In the United States, the presidential campaign turned harsher as Republican advisers pushed Wendell Willkie to stop campaigning as a gentleman and make the war the central issue. Willkie reluctantly agreed, then forcefully argued that Franklin Roosevelt was leading America toward war and that a Roosevelt victory would send American boys to Europe within months. The attack worked politically, and Willkie's standing in the polls rose.

Roosevelt faced the danger of appearing too interventionist at the very moment the first number in the new draft lottery was drawn on October 29. That night, Roosevelt tried to soften the measure's meaning by speaking of a national muster rather than using the words draft or conscription. As Willkie and other Republicans intensified fear-based appeals to mothers, Roosevelt answered by repeatedly promising that American boys would not be sent into foreign wars, deliberately omitting the Democratic platform's qualification about an attack on the United States in order to reassure isolationist voters.

The tightening race showed how powerful the issue had become. Gallup's final poll before Election Day put Roosevelt only four points ahead, far less than his earlier lead. The American political struggle therefore revealed a major constraint on how openly Roosevelt could support Britain, even as the European war deepened.

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler responded to the Luftwaffe's failure to break Britain by postponing Operation Sea Lion without fixing a new date. Hitler concluded that as long as Winston Churchill refused to yield, American intervention on Britain's behalf became more likely, and Hitler feared an eventual alignment of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. To prevent that outcome and secure Germany's eastern flank, Hitler increasingly turned his attention toward war with Russia, believing the campaign would be swift.

Until that eastern war could begin, Hitler ordered Hermann Goring to continue unrelenting air attacks to keep Churchill under pressure. Goring devised a broader bombing strategy that would still strike London but now expand to other urban centers in an effort to obliterate smaller cities and crush British resistance. The first operation under this new plan was given the code name Moonlight Sonata, marking a new escalation in the Luftwaffe's deliberate targeting of civilians.