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The U.S. economy added 12,000 jobs in October as hiring slowed.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton likely reduced employment last month.
The job numbers were expected to be constrained by the Southeast hurricanes and several worker strikes.
The report comes just days before next week's historic election and a key Federal Reserve meeting.
The unemployment rate remained at 4.1%, according to the Labor Department.
We welcome back to the program.
David Wasserman of Code Political Report, he serves as their senior editor and elections analyst here to talk about those House and races, the other things connected to campaign 2024.
Hello there.
Hey, it's not as if we lack for material this morning.
What holds your attention most from here on to Tuesday?
So we have a fascinating race at all levels.
The House is especially fascinating, always has been to me, but we've got a situation where Democrats might have a better shot in the House.
Certainly they have a better shot than in the Senate, but their chances in the House have arguably improved a little bit in the last few weeks and months, even as the presidential race has gotten even tighter and we've seen Kamala Harris's lead narrow.
And there are three reasons why Democrats have an opportunity to flip control of the chamber.
Right now, there are 221 Republican seats, 214 Democratic seats.
So Democrats need to pick up a net of four to make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker rather than Mike Johnson.
And there are a couple of reasons why they have a decent chance to get there.
The first is that the House is being fought on friendlier terrain for Democrats than the Senate or possibly the Electoral College.
You know, we've got 16 Republicans running for reelection in districts that voted for Joe Biden four years ago.
There are only five Democrats running for re-election in districts that voted for Donald Trump.
And most of those Democrats and Trump districts have decent brands heading into Election Day.
Some could be tough to beat.
The 16 Republicans, most of them are in two blue states where Democrats underperformed in the 2022 midterms, California and New York.
The second reason is you've got a decent number of check and balance voters out there who dislike both presidential candidates.
They don't want either party going too far in the next Congress.
And the dynamic in 2016 and 2020 was a lot of these voters, particularly suburban independents and especially women, they didn't like Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, but they were open to voting for a more normal Republican down ballot.
And Republicans actually had pretty good years in those elections.
But this year, voters are very conflicted about their expectations of who's going to win.
And to the extent a lot of those same voters want a check or an insurance policy on Trump going too far, they're opting for a Democrat down ballot.
We're noticing a handful of key races where Democrats are outperforming Harris in polling.
And then the third reason is that House Republicans have been a mess for the last two years.
It took them 15 votes to elect a speaker last January.
It took just eight Republicans to overthrow that speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
And we've seen downstream fundraising consequences of that leadership turmoil.
Democrats have clobbered Republicans at the candidate fundraising level.
It's a disparity unlike anything we've seen in a long time.
And the median Democratic incumbent, as of the beginning of October, in a competitive race, had three times as much money raised as the median Republican challenger, $6.3 million to $2.2 million, whereas the median Democratic challenger had raised just as much money as the median Republican incumbent.
What that means is that a lot of Democrats are going to be controlling the narrative or have controlled it in the final weeks of the campaign.
And so with that in mind, if you want to ask our guests questions about what is expected when it comes to the House, races, Senate races, top of the ticket too, 202-748-8,000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8002 for Independents.
And you can always text us at 202-748-8003.
If everything you said boils down to specific races that kind of illustrate what you're just talking about, where would you look to first?
Well, when we add up all the seats that at least lean to Democrats, we get 205 districts.
When we add up all the seats that at least lean towards the Republicans, we get 208 districts.
And then we have these 22 toss-ups in the middle.
Our House editor, Aaron Covey, has an excellent overview of all of this up this morning at cookpolitical.com.
We just moved several race ratings, six in Democrats' favor, two in Republicans' favor.
We see several Republican incumbents, including Anthony D'Esposito on Long Island, Brandon Williams in Syracuse, Don Bacon in Omaha, Nebraska, as slight underdogs for reelection.
There's also a number of other vulnerable Republicans who are polling even at best, people like John Duarte in California, Central Valley, or Lori Chavez-DeReamer in suburban Portland and Bend, Oregon.
But then the insurance policy for Republicans is open seats.
Republicans don't have really any vulnerable open seats to defend, whereas Democrats have four vulnerable open seats.
Two of those are in Michigan.
And one of the seats we moved this morning is Alyssa Slotkin's open seat in Lansing.
This is the seat that Democrat Alyssa Slotkin's leaving to run for Senate.
We believe Republican Tom Barrett might be entering election day with a slight advantage over Democrat Curtis Hurtel.
And so that is the reason why Republicans might still be ever so slight favorites for control of the chamber.
If you had those 22 toss-ups break evenly down the middle, Republicans would end up at 219 to 216 for Democrats, which is even narrower than the majority that they have now.
What we know from history, though, it's likely that most of those toss-ups will break one direction.
Another open seat, if I'm right, Colorado's third district.
Tell us what's going on with that.
That's right.
This is the seat where Republican Lauren Boebert left to run in a much redder district on the opposite end of Colorado.
And the Democrat in this race, Adam Frisch, who came within 546 votes of beating her in 22, really never stopped running.
And he's raised over $14 million for this House race, in part because for much of the cycle, he was running against Bobert, who is probably the best fundraiser that Democrats have ever had.
And so now he's running against a more conventional Republican, an attorney named Jeff Heard from Grand Junction.
And if this race had played out in 2022, it never would have been that close.
But because Frisch has been able to have such a fundraising head start on Heard, Frisch has the communication advantage, particularly on the expensive Denver airwaves, in the closing month of the race.
And that's kept it somewhat close.
We still believe the Republican Heard has an advantage here.
You mentioned Representative Don Bacon, not an unknown quantity in Congress, but what makes his race really tight this time around?
This is a very unique district because Nebraska's second district is in the national spotlight.
Nebraska is one of just two states that allocate its electoral votes by congressional district.
And this Omaha seat has been trending blue for some time.
And polls show that Kamala Harris is a very clear favorite over Donald Trump to carry the one electoral vote from this district.
And that undertow could drag Republican Congressman Don Bacon under.
Now, he has been a survivor.
He has been there since 2016.
He's won the seat even as Joe Biden was carrying the district in 2020.
This time around, he has the same opponent as in 2022, Democratic State Senator Tony Vargas.
And this has been a high-dollar race with Democrats accusing Bacon of getting closer to Trump and the MAGA wing of the party for endorsing a rule change in Nebraska that would have converted the state's electoral votes to winner-take-all.
That was highly controversial in Omaha.
But Bacon is emphasizing his bipartisan credentials.
He actually has an ad featuring the widow of his Democratic predecessor, Brad Ashford, endorsing his reelection campaign and hitting the Democrat as excessively partisan.
Dave Walzerman with us always.
A lot of information there when it comes to these down ballot races.
Again, call the line that best represents you.
We'll start with Beverly.
She's in Wyoming, Democrats line.
You're on with our guests.
Good morning.
Yeah, I was just wondering why they don't have Democrat ballots, our candidates in Wyoming.
And maybe if they had diversity, they might have a free election.
But it's going to be so hard for these Republicans to get a good base because they're all backstabbing each other.
And the ones that are the rhinos, well, I hope they win.
Okay, Beverly in Wyoming.
Wyoming's a state where the orientation of that at-large district was really decided by Liz Cheney's reelection race in the Republican primary a couple years ago when she lost to Harriet Hageman.
That moved the seat essentially from one that was a Trump skeptic Republican seat, to say the least, to a MAGA-held seat.
And what we're noticing in a lot of Republican open seats, and there are 23 Republicans who opted not to seek reelection this year, is the direction that the Republicans are headed overall depends a lot on who comes through these primaries.
And there are a number of open seats where candidates allied with Trump ended up prevailing.
People like Brandon Gill in Texas's 26th district.
But there are also a number of districts where we saw more conventional conservatives who would have fit in the party in the pre-Trump era prevailed.
People like Julie Fedorcak in North Dakota.
So it's going to be a mixed bag of incoming Republicans in the next Congress.
In North Carolina, James is there.
Republican line.
Go ahead.
Morning, fellas.
It reminded me when you were getting so excited about how much the Democrats have outraised the Republicans.
I was wondering if you care or if you thought about all the money that people like George Soros that hate our country and is really a bad guy that funds the Democrat Party and in these deep blue states where they throw bricks through windows and burn their cities down and stuff like that during 2020.
And as a matter of fact, this morning I saw on the ticker thing at the bottom of the TV that Speaker Johnson has come out and saying that there are serious issues with the Democrat Party taking money from our adversaries, which, you know, the Democrat people are good people.
My neighbors are good people, the Democrats.
But the party does not give a damn about America and they'll take money from anybody.
Mr. Wasserman, money comes in from a lot of these races from outside sources.
Talk about in general sort of where the money's coming from, especially some of those races where it's being focused on.
Yeah, and look, there are boogeymen on both sides here.
Republicans love to point out the Soros family.
Democrats are increasingly taking aim at the spending that Elon Musk has injected into the super PAC realm in 2024.
And yet there's a much broader array of donors that are funding super PACs that are spending hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on races at all levels.
And those PACs have less of a punch than the hard dollars that candidates spend because candidates who are raising funds that are subject to limits have access to better advertising rates than super PACs.
And yet one thing we noticed early on in the kind of reset of the presidential race when Kamala Harris was nominated after Joe Biden withdrew from the race is that Democrats leading super PAC, a group called Future Forward, which is going to spend upwards of $600 million on this year's campaign.
And don't get me wrong, they're comparably well-funded pro-Trump super PACs.
But they took the gamble of launching a really early reintroduction, a barrage of ads, reintroducing Kamala Harris as a change agent, which is something that's very hard to do when you're talking about the sitting vice president.
But it was very effective in turning her image around from negative 16, where it had been for much of the spring and much of the past couple years, to net neutral.
Now that we're finally seeing Trump's ads take their toll in Battleground States, we've seen Kamala Harris's favorability come back down from plus one to maybe minus two.
And that is an important difference between what we saw in August and September versus what we're seeing now in October.
One of those races you highlight in Minnesota, the second district of Minnesota.
This is Representative Angie Craig versus Joe Turab, if I'm saying it correctly.
T-Rab, yeah.
T-Rab, yeah.
Go ahead.
So this is a seat where Republicans were hoping to give a Democratic incumbent a tough race in the Minneapolis suburbs.
What we're seeing in the polling there is that the presidential race is tighter than it was in 2020.
So Joe Biden carried this district by seven points in 2020.
It wouldn't be surprising if Kamala Harris only won it by four or five.
But we're also seeing the Democrat Angie Craig win comfortably or lead comfortably in the polls over T-Rab, who's a former federal prosecutor and also comes from a family of Sudanese heritage.
And yet this is a prime example of where Republicans have not been able to match Democrats dollar for dollar.
Craig has raised $7.4 million this cycle to T-Rab's $2.6 million.
And so she's had a real communication advantage in portraying herself as a bipartisan problem solver and her opponent as part and parcel of Trump and the MAGA wing.
From what I've been reading, a lot of the races that the ones you don't mention specifically, but I think you did mention it in the introduction, is the 4th District of New York.
That's out of Long Island, if I'm correct.
That's Anthony DiEsposito.
That's right.
And this is a race that has been rocked by late scandal and revelations of Diesposito apparently putting his mistress and his fiancé's child on his congressional payroll.
Now, Long Island has probably a higher tolerance threshold for patronage politics than most parts of the country.
And yet the Democrat running against him, Laura Gillen, who fell three and a half points short in 2022, she's waged a much more aggressive campaign this time to get out in front of some of the Republican attacks that she's soft on law and order issues.
And we expect there to be a higher non-white turnout in 2024 than there was in the midterms.
This is a district that's almost half non-white, particularly in the five towns area of Nassau County.
So if there is a more normal Democratic turnout in those kinds of places in districts in and around New York City and also LA and California's Central Valley, then Democrats would have a better chance of taking back the House.
Let's hear from Ron.
Ron joins us from Iowa.
Democrats line for David Wasserman.
I'd like to hear Mr. Wasserman's take on the congressional race in the first district of Southeast Iowa between Marionette Miller-Meeks and Christina Bohannan.
I'll hang up and take his answer offline.
It's a fantastic question because this is one of the races that we're watching closely.
And Marionette Miller-Meeks ran for this seat or a previous version of it three times before finally getting elected.
And even though this district will likely vote for Trump, it voted for Trump by about three points four years ago, voters have not really warmed up to the Republican incumbent, Marionette Miller-Meeks.
And she only won her first term by six votes in the closest House race of the nation in 2020.
She won re-election more comfortably two years ago.
But the Democrat here, Christina Bohannon, is running a much more aggressive race this time, particularly on the abortion issue.
And Marionette Miller-Meeks got a primary challenge from a religious conservative candidate who attacked her from the right.
And that really dented her favorability with Republican voters.
What we're seeing in the polls now is that she's having a real problem consolidating her own base heading into the general election, which is giving the Democrat Bohannan an unusual opportunity.
I wouldn't have guessed at the beginning of the year that this race would find its way to our toss-up column, but we are seeing polls that show it either tied or even Bohannon with a small lead.
And if Miller-Meeks ends up winning, it'll only be because Trump's performance pushed her across the finish line.
Moshe from Brooklyn, New York, Republican line.
Hi.
Hi, how are you, Dave?
I was wondering how do you look at polling?
Like you interview people, like, what's your particular way?
Like, when you decide to move things in a tassel, give us more details exactly how you conduct how you conduct interviews.
I mean, polling.
Well, to be clear, except for a series of swing state polls that we did in conjunction with a Democratic and Republican polling firm, we're not polling these districts.
And there's a lot of public data about the presidential race and a lot of coverage of how precarious polls are these days given low response rates.
And it's true that pollsters are having a harder time reaching voters and they're having to weight their samples in ways that adjust for how they think the electorate will look at the end of the day.
And those assumptions may or may not prove correct.
So all polls are subject to error and that's always been the case.
But the vast majority of data that we're seeing is data that the parties have compiled privately.
And the reason why partisan polls taken by the parties can often be better than a lot of the public surveys or of higher quality is that that's what the parties are using to make investment decisions as to where they're going to allocate their resources across a wide array of battleground districts.
And in some cases, the party's polls paint a similar picture of what's going on.
In others, Democrats and Republicans have a very different notion of where races stand.
And so what we're doing is we're trying to see how everything lines up and making our best estimate of where these races stand.
But there are always a few surprises on election night.
On election night, you are known to say, I've seen enough.
When is that moment for you in some of these cases when you're analyzing data?
When is the moment when you make that conclusion?
Well, there's not a hard and fast rule, and I don't have a secret sauce.
My approach is actually more straightforward than a lot of people think.
I'm taking a look at the data that's coming in at the county, at the precinct level, and assessing whether the trailing candidate has a reasonable path to overtaking the leader or not.
And if you've watched these races long enough, you know that there are clear patterns across demographic groups, across geography, that can give you a pretty good idea of how races are shaping up early on election night.
Now, I'll actually be part of a larger team on Tuesday, as I have been in every major election since 2008.
I'll be a consultant for the NBC News Decision Desk as we size up races at all levels.
And the challenge with a presidential year, especially, is that there's so much data coming at you at once that if I were trying to do it myself, there's too much to cover and it's possible to make mistakes.
And so I prefer to be part of a larger team to evaluate what's going on and communicate it to our on-air talent.
We've been talking about down ballot.
What's your sense of where we are atop a ticket?
So this has been the closest presidential race in the polling that I've covered in my 17 years at the Cook Political Report.
We've got seven states that are basically tied or within a point or two points.
And that begs the question, who the heck are these 3 to 5% of people in polls who still haven't made up their minds after everything we've seen the past 10 years?
We're going to leave this here to take you now live to Portage, Michigan, where Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is delivering remarks at a campaign stop.