| | | | |  | | By Garrett Ross | | Presented by |  | | | |  | THE CATCH-UP | | | DEPT. OF SABER-RATTLING — Less than a week before the presidential election, KIM JONG UN is reminding the world he’s still hanging around — and ready to cause trouble. In what’s something of a pattern for the North Korean regime, a major ICBM test was carried off overnight in a move that seeks “to grab Washington’s attention,” WSJ’s Timothy Martin writes . The missile launched this morning demonstrated new frontiers of technical competence for the North Koreans, flying “for more than 85 minutes … [topping the] previous record of roughly 74 minutes.” It’s unclear if it would be capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the U.S. mainland. Speaking of despots … Hungarian PM VIKTOR ORBÁN posts to X at 8:32 a.m. : “Just got off the phone with President @realDonaldTrump. I wished him the best of luck for next Tuesday. Only five days to go. Fingers crossed.” POLL POSITION — WaPo’s latest poll out of Michigan finds an interesting flip-flop effect in the coin-toss presidential race: Among registered voters, DONALD TRUMP leads KAMALA HARRIS 47% to 45%. But among likely voters, Harris holds a 47% to 46% lead over Trump. Speaking of Michigan … Trump is planning to close out his campaigning in Grand Rapids, per WaPo’s Hannah Knowles. The latest crop: Trump +1 in Georgia and Harris +1 in North Carolina, per CNN.
|  Whether Kamala Harris can capitalize on a strong economy could prove decisive on Election Day. | Mike Stewart/AP Photo | FLYING ECONOMY — The final pre-election inflation reading dropped this morning, with data showing that inflation broadly continues to cool, as it has done for the past two years. It’s good news for the Fed and perhaps more importantly for Harris — but whether she can turn the reality into real impact next week remains to be seen. The breakdown: “Prices climbed just 2.1 percent compared with a year earlier. That is nearly back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent inflation goal,” NYT’s Jeanna Smialek reports. “Still, the report also shows evidence that price increases remain stickier under the surface,” with so-called “core” inflation ticking up a tad on a monthly basis. Despite the relatively rosy outlook for the economy, polling says that voters still “feel relatively glum about its recent track record,” Jeanna notes for the NYT. “The lingering pessimism is also something of a puzzle. … Confidence has crept back up as inflation has cooled, but it remains much lower than it was the last time the economy looked as solid as it does today. That is true for both the University of Michigan’s confidence index and a separate measure produced by the Conference Board, an organization that conducts business and economic research.” And it’s not just that the economy is performing better than expected — it’s outshining all peers. “With another solid performance in the third quarter, the U.S. has grown 2.7% over the past year. It is outrunning every other major developed economy, not to mention its own historical growth rate,” WSJ’s Greg Ip writes. Whoever wins the White House this month, Ip writes, will enter office with an economic strength not seen in years: “Three of the past four newcomers to the White House took office in or around a recession (the exception was Donald Trump, in 2017), which consumed much of their first-term agenda.” CLICKER — “How the U.S. Election Matters for the Rest of the World,” from NYT foreign correspondents, who detail the stakes beyond America’s borders LETTER FROM A SWING STATE — “Why North Carolina Stays Stubbornly Red,” by Steve Harrison for POLITICO Magazine in Lexington, North Carolina: “Rural and exurban places like Davidson County may not be growing as fast as Charlotte and Raleigh but they’re serving as a powerful political counterweight.” Good Thursday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. Send me the best politics-related Halloween costumes you see today: gross@politico.com.
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Click here & learn more. | | | | | 6 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW | | |  Both sides of the abortion debate have underlined extreme positions of their opposition to drive voters. | Rebecca Blackwell/AP | 1. ALL-OUT ON ABORTION: This year is the first presidential election since the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade, and campaigns from the top to the bottom of the ticket are leaning on abortion messaging to drive voters. One thing that’s been lost in much of the debate? Nuance. “More than 80 percent of abortions in the United States happen before 10 weeks, in the embryonic stage of pregnancy. But in the politics of abortion, the arguments and almost all of the ads focus on the other end, on the much rarer abortions later in pregnancy,” NYT’s Kate Zernike reports, noting that many of the closing arguments on abortion have simply “become a race to paint the other side as more extreme.” And yet, Republicans across the country have spent the run-up to Election Day trying to carve out a space on abortion that won’t deliver them a resounding loss, “going so far as to borrow language that would not feel out of place” at a Harris rally, NYT’s Allison McCann and Vivian Li report . “At least a half-dozen Republican candidates have put out direct-to-camera ads declaring their opposition to a federal abortion ban. Instead, they say, they support exceptions to existing state laws and back protections for reproductive health care, such as I.V.F.” 2. WHAT’S TO COME: “‘January 6th is going to be pretty fun’: How MAGA activists are preparing to undermine the election if Trump loses,” by CNN’s Curt Devine, Casey Tolan and Donie O’Sullivan: “Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests — culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results. … Trump’s allies — and the former president himself – are increasingly pushing debunked claims of voter fraud, spreading their rhetoric through podcasts with massive audiences, megachurch sermons and political rallies in key states.” Related read: “She Saw Jan. 6 Coming. Here’s What Worries Her Now,” by Betsy Woodruff Swan: “The founder of a private intelligence firm says far-right extremists are ramping up — before the election.” 3. GUNS IN AMERICA: “Gun death rates in some U.S. states comparable to conflict zones, study finds,” by WaPo’s Rachel Pannett: “The report, published Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research group, found that the overall rate of firearms deaths in Mississippi was nearly twice that of Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation where violent gangs control large swaths of the country and whose president was assassinated by gunmen in 2021. “Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama also had higher firearms death rates than Mexico, where rival drug cartels are engaged in bloody conflict. Montana’s death rate from guns was higher than in Colombia, where drug trafficking is rife. Wyoming, Arizona and Oklahoma all ranked above Brazil. Suburban New Jersey had a higher gun death rate than Nicaragua, Mali and Djibouti.” See the full report
| | | | REGISTER NOW: Join POLITICO and Capital One for a deep-dive discussion with Acting HUD Secretary Adrianne Todman, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL), Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and other housing experts on how to fix America’s housing crisis and build a foundation for financial prosperity. Register to attend in-person or virtually here. | | | | | 4. DEMOGRAPHIC DIVE: In the final weeks of the campaign, both candidates are stepping up their outreach in Indian Country, particularly in Arizona, which holds the highest population of Native Americans of the battleground states. “Democrats have spent money on ads, staff and other efforts across battleground states to mobilize Native Americans as a potential difference-maker in a tight race,” WaPo’s Patrick Svitek and Dylan Wells report . “Republicans have also made efforts at outreach to tribal communities in Arizona, arguing, among other things, that Trump is the best candidate to create economic opportunity for them. About a fifth of Native Americans live below the poverty level, according to the American Community Survey.” 5. CAUGHT ON TAPE: Despite repeatedly running away from the support of Trump in public, Maryland GOP Senate candidate LARRY HOGAN in a private call with donors called attention to Trump’s endorsement of his campaign and “suggested it helps him with the former president’s ‘hard core’ supporters,” CNN’s Sarah Ferris reports . “On the call Wednesday, a local GOP donor asked Hogan about the public perception that Hogan and Trump ‘hate each other.’ The former Maryland governor clarified that he did actually receive Trump’s endorsement, according to a video of the call exclusively obtained by CNN. ‘Donald Trump actually endorsed me,’ Hogan says, interrupting the donor and repeating: ‘Donald Trump actually endorsed me.’” 6. BIDEN’S BILLIONS: Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law marked the largest-ever investment to protect the nation against hurricanes, droughts, wildfires and other disasters being intensified by climate change. But nearly three years later, “the majority of that $33.6 billion remains unspent, POLITICO found in an analysis of federal data — a lag that imperils Biden’s hopes of building the nation’s resilience to the maladies of a warming world,” Zack Colman and Jessie Blaeser report. “The needs for this kind of spending are likely to be bottomless given the galloping pace of climate change, as seen by the devastation that Hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted in just the past month. But the progress of launching this work has been slow: Through the end of September, 80 federal programs that received $24.4 billion of the climate resilience money had awarded just $10.3 billion of it, according to POLITICO’s review of spending data provided by agencies.”
| | PLAYBOOKERS | | Gretchen Whitmer, Maura Healey, Janet Mills and Phil Murphy are going as Tim Walz for Halloween. Nate Silver, Stuart Stevens and … Bette Midler are beefing. Cardi B is set to join Kamala Harris for a rally in Milwaukee tomorrow. Jasmine Crockett went on Keke Palmer’s podcast. IN MEMORIAM — “Lewis Sorley, 90, Who Said the U.S. Won (but Then Lost) in Vietnam, Dies,” by NYT’s Adam Nossiter: “Mr. Sorley’s revisionist book ‘A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam,’ published in 1999, enjoyed a vogue at the Pentagon in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when officers were assigned to read it in the hope that it might offer a positive prognosis for those conflicts. As it turned out, it didn’t. And outside the Pentagon, the book’s main thesis was largely rejected.” OUT AND ABOUT — The Institute for Education and the Kingdom of Belgium held a dinner and discussion, “Finish Line: The Political Landscape at the End of a Historic Campaign,” hosted by Sophie Karlshausen and Kathy “Coach” Kemper last night, where Jerry Seib and Damian Paletta were honored as special guests. The cuisine was provided by chef Wout Sabbe. SPOTTED: R. David Edelman, David Fenstermaker, Matt Lira, Shaun Modi, Marci Robinson, Barbara Rosewicz, Jennifer Rudy, Kaivan Shroff, David Spence and Kelsey Kemper Valentine. — SPOTTED at a party at the Beach Cafe in Manhattan last night for Bianca de la Garza’s new book “Incoming: On the Front Lines of the Left’s War on Truth” ($17.43): Elliot Jacobson, Valeria Riccioli, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), Betsy McCaughey, Kelly Jane Torrance, Jon Levine, Rita Cosby, Greg Kelly, Bob Brooks, Tom DelBeccaro, Deneen and Tom Borelli, Rebecca Karabus, Anthony Ziccardi, Mike Davis, Evan Warner, Marc Lotter, Vish Burra, Doug Dechert and Dave Goodside. TRANSITIONS — Suzanne Nossel will be president and CEO of Freedom House. She most recently has been the longtime CEO of PEN America. … Bryan Bashur is joining Narrative Strategies as director. He previously was director of financial policy at Americans for Tax Reform. … Ron Storhaug is joining Cornerstone Government Affairs’ federal government relations team. He previously was deputy assistant secretary for tax and budget in the Treasury Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs. … … John Kolasheski, Halimah Najieb-Locke and CK Cheruvettolil are joining DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group as senior advisers. Kolasheski most recently was commanding general of the U.S. Army V Corps. Najieb-Locke most recently was deputy assistant secretary for industrial base resilience at the Defense Department. Cheruvettolil previously led the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s digital health and AI strategy. … WEDDING — Bridget Reed Morawski, a freelance environmental journalist in Washington and a WaPo alum, and Aaron Anderson, a senior site reliability engineer, got married Friday at the new Ironworks at Pencoyd Landing venue in Philadelphia. They met at Emerson College. Pic … Another pic Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.
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