Trump's closing argument before Americans vote: a $14 million pool and a joke about naming it after himself.

…(cont) Two days later, on October 8, he said the work was almost done. The project, underway since April to be finished ahead of the country's 250th birthday, was by then six months old.

On Monday, the day before voters decided control of Congress, the president stood at the finished pool and walked through it in the kind of detail a resurfacing contract usually gets filed, not announced: the pipe, the grass, the granite. He floated renaming it the Trump Reflecting Pool, then said he was joking.

The Washington Examiner counted the minutes: close to half of what had been billed as his closing argument to voters went to the pool. The same paper noted he has spent this year's campaign being accused of exactly that, prioritizing construction over the economy and the prices voters say they came to hear about.

The Guardian reported, in the same piece unveiling the $14 million makeover, that polling indicates most voters feel the president has grown too focused on building projects in the capital. A separate Guardian live file carried the New York Times/Siena poll showing Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Mike Rogers by 11 points in Michigan's Senate race, outside the margin of error, and Democratic Representative Haley Stevens endorsing Rogers anyway, a seat her party needs to hold the Senate.

Five items came across this desk today. Four are the pool. The fifth is the only one that mentions the Senate seat up for grabs tomorrow, and it does so in a paragraph about a poll, not in anything the candidate said himself at the microphone.

$14 million bought a pool that reflects the Lincoln Memorial. On the eve of the vote, it reflected something else: an afternoon where the infrastructure got a press conference and the election got a joke about a name, hon.