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Maybe Donald Trump came to Salem for just one photo.

When Trump announced that he would spend part of his last Saturday before the election in Virginia, the question that came to mind was: Why?

Virginia doesn’t appear to be in the game, according to polls, but Kamala Harris’s lead in the state isn’t out of reach.

Istated in a column on Friday Either a) the Trump campaign knows something the rest of us don’t about Virginia’s status, or b) this was a way to lay the groundwork for a post-election challenge against results he didn’t like. After all, the application was announced shortly after a federal judge blocked the state from removing noncitizens from voter rolls; a decision later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Isn’t any of this true? The Roanoke College Poll, released Friday, showed Harris’ lead in the state growing to 10 percentage points. And when Trump arrived in Salem, he said relatively little about the state’s voter rolls or election integrity issues in general.

Instead, the big surprise in Trump’s appearance was that he brought some members of the Roanoke College women’s swim team on stage and used it as an opportunity to attack the “radical left” for the “transgender craze.”

Last year, a transgender swimmer who had previously competed on Roanoke College’s men’s swimming team briefly joined the women’s team, sparking protests from other swimmers on the women’s team.

Trump’s appearance in Salem gave him a chance to talk about transgender issues with a real-life example: “Brave members of the swim team stood up to transgender fanatics,” Trump said.

This may have surprised some in Virginia, but it aligns with Trump’s message elsewhere. Friday Only, The Economist published a story It carried the headline: “Why is the Trump campaign spending so much money on ads about trans issues?” He didn’t actually measure how much Trump spent on such ads, but said: “That’s a message that Republicans have emphasized up and down the ballot. The latest poll by YouGov shows that Trump supporters are more aware of the former president’s policy on women’s sports than his policy on abortion.”

If this is an issue that galvanizes Trump supporters, it makes political sense for him to emphasize it in the closing days of the campaign, even if it means taking a detour into a state he can’t win. (He didn’t need to take too many detours; he came from North Carolina, a state he’s been to many times in recent days). This is also an issue where Trump could find additional supporters: A January poll from YouGov shows that only 19% of Americans support transgender athletes playing on a sports team that matches their gender identity rather than their biological sex. Among Democrats, the rate is 33%, still not very high.

Trump’s photo with the Roanoke College women’s swim team lit up conservative news sites over the weekend. At Cardinal, we counted more than a dozen sites that linked to that site.Your story about last year’s debate. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; The real question for Trump is how many votes this picture is worth.

Kaine appears on Saturday Night Live

Those who stayed up Saturday to watch Saturday Night Live had the opportunity to see pop star Chappell Roan. They also got to see Kamala Harris make a cameo in the show’s opening sketch. But there was another guest: Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. The Democratic candidate asked, “What’s in a Name?” appears in a game show sketch called; The joke was that none of the “contestants” could remember the Democratic vice presidential candidate from eight years ago.

Kaine’s appearance was reminiscent of a television ad featuring another former vice presidential candidate. In 1964, Barry Goldwater chose William Miller, a Republican congressman from New York, as his vice president. While Miller was a player in Washington, he was little known nationally, prompting Democrats to joke: “Here’s a riddle, it’s a murderer / Who the hell is William Miller?”

When the Goldwater-Miller ticket disappeared, Miller left politics. In the late 1970s, Miller appeared in an American Express commercial in which he mocked his obscurity.

When Miller died in 1983, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Miller was “more known for his appearances in commercials than for his years in Congress.”

If Kaine can skip the campaign trail on the final Saturday before the election, he should be feeling pretty good about his chances. The Roanoke College Poll gave him an 11 percentage point lead.

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