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    Tucker Carlson warms up crowd at Trump rally with bizarre spanking rant

    The audience at a Donald Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday erupted into bizarre chants of “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!” after an extraordinary and borderline creepy and sexist speech by far-right personality Tucker Carlson likening the Republican presidential candidate to an angry father spanking his daughter.“Dad comes home. He’s pissed. Dad is pissed. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,’” the former Fox TV host told the crowd in Duluth.“‘I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. You’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. It has to be this way.’”The Washington Post reported that Carlson’s comments, made during his warm-up to Trump taking the stage, intended to portray the ex-president as a person coming “home” to the White House to mete out discipline to the vice-president, Kamala Harris, as “punishment” for her term in office.But others saw the rant as simply “disturbing”, given Trump’s background as an adjudicated rapist and sex offender, and new allegations published by the Guardian that he molested a former model introduced to him by the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein in the early 1990s.Carlson, who was fired by Fox in April 2023 for “getting too big for his boots” at the network, has a controversial past of his own, including promoting Nazi falsehoods and conducting a lengthy, rambling interview with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in February in which both were highly critical of the US.Despite his reduced profile since his dismissal as one of Fox’s most prominent and highly paid stars, Carlson is still a highly influential figure in Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, exemplified by the crowd’s reaction to his “spanking” comments in Duluth.CNN reported the atmosphere at the event was similar to the Republican national convention in July at which Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination.“When Trump came on stage, they started screaming and chanting ‘Daddy’s home!’ and ‘Daddy Don!’ This is something I have not heard at a Trump rally so far. The vibe in the room is like a mini-RNC,” reporter Alayna Treene, who was covering the event, said in a clip published to X.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s own comments in Duluth, at a rally hosted by far-right youth group Turning Point USA, featured a familiar and lengthy diatribe of insults against Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 5 November election.“She’s not a smart person. She’s a low-IQ individual,” Trump said, before embarking on a meandering speech that included a curious claim that he had “stopped a war with France” during his time as president. More

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    What I learned when Turning Points USA came to my campus | Cas Mudde

    This Tuesday, Charlie Kirk brought his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour to the campus of my public university in a Republican-controlled state. It was nothing like the last time Kirk and his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization had visited. Although the different timing matters – this was literally two weeks before election day – the differences between the 2018 and 2024 events in many ways reflect the dangerous radicalization of the US right wing.In 2018, Kirk had a fairly similar agenda when coming to my university: “exposing leftist lies and progressive propaganda” at US universities. I wrote a column about the rather bland event, describing it as a “rightwing safe space”, in which Kirk railed against the “cultural Marxists”. Most students seemed more amused than aggrieved. How different this week’s event was.When I came to campus early, I saw them set up their stands. I drank my coffee opposite to a lone female student with a Trump hat – a rare sight even at my university. I then went to teach my course on far-right politics, where TPUSA’s event was the talk of the class. I told my students that I totally understood if they wanted to observe the event – who am I to stand in the way of them getting “de-brainwashed”? – and approximately half of my students indeed left halfway through class to attend the event.After class, I walked down to Tate Plaza, the open space in front of the student center, and was perplexed by the sight. I saw what looked like a sea of Maga hats on the large open space. I bumped into one of my students, who told me that TPUSA handed out the Maga hats for free, and that he was leaving because you couldn’t hear anything anyway. In the background Kirk was droning on about Kamala Harris, wokeism and his other favorite enemies. But there was something to the meeting, an energy that was lacking six years ago. This was not just a safe space, this was a boisterous and proud rally!Sure, almost anyone wearing their own Maga hat was older and not related to the university, but a couple hundred students happily accepted and wore the hat. Moreover, most kept them on when they left the rally, and went to the food court, to class or even downtown. Turns out that a hat that is the most recognizable symbol of support for a man that has been loudly and openly authoritarian and racist in the last months is a rather cool gimmick for privileged young white men.View image in fullscreenThere are important broader lessons to be drawn from the differences between these two TPUSA events. First, the 2024 meeting shows the radicalization of conservative America. While Turning Point was already supportive of Trump in 2018, it still had a largely independent program, ostensibly focused on traditional conservative values as small government and capitalism. In the past years, Kirk has not only fully embraced the authoritarian and nativist agenda of Trump, he and his organization have pivoted to full-on Christian nationalism.Second, Turning Point USA targets college and high school students, that is, those 21 and under. These kids and young adults have been socialized in a world in which 1 Trump is a former president; 2 the Republican party is the party of Trump; and 3 the US Capitol got stormed by Trump sympathizers. For those raised in Republican households, which means most of the students at my university, this means that Trump and the far right are completely normal. What we see as far right, they see as mainstream conservatism. They have no conception of the Republican party of George Bush Sr or Jr.Third, radicalized organizations like TPUSA have overtaken the role of mainstream conservative organizations such as the College Republicans, not just on campus but also as training grounds for the next “conservative” elite. Kirk has literally been training the cadres for the next Trump administration, should it happen. This is a very different kind of “Republican”, if they are Republicans at all. They are more assertive and extremist but less tied to traditional conservative organizations, including the Republican party.Fourth, and most optimistically, the sea of Maga hats also gave me a shimmer of hope for the upcoming election. Since Trump’s shock 2016 win, the media has obsessed about “shy Trump supporters”, that is, people who support Trump in the elections but do not say so in polls because of social desirability. Although empirical evidence has always been weak, the “shy Trump voter” never disappeared from the public debate. Seeing these students wear the Maga hats, not for fun or provocation, but as a “normal” expression of support for the “conservative” candidate in the presidential election, confirmed my suspicion that there are no “shy Trumpers” left in 2024.And, if this is true, there might still be hope, in the sense that the current polls are overrepresenting the Trump vote, because they are overcompensating for a dated phenomenon, the shy Trump voter, yet another victim of the normalization of Trump.

    Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More

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    Georgia secretary of state fends off cyberattack targeting absentee ballot website.

    Georgia’s secretary of state warded off a cybersecurity threat this month against what was most likely an attack by a foreign country targeting its website that voters can use to request absentee ballots.An unusual spike in users on the site appeared to be an attempt to shut it down. There were ultimately no disruptions to absentee ballot access. State and local election officials have faced increasing threats, both to their operations and physical safety, that have made the otherwise mundane, bureaucratic work of election management increasingly risky.The secretary of state’s office thwarted a sudden rise in users trying to access the site on Oct. 14, a tactic sometimes used by hackers to send a website offline by overwhelming it with requests, WSB-TV, a broadcaster in Atlanta, reported. A spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state confirmed this reporting.“We saw a spike of around 420,000 individual entities attempting to access the absentee ballot portal,” Gabe Sterling, an official in the secretary of state’s office, told WSB-TV. “We identified it and attempted to mitigate it immediately, and you see it start to drop back down.”Mr. Sterling also said that the attack may have come from a foreign country, although details were not clear.This is not the first cybersecurity threat Georgia election officials have faced. In 2022, a group of allies to former President Donald J. Trump tried to access voter data in Coffee County. The county also faced its own cybersecurity attack this year, according to CNN. Poll workers have faced threats of violence around the country. More

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    Trump escalates insults against Harris as he faces scrutiny over alleged praise of Hitler

    Donald Trump escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris at a Wednesday evening rally in Georgia as he faces growing scrutiny over reports of his praise of Hitler and alleged sexual misconduct.“This woman is crazy,” the former president said at an event in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, hosted by Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group. He said voters should stand up to the vice-president and tell her: “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.” He also said that in her recent interview with CBS, she “gave an answer that was from a loony bin”, later adding: “She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.”The rally, less than two weeks before election day, came after the Guardian published an interview with a former model who accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in 1993 after notorious sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein introduced them, an allegation the Trump campaign denied. Stacey Williams said it felt as if the unwanted touching was part of a “twisted game” between the two men and that it appeared Epstein and Trump were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”.

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    Williams’s account put the spotlight back on the roughly two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct throughout his career. Harris, campaigning with Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has sought to encourage Republican women to support the Democrat.The Georgia rally also came after Harris’s surprise speech in Washington DC on Wednesday, when she denounced the former president as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power”. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, told the New York Times this week that he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. He also said Trump repeatedly commented: “Hitler did some good things, too.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a characteristically rambling speech, Trump went on meandering tangents about Google (“Google is treating us much better. Do you notice that? What happened to Google?”); McDonald’s (“McDonald’s was one of the most viewed things that [Google] ever had”); Emmanuel Macron (“I stopped wars with France”); Richard Nixon (“That was not good when they found out he taped every single conversation”); and the vice-president’s name (“You can’t call her ‘Harris’ because nobody knows who the hell you’re talking about”).He threatened to sue CBS’s 60 Minutes, repeating false claims that the station manipulated Harris’s interview after Trump backed out of his planned interview with the program. He reiterated the threat a second time about an hour later in his speech.Robert F Kennedy Jr, former independent presidential candidate, also rallied for Trump in Georgia, calling Kelly a “known liar”. Trump did not address Kelly at the rally, but on Truth Social called his former chief of staff a “LOWLIFE” and “total degenerate”.In a “faith-focused” town hall in Zebulon, Georgia earlier on Wednesday, Trump praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has been condemned for undermining democratic institutions and aligning with Moscow and Beijing.Asked about his faith, Trump responded: “When you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people that don’t have that.” He went on to falsely suggest he has endured more investigations than notorious gangster Al Capone. More

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    Giuliani ordered to turn over apartment and Benz to Georgia election workers

    Rudy Giuliani must give control of his New York City apartment, a 1980s Mercedes-Benz once owned by Lauren Bacall, several luxury watches and many other assets to two Georgia election workers he defamed.Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets.A jury ruled that Giuliani owes them around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.“The road to justice for Ruby and Shaye has been long, but they have never wavered,” said Aaron Nathan, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss. “Last December, a jury delivered a powerful verdict in their favor, and we’re proud that today’s ruling makes that verdict a reality.”“We are proud that our clients will finally begin to receive some of the compensation to which they are entitled for Giuliani’s actions,” said Nathan. “This outcome should send a powerful message that there is a price to pay for those who choose to intentionally spread disinformation.”A spokesperson for Giuliani did not immediately return a request for comment.In addition to his apartment on the Upper East Side Giuliani was also ordered to turn over several items of Yankees memorabilia and around two dozen watches. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.After losing the defamation case last fall, Giuliani declared bankruptcy to try and avoid paying Freeman and Moss the money they were owed. A judge dismissed that bankruptcy case earlier this year.After the 2020 election, Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused Freeman and Moss of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night in 2020. He continued to do so even after Georgia election officials said the video showed both women doing their jobs with no issue. They have also been formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing.The video and lie about the two women became central to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. The ex-president mentioned Freeman by name on a phone call in 2021 with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asking her to overturn the vote.Both women have rarely been seen in public since the incident, but have spoken about how it has upended their lives. They received constant death threats, were chased from their homes, and lost their jobs. During the defamation trial in Washington DC, they spoke about the depression they faced after the election.Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York and Washington DC, has shown little regret for his false statements. During the trial, he gave a press conference on the courthouse steps in which he insisted everything he said about Freeman and Moss was true.Freeman and Moss also recently settled a defamation suit with the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that was the first to publicly identify them and amplified the video. While the terms of that settlement were confidential, the site has deleted all articles mentioning the two women and posted a notice acknowledging they did not do anything wrong.Freeman and Moss have also settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right network, which broadcast an apology.All of those cases are being closely watched because they amount to the most significant accountability so far for those who spread lies about the 2020 election. Scholars are closely watching to understand how powerful a tool defamation law can be in curbing misinformation.Giuliani also faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. More

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    Republican top Georgia elections officer says voting integrity lies hurt his party

    Georgia’s top elections official says he believes Republicans’ claims of doubting the integrity of the vote in November’s presidential election “will really hurt” their party’s chances at the poll.In an interview on Sunday with NewsNation, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, defended the election process he oversees amid the casting of a record number of early votes in recent days. His comments came after the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Raffensperger’s fellow Republican, posted claims on X that a voting machine had misprinted a voter’s selections to the detriment of her party.Raffensperger, who took office in 2019, said that “spreading stories like that” will “really hurt our turnout on our side”.“I’m a conservative Republican, so I don’t know why they do that, it’s self-defeating,” Raffensperger added. “You know, you can trust the results.”Georgia, a battleground state, has been a central focus for Republicans in their unfounded claims of voter fraud. During the 2020 election, after Joe Biden won Georgia by a close margin and took the presidency from Donald Trump, Raffensperger announced a ballot recount. That recount confirmed that Biden had won the election.Ever since, legal and political showdowns have placed the state as a central focus for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House in a contest against the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Recent court rulings in Georgia have pushed back on Republican-led attempts to change how the state handles its elections.The Georgia state election board, a relatively obscure five-person panel primarily made up of Trump-aligned Republicans, passed a number of rules that would significantly change how the state handles its political races. The most controversial proposal sought to obligate poll workers to hand-count paper ballots on election night.Nonetheless, Georgia judges ruled against implementing those changes after Raffensperger warned they could lead to disrupting the certification of the election, confusion and delays. Georgia’s Republican party has appealed.More than 1 million voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, cementing its status as a swing state in the race between Harris and Trump.After the 2020 elections, Trump-aligned Republicans lied that their candidate lost to Biden because of voter fraud. Fervor over those lies culminated in Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Raffensperger at one point received a phone call directly from Trump pressuring him to “find” him enough votes to prevent Biden from winning Georgia, though the secretary of state rebuffed him.

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    Georgia state prosecutors later filed criminal charges against Trump over his attempts to overturn the outcome of the presidential election there, all of which are part of the many legal problems that the former president has been confronting while running for the White House again.In an interview with the New York Times earlier in October, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, refused to answer whether the former president lost the 2020 election. Vance later clarified that he did not think Trump lost the 2020 race, saying: “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”Raffensperger on Sunday maintained Georgia was “ranked number one” for election integrity by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum.“That just shows you we’re doing the right thing,” Raffensperger said. “Voters trust the process we have in Georgia. It’s easy to vote. It’s hard to cheat.” More

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    A Crack, a Shift, Then Screams: Witnesses Describe Georgia Dock Collapse That Killed 7

    Investigators have begun looking for reasons behind the failure at a ferry dock on Sapelo Island, the site of a festival celebrating the heritage of descendants of enslaved people. They had come to Sapelo Island, just off the curve of the Georgia coast, for a celebration of resilience, of a people, of a culture that for generations had been so fragile but could not be broken.The smell of smoked mullet drifted. Vendors sold red peas and rice. Performers onstage presented poetry and sang African spirituals.By midafternoon on Saturday, dozens readied for the trip back to the mainland, a route beginning with a ferry known as the Annemarie waiting at the end of the floating dock in the marsh. But then, a strange cracking noise. The walkway to the dock suddenly shifted. Then it collapsed.“Everyone’s falling into the water, and you’re hearing screams,” said Michael Wood, 43, who had been waiting in line to board.On Sunday, members of the tight-knit Gullah Geechee community, descendants of formerly enslaved people in the Southeast, who had gathered for a festival celebrating their heritage, mourned four women and three men, all of them older than 70, who were killed. And officials began investigating how a short journey to the only way off the Georgia island could have led to such tragedy.“The initial findings of our investigation at this point showed a catastrophic failure of the gangway, causing it to collapse,” said Walter Rabon, the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, adding that investigators and engineers will be gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses. Three people were also injured and remain hospitalized in critical condition. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Harris marks birthday with church visit after Trump’s crude rhetoric at rally

    Democratic governors from three states in the so-called blue wall that is key to their party’s aspirations for an electoral college victory delivered closing pitches for Kamala Harris on Sunday as their presidential nominee celebrated her 60th birthday with a visit to church.Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Tony Evers of Wisconsin and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer barnstormed the Sunday morning political shows to talk up the vice-president’s policy agenda – and highlight differences with Republican candidate Donald Trump, 16 days before an election that polls suggest is still on a knife edge.Acolytes of Trump, meanwhile, attempted to defend the former president’s extraordinary and vulgar rhetoric during a Saturday night rally in Pennsylvania, when he called Harris a “shit vice-president” and exalted the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.“I don’t want to go back to Donald Trump when he was in charge of the country,” Shapiro told NBC’s Meet the Press.“Remember the record? I know there’s still some people that have maybe a little brain fog, they don’t remember what it was like under Donald Trump. You had more chaos, you had less jobs, and you had a whole lot less freedom.“I don’t think we want to go back to a time of chaos. I want a stable, strong leader, and that’s Kamala Harris.”It also emerged Sunday that Harris has no plans to campaign with Joe Biden before election day on 5 November, a development appearing to confirm recent reports of friction between the two after the 81-year-old president was pressured out of running for re-election over age-related questions.“The most important role he can play is doing his job as president,” an anonymous White House official told NBC News, which said the decision was mutual following discussions between the campaign and Biden administration officials.Shapiro joined Evers and Whitmer, his fellow passengers on a weekend blue wall bus tour, for a joint interview on ABC’s This Week, in which the three spoke of polls showing the presidential race virtually deadlocked in all three states.“Both candidates believe that Pennsylvania is critical – I just think we’ve got a better candidate, a better message, and what we’re experiencing is a whole lot more energy,” Shapiro said.In Michigan, according to Whitmer, voters were comparing both candidates’ records ahead of the 5 November election.“While this is going to be close, I’d much rather be playing our hand in theirs,” she said. “We got a better candidate. We’ve got receipts on the issues that matter to the American people, on the economy, individual rights, affordable housing, and we got a better ground game.”Evers, a two-term governor, pushed back on Trump’s claims that a Harris administration would tank the US economy, using Democratic policies in Wisconsin as an example.“We have the best economy we’ve ever had, the largest budget we’ve ever had, and we’re in good shape, and people are making more money than they ever made. So we’re in a good place, and it had nothing to do with Donald Trump,” he said.The swing state governors were speaking as Harris rallied Black voters in another swing state, Georgia, on Sunday with “souls to the polls” visits to two community churches.“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 told the congregation of the New Birth Missionary Baptist church in Atlanta.“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 actions and with our votes.”Harris has been attempting to shore up support from the Black community, particularly Black men. Polls have warned of a lack of enthusiasm for her campaign, though newer polling from the Howard Initiative on Public Opinion found Harris had built a lead among Black voters in swing states.Singer Stevie Wonder was scheduled to join her later at a rally at the Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro. That gathering was set to occur ahead of Harris’s interview with civil rights leader Al Sharpton to be broadcast later Sunday on MSNBC.“We just have to keep doing the work,” Georgia US senator Raphael Warnock – a Black Democrat – said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “And the good news is – that’s exactly what Kamala Harris [is] … doing.”Trump remained in Pennsylvania for an afternoon rally in Lancaster and a photo-op at a McDonald’s restaurant, the day after his bizarre appearance in Latrobe, Palmer’s home town, in which he riffed at length – in an unrefined address – about how well endowed the golfer was with respect to his genitalia.Republicans appearing on the Sunday talk shows attempted to detract from Trump’s comments and other recent behavior, including suggesting in an interview this week he would use the US military against political enemies.View image in fullscreenThe South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham lost his composure when questioned about it on NBC’s Meet the Press – and tried to pivot to two recent assassination attempts on Trump, both conducted by pro-Republican persons.“When you talk about rhetoric, you gotta remember they tried to blow his head off,” Graham said. “He’s been shot at and hit in the ear, and we’re lucky they didn’t blow his head off. And another guy tried to kill him … so I’m not overly impressed about the rhetoric game here.”Graham also condemned Republican colleagues, including former members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, as well as numerous ex-Trump administration officials who have denounced him and expressed support for Harris.The retired general Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, called Trump “fascist to the core”, according to veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book War.“To every Republican voting for her, what the hell are you doing?” Graham said. “You’re supporting the most radical nominee in the history of American politics. When you support her, you’re supporting four more years of garbage policy.”US House speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, was more restrained – but equally as determined to avoid questions about Trump’s commentary in an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, suggesting that it was host Jake Tapper who was obsessed with talking about Palmer’s penis.“The media can pick it apart, but people are going to vote what’s best for their family and they see that in Trump,” he said.Early in-person voting is under way in numerous states, with voters in Georgia setting a first-day turnout record Tuesday, even as polls have the candidates in a virtual dead heat.Shapiro said winning over the remaining undecided voters would determine the winner.“There are people that, frankly, don’t follow this on a daily basis, people that don’t follow the polls. They go to work, they got kids at home, they do their job with their kids and get up the next day,” he said.“The polls look at a small number. I know it’s a science, but at the end of the day I run into people all the time who just haven’t given it a thought, so we’re going to help them.” More