In 2024, all eyes are on Pennsylvania: its nineteen electoral votes make it the largest swing state, and it’s considered a critical battleground for either  or  to win the White House. For many years, Pennsylvania trended slightly blue, but the state has become deeply purple—with a divided state House and a series of razor-thin margins in general elections. One notable exception to this was the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race. The Democrat Josh Shapiro won by almost fifteen points against a Trump-aligned Republican, and his approval ratings in the state remain high. “To win in Pennsylvania, you’re not winning with only Democrats,” Shapiro told David Remnick. “You’ve got to get like-minded Independents and Republicans.” Shapiro was on the shortlist of candidates for Harris’s pick for Vice-President—which may be the cause of attacks from Donald Trump, including one calling him an “overrated Jewish governor.” He spoke with Remnick to talk about Harris’s  of Minnesota’s governor, , as her running mate, and what it takes for a Democrat to win Pennsylvania. “We’re a big state, but we’re still a retail state,” Shapiro said, “meaning you got to show up!”

The Washington Roundtable is joined by George Conway, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and creator of the Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee, both of which specialize in making custom attack ads designed to aggravate Donald Trump. They discuss Vice-President Kamala Harris’s debate performance and how her campaign might continue to draw out Trump’s worst instincts by psychologically triggering him. “When we first started running ads, he went on Truth Social and specifically attacked me and Fox News for putting my ads on his TV,” Conway says. “The thing got into his head. . . . He would never have talked about himself possibly having a ‘personality defect’ if it weren’t for what we had said.”

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Kamala Harris successfully prosecuted a case against Donald Trump on issues ranging from abortion to the January 6th insurrection at last night’s debate in Philadelphia. How will that fare with voters against Trump’s “fan service” recitation of Internet conspiracies? Tyler Foggatt sits down with the New Yorker staff writers Clare Malone and Vinson Cunningham to examine each candidate’s performance, along with a surprise Taylor Swift endorsement for Harris, and what it means with less than two months until Election Day. 

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Of the sixty-five lawsuits that Donald Trump’s team filed in the 2020 election, Democrats won sixty-four—with the attorney Marc Elias spearheading the majority.  Elias was so successful that Steve Bannon speaks of him with admiration. 

Now Marc Elias is working for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and, despite his past victories, Elias says that 2024 is keeping him up at night.  The bizarre antics and conspiracy theories of Rudy Giuliani are a thing of the past, Elias tells David Remnick: “We should all expect that they are more competent than they were before. And also Donald Trump is more desperate than he was before. … He faces the prospect of four criminal indictments, two of which are in federal court.” Election-denying officials are now in power in many swing states; Trump has publicly praised his allies on state election boards.  Elias fears the assault on the democratic process could be much more effective this time.  Still, some things don’t change. “I believe Donald Trump is going to say after Election Day in 2024 that he won all fifty states—that there’s no state he didn’t win,” Elias says. “That is just the pathology that is Donald Trump.”

The Washington Roundtable revisits Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s past debate performances and considers how the candidates might approach next week’s showdown. “Trump doesn’t do subdued self-defense,” Evan Osnos says. “He’ll come back furious and basically do a lot of the work for [Harris] of showing, to borrow one of his favorite adjectives, what a ‘nasty’ guy he is. I think that could be pretty effective for her.” Plus, where the fund-raising race stands with Election Day only two months away.

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How has a phrase that just a decade ago had a narrow, technical definition come to essentially represent anything political that we don’t like? Jon Allsop, who writes Columbia Journalism Review’s daily newsletter and contributed this week to The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how “election interference” has become a ubiquitous term and what that indicates about the future of American political discourse. “It’s a project that is designed to insulate candidates against losing, whether they actually lose or not,” Allsop said. 

In fiction and nonfiction, the author Danzy Senna focusses on the experience of being biracial in a nation long obsessed with color lines. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President, some of Senna’s concerns have come to the fore in political life. Donald Trump attacked Harris as a kind of race manipulator, implying that she had been Indian American before becoming Black for strategic purposes.  The claim was bizarre and false, but Senna feels that it reflected a mind-set in white America. “Mixed-race people are sort of up for debate and speculation, and there’s a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your background is or your identity,” she tells Julian Lucas, who wrote about Senna’s work in The New Yorker.  “And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we’re going to debate you and we’re going to discount you and we’re going to accuse you of being an impostor.”  Senna talks about why she describes people like herself and Lucas using the old word “mulatto,” despite its racist etymology. “The word ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ to me is completely meaningless,” she says, “because I don’t know which races were mixing.  And those things matter when we’re talking about identity.”  Senna’s newest novel, “Colored Television,” follows a literary writer somewhat like herself, trying to find a new career in the more lucrative world of TV.

The New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry joins Tyler Foggatt to unpack Kamala Harris’s cultural blitzkrieg and how a litany of A-list celebrities and online influencers have helped revitalize the Presidential race. “It’s like the scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’ or something, where Uma Thurman overdoses and then has the adrenaline shot into her heart,” Fry said. To what degree can a candidate turn “being cool” into a winning strategy?

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The Washington Roundtable discusses the highs and lows of the Democratic National Convention and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s rousing acceptance speech, with Evan Osnos and Susan B. Glasser reporting from Chicago. Plus, behind-the-scenes moments from the “festival atmosphere” for delegates, donors, and influencers, at the United Center. 

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The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the sights, sounds, and broader implications of the Democratic National Convention. Marantz describes a convention defined by feelings of unity and a profound sense of relief among party insiders. Plus, they reflect on the D.N.C.’s use of what Marantz describes as “cringe-millennial” culture.
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