Morning Report — Hurricane Milton poses catastrophic Florida risk
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In today’s issue:
- Floridians flee massive Hurricane Milton
- Democrats are getting worried
- Supreme Court skeptical of ghost guns
- Trump gave Putin COVID-19 tests, book says
Hurricane Milton, which regained Category 5 strength Tuesday, is barreling toward the Gulf Coast of Florida early this morning and is expected to strike much of the state in darkness tonight. The storm has sustained winds of 160 mph and is centered on a diagonal trajectory about 300 miles southwest of Tampa.
More than 5.9 million people have been urged to leave flood zones or exit the state, one of the largest evacuations in Florida’s history. Highways were jammed Tuesday and some gas stations were out of fuel.
The cities near the mouth of Tampa Bay have not yet recovered from the worst storm surge in memory during Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago, although that cyclone made landfall more than 100 miles to the north. The low-lying Tampa Bay region could be hit with 15 feet of storm surge, according to forecasters. Hurricane-force winds extend 30 miles from Milton’s eye.
The Hill: What time could the storm make landfall? Answer: Late tonight or early Thursday.
Milton is expected to make landfall as a Category 3 or Category 4 storm with winds surpassing 111 mph. (Sustained winds are considered damaging beyond 50 mph.)
Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned residents who experienced unexpected flooding catastrophes after Helene that they should heed evacuation orders by this morning, or risk fatalities because of the projected storm surge. More than a foot of rain could add to the danger.
“You don’t have to go to another state, you just have to get to higher ground,” Castor said. “This is going to be an event like none other.”
The approaching storm forced Univision to cancel a planned Miami town hall interview, scheduled Tuesday night with former President Trump.
President Biden, who was scheduled to travel Thursday to Germany and then Angola, announced he would instead remain at the White House to monitor the Milton emergency.
BOB’S SMART TAKE:
Weather events usually become political, and Hurricanes Helene and Milton are no exception.
Harris and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) exchanged barbs after the White House told reporters that the governor was ignoring calls from the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
DeSantis said he was unaware of the Harris calls and noted he has dealt with other hurricanes.
He told Fox News, “She has no role in this. In fact, she’s been vice president for three and a half years. I’ve dealt with a number of storms under this administration. She has never contributed anything to any of these efforts…”
It’s unclear which side is spinning, but the White House and DeSantis need to lower the temperature. Milton has become one of the biggest storms in history and the focus needs to be on saving lives.
Harris and DeSantis don’t need to have a bonding moment like President Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) did in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey. But they must put election-year politics aside.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), contrary to public confusion and a torrent of false assertions that infuriated state and local officials about the aid now being provided to struggling families and communities,will not exhaust all funding in order to help victims of Hurricanes Helene and Milton (or to respond to other possible disasters ahead).
“The reality is that FEMA has so many resources that are available to folks who desperately need them now,” Vice President Harris said Monday.
The vice president and DeSantis traded barbs about which party and which officials and candidates are playing politics during a weather-caused crisis. GOP running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio in a Wall Street Journal opinion article this morning accused the president and vice president of “flouting their duties” during hurricane response.
Trump, who governed through natural disasters and met with storm victims as president, this week falsely said federal agencies under the Biden-Harris administration were not helping hurricane-damaged communities. He incorrectly asserted that FEMA rerouted disaster relief funds to other purposes.
Biden, speaking Tuesday following advisers’ briefings about the federal responses to Helene and Milton, said he directed his administration to help save lives and provide assistance “before, during and after” the extreme weather events — “and that’s being done,” he added. The White House released a fact sheet to outline administration responses to date.
▪The Hill: Two back-to-back major hurricanes are exposing the inadequacy of insurance policies and lack of coverage for many homeowners, companies, small businesses and hard-hit communities.
▪The New York Times: The National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, N.C., which collects data from around the world to help track Earth’s warming, took a punch from Hurricane Helene. Work is underway to get it back online.
FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund appropriations serve multiple federal agencies involved in emergency assistance domestically. Congress and the president can assess what’s required for ongoing disasters and agree to replenish or augment available funds.
The last time disaster relief funding was this politicized before an election was in 2012. Republican lawmakers at that time paid a political price for holding up additional relief funding, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports.
Republicans, such as Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolinaand Rick Scott of Florida, would like to see Congress quickly approve additional funding during an emergency session, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said there will be time to tackle the hurricane relief question when the House and Senate regroup after the election. Democrats now want to use billions of dollars in disaster relief as a bargaining chip to pass an omnibus spending package before the end of the year.
Scott, using his official social media platforms Tuesday night, warned constituents. “NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO WAIT. Don’t wait. Get to safety NOW,” he wrote. “THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE to EVACUATE.”
3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY:
▪ Business leaders insist they see clouds gathering on the economic horizon as central bankers project confidence and U.S. employment appears strong.
▪ Artificial intelligence, or at least the human brains responsible for artificial neural networks, won a Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday. The recognition went to scientists Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield.
▪Alaska’s annual Fat Bear Contest has a winner named Grazer this week.
LEADING THE DAY
© The Associated Press | Matt York
ARIZONA: Today marks the first day of early voting in Arizona, and Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) will hold rallies in Tucson. According to a Decision Desk HQ/The Hill average of polls, Trump has a 0.8 point lead in the Grand Canyon State, well within the margin of error.
Harris will hold a rally in Phoenix on Thursday, a day after mail ballots go out across the battleground state. Every vote counts in Arizona, which had the closest margin of any state in the 2020 presidential election.
▪ The Wall Street Journal: Rate increases, combined with another blistering summer, have meant big bills for Arizonans. Politicians, including Trump, have noticed.
▪ Bloomberg News: Iron fences, cameras everywhere: Arizona girds for chaos at the polls.
DEMOCRATS ARE NERVOUS. A few weeks ago, they were feeling bullish about Harris’s prospects. But now, with less than a month to go until Election Day, they’re increasingly worried about a number of matters, from static poll numbers to the vice president’s standing with men.
“Everything is deadlocked and the composition of the electorate is unknowable and there’s so many things that are unprecedented,” Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons, who served as Harris’s communications director until last year, told The Hill’s Amie Parnes. “We can’t look back with any level of security because we haven’t had an African American woman on the ticket. We haven’t had a former president running again. We haven’t had a campaign with two assassination attempts. We haven’t switched out a candidate two months before Election Day before. So, it’s just hard to know. If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention.”
To combat the numbers, Harris is targeting key voting blocs with a media blitz this week — aiming to get in front of seniors, women, Latino voters and young voters. Her strategy is showcasing an all-of-the-above approach in terms of turning to both traditional media and nontraditional outlets — from influential podcasts to “The View” to sitting down with Howard Stern.
A Thursday town hall with Univision will reach Latino voters while her appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast shows outreach for millennial and Generation Z women.
“It’s a very smart move,” said Michael LaRosa, first lady Jill Biden’s traveling press secretary during the 2020 campaign. “They’re leaving no demographic or audience to chance, and it’s precisely what they should be doing. They’re not just expecting those voters to show up; they’re earning those votes by going where they are and asking for their vote.”
The Hill: Harris cracked open a Miller High Life with “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, then criticized Trump and joked that happens when she drinks beer.
IS THE STRATEGY WORKING? In The Memo, The Hill’s Niall Stanage writes that Harris’s media blitz has been mixed. While she handled an appearance on ABC’s “The View” adeptly for the most part, an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” was rockier.
CASH RACE: The 2024 election is slated to be the most expensive in American history, raising questions about the flow of money across the country and its potential impact. The total cost of the 2024 federal election is projected to top $15.9 billion, according to a new estimate from OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit researching the flow of money in American politics. That exceeds the record $15.1 billion spent during the 2020 election.
The Hill’s Taylor Giorno breaks down what to know about money in the 2024 race.
Republicans are scrambling to close the fundraising gap with Democrats in key battleground states. The disparity has led to a few measures for the GOP to try to make up ground in the final weeks, like a switch in ad strategy and outside spending making up for the difference in some states. But The Hill’s Jared Gans reports the GOP’s cash problems have posed lingering questions about how their fundraising struggles could hurt their chances in November.
2024 ELECTION ROUNDUP:
As both Harris and Trump continue to batter one another over storms, the economy and inflation, political watchers say one critical piece of the conversation is missing: the nation’s climbing debt.
Voting by mail is increasingly popular, but mail ballots are rejected far more often than in-person ones. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, parties are battling over which ones to count — or not.
Oklahoma schools are deciding how to follow state Superintendent Ryan Walters’s Bible mandate, if at all, while the official currently has his hands full with his search for what Bible to purchase for classrooms.
Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D) and former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) clashed over foreign policy, manufacturing and immigration during their first debate Tuesday as they battle to replace retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) in the Senate.
House Republicans said back in July that Vance “sets Ohio on fire” and would provide a “real lift” in key races. But they’re not using him in this critical battleground district.
Federal officials have arrested a citizen of Afghanistan who was living in Oklahoma and allegedly plotting an Election Day attack in the name of ISIS.
Ethel Kennedy, a social justice advocate and the widow of late U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, is recovering after suffering a stroke last week.
WHERE AND WHEN
The House will convene a pro forma session at 1 p.m. Friday. The Senate will hold a pro forma session Friday at 8:30 a.m.
The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 10 a.m. Biden will convene a call with rabbis at 2:15 p.m. to commemorate the Jewish High Holidays. The president at 3:15 p.m. will greet Irish Taoiseach H.E. Simon Harris in the Oval Office. The president will speak from the Roosevelt Room at 5:30 p.m. about Hurricane Milton.
The vice president, who is in New York City, will join Biden virtually at noon for briefings conducted in the White House South Court auditorium about hurricanes Milton and Helene.
Candidate schedules this week: Harris heads from New York City to Nevada tonight. She will hold a campaign event in Las Vegas on Thursday before traveling to Arizona, where she will campaign in Phoenix. The vice president will return to Washington, D.C. on Friday. Trump today will campaign at 3 p.m. in Scranton, Pa., and in Reading, Pa., at 7 p.m. On Friday, Trump will hold a 1 p.m. rally in Aurora, Colo. On Saturday, the former president will challenge Harris in her home state with an appearance in Coachella, Calif. Vance holds a rally in Tucson, Ariz., today and Greensboro, N.C., Thursday night. On Saturday afternoon, the Ohio senator will campaign in Johnstown, Pa. Walz this morning will be in Chandler, Ariz., for a veterans and military families event with Arizona Senate candidate Rep. Ruben Gallego. At midday, Walz will join a tribal leaders event in the Phoenix area before flying to Tucson, where he will hold a rally this afternoon.
The White House daily press briefing is scheduled at 1:30 p.m.
ZOOM IN
© The Associated Press | Haven Daley
The Supreme Court on Tuesday signaled it is likely to uphold the Biden administration’s move to regulate “ghost gun” kits. The devices enable a user to assemble a fully functional firearm in a matter of minutes, writes The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld. The Biden administration has raised alarm about ghost guns’ exploding popularity and difficulty in tracing them. Law enforcement officials seized more than 19,000 of them in 2021 alone, the Justice Department said.
In Oklahoma, Richard Glossip, a death row inmate, has been scheduled for execution nine times — and, each time, has avoided that fate following legal twists and turns. Convicted for the 1997 killing of his former boss, Glossip has maintained his innocence for nearly three decades, The Hill’s Ella Lee reports. Now, Gentner Drummond, the state’s Republican attorney general, has joined him in urging the Supreme Court to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence to grant him a new, fair trial. That unlikely turn of events placed the rare capital case before the justices, who will consider Glossip’s latest bid for freedom during arguments on Wednesday.
In Colorado, the state’s Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit on procedural grounds against a Christian baker who would not make a cake for a transgender woman.
The Atlantic: How special counsel Jack Smith outsmarted the Supreme Court — and why it may not matter.
ELSEWHERE
© The Associated Press | Sergei Ilnitsky, EPA
TRUMP AND PUTIN: In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged and the world confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use. Putin, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me” (The Washington Post).
Russian state media company VGTRK, which owns and operates the country’s main national TV stations, was targeted in a massive cyberattack on Monday that a Ukrainian government source said was caused by Kyiv. Hackers also targeted Russia’s court information system, taking down court websites and claiming to have wiped court documents and decisions in the system’s database. The hacks coincided with Putin’s 72nd birthday (Reuters).
The New York Times: The roots of Trump’s animus toward Ukraine — an issue with profound consequences should he be elected again — can be found in a yearlong series of events spanning 2016 and 2017.
ISRAEL AND HEZBOLLAH continued to trade heavy fire Tuesday as the Israeli military signaled it may be expanding its ground military offensive in Lebanon and Hezbollah’s highest-ranking official pledged to keep fighting. Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem said the group supports a 21-day cease-fire with Israel, though it has long said it would not agree to a more permanent truce without a cease-fire in Gaza as well.
Meanwhile, the White House has grown increasingly distrustful of what the Israeli government says about its military and diplomatic plans, Axios reports. Israel’s planned retaliation against Iran for its massive missile attack is magnifying the lack of trust; retaliation would require coordination with the U.S. in case Iran responds. Officials said the Biden administration has been surprised several times recently by Israeli military or intelligence operations.
“Our trust of the Israelis is very low right now and for a good reason,” one U.S. official said.
Biden is expected to speak on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, talks set to include discussion of any plans to strike Iran. Israel has so far refused to divulge to the Biden administration details of its plans to retaliate against Tehran, officials said (Reuters and The Wall Street Journal).
▪ The Washington Post: A planned visit to Washington by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was abruptly canceled, a sign of tensions between the two allies that casts doubt on whether the Biden administration can prevent Israel’s multifront conflict from exploding into wider war.
▪ The New York Times: What is Hamas capable of after a year of war?
▪ Wall Street Journal: Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, has revived the practice of suicide bombings to achieve the group’s goals.
OPINION
■ “I can’t even find the right adjective”: Hurricane Milton offers a catastrophic reminder, by Eugene Robinson, columnist, The New York Times.
■ Washington racks up another $1.8 trillion budget deficit, by The Wall Street Journal editorial board.
THE CLOSER
© The Associated Press | Ed Bailey
And finally … 🎭 On this day in 1986, “Phantom of the Opera” premiered on stage in London, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and starring Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman. It ran for 13,629 performances.
Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, the musical tells the tragic story of soprano Christine Daaé, who becomes the obsession of a mysterious but disfigured musical genius living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Paris Opera House.
The Tony- and Olivier Award-winning musical had its Broadway premiere in 1988 and was at one point the longest running show in Broadway history, celebrating its 10,000th performance in 2012.
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