Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast's daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It's just 20 days to Election Day and here's what's happening in the race for the White House between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

THE DOWNLOAD

More than 100 Republican officials supporting Kamala Harris for president planned to join the vice president in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to publicly rebuke Donald Trump, their own party's presidential nominee.

“He just can’t be back in the Oval Office,” former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) told the Daily Beast on Tuesday evening during her drive to the Keystone State for the event. And she predicted: Harris will win.

“I think there is a silent majority,” she said. “I think there is a silent group of women who will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump and who will quietly vote for Harris.”

Donald Trump told an all-female town hall in Georgia on Wednesday that he was not “unhinged” as he doubled down and identified the “enemy from within” as Nancy Pelosi and her husband, who were nearly killed would be.

He turned his fire on the former House speaker, who almost single-handedly snatched an easy election victory from Trump as she led the charge to push President Joe Biden out of the race, leaving Trump dead even against a more formidable opponent.

“Because they are, they are very different, and it is the enemy from within, and they are very dangerous. They are Marxists, communists and fascists,” Trump, 78, said at the Fox News town hall as he headed into his own soundbyte.

Obsessed with polls

The race is getting closer and closer. Harris and Trump are separated by just one percentage point, with the Democratic candidate narrowly leading 48 percent to 47 percent in a Marquette Law School poll released Wednesday. Four percent said they would vote for another candidate and 1 percent said they did not plan to vote in the presidential election. But if there are third-party candidates on the ballot – independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party candidate Jill Stone– Harris leads Trump 44 percent to 41 percent.

The same poll shows that 51 percent of likely voters will vote for Democrats in Congress, while 49 percent will support Republicans.

ON THE WAY

Republicans for Harris crawled out of the woodwork to publicly show their support for the Democratic presidential candidate in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. Harris was also scheduled to take part in a high-profile live interview with Fox News. Trump is hosting a star-studded fundraising gala at Mar-a-Lago with roundtable discussions and a candlelight dinner for couples willing to donate or raise $924,600.

WAYBACK WEDNESDAY

Stop us if this sounds familiar… On October 16, 2016, Donald Trump began suggesting that the election would be “rigged” against him in “many polling places.” Of course, he had claimed his defeat in the Iowa caucus Ted Cruz was also manipulated. But this was the first hint of his denial of the general election, which was quickly forgotten the next month when he won – although it has been revived frequently since then.

The beast of the day

No matter how well Kamala Harris does in her first Fox News face-off on Wednesday night, that's a safe bet Brett Baier will not emerge as favorite. When Baier pushed hard to secure the interview, he invited a flood of critics — on both sides of the aisle.

Meanwhile, some Democrats are wondering why Harris, even as she looks for every possible vote, is heading so directly into enemy territory.

“She’s going into the lion’s den,” said one Democratic strategist The Hill –especially when the moderator is Baier, the 54-year-old moderator of Special report and the face of the station's pure reporting.

SHAMELESS PLUG

John Oliver brings his biting mix of comedy and polemic to The Daily Beast Podcast, debuting at midnight. He tells Samantha Bee And Joanna Coles how he is coping with the run-up to the election, how he, as an immigrant, rates the USA in the top ten places and what he really thinks about the British royal family.

Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTubeAnd all major podcast players.