Good morning. It is October 22nd. It is a comfortable morning shaping up to be another excessively warm fall day in New York City, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, it's not much of a news day as we sit two weeks away from the only piece of news anybody really cares about or really two weeks and some untold number of days until the election results are in and known. And so the lead news story on page A1 is, “Battle is fierce for sliver of pie, undecided votes. Huge last ditch hunt. Election could hinge on people who aren't super political.” You don't say. Having already done the story about how it's coming down to the battleground states, now it's the same story but for people. The campaigns are campaigning really hard to reach the people who don't care about campaigns. Reporting from the current front lines of democracy, the Times finds Kyler Irvin, 22, a telehealth specialist from the San Tan Valley, Arizona, in the Phoenix area, who has never voted and said he registered only at his mother's insistence, who told the paper, “‘I’m not seeking out a ballot to vote because I don't care.’ He did not watch the debates,” the Times writes, “does not follow news coverage and does not believe his vote will make a difference. But he did say he remembered the pride he felt when, as a black elementary school student, he watched Barack Obama win the 2008 election. If the mail-in ballot comes, I'll send it in for Kamala, Mr. Irvin said, if it comes to my front door.” 

Next to that on page one is a story about Kamala Harris's religion. Her church is Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. She also attended a Hindu temple growing up. Her husband is Jewish. Somehow this all devolves into yet another discussion of Donald Trump's claims that she isn't really black enough to count. Basically, Harris sounds like an extremely normal, intermittently church-going person who is culturally literate about religion, practicing it personally in a non-ostentatious way, practicing it publicly within the normal parameters of what's expected of American politicians, and generally living, as the subhead says, “a life that embodies a pluralistic America.” Not sure why the story's running in late October, or why it's in the number two news hole, except for the aforementioned pre-election news vacuum. 

Below those two stories, down at the bottom of the page, Trump campaign reporter Sean McCreesh writes about Trump's McDonald's stunt. Once again, the Times fails to fully clarify how absolutely phony the stunt was, but the focus of the piece has merit. The headline is “While Trump is serving fries, rival crowds dish out vitriol.” And despite taking a both-sides approach to the protesters and counter protesters, it still basically lands on the accurate and important theme that whether it's right-wingers yelling at their liberal neighbors or liberals yelling at their right-wing neighbors, Donald Trump moves through the world of American politics in a cloud of endless acrimony. People screaming at each other is just what life consists of when Donald Trump commands the scene. 

What else is rattling around in this strangely empty paper? The whole front page of the national section is devoted to the ineffable mystery of what the Midwest is. “Is it Ohio,” the Times asks, “Chicago, field of dreams? Are the Great Plains included? The question of how to define the region is back in the spotlight in an election year with two Midwestern vice presidential candidates and a greater focus on its voters.” That setup about the vice presidential nominees sort of stumbles. The Times starts with Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and vice presidential nominee on the Democratic side, who has the Times' writes, “happily taken up the mantle of Midwestern dad. His tater-tot hot dish, a Minnesota favorite, has won competitions, he notes.” But then it turns to, or turns away from, the problem of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, who, the Times writes, “often talks about being raised by his Mamaw”—or mam-aw, or however he says it—‘the name we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers,’ he said in a speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He plays up his love of the Ohio State University, emphasis on the, and football.” But Ohio State and football aside, the line about hillbilly grandmas is about the fact that J.D. Vance built his career on denying his Midwestern identity and pretending to belong to a completely different region of the country, Appalachia. Wherever exactly the Midwest may lie, whether you're more partial to the Old Northwest, or you put more emphasis on the Great Plains, which is wrong, but whatever. The Midwest is flatlands. It's cornfields. However you draw the boundaries, it's some piece of the part of the country that's in between the mountains. J.D. Vance's fake mountain identity is all about trying to pretend to be something more interesting than a midwesterner. 

On the page facing that, The Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn tries to tell people not to trust the polls, but also to read his column about the polls. “Contest tightens, but polling lacks real precision.” Yeah, no thanks. 

Below that, “Harris sets a fundraising record forging a vast gap with Trump.” I don't think you can really “forge” a gap. but the Times reports that Harris raised $378 million in September, compared with the Times' rights to the $160 million reported by former President Donald J. Trump's campaign and allied groups. That's one more piece of reporting, forming a coherent picture of an election where conventional indicators are all pointing a certain way. Contrary to the polls, a counter indicator, low down in the story, is that Timothy Mellon, described by the Times as the “reclusive heir to the Gilded Age banking fortune, a banking fortune so famous that it gets the definite article, has now donated a total of $152 million to the political action committee MAGA, Inc. The Supreme Court has ruled that political action committees, which were allowed to collect unlimited money because they were independent of the campaigns, and therefore not subject to campaign finance rules, are now free to closely coordinate with the candidates on campaigning activities.” That is also what Elon Musk is up to in Pennsylvania. So the billionaires in a world where cash is legally free speech continue aiming to have their say on election day. 

And we have an Indignity MorningPodcast audio correction yesterday talking about the campaign coverage from a perennial battleground of the upper Midwest. I mispronounced Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin. Listener John Heaton alerted us to the fact that I had emphasized the third syllable instead of the second. The Indignity Morning Podcast, working as it does from the written word to the spoken word, spends considerable time rummaging through ever less helpful Google video search to pull up reference audio for unfamiliar names. Apologies to the people of Ashwaubenon for the lack of due diligence. The Indignity Morning Podcast regrets the error. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Our ongoing pursuit of audio accuracy is underwritten by the financial support of You the Listeners. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going, if you have not already. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.