It’s Friday, but this close to Election Day, the campaigns aren’t taking a weekend break. Here’s a peek at what’s been going on 11 days before the election.

Where is everyone?

For the two presidential candidates, everything is bigger in Texas today. Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris will hold a rally in Houston with pop star Beyoncé and country music legend Willie Nelson. Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Rep. Colin Allred, will also be there. The rally will focus on reproductive rights.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump will be in Austin for a news conference focused on immigration and to record an interview for the mega-popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” This evening, he’s headed back into the battlegrounds with a rally in Traverse City, Mich.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance is switching places with his counterpart today — he’ll be in North Carolina, with stops in Raeford and Monroe (different places from where Tim Walz visited yesterday). Democratic VP hopeful Gov. Tim Walz is right here in Pennsylvania — but sticking to the eastern half of the state — with political stops in Philadelphia and Allentown and a rally in Scranton this evening.

New data, same conclusions

As far as national polls go, the headlining release for today is the New York Times/Siena College poll, a survey that many consider the gold standard of political polling. The survey was conducted from Oct. 20-23 with likely voters, and it has Harris and Trump tied at 48%, with 4% of respondents undecided.

A new Franklin & Marshall poll of Pennsylvania found Trump ahead one point, 50-49%, in line with the back-and-forth razor-edge lead that both candidates have had in results from this week.

An Emerson College/RealClearPennsylvania poll of the Pennsylvania senate race found incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey up one point over Republican nominee David McCormick, 47-46, among likely voters. Franklin & Marshall found the same margin, with respondents breaking 49-48 for Casey.

The FiveThirtyEight models haven’t moved today, still giving Trump and Harris essentially equal chances to win. Casey maintains a 3.6-point lead in the site’s average.

Some stories from the around the campaigns

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world — and ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump — has made the news several times in the past 24 hours. Last night it was reported that Musk pumped another $43 million into his pro-Trump America PAC, putting his total contributions to the Republican nominee at about $118 million. News also broke that Musk has spoken regularly with Russian president Vladimir Putin since 2022.

When it comes to his daily $1 million swing state giveaways, Musk suspended the sweepstakes for two days after receiving a letter from the Department of Justice. But he made up for it yesterday, awarding prizes to one voter in Michigan and one voter in Wisconsin.

Harris secured the endorsements of two influential Republicans in key swing states, Wisconsin and Michigan. Shawn Reilly, the mayor of Waukesha, Wis., and former U.S. Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan are voting for her.

When a paparazzo asked Mel Gibson about the election, he confirmed his support for Trump, declaring that Harris “has the IQ of a fencepost.”

As of this morning, Pennsylvanians have cast almost 1,285,000 early or mail-in ballots. The party split is currently 59.4% from registered Democrats, 30.4% from registered Republicans and 10.2% from nonaffiliated or minor party voters. Allegheny County continues to lead the state in ballot returns.

A group of nuns in Erie are firing back against accusations of voter fraud from a Republican canvasser. The door-knocker saw that 53 individuals were registered to vote at the address of the church — but didn’t see any of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie who do, in fact, reside in living quarters nearby.

And here’s some of The Boss to start off your weekend.

here's Bruce Springsteen's performance of "Dancing in the Dark" at the Harris-Obama rally in Georgia pic.twitter.com/5nHv7F1P7p

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 24, 2024

Dispatches from the op-ed sections

Opinions are only getting spicier as Election Day nears. Here are some columns and essays to peruse today.

“The double standard for Harris and Trump has reached a breaking point” in the Washington Post, written by Eugene Robinson, says, “Somehow, it is apparently baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way. I don’t know the answer to the chicken-or-egg question — whether media coverage is leading public perception or vice versa — but the disparate treatment is glaring. This week, it became simply ridiculous.”

In a Newsweek piece, Bobby Jindal and Charlie Katebi claim that “Trump’s Health Care Policies Put Patients First.” Supporting that assertion, they say, “Throughout the 2024 presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked former president Donald Trump with dire, misleading warnings about how his policies would devastate America’s health care system. However, Trump has a proven track record that indicates otherwise: His administration implemented policies that delivered better care at lower costs for Americans.”

Jamelle Bouie tells readers of the New York Times that “The Only Guardrail Left Is Us.” He writes, “Mark Milley. John Kelly. Mark Esper. Two generals. Three high-ranking officials in the Trump administration. Men with intimate knowledge of Trump’s impulses and private behavior. And here they are, in the crucial weeks before the election, telling the American public — explicitly and without euphemism — that their former boss is a would-be autocrat who will, if given the chance, plunge this country into the darkness of authoritarianism.”

In the Wall Street Journal piece “Kamala’s Basket of Deplorables,” Kimberley A. Strassel opines that Harris may lose because she’s doing too much to re-run former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign. “Mrs. Clinton battered Mr. Trump in 2016 as more toxic than botulism, utterly unfit for the Oval Office. The press and Democrats spent the next four years accusing him of conspiracy, fraud, self-enrichment, authoritarianism and ineptitude, after which President Biden turned ‘MAGA Republicans’ into a pejorative. This is so familiar by now that the definition of an undecided voter is someone who is aware of Mr. Trump’s problems yet unpersuaded to vote for his opponent.”

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