Today in one sentence: House Speaker Mike Johnson promised a “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act if Trump is reelected and Republicans retain control of the House; Trump promised to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “control” of several public health agencies, and appoint Elon Musk to a new “government efficiency commission” that would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship”; the economy grew at an 2.8% annual rate during the third quarter; Trump, if re-elected, plans to withhold federal grants from local law enforcement agencies that refuse to support his proposed mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; the Supreme Court allowed Virginia to remove about 1,600 people from the state’s voter registration rolls less than a week before the presidential election; Biden referred to Trump's supporters as "garbage"; and Kamala Harris, delivering her closing message to a crowd of 75,000 people at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., urged Americans to embrace a “new generation of leadership.”

  • The presidential election is 6 days away.

  • 📈 Polling Vibes.

  • Harris +1.0 points (New York Times)
    Harris +1.4 points (FiveThirtyEight)
    Harris +1.1 points (Nate Silver)
    Harris +1.4 points (The Economist)
    Trump +0.4 points (RealClearPolitics)
    Harris +1.5 points (Split Ticket)

  • 🔮 Forecasting Vibes.

  • Editor’s note: Forecasts are probabilities, not certainties. They reflect the current vibes, not the final result.

  • Trump wins 51 times out of 100. Harris wins 49 times out of 100. (FiveThirtyEight)
    Trump wins 54 times out of 100. Harris wins 46 times out of 100. (Nate Silver)
    Trump wins 50 times out of 100. Harris wins 50 times out of 100. (The Economist)
    Trump wins 50 times out of 100. Harris wins 49 times out of 100. (JHK Forecasts)
    Harris wins 52 times out of 100. Trump wins 47 times out of 100. (Split Ticket)
    Harris wins 52 times out of 100. Trump wins 46 times out of 100. (CNalysis)
    Trump wins 62 times out of 100. Harris wins 38 times out of 100. (Election Betting Odds)

  • 💡 Poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions. “Simple changes in how to weight a single poll can move the Harris-Trump margin 8 points.” (Good Authority)

  • 💡 How not to freak out about the election. “Do you have a problem now?” “Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now.”(Oliver Burkeman)

  • 🗳️ Early voting is surging across the U.S. Explore the data. “Early voting has begun in states across the country where voters are able to cast their ballots either in person or via mail.” (NBC News)

  • ⏳ When polls close in each state and how long it may take to count votes. “Vote counting isn’t expected to be nearly as slow as it was last time around, but there’s a chance we won’t know the outcome of the presidential race — and possibly even control of Congress — on election night.” (Washington Post)

1/ House Speaker Mike Johnson promised a “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act if Trump is reelected and Republicans retain control of the House. “Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson told the crowd at a rally in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table.” When an attendee asked Johnson, “No Obamacare?” Johnson, rolling his eyes, replied: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” Trump, meanwhile, has only offered that he has “concepts of a plan” when it came to replacing the Affordable Care Act. Trump tried and failed to repeal the ACA as president. (NBC News / Washington Post / New York Times / CNN)

2/ Trump promised to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “control” of several public health agencies, and appoint Elon Musk to a new “government efficiency commission” that would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship.” Kennedy, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, said his agenda would be “making America healthy” through the “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA […] Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture.” During the racist campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Trump said he would let Kennedy “go wild on the medicines.” Musk, meanwhile, agreed that Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, extend his 2017 tax cuts, eliminate the personal income tax, and impose blanket tariffs up to 20% on all imported goods would “necessarily involve some temporary hardship” to “ensure long-term prosperity.” Economists widely agree that Trump’s economic and fiscal proposals would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality,” as well as undermine the rule of law and political certainty. (CNN / NBC News / New York Times / HuffPost / ABC News / Mother Jones)

3/ The economy grew at an 2.8% annual rate during the third quarter. While the GDP increase is at a slightly weaker pace than the second quarter’s 3% rate and below economists’ expectations of 3.1%, the economy has outperformed expectations and defied every prediction of a recession under the Biden administration. (CNN / Wall Street Journal / Politico / Axios / New York Times / CNBC)

  • 💡 Trump wants you to believe that the US economy is doing terribly. It’s untrue. “Despite his claims to the contrary, unemployment is low, inflation is way down, and job growth is remarkably strong.” (The Guardian)

4/ Trump, if re-elected, plans to withhold federal grants from local law enforcement agencies that refuse to support his proposed mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. To pressure local law enforcement agencies into cooperating, Trump plans to cut access to the Byrne JAG grant program, a major federal funding source for law enforcement that allocates over $250 million annually for policing, rehabilitation, and corrections. During his previous term, Trump cut these grants to sanctuary cities, leading to legal battles that delayed implementation until Biden restored the funds in 2021. Confident in the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, Trump’s campaign believes they can overcome legal challenges quickly if re-elected. (NBC News)

5/ The Supreme Court allowed Virginia to remove about 1,600 people from the state’s voter registration rolls less than a week before the presidential election. After a federal judge ruled that Virginia purged 1,600 people from the state’s rolls too close to Election Day in violation of federal law, the Supreme Court granted Virginia’s emergency appeal with no reasoning. The National Voter Registration Act doesn’t allow states to make “systematic” changes to voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election to prevent any last-minute mistakes. Nevertheless, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in August requiring daily updates to state voter rolls to remove suspected noncitizens. It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote, but studies have found that noncitizens voting is extremely rare. (Associated Press / Washington Post / Axios / NPR / Politico / NBC News / Bloomberg / New York Times)

  • The Trump campaign sued Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Board of Elections over claims the county had “turned away voters” who were attempting to apply in person for a mail-in ballot. Pennsylvania Common Court Pleas Judge Jeffrey Trauger granted a preliminary injunction to extend the in-person mail-in-ballot deadline to Nov. 1, finding that the county violated the state’s election code. The previous deadline had been Tuesday. The campaign had asked for one-day extension. (Bloomberg / ABC News / Associated Press / NBC News)

6/ Biden referred to Trump’s supporters as “garbage” when responding to a question about the comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. Although the White House has disputed that interpretation of the quote – “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters” – Republicans immediately connected it to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remark that Trump’s supporters were a “basket of deplorables.” Kamala Harris, meanwhile, distanced herself from the comments, saying “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” She added: “I believe that the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not. And as president of the United States, I will be a president for all Americans, whether you vote for me or not. That is my responsibility, and that’s the kind of work that I’ve done my entire career. And I take it very seriously.” (NBC News / Axios / CNN / Politico / CNN / NPR / Washington Post / Bloomberg / ABC News / Wall Street Journal / Associated Press)

7/ Kamala Harris, delivering her closing message to a crowd of 75,000 people at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., urged Americans to embrace a “new generation of leadership.” America, Harris argued, was born “when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant” and that over generations, Americans had fought threats both foreign and domestic to preserve that freedom. But, “they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant” – a reference to Trump. The U.S. “is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators,” she said, but the “greatest idea humanity ever devised.” The Ellipse is where Trump, on Jan. 6, 2021, encouraged his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Congress from certifying Biden as president. “Americans died as a result of that attack,” Harris said, noting that Trump’s response to his staff describing how protesters wanted to kill Mike Pence was reportedly, “So what?” Before she ended, she said: “It is time to turn the page on the drama and conflict, the fear and division.” (New York Times / Axios / The 19th / CBS News / Associated Press / Wall Street Journal)

✏️ Notables.

  1. U.N. report obscures meat’s true climate impact. “By measuring only direct emissions, the U.N. unintentionally makes a massive polluter look much more innocent than it is.” (HEATED)

  2. A Texas woman died after the hospital said it would be a “crime” to intervene in her miscarriage. “Doctors said it was “inevitable” that Josseli Barnica would miscarry. Yet they waited 40 hours for the fetal heartbeat to stop. She died of an infection three days later.” (ProPublica)

  3. How U.S. Voting Machines Became Safer Than Ever. “The voting system industry is besieged by conspiracy theories, including from the likes of Elon Musk, about mass hacking and rigging of electronic voting machines. And yet the technology is extremely conservative.” (Bloomberg)

  4. How ranked-choice voting could change the way democracy works. “Detractors say it confuses voters. Supporters say it better represents the will of the people.” (Washington Post)

  5. The crisis that could ensue if Harris wins narrowly. “How far would Trump and his supporters go to try and flip the outcome?” (Vox)

  6. Revenge Voting Is a Mistake. “Protesters angry over Kamala Harris’s support for Israel should not forget what they stand to lose.” (The Atlantic)

  7. Will Democracy Survive Another Trump Win? “Autocrats learn from their mistakes,” warns one expert. (Mother Jones)

  8. The Deep Psychological Reason We’re Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump. “It’s been almost a decade, and yet it continues.” (Slate)

  9. If Trump loses the election, our nation can finally rest. “Trump wasn’t the only cause of the craziness of the late 2010s, but he was one cause, and he’s the only major piece of that era that’s threatening to come back.” (Noah Smith - Noahpinion)