Republicans, trying to blame her for the post-pandemic rise in prices. That hasn’t been very successful so far. As a recent Washington Post poll shows, only about a third of Americans believe she had significant influence on Biden’s economic policies.

But Republicans won’t be mentioning the 15 million jobs created during the Biden administration, the robust stock market or the dwindling remains of inflation. Instead, following the standard Trump method, they will just issue a series of misleading, distorted ads.

Every week on The Point, we kick things off with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• Donald Trump will speak to the Fraternal Order of Police board of trustees on Friday in North Carolina, then hold a rally near Wausau, Wis., on Saturday. Tim Walz will be in Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Thursday. After a fairly busy Labor Day weekend, Kamala Harris’s plans are so far light for the week — but presumably both she and Trump will be prepping for next week’s debate.

• On Thursday, Judge Tanya Chutkan will hold a status hearing in the federal Jan. 6 case, in which Trump is still charged with four felony counts, after a variety of filings from both Trump’s team and prosecutors last week. We might find out more about what, if anything, will happen with the case before the election.

• Just to give you a sense of how soon the election is in a world of absentee and early voting: In North Carolina, officials will begin mailing absentee ballots on Friday. That’s basically the earliest that happens, but over the next few weeks, more and more states will mail out absentee ballots or open early-voting locations.

• One thing, tonally, that came up during the Democratic convention was the shift toward more jokes about Trump versus the very solemn and dark approach often taken by President Biden. That sometimes created jarring swings in tones, particularly during the nightly segments on Project 2025, which often were delivered pretty ironically. A specific policy agenda like Project 2025 can be either a serious problem or an object of joking derision for critics, but it’s harder for it to be both at the same time from the same person. On television, however, the Harris campaign is running a dark, non-joking ad about Project 2025 with a vintage voice-over that feels like something from the 1990s or 2000s.

• As we get closer to the election, it can be hard to keep up with what to read. Here’s some informative reporting from the past week worth checking out: Jazmine Ulloa of The Times drove around Pennsylvania looking for Nikki Haley voters and interviewed them about their diverging plans for the fall. David Weigel of Semafor took a look at the Trump campaign’s strategy in embracing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. There was a great article by Richard Rubin of The Wall Street Journal on what Harris’s tax plans would actually mean.

Our presidential folklore is awash with animal stories. Remember Franklin Roosevelt’s dog Fala? No? Well, it was a while ago. President Biden is a big dog lover, but his pets were exiled to Delaware after multiple biting episodes. Jill Biden brought in a cat to fill the void.

Kamala Harris has been photographed cuddling puppies, but if there’s going to be any Republican animal stories during the campaign this fall, chances are they’re going to be sort of unpleasant. Donald Trump doesn’t like animals — naturally, since they draw attention from him. And now he’s got a new supporter who’s famous for his run-ins with their corpses.

Yeah, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once allegedly chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach, bungee-corded it to the roof of his car and drove it five hours to the family home. Some years ago, Kennedy’s daughter Kick Kennedy called the episode “the rankest thing on the planet.”

People, does that remind you of anything? Back when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama, his son once told the story about a family vacation in which Romney put Seamus, their pet Irish setter, in a roof crate for a 12-hour drive to Canada. Apparently, Seamus weathered the trip fine, but the presidential campaign in 2012 was very boring. As a diversion, I decided to try to see how many times I could mention the story before Election Day. Diligent readers counted around 80 mentions.

How would you compare the whale incident with that? Does it make you miss Romney? Yes, he was boring, but we’ve certainly learned how much worse a candidate can be. Don’t forget: Kennedy also dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park. His explanation was that he’d found it on the side of a road and decided to take it home to refrigerate its meat. Then, upon realizing that he was late to a steakhouse dinner, he changed his mind and left the carcass in the park, creating a stir he called “amusing.”

Kennedy, you may remember, says he once suffered from memory issues because of a dead worm in his brain. He’s now supporting Trump for president, and Trump might even consider giving an administration job to his new pal.

No further comments seem necessary. Just remember that whale.

When Vice President Kamala Harris started talking policy with a heavily promoted speech about voters’ top concern — the economy — where do you suppose she did it?

My home state, North Carolina. And my governor, Roy Cooper, was the Democrat chosen to introduce her on the climactic final night of the party’s convention.

But then Donald Trump stages a rally in North Carolina seemingly every other week — often enough that I’m terrified he’ll build and start hanging out at some Tar Heel analogue of Mar-a-Lago. He’s fixated on this place.

For good reason. North Carolina has 16 Electoral College votes — the same as Georgia, one more than Michigan and only one fewer than Ohio. And they appear to be in play. On Tuesday, the Cook Political Report moved North Carolina into the tossup category.

The state hasn’t voted Democratic in a presidential election since 2008, when Barack Obama won, but Joe Biden lost here in 2020 by only about 75,000 votes, or under 1.4 percentage points.

And 2024 is different. Political analysts here tell me that they’re struck by the burst of energy for the Harris campaign and its significant investment in the state, where, according to the Pew Research Center, about 23 percent of eligible voters are Black, in contrast to 14 percent nationally. They haven’t seen anything like it since 2008.

Additionally, Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., noted that in the Republican presidential primary here, Nikki Haley received hefty percentages of the votes in urban counties even though her campaign by then was a lost cause. That suggests a potent anti-Trump sentiment among moderate Republicans and independents.

There’s yet another distinctive dynamic this time around. The slate of Republican candidates for statewide office is MAGA fury through and through. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, is a firebrand with a history of misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic and altogether deranged remarks. Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction, has suggested that Cooper, Biden, Obama, Hillary Clinton and Anthony Fauci should be executed for treason — and that Obama’s killing should be televised.

Asher Hildebrand, a fellow professor at Duke University’s School of Public Policy, said that while that extremism probably won’t “push too many voters to the polls for Harris, it very well might keep some Trump voters home.”

And in an election potentially decided by one measly percentage point, such disaffection absolutely could turn North Carolina blue.