Trump comes to Salem for a photo op; Kaine goes to New York for a video op

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Maybe Donald Trump came to Salem for a single photo.

When Trump announced he would spend part of the final Saturday before the election in Virginia, the overwhelming question was: Why?

Virginia does not appear to be in play, according to the polls, although Kamala Harris’ lead in the state hasn’t been so big as to be out of reach.

I speculated in a column Friday that either a) the Trump campaign knows something the rest of us don’t about Virginia’s status or b) this was a way to lay the groundwork for a post-election challenge to any results he doesn’t like. After all, the appeance was announced shortly after a federal judge blocked the state from purging noncitizens from its voter rolls, a decision later reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

What of neither of those things is true? The Roanoke College Poll that came out Friday showed Harris’ lead in the state expanding to 10 percentage points. And once Trump got to Salem, he said relatively little about the state’s voter rolls or election integrity issues in general.

Instead, the big surprise out of Trump’s appearance came when he brought some members of the Roanoke College women’s swim team on stage and used that as an opportunity to bash the “radical left” for its “transgender craziness.”

Last year, a transgender swimmer who had previously competed on the men’s swim team at Roanoke College briefly joined the women’s team, prompting protests from other swimmers on the women’s team.

Trump’s Salem appearance gave him a chance to talk about transgender issues with a real-life example: “The brave members of the swim team stood up to the transgender fanatics,” Trump said.

This may have taken some in Virginia by surprise but it fits with Trump’s message elsewhere. Just Friday, The Economist published a story headlined: “Why the Trump campaign is spending heavily on ads on trans issues.” It didn’t actually quantify how much Trump is spending on such ads but said, “It is a message Republicans are emphasising up and down the ballot. Recent polling by YouGov shows that Trump supporters have higher awareness of the former president’s policy on women’s sports than of his policy on abortion.”

If this is an issue that animates Trump supporters, it makes political sense that he would emphasize it in the closing days of the campaign, even if it means taking a detour into a state he may not win. (He didn’t have to make much of a detour; he came from North Carolina, a state he’s hitting multiple times in the last days). This is also an issue where Trump may find additional supporters: That YouGov poll — which, admittedly, is from January — shows only 19% of Americans support trans athletes playing on sports teams that match their gender identity rather than their biological sex. Among Democrats, the figure is 33%, still not particularly high. That makes this the classic wedge issue, in the sense that it can potentially drive a wedge into the Democratic base and cleave off some votes for Republicans.

The photo of Trump with the Roanoke College women’s swim team lit up conservative news sites over the weekend. Here at Cardinal, we counted more than a dozen such sites that linked to our story last year on the controversy. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; the question for Trump is how many votes that picture is worth.

Kaine makes an appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’

Those who stayed up Saturday to watch “Saturday Night Live” got to see pop star Chappell Roan. They also got to see Kamala Harris make a cameo in the show’s opening sketch. There was another guest, though: Virginia’s Sen. Tim Kaine. The Democratic candidate shows up in a game show sketch, “What’s That Name?,” where the joke was that none of the “contestants” could remember the Democratic vice presidential candidate from eight years ago.

Kaine’s appearance was reminiscent of a television ad featuring another former vice presidential candidate. In 1964, Barry Goldwater picked William Miller, a Republican congressman from New York, as his running mate. While Miller might have been a player in Washington, he wasn’t well-known nationally, prompting this Democratic joke: “Here’s a riddle, it’s a killer / Who the hell is William Miller?”

When the Goldwater-Miller ticket lost, Miller left politics. In the late 1970s, Miller was featured in an American Express ad in which he poked fun at his obscurity.

When Miller died in 1983, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Miller was “better known for his advertising appearance than his years in Congress.”

If Kaine can skip the campaign trail on the final Saturday before the election, he must be feeling pretty good about his chances. The Roanoke College Poll gave him a lead of 11 percentage points.