Vice President Kamala Harris bet big last week that former advisers to Donald Trump can help make her president.

Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley and former national security adviser John Bolton have not endorsed her candidacy, but they have each made clear they oppose his. And they have played a starring role in her television advertising.

Three of her top four ad spots by spending between Oct. 7 and 17 focused on former Trump aides and other Republicans who have warned about another Trump presidency. She spent more advertising on that message than any other topic, including abortion, her own biography, policy attacks on Trump or the economy, according to the AdImpact tracking firm.

“Consider what his closest advisers have said,” Harris implored at a rally Thursday in Bucks County, Pa., as she carried the message on the campaign trail. “America must heed this warning.”

This attempt to appeal to the tiny sliver of remaining persuadable or undecided voters follows a pattern that Democrats have deployed in previous elections with mixed success against Trump. Hillary Clinton in 2016 invested heavily in fall ads highlighting offensive things Trump had said over images of children watching television or young girls looking in the mirror. Joe Biden in 2020 insisted that “character is on the ballot” in his closing spot.

But Democrats believe this effort is different, and they point to extensive testing to back up the claim. Recent public research by Blueprint, a Democratic polling operation funded by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, found the Republican critique of Trump to be the most effective of 12 tested messages this month. Notably, a straight attack without Republican voices on Trump’s character, his erratic behavior, election result denial and the Jan. 6, 2021, riots had no clear effect.

“This is really the first time I have seen the pure Trump personal attack land, and it is entirely because the messengers are Republican messengers,” said Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for Blueprint. “Simply saying the guy lacks character or is selfish or is a scam artist — none of that really moves voters. But saying that the guy is a threat is meaningful and persuasive to voters.”

Multiple senior advisers to the Harris campaign said their own internal research has tracked the same finding in polling, focus groups and other forms of ad testing. They have come to view the Republican adviser attack on Trump’s unfitness for office as one of three main tranches of their closing message, along with economic and abortion arguments.

“Every which way, the people who used to work with Trump, who are Republicans and the military and security messengers, it always rises to the top,” said Molly Murphy, one of Harris’s pollsters. “The character stuff can be a matter of opinion. And what is known to a lot of swing voters out there is there are a lot of people who don’t like Donald Trump. That is meaningfully different than people who have seen him up close having concerns about the course of the country.”

The revelation has put even current opponents of Harris’s candidacy in the awkward position of serving as uninvited surrogates.

“It’s caused me a lot of problems because people see it and think I’ve signed up to endorse Kamala Harris, which I haven’t,” Bolton said. The Harris ads show clips from Bolton’s statements on CNN that Trump will cause “a lot of damage” if reelected and that “the only thing he cares about is Donald Trump.”

But Bolton argued the ads fail to make the affirmative case for voters like him. “To bring those Republicans over, you’ve got to give them a reason to say that she isn’t radical,” he added. “They haven’t done that.”

Milley — the former top military officer who gave a speech in 2023 denouncing the “wannabe dictator” that was clearly directed at Trump — was recently quoted in a book by the journalist Bob Woodward calling the former president “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” Pence, who has declined to say how he will vote, is quoted in Harris ads saying he cannot endorse Trump because the former president attempted to put himself above the Constitution after the 2020 election by stopping the certification of electoral votes.

Marc Short, the former chief of staff for Pence, said he did not believe the spots would move a large number of voters because “most people have already made their mind up about January 6 and all of that.” But it could still be effective, he said. “What is the very, very narrow group of people who couldn’t decide after having Trump on the national stage for a decade? That’s a rare animal. Okay, then what moves that rare animal?”

Harris advisers believe that more narrow group could be decisive. As it stands the race is effectively tied and largely immobile across public polling in the battleground states, despite massive advertising spending and get-out-the-vote efforts on both sides. In addition to the senior advisers who have broken with Trump, the campaign has deployed lower-ranking officials and Republican politicians as surrogates across battleground states.

Harris plans to campaign Monday with former representatives Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes in the suburbs of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former press secretary who has endorsed Harris, said the Democratic campaign has asked her to tape local TV and radio interviews and attend events in swing states. Much of her argument, she said, is to convince people who are surrounded by Republicans — and traditionally view themselves as conservatives — that they really don’t want four more years of Trump.

“When you’re actually talking to people, the thing that has been for me, most impactful: ‘Hey, I’m not a disgruntled employee. I’m not angry. I just really know him and I’m able to give so many real life examples of some of the stuff he’s done or said.’”

Sarah Matthews, a former Trump spokeswoman who quit on Jan. 6 and is now campaigning against Trump, has also been traveling with the Harris campaign. “People are just tuning in. It’s not too late,” she said. “There were a lot of people in the White House who know better than anyone. They were in the Situation Room with Trump. They saw his decision-making. They saw how unfit he is.”

Other close Trump aides have so far refused to speak out, even though their concerns about Trump’s fitness for office are well known. An August Washington Post survey found that only 24 of the 42 people who served as Cabinet-level officials under Trump had endorsed his reelection. Fifteen had made no comment. Pence, Bolton and Esper said they would not support his reelection without endorsing Harris.

Former chief of staff John F. Kelly, for instance, is not expected to weigh in during the final days of the race, according to a person familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Kelly believes Trump is unfit to be president and has long expressed those views, but grew frustrated that his public comments have not moved the needle.

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up,” he told The Washington Post last year.

Barr, who once compared voting for Trump to “playing Russian roulette with the country,” endorsed Trump’s reelection in April.

In the face of the onslaught, Republicans have encouraged Donald Trump to deploy his former rival for the Republican nomination, former U.N. secretary Nikki Haley, to counter the effort. She was a sharp critic of Trump’s during the nomination fight, calling him “unhinged” and “diminished.” She later endorsed his candidacy.

A Fox News host asked Trump on Friday if Haley would campaign for him. “I’ll do what I have to do,” he responded. “Nikki Haley and I fought, and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points. … I beat Nikki badly.”

Trump often gets frustrated by public criticism from his former advisers and has told donors his biggest regret in his first term is his personnel choices.

“All of these so-called Republicans are driven by their hatred for Donald Trump rather than their love for our country. For most Americans, this election poses a binary choice between a successful, former president in President Trump and a failed Vice President in Kamala Harris, who is the most radical Democrat to ever lead their party’s ticket. Anyone who wants to make America great again, secure our southern border, restore law and order and bring down inflation only has one option on the ballot, and that option is President Donald J. Trump,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman.

The Trump advertising strategy last week was more evenly divided between messages on taxes, Biden administration failure, her past support for banning natural gas fracking and her support of providing transgender medical procedures for those in prison. One of the ads focusing on the transgender attack, which Trump advisers hope to use to paint her as out of touch with voter concerns, received more spending than any other spot, accounting for $13 million of the $41 million Trump’s campaign spent between Oct. 7 and 17, according to AdImpact.

The Harris campaign spent $55 million during that same period, with a major focus on all of the swing states, including what one Harris adviser described as a 1,280-point purchase in the week than ends Tuesday in the Raleigh, N.C., media market. As a rough approximation, 100 ratings points allows all viewers in a market to see a spot once.

One digital ad running in that state, which was recently battered by a hurricane, shows two former Trump administration officials discussing how Trump handled disaster response during his presidency, including one incident in which he resisted providing support for forest fires in California for political reasons, causing advisers to prepare a briefing showing how many Californians voted for him.

“We are going to drive that message however we need to drive it,” said Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager who is overseeing much of the advertising effort.

Harris has been aided in that task by a coalition led by Future Forward, the primary independent group advertising in support of her, which spent an additional $79 million between Oct. 7 and 17, overwhelmingly focused on economic concerns and Harris’s plans to improve them, according to AdImpact.

“You have got to think of it as a multiweek story,” said David Plouffe, a top strategist for Harris, about the Republican-focused messaging attack. “Raising the risk of a Trump second term is an important piece of business. It is not our only piece of business. But it is an important one.”

For the third time in a week, former president Donald Trump repeated his charge that Democrats allied against him are “the enemy from within” in an interview with Fox News during which he called the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol “a beautiful thing.”

Trump, in an interview with “Media Buzz” that aired Sunday, referred to Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, both California Democrats, as “bad people” who threaten democracy. Interviewer Howard Kurtz asked, “Are you prepared to say now that you will not use law enforcement to punish or prosecute your political opponents?”

Trump responded, “Excuse me, that’s what they’re using on me.”

In a separate Fox News interview that aired on Oct. 13, Trump said that his foes could be “very easily handled” by the National Guard, or, “if really necessary, by the military.” He repeated the line about the “enemy from within” days later during a Fox News town hall event.

“You call Americans who don’t support you ‘the enemy within.’ That’s a pretty ominous phrase to use about other Americans,” Kurtz noted.

“I think that’s accurate,” Trump replied, before referencing Pelosi and Schiff, two outspoken Trump critics.

“These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people,” the former president said. “But when you look at shifty Schiff and some of the others, yeah, they are to me the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within.”

Ian Krager, a spokesman for Pelosi, said in a statement that in “talking about turning our military on his political opponents and the American people, Donald Trump is showing once again why his election would be a disaster for our country and our democracy.”

Schiff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign immediately seized upon Trump’s remarks, posting several clips on X to underscore her campaign stump assertion that the former president is “unstable.”

“Even in his Fox News safe space, Donald Trump cannot help but show himself as the unhinged, angry, unstable man that he is — focused on his own petty grievances and tired playbook of division,” the Harris-Walz campaign said in a statement.

Trump, during the interview, criticized Harris as incompetent and a Marxist who is going to “ruin this country.”

He also spoke in glowing terms about the size of his crowd and actions of the mob in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — after which scores were injured, six people were left dead in the aftermath and 1,200 were arrested. Trump described the mob as a small group of people who “peacefully and patriotically” went to the Capitol to “protest a rigged election.”

“There was a beauty to it and a love to it that I’ve never seen before,” he said.

Harris last week criticized Trump for “gaslighting” Americans about the Jan. 6 attack.

The former president on Sunday also dismissed warnings of the danger of a second Trump term from one of his own defense secretaries and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Retired Gen. Mark A. Milley told author Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” according to Woodward’s new book.

“They were not my cup of tea, they were woke, not great generals,” Trump said Sunday of Milley and former defense secretary Jim Mattis. “I don’t respect them as soldiers. I never did.”

He also refused to back down from his claims he made during his debate with Harris last month that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets — assertions that were quickly debunked by local and state officials.

“I don’t think it’s been debunked at all,” Trump said.

On the Sunday talk shows, Trump surrogates dismissed concerns about his increasingly overheated campaign rhetoric and downplayed his statement that Democrats are the enemy from within.

In an interview with CNN, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) first said Trump was talking about “marauding gangs.” Then, when pressed, Johnson said that he did not believe Trump would actually use the military on his political opponents, as Trump had alleged last week.

“I did not hear President Trump in that clip say he’s going to sic the military on Adam Schiff. That’s not what he’s saying,” Johnson said

Sunday’s Fox interview was conducted at Trump Tower in New York on Saturday, hours before Trump flew to Pennsylvania and made headlines for riffing on the size of the genitals of famed golfer legend Arnold Palmer — he was “all man,” Trump said. The event took place at an airport in Latrobe named after Palmer.

JONESBORO, Ga. — Kamala Harris spent the Sunday of her 60th birthday working to turn out Black voters in Georgia, where she asked congregants at two churches outside of Atlanta to choose between a country of “chaos, fear and hate” — represented, she implied, by former president Donald Trump — and the “country of freedom, compassion and justice” that she envisions.

Harris’s campaign hopes that high turnout among Black voters will help the vice president beat Trump in a race where polls in every key swing state, including Georgia, have shown the two candidates neck-and-neck.

The campaign still has work to do. Among Black registered voters, 72 percent of men and 85 percent of women support Harris, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. Those are strong majorities, but Harris’s numbers with Black voters are weaker than President Joe Biden’s were at this point in 2020.

Harris’s efforts Sunday represented an attempt to narrow that gap.

Churches have long been key to Black civil rights and political organizing in the United States, and both the churches Harris visited Sunday are participating in her campaign’s “Souls to the Polls” drive, which buses churchgoers directly from Sunday services to early voting locations.

The number of voters that campaigns can reach at Black churches, however, may be lower than it has been in the past. Black Protestant churches, like other churches across the country, have seen membership declines in recent years. The percentage of Black Protestants who say they generally attend church at least once a month dropped to 46 percent in 2022, down from 61 percent in 2019, according to a Pew survey.

The Harris campaign faces other challenges with Black voters. Many Black men have been frustrated by the economic pain caused by inflation during the Biden administration and disappointed by Democrats’ inability to deliver on their promises to enact criminal justice reform and rein in police misconduct. Some Black male voters have also told The Washington Post they are concerned about Harris’s record as a prosecutor in California and believe the Democrats have catered too much to immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community rather than Black voters.

But Harris’s campaign hopes that the Souls to the Polls effort — led by its National Advisory Board of Black Faith Leaders — will allow it to bank millions of early votes so it can focus on turning out lower-propensity voters, including non-churchgoers skeptical of her, in the final days before the election.

At her first stop, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest Sunday morning, Harris told congregants that she was guided by the teachings of the Bible from an early age, and that growing up in the Black church in Oakland has shaped her leadership style. When Harris was a young girl, a close neighbor and family friend took her to the 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, Calif., where she learned to live by the creed that God “asks us to speak up for those who cannot speak for the themselves” and to “defend the rights of the poor and the needy,” she said.

Wearing a skirt suit and a pink ribbon to commemorate “Pink Sunday” for breast cancer awareness, Harris said she learned from the parable of the good Samaritan that people of faith should “understand that in the face of a stranger, one should see a neighbor.”

She described the election as a consequential decision for people of faith, arguing that the “country is at a crossroads.” The question, the vice president said, is “what kind of country do we want to live in?”

“A country of chaos, fear and hate or a country of freedom, compassion and justice?” she asked. “The great thing about living in a democracy is that we the people have the power to answer that question. So let us answer, not just through our words but through our action and with our votes.”

At her second stop — a Souls to the Polls event at Divine Faith Ministries International where musician Stevie Wonder serenaded her with “Happy Birthday” — Harris again framed the election as a choice between a leader who would denigrate others and one who would seek to lift them up.

“Our strength is not based on who we put down as some would try to and suggest,” she said referring to Trump at her second stop in Jonesboro. “Our strength is based on who we lift up. And that spirit is very much at risk in these next 16 days.”

Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), who spoke before Harris at Divine Faith Ministries, said he didn’t believe that large numbers of Black men would end up casting a ballot for Trump. The bigger risk for Democrats, Warnock said, is that they will stay home.

“The real threat is apathy — taking it for granted — that’s how it slips away from us,” Warnock said. “Black men are not going to vote for a man who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying that five young men of color ought to receive the death penalty. The Central Park Five — y’all remember that? And then when it was found out they were innocent [Trump] said ‘I stand by what I said,’” he added, referring to Trump’s insistence that the initial suspects in a notorious 1980s rape case are guilty, despite evidence that exonerated them.

“We’re not voting for him. We just need you to show up,” Warnock continued. “Brothers show up. We need your voice. Real men vote.”

Warnock asked all the men in the Jonesboro church to stand. Then, speaking to Black women, he said, “Tell the brothers in your life, we need you to vote. If you’re married to him, just tell him it’s going to be a long cold winter” if he doesn’t vote.

Black voters will be the linchpin to Harris’s victory in November, the Rev. Leah Daughtry of the House of the Lord Churches, a former chief of staff to the Democratic National Committee, argued during a DNC call Friday outlining the Souls to the Polls drive.

“We are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we will have Kamala Harris’s back in this election,” Daughtry said. “We can fight for opportunity for everyone by showing up at the polls, voting early, mailing your ballot, whatever way you can to participate in this election of a lifetime.”

Arndrea Waters King — the wife of Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights icon — said she was deeply concerned about what is at stake for “little Black girls” like her own daughter. She criticized Trump for appointing three justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protected abortion rights.

“Because of Donald Trump, my daughter — the only grandchild of Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr. — has fewer rights today than the day that she was born,” said Waters King, who is president of the Drum Major Institute.

Billionaire Elon Musk has further escalated his direct intervention in the 2024 election in support of GOP nominee Donald Trump, announcing Saturday that he will hand out $1 million daily in a lottery for registered swing-state voters who sign a petition put out by his super PAC’s voter recruitment drive.

Legal experts questioned the legality of the move because it ties a monetary reward to voter registration status, which is expressly prohibited under federal law.

Musk — ranked by Bloomberg as the richest man in the world with a net worth of $269 billion — on Saturday announced that daily through Election Day, America PAC, the super PAC he created to campaign for Trump, will give away “$1M to someone in swing states who signed our petition to support free speech & the right to bear arms.”

“We want to make sure that everyone in swing states hears about this and I suspect this will ensure they do,” Musk said in a post shared on X.

The billionaire then linked to the petition, which states that the effort’s goal is to “get 1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” The site explicitly says that the program is open only to registered voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

The petition asks individuals to fill in their name, address and phone number, and they are encouraged to refer the form to other swing-state voters.

In addition, an individual signing the petition can receive $47 for each registered voter in a swing state that they successfully convince to sign the petition. Then individuals who sign the petition are entered into a lottery of sorts that will award one winner a prize of $1 million daily from now until Nov. 5.

The site also presents a special offer to voters in Pennsylvania — those who sign the petition will receive $100, and if they successfully convince another registered voter in the state to sign, they will receive another $100. The registration deadline in Pennsylvania is Monday.

The checks are only the latest move by Musk to boost his efforts on behalf of Trump. As The Washington Post has reported, Musk’s America PAC has emerged as a significant player in Trump’s bid for a second term.

The billionaire has donated at least $75 million through his America PAC in support for Trump. The super PAC is running one of the most ambitious independent get-out-the-vote operations for the former president in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential race, particularly focusing on getting out the vote in swing states through a number of efforts, including large canvassing campaigns.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), in an interview with NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” said Musk’s petition raises “real questions” over how he’s spending his money in the presidential race, suggesting that law enforcement “could take a look” at Musk’s actions.

“Musk obviously has a right to be able to express his views. He’s made it very, very clear that he supports Donald Trump. I don’t — obviously, we have a difference of opinion. I don’t deny him that right,” Shapiro said. “But when you start flowing this kind of money into politics, I think it raises serious questions that folks may want to take a look at.”

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at the firm Harmon Curran, also said in an interview Sunday that Musk’s efforts are questionable.

“You can’t give something of value to people in exchange for them voting or registering to vote,” Kappel said.

Kappel cited a federal statute that states that whoever “makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate” will face fines or jail time. Kappel noted that, even if not illegal, Musk’s latest effort appears to signal that his super PAC “is not close to meeting its targets in terms of getting people out to vote for Trump.”

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote on his blog Saturday night that the lottery program “is clearly illegal” because federal law prohibits paying someone on the basis of them being registered voters. Hasen also pointed to the Justice Department’s manual on election crimes, which forbids payments “intended to induce or reward the voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.”

America PAC said it has already granted a $1 million award to an individual who signed up through the petition — a man they identified as John Dreher, who was invited onstage by Musk during a Saturday rally in Harrisburg, Pa.

In a video shared by the PAC, Dreher said he admires Musk and then urged young men to vote early, warning that “there’s a lot of things that can go wrong and prevent you from voting.” Onstage, Musk handed Dreher the check, saying that Dreher had “no idea” that he would be taking money home from the rally.

“So anyway, you’re welcome,” Musk told Dreher.

Kamala Harris entered the final full month of the presidential election with an enormous financial advantage over Donald Trump, according to new federal campaign finance filings released Sunday.

The Harris campaign and its allied committees raised more than $1 billion in the third quarter, allowing her to significantly outspend the former president’s campaign on television and digital ads, voter contact efforts and staff in the final sprint to Election Day.

The Harris campaign reported raising $221.8 million in September. A pair of celebrity-studded fundraisers in Los Angeles and San Francisco that she attended on the last weekend of the month brought in about $55 million of that total, according to a campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures.

Trump’s campaign, by contrast, raised $62.7 million during September, less than a third of the Harris campaign’s total, according to Federal Election Commission filings Sunday. His effort ended the month with $119.7 million in cash on hand to Harris’s $187.5 million.

Harris began building a cash advantage over Trump as soon as she began seeking the nomination in late July, benefiting from a flood of small-dollar donations from Democrats who were excited that she had replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. She raised $126 million from 1.4 million donors in less than three days after Biden withdrew from the race. And a recent Post analysis of campaign spending showed that Harris is running a campaign that is about three times the size of Trump’s operation.

The vice president’s coordinated campaign raised $1 billion in less than 80 days after she entered the race, according to multiple people familiar with the sum. New reports filed on Tuesday showed that Harris’s primary fundraising vehicle for big-dollar donations, the Harris Victory Fund, brought in a staggering $633 million during the third quarter. That was more than four times as much as the $145 million that the victory fund’s GOP counterpart, the Trump 47 committee, brought in, according to reports filed last week.

Despite that huge spending edge and Harris’s sprawling ground game, her campaign has still struggled to significantly outpace Trump in key swing state polls. The vice president’s campaign has a much larger footprint than Trump’s, which relies on outside groups to help it turn out voters, and her advisers are worried about whether they will have enough money to secure victory. Harris’s advisers believe that the race remains close in all of the key swing states, and point to the high cost of targeting hard-to-reach and infrequent voters in seven very different states.

The Washington Post’s latest polling average shows Harris leading in four of the seven battleground states that are most likely to determine the election — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada — but only by narrow margins. Trump is leading in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia, where Harris campaigned on Sunday as part of the Democrats’ “Souls to the Polls” push to get Black voters to cast their ballots early.

Here are some takeaways from Sunday night’s filings with the FEC.

PAC paying Trump’s legal expenses owes more than it has on hand

Save America, the leadership PAC that Trump has used to pay his legal bills and those of some of his associates, raised $1.4 million in September and spent $4 million, most of it on lawyers, demonstrating how the former president’s legal problems have continued to strain campaign resources.

The group had less than $2 million left in cash and owes nearly $5 million in legal debt.

Super PACs take in millions in the final sprint

The Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC — which has spent more than $314 million on ads on Trump’s behalf this cycle, according to the data firm Ad Impact — raised $40.7 million in September and spent almost that much over the period.

MAGA Inc. had $61 million on hand. It has primarily been funded by Timothy Mellon, the reclusive Wyoming-based businessman who is the scion of former treasury secretary and banking tycoon Andrew Mellon. Mellon has given $150 million to the group this cycle, including $25 million last month. Linda McMahon, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team and the chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, gave another $5 million to MAGA Inc., bringing the total that she has given to the group this cycle to more than $20 million.

Mellon and several other megadonors have dominated the spending landscape for Republicans this cycle. Preserve America, another super PAC running ads on behalf of Trump and against Harris, has been almost single-handedly funded by billionaire philanthropist Miriam Adelson, the wife of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Miriam Adelson has given at least $100 million to the group. (Preserve America has aired or reserved about $113 million in ads through Election Day, according to Ad Impact).

Future Forward, the Democratic PAC that has dominated the outside spending on ads to boost Harris’s campaign this cycle, took in $104 million in September and had $70.2 million available to spend. FF PAC has outspent the MAGA Inc. super PAC on ads with more than $397 million either spent or reserved through November, according to Ad Impact. FF PAC’s September fundraising included $10 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, $9.9 million from angel investor Chris Larsen, who co-founded cryptocurrency firm Ripple Labs, and $5 million from billionaire Illinois governor JB Pritzker. The Harris-aligned PAC also received more than $40 million from its affiliated nonprofit, which is not required to disclose its donors.

Reports filed last week showed that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people, gave nearly $75 million to a political action committee he helped create. That group, called America PAC, is focused on get-out-the-vote operations in swing states including Pennsylvania, where Musk has been campaigning for the former president. In its most recent filings, America PAC reported that it has spent more than $100 million to boost Trump, with a major focus on canvassing and direct mail.

On Saturday, Musk announced that he will use a lottery to hand out $1 million each day to registered swing-state voters who sign a petition tied to his super PAC’s voter recruitment drive. Legal experts have questioned the legality of the offer, because it ties a monetary reward to voter registration status, which is prohibited under federal law.

Democrats maintain edge in congressional fundraising

The Democratic National Committee raised $98.6 million in September, once again topping the Republican National Committee, which reported taking in $37.8 million last month. The RNC said it had $69.7 million on hand at the end of September compared to the DNC’s $46.5 million.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee, which work to aid candidates for the House of Representatives, were more evenly matched. The DCCC reported $49.9 million in cash left at the end of September and the NRCC reported $48.9 million. However, the DCCC outraised the NRCC by over $11 million for the month, taking in $30.3 million to the Republicans’ $18.8 million.

Democrats have held fundraising leads in the race for the House and the Senate for much of this election cycle. Reports filed with the FEC last week showed that in 25 of the 26 most competitive races, the Democratic candidate raised more than their GOP opponent. Democratic House candidates in those 26 battlegrounds spent almost $92 million from July through September — more than twice what their GOP counterparts spent. Republican Senate candidates also trailed their Democratic opponents in fundraising in all 11 of the most competitive races.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee reported raising $30.7 million last month and had $21 million in cash left over at the end of September. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised slightly less, bringing in $28 million, but finished the month with $37.4 million cash on hand.

The major super PACs involved in Senate races were fairly evenly matched. The Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC raised $119.1 million in the third quarter, with $108.9 million on hand. The Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund raised $115.7 million — including $20 million from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and $10 million from hedge fund manager Paul Singer — with $112.3 million on hand at the end of September, according to last week’s filings.

A new report projects that the Social Security Trust Fund might run out of money within six years under a Donald Trump presidency, while Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposed policies would not meaningfully change the current trajectory.

Social Security faces a looming funding crisis in an aging country, with trustees most recently predicting that the retirement and disability program’s trust fund will become insolvent in 2035. Many of Trump’s campaign proposals would accelerate that timeline, potentially by years, said the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that opposes large federal deficits.

In a report released Monday, the organization concluded that many of Trump’s proposed second-term agenda items all work in the same direction when it comes to the Social Security Trust Fund. The budget group did not produce a similar report on Harris’s policies because they would have a negligible effect measured only in weeks or months rather than years, said Marc Goldwein, CRFB’s senior policy director.

Compared to prior presidential campaigns, Goldwein said, “I can’t think of anything that would be this order of magnitude” in its detrimental effect on Social Security’s bottom line compared to the policies Trump has proposed.

Most directly, Trump has promised that no Social Security recipients should have to pay federal income taxes on their benefits. Under current law, 40 percent of beneficiaries pay taxes on some portion of their Social Security. The tax they pay on their benefits goes directly back to the trust fund, and getting rid of it could cost the program almost $1 trillion over 10 years, the report forecast.

Other Trump policies might have indirect effects. Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented workers could cost the trust fund hundreds of millions of dollars, the CRFB said. Many undocumented immigrants have payroll taxes taken out of their paychecks for the Social Security Trust Fund, but never become eligible to claim benefits, so they are a net positive for the program.

Trump’s proposed high tariffs on all imports could affect the economy in several ways detrimental to Social Security’s financial health, CRFB said. If the tariffs drive high inflation as projected by Wall Street experts, Social Security will have to pay out more in benefits because of automatic cost-of-living adjustments based on inflation.

The report also pointed to Trump’s promises not to tax tip income or income earned during overtime hours. Trump has not clarified whether he means to exempt them from federal income taxes only or also from taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. If he means the latter, that could cost Social Security $150 million to more than $1 trillion over a decade, with the likely outcome on the very high end of that range, CRFB said.

All added up, the report forecasts that Social Security under Trump would hit the point where by law it must cut benefits in 2031 or 2032. And unless Congress changes the law that triggers the automatic cuts, the size of the cut to benefits would rise, from a current projection of a 23 percent reduction for all Social Security checks to a predicted cut of about 33 percent.

Both Trump and Harris have said they aim to protect Social Security to prevent cuts if elected, but neither candidate has offered a comprehensive plan to plug the current projected gap. Stabilizing the trust fund will require either raising more money or spending less money in some way, or a combination of the two.

Trump has talked of raising more money by drilling for oil on federal lands and has claimed that undocumented immigrants receiving benefits has led to Social Security’s problems, a view rejected by experts who point out that immigrants pay more into the program than they receive.

Harris supports a plan to raise some of the money by imposing payroll taxes on income above $400,000; currently, workers stop paying Social Security taxes after their first $168,000 in annual income.