The momentum behind Kamala Harris has been so major that it may turn Florida blue again in November.
The Democratic presidential nominee is closing the gap on the Sunshine State’s solidly red status, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV survey of 500 registered voters released Tuesday. The poll results suggest Harris is just five percentage points behind Donald Trump—a far cry from the 19-point advantage that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had over Democrat Charlie Crist in 2022.
The USA Today poll showed Trump receiving the support of 47 percent of surveyed potential voters in Florida, while Harris gained the support of 42 percent. That five-point difference is within the poll’s margin of error.
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. trailed behind with 5 percent, while another 5 percent were undecided or refused to disclose their preference.
Another poll conducted by Civiqs indicated that the number of Democrats feeling positive about the upcoming election had shot up since President Joe Biden exited the race, with approximately 34 percent of the party reportedly feeling hopeful. The number of surveyed participants feeling negative—including “scared,” “depressed,” and “angry”—had all gone down.
That could be why former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke believes that the Lone Star State could also be coming into play for Harris—or, at the very least, that her candidacy would motivate enough Texas Democrats to vote downballot in other contentious races.
“The thing is you now see Democrats smiling,” O’Rourke told MSNBC Monday. “There is joy in our party. There is electricity moving through our system. And yes, places that I think were written off are now in contention.”
“I think Harris-Walz rise or increase the chances that we’re going to be able to win these races,” O’Rourke continued, referring to the House race between Democrat Michelle Vallejo and Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz, as well as Democratic Representative Colin Allred, who’s gunning for Senator Ted Cruz’s seat.
“Who knows, but Joe Biden lost Texas by only 5.5 points in 2020. It’s been moving faster into the blue column than any other battleground state. Anything, I think, is possible in this year, and with the energy that those two are bringing to the ticket, I think that Texas could possibly be in play,” O’Rourke said.
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Donald Trump is still obsessed with his crowd size—and his buddies are only too happy to back him up.
On Monday night, Trump claimed that 60 million people were listening to his one-on-one conversation with Elon Musk, despite the livestream’s own data tracker indicating that just a fraction of that—roughly a million people—had tuned in. Moments later, Musk amended Trump’s verbiage to project that 100 million people would listen to the glitched-out interview “over the next few days [and] weeks.”
But outside of the X Space, Trump’s allies took the crowd space lie to the moon.
“The president going on X with Elon Musk last night—which got almost, I think, 1 billion views now, is a perfect example of how you combat the disinformation being pumped out by the Democrat media cabal and the Kamala Harris campaign,” conservative strategist Roger Stone told Newsmax Tuesday.
they’re a couple hours away from claiming 10 billion people listened to Elon Musk fluff Donald Trump last night pic.twitter.com/blFJQTkehd
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2024
It’s possible Stone was referring to a stretched data point elevated by Musk late Monday night, claiming that the discussion’s audience had reached one billion people—if you lumped in the livestream audience with the aggregate views of every single post made in relation to or mentioning Trump’s talk.
But whether it comes from his allies or the GOP presidential nominee himself, the X crowd nonsense is just another indicator that Trump can’t stop obsessing over his dwindling crowd sizes—and Harris’s growing popularity. Last week, Trump spent some of his spontaneous Mar-a-Lago presser boasting about his attendance numbers, including claiming that his January 6 crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (photographic evidence proves it wasn’t even close).
On Truth Social, Trump lamented that the “fake news … refuse to mention crowd size” when he believes he has more attendees. He also pushed a baseless conspiracy that Harris’s campaign had turned to A.I. to distort her crowd numbers. And on Sunday, the bloviating populist seemed to completely lose it over the issue, claiming online that Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “cheated” at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and that the 15,000 supporters who showed up to see them arrive “DIDN’T EXIST.”
In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and even exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. Late last week, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”
Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that the short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which reportedly only permitted the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, was evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign. Trump’s return to X on Monday—the first time the Republican had posted in earnest to his account since he was banned following the January 6 riot—was seen as further evidence that the campaign had reached a “break glass” moment amid GOP panic over Harris’s surging lead.
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J.D. Vance helped to fund a startup that was supposed to make things better for working people in eastern Kentucky. But not only did it fail, it provided terrible working conditions, causing employees to flee in droves—only to be soon replaced by migrant workers.
CNN reports that in 2017, in the wake of his successful book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was hired by AOL co-founder Steve Case to invest in underserved markets. One week later, Vance took a meeting with Jonathan Webb, the founder of a startup called AppHarvest.
AppHarvest’s plan was to create an indoor farming operation growing fruits and vegetables in eastern Kentucky, an economically distressed region close to much of the U.S. population with plenty of land and water nearby. Webb had already drained his savings and maxed out his credit cards to run the startup, and he needed more cash. So he reached out to investors, including Vance.
Vance would invest $150,000 in AppHarvest, with other investors chipping in $50,000 each. While Senate disclosures say Vance was named to the company’s board of directors in March 2017, AppHarvest’s security filings say that he joined in 2020. Vance’s own venture capital firm, Narya, had AppHarvest as one of its earliest publicly disclosed investments.
Over the next few years, Vance helped the startup get millions of dollars in capital, and helped Webb as a pitchman. All the while, AppHarvest was hiring eastern Kentucky locals to help with its crops, having pledged to bring thousands of jobs to “high unemployment areas,” according to a presentation it gave to investors in 2020.
At first, things were going well, said one new hire, Anthony Morgan. He said his hours as a crop care specialist were manageable and that the benefits were better than anything else in the area. But a few months later, production fell behind and workers were put under pressure. The company cut employee health care benefits along with other costs, and hours were increased with breaks cut.
For workers like Morgan, that meant longer days in a very hot greenhouse, which put them in danger.
“I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan told CNN. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up and you seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”
As conditions got worse, more and more workers left the company. Morgan organized a sit-in to demand better conditions and was later fired after he took time off to get treatment for an injury that he suffered on the job, he said.
Morgan’s issues were shared by other workers at the company. One other crop care specialist, Shelby Hester, said that the company didn’t provide masks for employees to deal with mold and other contaminants in the greenhouses. Hester corroborated Morgan’s account of workers experiencing heat stroke symptoms, and added that managers disregarded doctor’s notes as a reason to miss work.
With native Kentuckians leaving their jobs, their positions were soon filled by migrant workers coming from countries like Mexico and Guatemala. Politicians and other leaders, like Senator Mitch McConnell, would visit the company’s facilities, only for the migrant workers to be sent away so they wouldn’t be seen.
Kentucky state inspectors visited AppHarvest facilities but didn’t issue any citations, and instead lauded supposed company precautions like mandatory heat breaks and drinks for employees. Nothing would ever happen, and the poor working conditions were documented in a report last year by Grist and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
The company went bankrupt in 2023 with $341 million in debt, dealing with millions of dollars in lawsuits. Vance left the company’s board in April 2021 before his run for the Senate in Ohio but still had $100,000 invested in the company. With Vance touting his business record as the Republican vice presidential nominee, AppHarvest is another big strike against him and the campaign.
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