Good morning! They say you should always dream big. Russia took that to heart yesterday when it got mad at Google and hit ‘em with a fine. How much is the fine you ask? Oh, just a casual $20 billion trillion trillion — about 2 billion trillion times the entire world economy. Something tells us that math just ain’t gonna math.

2024

🔒️ Candidates make closing arguments as campaign nears end

As we count down the hours to Election Day, the two campaigns are making their closing arguments and racing to the finish line. It’s no secret that Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are worlds apart on the issues. So let’s take a look at this race, where each candidate stands on a few key issues, and what we might expect from a President Harris or a President Trump 2.0.

Kamala Harris, perhaps leery of following too closely in President Hillary Clinton’s footsteps, hasn’t made her gender much of an issue in the campaign. But we could be days away from breaking that big, final glass ceiling in American politics. Harris would also become only the second sitting vice president to be elected president (rather than getting tragedy-induced promotion) since 1836.

On the policy front, Kamala Harris hasn’t veered too far from Biden-Harris administration moves. After all, she’s right there in the name. She recently said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently from Biden before quickly changing her tune. Let’s take a look at some of her more interesting plans.

• Housing: Harris plans to build 3 million new homes (that’s a 50% boost) over the next four years and give first-time homeowners a $25,000 tax credit.

• Taxes: Taking a page from Trump, Harris wants to end taxes on tips in concert with a boosted minimum wage.

• Childcare: She wants the feds to cap childcare costs at 7% of working families' income.

• Economy: She's made a big push for an "opportunity economy." It emphasizes better jobs and a lower cost of living whether you "live in a rural area, small town, or big city."

The Harris gist: unity, moving on from Trump, opportunity, and equality. You can find her full platform here.

Back on the campaign trail, Harris made her final appearance in Phoenix yesterday before hitting Nevada. She’ll appear in Milwaukee, Wisconsin tonight with Cardi B and a gaggle of other artists. She recently added to her athlete cred with LeBron’s endorsement and to her Republican celebrity (not exactly a large group) cred with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.

• She slammed Trump's remark about protecting women from crime whether they "like it or not" as sexist and devaluing toward women.

Donald Trump could be days away from becoming only the second ex-president to return to the White House and the first to do so since Grover Cleveland in 1892. He would also, at 78, become the oldest president ever elected — a record he also set back in 2016 before Biden beat it in 2020.

On the policy front, Donald Trump has mostly embraced typical Republican positions. But the man who once suggested the U.S. buy Greenland from Denmark has some more interesting ideas, too.

• Cities: Last year, he floated a contest to design and build 10 new cities on federal land.

• Taxes: He took his famed “no taxes on tips” idea and kicked it up a notch last month when he suggested dumping the income tax altogether. He’d prefer it be replaced with tariffs (taxes on imports).

• Economy: Trump said yesterday that he’d like to create a new Cabinet role with an exclusive focus on reducing the cost of living.

• Government: He’s famously proposed creating a new “government efficiency commission” headed by Elon Musk to weed out bad spending.

The Trump gist: security, competence, and affordability. You can find his full platform here.

Back on the campaign trail, Trump made his final stop in Nevada yesterday ahead of a visit to the majority-Arab city of Dearborn, Michigan today. He got a good reaction from rolling up in a garbage truck and a hi-vis vest before winning the crucial endorsement of Jake Paul.

• He sued CBS News for $10 billion for "voter interference through... news distortion" over a recent interview of Harris that he claims was edited to make her look good.

GOVERNMENT

✍️ The most minor of scandals just dropped. Over the objections of the government’s stenographers, White House press aides added an apostrophe to the official government transcript of President Biden’s remarks. The move changes the meaning of his sentence from calling Trump supporters “garbage” to slamming the remarks of a specific Trump rally speaker. But these scripts all end up in the National Archives, so it’s not nothing.

🎃 President Biden and the first lady hosted their final White House Halloween, dubbed “Hallo-read,” on Wednesday. About 8,000 people attended throughout the day and the Bidens later spent an hour handing out treats. No word yet on whether they left anything on a Minion’s head but Jill did dress up as a panda, so that’s something.

📉 The 12-month inflation rate fell to 2.1% in September, according to new data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). It’s trending closer toward the target rate of 2.0%, but voters haven’t forgotten the higher rates of recent years. And that could be bad news for Kamala Harris.

POLITICS

🗳️ Millions of early votes roll in nationwide

It’s almost here! Election Day voting will begin on parts of the East Coast about 95 hours after this email is delivered. But nearly 63 million votes have already been cast. With 54% of voters saying they plan to vote early this year, that trend is likely to continue through the weekend. About 158 million total votes were cast in 2020, so hitting that majority mark is within reach by Monday.

We don’t have vote totals for these early votes yet, so we can’t draw any conclusions. But we can make some observations based on the data state governments have made available.

• More than 500,000 of Georgia’s ~3.7 million voters did not vote in 2020.

• Fifty-eight percent of early voters in Pennsylvania thus far are Democrats. Just 32% are Republicans.

• Democrats are posting smaller 5% and 11% leads in Michigan and Wisconsin.

• But Republicans maintain a 6% edge in Nevada.

What does all this mean? It’s not unreasonable to assume voters are pulling the lever for their own party’s candidate, which might give Democrats some hope. But Democrats have thicc voter registration advantages in many of these states. And they’re swing states anyway. So a lot of voters are actually voting for the other team.

• Republicans have historically waited til Election Day to vote (who doesn’t love a big event?), while Democrats have long tended to vote early.

• So Democrats “leading” in the early vote in some states isn’t necessarily good news for Team D.

Both campaigns appear to think they’re in good positions to win. The Trump campaign believes "victory is within our reach" and that he's in a much better position than at this point in 2020. Meanwhile, Team Harris feels "very, very good" about the early voting situation.

TRIVIA

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin endorsed Donald Trump for president this week, citing Trump's support for space exploration. Long before endorsing a string of Republicans for high office, however, Aldrin was the second person to walk on the moon following his Apollo 11 crewmate Neil Armstrong. Who was president of the United States during that historic mission?

Hint: The year was 1969.

BRIEFS

● Bigger isn’t always better. North Korea test-launched yesterday what it calls “the world’s strongest” intercontinental missile. But the massive launcher required might make this thing useless in wartime.

● The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Virginia could remove thousands of non-citizens from voter rolls after the feds argued that many U.S. citizens were swept up in the move.

● Starbucks’ new CEO wants the chain to return to its OG cozy vibes amid three straight quarters of declining sales. Part of his plan? Buy 200,000 Sharpies.

● The death toll from tragic floods in Valencia, Spain climbed to 158 after a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours on Tuesday.

QUOTE

ANSWER

Apollo 11 astronauts dropped a commemorative plaque on the moon featuring their signatures and that of then-President Richard Nixon. Considering NASA’s plans to return to the moon in 2026 with its planned Artemis III mission, the winner of next week’s election just might join that exclusive club.