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Harris Raises Funds from Hack by Steyer Team: Campaign Update

Here’s the latest on the 2020 presidential race and what to watch today.

Harris Raises Funds from Hack by Steyer Team: Campaign Update
Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California and 2020 presidential candidate, speaks during the Everytown for Gun Safety Presidential Gun Sense Forum. (Photographer: Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Kamala Harris seized on a data breach of her South Carolina volunteer profiles by Tom Steyer’s campaign as an opportunity to raise money.

Harris called the breach “outrageous” in an email seeking donations from supporters.

The call to action comes after Dwane Sims, Steyer’s South Carolina deputy state director, downloaded her campaign’s data on volunteers from the state party file. The incident was reported Monday by the Post and Courier in Charleston.

The Steyer campaign said in a statement Tuesday that it was briefly given access to the Harris volunteer contact profiles after the South Carolina Democratic Party temporarily restricted access to its own data. The campaign said Sims contacted the party minutes after realizing he had access. He resigned Tuesday morning after being put on leave over the weekend.

The Democratic National Committee maintains each campaign’s separate accounts of voter files. Prior to joining Steyer’s campaign, Sims was the South Carolina party’s voter file manager. Sims’s SCDP accounts were disabled after he left, but he was able to access the data through a separate training account, according to the Post and Courier.

Since the incident, Sims is permanently banned from accessing DNC voter data files, the newspaper reported.

Warren Says She Would Pay Troops More (9:00 a.m.)

Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a new policy proposal Tuesday that she would set pay raises for military service members “at or above the Employment Cost Index” if elected president.

Her plan for the U.S. armed forces also includes a move to “prosecute sexual harassment as a standalone crime under military law,” and “set a goal of cutting veteran suicides in half within my first term.”

Warren said she’d take military funds that President Donald Trump has redirected to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and use them to pay for Defense Department child care centers and schools on bases. Her pay proposal would peg troops’ salaries to a faster rate of inflation that tracks overall employment changes.

Her proposal, which was published on Medium.com, didn’t include a price tag or a financing mechanism, but she called for “reining in our bloated defense budget and reducing the influence of defense contractors at the Pentagon, and bringing our troops home responsibly.” -- Sahil Kapur

Trump Trails Top Democrats in New National Poll (7:48 a.m.)

Trump lags behind five potential Democratic rivals in one-on-one matchups, dragged down by an approval rating below 40%, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Warren and Bernie Sanders perform best nationally against Trump, with Biden ahead by 17 points, Warren by 15 points and Sanders by 14 points. But South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Kamala Harris also best Trump in the poll, with Buttigieg up by 11 points and Harris by nine points.

The survey, released Tuesday, comes one day after Trump was found competitive against top Democrats in six key battleground states in a set of New York Times/Siena College polls. Across Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina -- the states that Trump won most narrowly in 2016 -- the poll found the president only trailed Biden by an average of two percentage points among registered voters -- within the margin of error.

The Washington Post/ABC poll found voting preferences in line with how people regard the president’s performance. He won support among 95% of the 39% of registered voters who approve of the job he’s doing. But Trump received only 7% backing among the 58% of voters who disapprove of Trump’s performance.

The poll of 876 registered voters, conducted Oct. 27-30, has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4 percentage points. -- Elizabeth Wasserman

COMING UP

Tuesday is Election Day, with voters in Kentucky and Mississippi casting ballots for new state governors. Virginia holds state legislative elections, in what will be key tests for Democrats and Republicans ahead of 2020 races.

Trump plans a rally Wednesday in Monroe, Louisiana, where Governor John Bel Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the Deep South, is facing Republican challenger Eddie Rispone, who describes himself as a conservative businessman, in a Nov. 16 runoff vote.

--With assistance from Elizabeth Wasserman and Sahil Kapur.

To contact the reporter on this story: Emma Kinery in Washington at ekinery@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, Justin Blum

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.