Morning Report — Hurricane Milton damages Florida, leaves fatalities 

In today’s issue:

• Hurricane Milton leaves wreckage, fatalities in Florida  
• Presidential contest comes down to Pennsylvania
• Biden’s rocky relationship with Netanyahu
• Take our quiz about candidates and late night TV

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White caps, driving bands of rain and deadly tornadoes were among Hurricane Milton’s earliest warnings before smashing into Florida’s Gulf Coast south of Tampa Wednesday night and making an exit this morning as a Category 1 storm into the Atlantic Ocean.

The state is reckoning with fatalities from tornadoes, power outages that plunged 3 million people into darkness overnight, winds that destroyed the fabric roof on baseball’s Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg and at least 18 inches of rain mixed with storm surge in some areas. 

President Biden, who will be briefed on the storm’s aftermath today, was informed when Milton came ashore around 9 p.m. Wednesday. The hurricane will be back over open water this morning on Florida’s east coast.

Speaking ahead of the storm’s landfall, Biden said he advised state and local officials to phone him directly if they need additional help. He described 1,300 Coast Guard personnel in Florida, 1,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency responders prepositioned in the state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers power restoration teams.   

Ahead of Milton’s fury, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), said he deployed resources, including 9,000 National Guard members from Florida and other states, more than 50,000 utility workers from as far as California, and highway patrol cars with sirens to escort gasoline tankers to replenish supplies so people could fill up their tanks before evacuating.

“Unfortunately, there will be fatalities; I don’t think there’s any way around that,” DeSantis predicted.

He was right. In one county, several people in a retirement community were killed by a tornado, police reported. The state is just beginning to assess Milton’s wreckage.

▪ The Hill: Why did Hurricane Milton become so intense, so fast? Will future storms do the same?

▪ Newsweek: Tornadoes ahead of Milton’s landfall left Floridians without shelter.

▪ The Hill: FEMA has enough money to respond to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

▪ The Hill: Education experts believe students in the aftermath of tragic events including natural disasters need to return to established school routines as soon as possible. That’s easier said than done.

Biden is expected today to reassure Americans that government responders — federal, state and local — will assist people whose lives have been upended by too many natural catastrophes, including four named hurricanes in 2024. Vice President Harris, campaigning in hurricane-pummeled North Carolina and other battleground states, is having a tough time explaining how she would tap her governing experience and her vision as a change agent separate from the president.    

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BOB’S SMART TAKE: 

It was a good question though one that should have been anticipated — and answered. During an appearance on “The View” this week, Harris was asked whether she would have done anything differently to Biden over the last four years.

“Not a thing comes to mind,” Harris responded.

Harris later was asked a similar question on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and she mentioned a line she has used before: “Obviously I’m not Joe Biden…” This was an unforced error with less than a month to go in a presidential contest that could not be closer.

The “change” candidate usually wins, and Harris has topped former President Trump in that category in recent polls. That won’t last if she continues to embrace President Biden and his unpopular policies.

To be clear, Harris doesn’t need to excoriate Biden. But she needs to rattle off a few policy differences (they exist) instead of repeatedly using the “obviously” line. Otherwise, Trump will become the candidate of change and will win on Nov. 5.

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3 THINGS TO KNOW TODAY: 

▪ Should we be preparing for Category 6 hurricanes?

▪ Severe solar storms could stress power grids even more as the U.S. deals with major back-to-back hurricanes.

▪ How to apply for FEMA assistance.

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LEADING THE DAY

There are 26 days until Election Day.

Republicans have seized on Harris’s comments on “The View” and “The Late Show,” which augmented a central theme of Trump’s campaign — that if elected, the vice president would just continue what he describes as the failed policies of Biden. 

Harris worked to correct the misstep, telling “The View” that unlike Biden, she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet. That night, she told Colbert she wasn’t Biden or Trump. The line Harris is walking is difficult, though hardly unprecedented for a vice president seeking to move up to the Oval Office. 

David Thomas, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Vice President Al Gore, said Harris needs to be able to pivot to what her vision of the future is without trampling on Biden.

“You cannot run from the administration you served in,” he said. “You are a part of it, and you should be able to talk about the successes that your administration has had.”

But there’s a bright spot for Harris: a New York Times poll released Tuesday found Harris has pulled slightly ahead of Trump as a change candidate. Forty-six percent of voters said she represents change, while 44 percent said the same of Trump.

PENNSYLVANIA: Pollsters and political analysts say that more than any other state, the Keystone State will decide the winner of the 2024 presidential election. A new Decision Desk HQ analysis gives the winner an 85 percent chance of becoming president.

Harris and Trump — who are deadlocked in the state — are pouring more of their time and money into Pennsylvania than any other battleground. Scott Tranter, the director of data science at Decision Desk HQ, said that Pennsylvania is the decisive state because of its political makeup, which is evenly split between Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning voters distributed across urban, suburban and rural areas.

He also cited its size, accounting for 19 electoral votes, and its history of voting the same way as two other key Midwestern battlegrounds, Michigan and Wisconsin.

“Generally speaking, and this is what the model looks at, however Pennsylvania goes, Michigan and Wisconsin follow,” Tranter said. “That’s not always the case, but the model says probabilistically [it happens] more often than not.”

Trump barnstormed Pennsylvania on Wednesday, holding rallies in Biden’s hometown of Scranton and in Reading. It was his fourth visit to Pennsylvania since the start of September, and came four days after he held a rally in Butler, the site of the July assassination attempt that wounded him.

Former President Obama will launch a get-out-the-vote tour for Harris in Pittsburgh this evening, and Harris herself is expected to visit Erie on Monday for a rally.

The New York Times: Inside the battle for America’s most consequential battleground state.

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2024 ELECTION ROUNDUP:

The great political battle over Hurricane Milton didn’t wait for the storm to land.

Trump is holding up the transition-to-governing planning process before the election, which is embodied in law: “Trump has so far opted out of the official planning for a government handover, a move that allows him to avoid disclosing his donors to his transition effort.”

🎤 CNN gave Trump (and Harris) until today to accept its invitation to debate for second time on Oct. 23. The Harris campaign keeps saying she’ll be there. 

Harris and Trump are virtually deadlocked in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Arizona — four of the major swing states that will play a deciding role in the election, according to new polling from The Hill and Emerson College Polling. 

What will Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) do? That’s the quiet question bouncing around Washington this month as the parties race furiously toward Election Day and Trump is already laying the foundation for challenging the results if he loses. 

House GOP Latinos are building campaign infrastructure to protect their members and grow their numbers, at times directly competing with their Democratic counterparts, who have a huge head start.

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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 9 a.m. Biden at the White House and the vice president (remotely) will be briefed throughout the day about Milton’s aftermath.

First lady Jill Biden will host a “Girls Leading Change” event at 5:30 p.m. at the White House to mark International Day of the Girl.

Candidate schedules this week: Harris will tape a town hall interview with Univision in Las Vegas at 1 p.m. PT to broadcast at 10 p.m. She will depart Las Vegas for Phoenix and arrive in the evening to headline a campaign event in Phoenix at 6:30 p.m. local time. Trump on Friday 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 Greensboro, N.C., tonight. On Saturday afternoon, the Ohio senator will campaign in Johnstown, Pa. Walz on Friday will campaign in Michigan’s Macomb County at 11 a.m. 

The White House daily press briefing is scheduled at 1:30 p.m.

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ZOOM IN

THE SUPREME COURT on Wednesday probed whether Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip’s murder conviction should be thrown out because a key witness lied in court and prosecutors withheld information about him. As Justice Elena Kagan put it, the state’s most important witness, Justin Sneed, was “exposed as a liar.” 

The case is unusual, as Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, has sided with a defendant (NBC News).

Politico: Why the Supreme Court might cast the final vote for president. Three scenarios for major interventions.

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ELSEWHERE

One year after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, Israel is reshaping the Middle East by force, taking the fight to Iran and its proxies with the help of the U.S. — despite pleas by the Biden administration for diplomacy. While Biden is cautioning against a major attack on Iran in retaliation for a missile barrage last week, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Herzog, is warning that “a long and arduous path” lies ahead. 

U.S. officials were blindsided last month when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected a cease-fire proposal in Lebanon that the White House had coordinated with Jerusalem behind closed doors. The episode demonstrates how the Israeli government, under Netanyahu, is reframing the war aims. 

“This is our war of existence — ‘the war of redemption.’ This is how I would like the war to be called officially,” Netanyahu said during a Monday Cabinet meeting. “We are changing the security reality in our region, for our children and for our future, in order to ensure that what happened on Oct. 7 does not recur. Never again.”

Still, the Biden administration has dropped its support for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon and is openly supporting Israel’s ground offensive, a State Department spokesperson said Tuesday, calling the Israeli actions “incursions to degrade Hezbollah’s infrastructure.” Biden and Harris spoke with Netanyahu for the first time since August on Wednesday.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: How Oct. 7 upended America’s global military strategy. The plan was to shift forces to deal with China and Russia. It ran into Middle East headwinds.

▪ The New York Times: More than 600,000 people have been displaced within Lebanon, and more than 300,000 have left the country since the war started, according to the United Nations.

▪ Reuters: Israel needs to urgently address “catastrophic conditions” among Palestinian civilians in Gaza and stop “intensifying suffering” by limiting aid deliveries, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said on Wednesday.

▪ The Washington Post: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán relishes his role as Trump’s favorite European ally.

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OPINION 

■ Harris wants Medicare to pay for home care. How will she pay for that? by The Washington Post editorial board.

■ What will it take for Ukraine to win? by Thomas Graham, opinion contributor, The Hill. 

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THE CLOSER 

Take Our Morning Report Quiz

And finally … It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for this week’s Morning Report Quiz! Inspired by Harris’s appearance on “The Late Show,” we’re eager for some smart guesses about presidential candidates on late-night television.

Be sure to email your responses to asimendinger@digital-staging.thehill.com and kkarisch@digital-staging.thehill.com — please add “Quiz” to your subject line. Winners who submit correct answers will enjoy some richly deserved newsletter fame on Friday.

Who was the first presidential candidate to appear on a late-night talk show?

1. Gerald Ford
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt
3. Calvin Coolidge
4. John F. Kennedy

“Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon made headlines in 2016 for doing what during an interview with then-candidate Trump?

1. Wearing matching ties
2. Ruffling Trump’s hair
3. Recreating a sequence from “The Apprentice”
4. Filming the interview at Trump Tower

During her Tuesday appearance on “The Late Show,” Harris cracked open which brand of beer with host Stephen Colbert?

1. Budweiser
2. Coors
3. Miller High Life
4. Corona Extra

After decades of mostly stoic candidate interviews on talk shows, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton broke the mold by playing saxophone on which show?

1. The Arsenio Hall Show
2. Late Night with David Letterman
3. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
4. CBS Late Night

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