Today we discuss cliff-hangers, the Founding Fathers and legerdemain.

Let’s get to it. Who’s going to win the presidential race?

I haven’t a clue.

So what good are you?

That’s a question readers ask all the time.

What can you say about the race?

The contest will come down to seven or so highly competitive states and, maybe, the one electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which is anchored in the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan area.

The key states are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In short, the battlegrounds that determined the outcome of the 2020 election.

Why the same states over and over? Why not, say, California?

Pull up your chair for a quick civics refresher.

The presidential race is determined not by the winner of the popular vote but which candidate takes a majority — 270 votes — in the electoral college. Some might recollect that two of our last four presidents — George W. Bush and Donald Trump — claimed the White House despite losing the popular vote.

That’s outrageous!

Can’t help you there. Blame the country’s founders. They wrote the rule book.

Go on.

Most states, including the biggies like California, Texas, Florida and New York, are locked into their partisan preferences. (California and New York are solidly Democratic while Texas and Florida — once the nation’s premier swing state — lean Republican.)

Given those inclinations, Kamala Harris can pretty much bank on 226 electoral votes. Trump can count on 219. That leaves 93 up for grabs in those seven states.

What was that about Omaha?

Just about every state awards their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Nebraska is one of two — Maine being the other — that has a hybrid system awarding some electoral votes to the winner of the statewide vote and others based on the winner of each congressional district.

There’s a not-inconceivable scenario in which Harris finishes with 269 electoral votes and needs the one vote from Nebraska to avoid a tie in the electoral college, which would send the election to the House to decide. In that case, Trump would almost certainly prevail, as each state’s delegation would have one vote and Republicans are expected to control more delegations than Democrats.

Wasn’t there a recent effort to boost Trump by changing the law in Nebraska?

Yes there was and it failed, thanks to a single upstanding Republican state senator from Omaha, Mike McDonnell, who refused to go along.

Which was a good thing.

Why is that?

If you thought 2020 was fraught — with all the wrangling over pandemic-induced changes to the balloting process — or consider the 2000 contest to have been divisive — with a partisan Supreme Court vote delivering the White House to George W. Bush after Florida effectively ended in a tie vote — imagine if this election was decided by some last-minute Republican sleight of hand.

What about control of Congress?

That also appears up for grabs, though Republicans have a distinct advantage in the fight for the Senate.

Because of that French word you used?

Legerdemain? No. Because of mathematics.

There are 34 Senate races across the country. Democrats are defending 23 seats, Republicans 11. Worse for Democrats, several of the seats they’re trying to hang onto are in states Trump carried in 2020 — several of them rather handily.

Right now, Democrats hold a bare Senate 51-49 majority, which includes four independents who caucus with them. The party has ceded West Virginia, where one of those independents, Joe Manchin III, is retiring and where Trump won by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020. That puts the Senate at 50-50. Democrats could keep control if they win the White House, since the vice president casts the tie-breaking vote. But that would require the party to win every one of the seats now being fiercely contested.

And how’s that going for Democrats?

Not bad — but maybe not good enough.

At the moment, Democrats appear to be holding their own in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. But Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin look to be much closer. And Democrat Jon Tester appears to be in grave danger in Montana, a state Trump carried four years ago by 16 percentage points. Tester has a history of winning tough races, but this one is his toughest yet.

So it’s all gravy for Republicans?

Pretty much.

Democrats would love to flip GOP-held seats in Texas and Florida and help take out Sen. Deb Fischer in Nebraska, where independent Dan Osborn is making a strong run.

But all three states are virtually certain to back Trump in November and it’s getting increasingly difficult for Senate candidates to swim against the partisan tide. In 2016, for the first time since the direct election of U.S. senators began a century earlier, every Senate race went the same way as the presidential contest; if Trump won a state, the seat went Republican. If Hillary Clinton prevailed, the seat went Democratic.

That pattern held in 2020 with the exception of Maine, where Joe Biden prevailed and Republican Susan Collins was reelected to her fifth term.

What about control of the House?

That’s also too close to call.

Republicans currently hold a razor-wafer-tissue-thin (your choice!) majority of just four seats. All 435 seats are on November’s ballot, but the fight for the majority will come down to roughly two dozen contests.

Several of those are in California, which has become one of the country’s prime congressional battlegrounds after voters in 2008 took the power to draw district lines away from self-interested lawmakers. Democrats hope to flip Republican-held seats in Orange County, the Central Valley, the L.A. suburbs and Palm Springs. They’re also on the offense in New York, where the GOP made significant gains in the 2022 midterm election.

But Republicans aren’t just hunkered down trying to preserve their bare majority. GOP targets include a handful of Democratic-held seats in California as well as incumbents in Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

What do the polls say?

Ignore ‘em. Even the best are nothing more than an educated guess. No one knows what’s going to happen.

Honest.

Instead of obsessing over the latest higgledy-piggledy, do something useful. If you’re undecided, do some research. If you’re committed to a candidate, and have the time and inclination, volunteer to knock on doors or make phone calls.

Above all, be sure to vote and do so in time to make certain your ballot is counted.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson addressed claims that the Biden administration diverted Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds to immigration efforts, saying the pools of funds are “different,” but that he understands why Americans are “frustrated.” 

“The streams of funding are different, that is not an untrue statement, of course,” Johnson, R-La., told Fox News’ Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” “But the problem is with the American people, see, and what they’re frustrated by, is that FEMA should be involved. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, their mission is to help people in times like this of natural disaster. Not to be engaged in using any pool of funding from any account for resettling illegal aliens who have come across the border. That’s what the Biden administration, Kamala Harris and Secretary Mayorkas have been engaged in.” 

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last week denied that FEMA resources were going to migrants, but cited FEMA funds for migrants in 2022.

“Former President Trump is accusing the Biden administration of using FEMA funding to support undocumented migrants.  How is the White House responding to that?” a reporter asked during a Friday press conference.

FEMA HAS FUNDS NEEDED FOR ‘IMMEDIATE RESPONSE AND RECOVERY,’ DESPITE MAYORKAS’ WARNING

“I mean, it’s just categorically false. It is not true. It is a false statement,” Jean-Pierre responded. 

Critics have since compared her statement to comments made in 2022, where she cited FEMA resources were available to illegal immigrants.

“FEMA Regional Administrators have been meeting with city officials on site to coordinate – to coordinate available federal support from FEMA and other federal agencies,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at a Sept. 16, 2022, press conference. 

“Funding is also available through FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter program to eligible local governments and not-for-profit organizations upon request to support humanitarian relief for migrants,” she added.

FEMA has a pool of funds explicitly used for natural disasters, while Congress called on FEMA in 2022 to disseminate funds from Customs and Border Protection to assist American communities affected by the immigration crisis.

KJP SLAMMED AFTER HURRICANE HELENE OVER MIXED MESSAGES ON WHETHER FEMA RESOURCES USED FOR MIGRANTS

Border Patrol picks up a group of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border near Sasabe, Arizona, on March 13, 2024. (Justin Hamel/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

FEMA’s website currently has a “Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response” page to address false claims surrounding recovery efforts, including a rebuke of the claim that FEMA diverted disaster response funds to “border related issues.”

“This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts,” FEMA posted in response to the claim. 

Hurricane Helene has left more than 220 people dead after flooding devastated towns and cities across Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

Debris is strewn on the lake in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Lake Lure, North Carolina. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas drew national attention last week when he indicated that FEMA does not have enough funding to make it through hurricane season, which typically wraps up in November. 

LAWMAKERS OUTRAGED OVER FEMA FUNDING CONCERNS

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” he said Wednesday, heightening concerns around funds for Americans left displaced by the hurricane. “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”

The DHS, however, said the following day that FEMA has the funds needed to assist those currently affected. 

“FEMA has what it needs for immediate response and recovery efforts,” spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg said on X. “As [Administrator Deanne Criswell] said, she has the full authority to spend against the President’s budget, but we’re not out of hurricane season yet so we need to keep a close eye on it.”

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ‘FAILED TO ACT’ IN HURRICANE HELENE AFTERMATH: REP. CORY MILLS

An aerial view of the damage following Hurricane Helene in Erwin, Tennessee. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Johnson said during his interview Sunday that when citizens take public transportation and spot illegal immigrants traveling the nation, their tickets are “gleefully” paid for by the Biden-Harris administration via non-governmental organizations. 

“When you see illegals in your local airport and you see them being transported around the country with planes, trains and automobiles to every community, everywhere, every state’s a border state now, because of that. That’s the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations mostly, that are transporting those people around. And then they send the receipts to the federal government,” he continued. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson holds a news briefing in Washington, D.C., on June 26, 2024. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“And Biden, Harris and Mayorkas gleefully pay those receipts because they open the border intentionally. The American people are disgusted by this. They’re fed up with it, and so are Republicans in Congress. And it’ll stop after Nov. 5 because we’re going to have a unified government with Republicans in charge, and we will bring sanity back to this situation,” he added. 

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.  

Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report. 

In the waning minutes of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz hit on a question that has become central to the 2024 presidential race — and to America’s political future more broadly.

Walz, who is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, was sparring with Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters intent on overturning the 2020 election of President Biden.

Walz called the attack “a threat to our democracy,” and one driven by Trump’s refusal to admit defeat. “He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said to Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”

Vance, unwilling to buck Trump’s false claim that the last election was stolen, said he was “focused on the future.”

“That,” Walz said, “is a damning non-answer.”

The next day, the issue was again magnified for voters when a federal judge in Washington released a new court filing from Special Counsel Jack Smith, in which Smith provided the most comprehensive accounting to date of what prosecutors allege was a sweeping criminal conspiracy by Trump and his allies to not just deny the election, but also subvert it.

“When [Trump] lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith wrote.

Taken together, the two episodes served as a stark reminder of something Democrats have been eager for voters to focus on in the current race: the former president’s alleged willingness to undermine the will of voters in the last one.

State elections officials, independent elections experts and most Americans agree today that Biden’s victory over Trump was legitimate. Despite substantial efforts to do so by Trump’s backers, no one has produced evidence of substantial voter fraud or election irregularities, and experts have concluded there were none.

Special Counsel Jack Smith speaks about an indictment of former President Trump in 2023.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Democrats have condemned Trump for his dishonesty and impeached him in the House for inciting the Jan. 6 attack, and Smith and prosecutors in Georgia have indicted Trump for his alleged scheme to remain in power illegitimately.

Trump, meanwhile, has maintained his position that the election was stolen from him, and many Republicans still believe the same. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in December, for example, found that 62% of U.S. adults said they believe Biden was legitimately elected. While 91% of Democrats believe it, just 31% of Republicans do, the survey found.

Trump has downplayed the Jan. 6 attack and promised to pardon those convicted in the fray. He also has begun already to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming election.

As voters begin casting their ballots in the current race, political experts say they will be weighing a host of issues, including the economy, immigration and reproductive rights. But particularly after the last week, they also may be thinking about Trump’s election denial and the fallout from it, the experts said — and for good reason.

“It’s not just about denying 2020,” said Bob Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future at USC. “It’s about whether or not you are going to uphold the fundamental precepts of democracy.”

“It should be a major issue for voters,” said Richard L. Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, “because, really, it was an unprecedented attempt to steal an election.”

More than just denial

After Smith’s lastest filing was released, Trump went into a rage on his social media platform Truth Social, accusing the Justice Department of “COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and saying he did “NOTHING WRONG.”

Trump called Smith’s case against him a “SCAM,” and suggested that the timing of the filing so close to the election broke with Justice Department rules for avoiding unnecessary political influence.

The timing is in part due to Trump’s own efforts to fight the case. It was on an earlier trajectory before Trump appealed to the Supreme Court — which found in an unprecedented ruling in July that presidents enjoy broad immunity for actions taken as part of their official duties.

Smith’s latest filing is a response to that ruling and a detailed articulation of why Trump’s actions to subvert the 2020 election were taken not in his official capacity as president, but in his private capacity as a losing political candidate — and therefore not something for which he enjoys immunity.

The filing details how Trump allegedly “laid the groundwork for his crimes” well before the election even occurred, including by telling advisors that he would claim victory before ballots were even counted, and how he continued to push his election fraud narrative long after he was told, repeatedly, that no such fraud existed.

Smith wrote that Trump conducted a “pressure campaign” targeting Republican leaders, election officials and election workers in states he had lost in an effort to change the outcomes there — such as when he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he wanted to “find 11,780 votes,” a margin that would have won him that state.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger participates in an election forum in September in Ann Arbor, Mich.

(Carlos Osorio / Associated Press)

When those efforts failed, Smith wrote, Trump personally set into motion and monitored a brazen plan to send fake slates of electors to Washington to cast state electoral votes for him instead of Biden, who had won them. He continued his “stream of disinformation” on Jan. 6, Smith wrote, falsely suggesting Pence could unilaterally halt the certification of Biden’s victory and motivating his supporters to storm the Capitol.

Hasen said all Americans should read the filing to get a “good picture of the depths to which Trump was willing to go to try to turn himself from an election loser to an election winner.”

Most important, Hasen said, is the number of times it shows Trump ignored evidence that he lost.

“Just in terms of the morality of it, to know that the election was not stolen and to keep claiming it and undermining American democracy is incredibly dangerous and deserving of condemnation,” Hasen said.

Why it matters

Trump claims that a vast majority of Americans feel the 2020 election was rigged. It was not, and they do not, according to polling. However, a sizable minority do feel that way, and many leading Republicans have done little to dispel the notion.

During the debate, for example, Vance downplayed the historic threat of the Jan. 6 attack and suggested that Trump had adhered to democratic standards by ceding power to Biden at his Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration.

“It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country,” Vance said.

In fact, Trump refused to attend Biden’s inauguration, making him the first president in 150 years to skip one.

Walz accused Vance of advancing “revisionist history,” and the next day told reporters that it should be “disqualifying” for Vance to not acknowledge Biden’s victory.

Experts said such election denial is indeed a serious issue, and a dangerous thing for Trump and Vance to advance.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said her organization is involved in dozens of legal actions across the country in advance of next month’s election, from groups that she said are “setting the stage for this narrative that there is something nefarious at play, that there is something questionable, that the results of the election aren’t valid.”

The litigation is clearly part of a broader strategy, largely on the political right and clearly borne out of what happened in 2020, to “launder” legitimacy for later election denial claims through the legal system, Lakin said.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Voting Rights Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, agreed.

“The effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election and everything that followed did kind of spawn a whole election denier movement that has proliferated and has been funded and has been pushed forward by not just Trump but a number of other prominent figures, and it has led to a situation in 2024 where there is a much broader, more coordinated effort to undermine faith in our elections, to sow distrust, and to set the stage to subvert the outcome of elections in 2024,” Morales-Doyle said.

That said, both he and Lakin said there is room for hope. Among other things, prominent election deniers who ran for election offices in swing states in 2022 were resoundingly defeated, they noted. And some states have passed new laws since 2020 to shore up election systems and make frivolous challenges to election results more difficult.

Morales-Doyle said he wants people to be aware of election denial and the threats it poses, but also to not get discouraged by it — because the evidence shows American election systems are strong, and thinking otherwise based on misinformation only serves to weaken them.

“The best way to respond to these unprecedented attacks is to buy into democracy, to participate, to go and vote,” he said.

Shrum said Vance was clearly “talking to an audience of one, Donald Trump,” when he wouldn’t answer Walz‘s question about the 2020 election, but that his doing so didn’t do Trump any favors.

“Trump has convinced a substantial part of his base, of the people who are voting for him, that there was something wrong with the election, but I don’t think Americans generally think that,” Shrum said. “In fact, it drives voters away.”

Polling shows that many Americans take a dim view of election denial. One recent Monmouth University poll, for example, found that 58% of Americans believed that an unwillingness to accept election outcomes was a “major problem” for the country.

Republican elections officials are among those expressing concerns.

Late last year, the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute and Gallup released polling that showed that only 40% of Republicans were very or somewhat confident in the accuracy of U.S. elections. Along with the polling, a group from Johns Hopkins and the conservative-leaning think tank R Street Institute released a set of “core principles” for restoring that trust — including having conservative leaders publicly affirm election system security and champion policy changes that build trust.

“As Republican state election officials, we believe in the power of citizens to choose their leaders freely and fairly, and we have faith in the integrity of election systems in place to carry out the voters’ will,” said the group’s members — including Raffensperger of Georgia, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson. “We are also worried. Our democracy cannot hold if its citizens do not trust that elections accurately reflect the will of the people.”

Charles H. Stewart, a political science professor and director of the MIT Election Data + Science Lab, said many Americans already understand — at least in broad strokes — that Trump denied the election and worked to reverse the results.

Stewart doesn’t expect Smith’s latest filing or Walz’s debate efforts to swing voters in any major way, but said they “may keep the issue more visible” and increase the “enthusiasm” for voting among those most appalled by Trump’s actions.

Hasen said he hopes more Americans work to understand the full implications of Trump’s election denial, and vote accordingly.

“The question of whether we will have peaceful transitions of power,” Hasen said, “should be one of the top things on every voter’s list of considerations.”