President cancels two rallies, upgrades to a 19-state phone sprint, warns voters Democratic wins mean less federal help.

…(cont) What they will hear, ABC News reported the same day, is a price. The president has been signaling to the same states that federal help will be "far less likely" if their voters elect Democrats. The rally died; the ask survived it, cheaper to produce and harder to walk back, because nobody can clip a phone call into a thirty-second attack ad.

The threat did not arrive alone. On Monday the president offered a $1 million reward, paid on arrest and conviction, for reports of voter fraud in this election and past ones. On Tuesday the advocacy group Demand Justice found that 53 of 60 battleground House and Senate races sit in districts or states with at least one Trump-appointed, election-denying judge on the bench. In August the Supreme Court had cleared ground for the fight, lifting an injunction on the president's mail-in-voting order 6 to 3. And in Texas, campaigning for other Republicans, the president touted the oil prices he once predicted a war with Iran would bring — "I knew that oil would go up" — while on a nearby tarmac, before his own flight to Michigan, the vice president was asked about the president calling that state's Democratic Senate candidate a "jihadist" and responded to the question.

None of this is bunk; all of it is dated, filed, and on the record before the polls open. The retail rally is survived by a phone line, a bounty, and a bench. It was preceded in death by the economy, as a thing a campaign was still willing to run on. In lieu of flowers, count the days left, and vote anyway.