On Fox News’ Special Report last night, we talked about Kamala Harris’s vibe spiral and the fallout from a media tour that contained more botches than Democrats would like to see at this point in the race. The race is very tight, but for a Democratic campaign that had hoped for momentum headed into November, that seems to be lacking indeed. And now comes a WSJ poll which bears this out in the numbers from swing states:
Voters in the nation’s seven battleground states see Donald Trump as better equipped than Kamala Harris to handle the issues they care about most—the economy and border security—yet are divided about evenly over which candidate should lead the nation, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.
The survey of the most contested states finds Harris with slim leads in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia on ballots that include independent and third-party candidates where they will be offered as options. Trump has a narrow edge in Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. But no lead is greater than 2 percentage points, except for Trump’s 5-point advantage in Nevada, which like the others is within the poll’s margin of error.
Across the full set of 4,200 swing-state voters, Trump gets 46% support and Harris draws 45%. The survey finds that the race in every state—and therefore the presidential election—is too close to call. If Harris wins the states where she leads in the poll, she would win a narrow majority in the Electoral College.
Welcome to Thunderdome, where the vibe is Miller High Life — which should only ever be enjoyed in a longneck as befitting the champagne of beers — and a Kamala Harris campaign that is turning from ebullience to despondence in short order. As my colleague Amber Duke and I discussed this week in the latest Thunderdome podcast, the refrain is a simple one: the joy is gone.
The summer vibes that once sent a thrill down the pant-legs of everyone on the set of Morning Joe, including Mika and her lower-T colleagues, are now reduced to a point of constant contention: what is Kamala doing wrong — and how can she right the ship? And: why can’t Tim Walz be more like Josh Shapiro? And, even more: why won’t Joe Biden just shut up?
The answer to that final question is obvious: he no longer cares if Kamala Harris wins or loses. Nancy and Barack and Chuck made their bet. He is content to let her dangle. And in that dangling, she is repeating the mistakes of the past — as Alex Shepherd writes at the New Republic:
Five years ago, Harris entered the primary with an expansive message that was ideally suited for a general election campaign. When that primary quickly became the most policy-heavy in American history, it faltered. Now, having been anointed her party’s nominee without a primary, Harris doesn’t have to do most of the things she struggled with five years ago. She doesn’t have to engage in drawn-out, detailed policy discussions or engage in the delicate maneuvers and triangulations crowded primaries require. She can run the kind of campaign she instinctively wants to: one built on broad strokes and big themes. Harris’s core message — that it’s time for her party and the country to come together to finally exit the Trump era — resonates far better when she is leading a presidential ticket than it did when she was competing with a dozen other challengers.
But the flaws in Harris’s approach are as clear now as they were five years ago — and they could prove to be just as disastrous now as they were then.
Five years ago, Harris’s campaign failed in large part because she couldn’t offer a larger vision for her party or the country. Then, as now, she talked about the need to lift up the middle class and to promote freedom and decency at home and abroad. But even as she has slowly fleshed out her platform, it’s still not clear what her main policy priorities would be as president. There is a general suspicion that she intends to retreat slightly from Biden’s robust, worker-friendly economic agenda and that her presidency would be more corporate friendly. (Indeed, in a big speech laying out her economic agenda, Harris echoed the vagueness of her 2019 Times interview, promising to eschew ideology and instead take “good ideas from wherever they come.”)
But what she has articulated amounts to a grab bag of ideas on par with what she offered in the last Democratic primary: a mix of progressive and neoliberal policies (with lots of tax credits and populist bromides) that suggests no real core ideas about domestic policy. Five years ago, Harris tried to dodge the question of what the Democratic Party should be and how it should govern; today, it’s still not clear she really has an answer.
A campaign that can be reduced to “I am not physically the same person as Joe Biden” is a campaign in desperate need of a message. The problem for Kamala is that time’s a-wasting — and she seems to be tracking not toward finding her footing, but toward new speed-bumps, including ones set up by the very media figures who very much want her to win.
Check the Univision town hall for another example of this. This should be cupcake, a lay-up to a friendly audience. Instead, Harris gets bogged down with meandering answers about what she’ll do as president motivated by some aggressive restraint to taking any solid positions, while also sounding too far left for much of the country. Her policy plans include a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegals to turn them into voters. And she treated a voter with a totally straightforward question about her abrupt path to the nomination as if it wasn’t a concern. The approach toward dismissal is consistent with the Biden White House’s approach — see Secretary Mayorkas, who has turned being an irresponsible jackass into an artform during his tenure — but it’s exactly the wrong note for her to be sounding right now:
In our podcast and this morning with Hugh Hewitt, I’ve suggested this is one area where Kamala Harris could’ve provided some distinct separation from Joe Biden without engaging in direct policy disputes, instead framing Joe as being someone who was too loyal, too forgiving of cabinet members like Mayorkas who failed to do their jobs. It would allow her to sound a girlboss note of demanding more accountability from our leading public servants, and remind people that she hasn’t been in Washington forever like Joe has — but she couldn’t even manage to do that.
If Kamala ends up being the sacrificial lamb this cycle, it won’t be for lack of effort to turn her into a winner. It will be because she played it too safe, misread the electorate and thought the vibes could save her. They never do.
Barack Obama is Disappointed in You, Again
Referencing reports that support for Harris is lagging among Black males, the former president gave what amounted to a scolding as he made an unscheduled stop at a campaign field office in Pittsburgh.
“You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said. “Because part of it makes me think— and I’m speaking to men directly— part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
The former president is the most popular figure in the Democratic Party and his campaign blitz was expected to inject a jolt of momentum in the final weeks of the race — capturing some of the energy that propelled his historic rise to the White House. But it has also surfaced some weakness in Harris’ own history-making effort.
Obama told volunteers that a lack of enthusiasm appeared to be “more pronounced” among Black men who will be key if she hopes to triumph over Donald Trump, especially in battleground Pennsylvania.
“We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” he said, according to a video of the remarks posted on social media.
You Don’t Win Rural Votes With Flannel
Rural America is still Trump country — maybe more so than ever. Four years ago, exit polls showed him carrying about 57 percent of the rural vote. This year, polls nationally and in Minnesota put his support in rural areas and small towns at around 60 percent or above.
One of the Harris campaign’s goals is to cut down Trump’s margins in the rural Midwest. They are organizing in rural areas and have opened offices in far-flung outposts in swing states. And even if vice presidential candidates don’t have a rich history of making much of a difference in presidential elections, it was one reason many Democrats here cheered Harris’ selection of Walz, a Midwestern governor with a small-town pedigree.
The strategy, said John Anzalone, a veteran pollster and Harris adviser, is simple: “If you can do a couple points better, five points better, in those rural areas, and you multiply that by all the rural areas in those states, it’s a big deal.” Small margins tallied county-by-county can lead to a state-wide win. And Walz, he said, “is the first nominee in modern history, maybe since [Jimmy] Carter, who can talk small town America, rural America.”
I met Jeffrey in the field house overlooking the football field where Albert Lea’s high school football team, the Tigers, were getting beat. As the sun set over the far endzone, Jeffrey adjusted a window shade for a group of mostly older alumni watching from inside.
They weren’t exactly fans of the governor. There was Jim Munyer, the retired teacher I’d met at a Civil War Roundtable the previous night, who called Walz a “chameleon.” He suspected Walz was really more “California East, or California Midwest, I guess.”
There was Lowell Peterson, who told me over coffee earlier that day that when he saw Walz’s camo-print cap, all he saw was a desire to “be a friend to everybody.” And, he said, “I don’t like that crap, sucking up to everybody.”
And in a yellow safety vest by the concession stand, there was Mike Murtaugh, a former mayor of Albert Lea who, like a large number of people here voted for Barack Obama — and for Walz — before voting twice for Trump.
Murtaugh, who was helping with parking at the game, said of Walz, “He plays himself as a former teacher from out-state Minnesota, but his base definitely seems to be more metro.” And in the stands not far from him, the current mayor of Albert Lea, Rich Murray, told me that while Harris and Walz won’t have trouble winning the state, “he’s not going to get the votes out here.”
TNC’s Dark Twisted Fantasies of Violence
Ta-Nehisi Coates openly fantasizes about participating in October 7th.
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates admitted he doesn’t know if he would have been "strong enough" to not take part in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack last year.
"I haven't said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail, and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might be shot. Yeah. By somebody off, you know, the side of Israeli boats," Coates began on Trevor Noah’s "What Now?" podcast Wednesday.
He continued, "If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don't get the right permit, she might die."
"And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down. Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say this is too far? I don't know that I am," Coates concluded.
Feature
The Texan doctor and the disappeared Saudi princesses.
Items of Interest
Foreign
Israeli strikes kill 22 in Beirut.
The axis of upheaval and the Russia-DPRK partnership.
North Korea engineers deployed with Russia in Ukraine.
September was the bloodiest month for Russian soldiers in Ukraine war.
Officials race to estimate severity of China’s hacks.
The Nobel Peace Prize has become a sick joke with UNRWA nom.
Domestic
Joe Biden breaks with Kamala Harris over DeSantis performance.
How Mike Johnson has had to adjust on the fly.
Top Democrats including Jamie Raskin won’t commit to certifying election.
Mail-in voting and the key fights in three battlegrounds.
Democratic Pennsylvania fortunes tied to Casey family.
Brandon Johnson defends first lady’s pricey office makeover by invoking racism.
Lessons from protectionism past.
Tim Ballard files competing lawsuits against women accusers.
2024
Pennsylvania swing voters skeptical of Harris.
Antle: Kamala Harris is panicking.
Glasser: Is it time to panic yet?
Kotkin: What would Harris’s plans mean for America?
Tim Walz struggles with Strahan question about abolishing electoral college.
Walz campaigns in Arizona with Gallego, McCain.
Harris supporters pass out, throw up at Arizona rally.
How Trump and abortion politics are driving the gender gap.
Walz plans media blitz to win male voters back.
Vogue endorses, puts Harris on cover.
Media
CBS News in turmoil over TNC, Doukopil, 60 Minutes controversies.
Ex-CBS staffers call for outside probe of 60 Minutes after editing scandal.
CBS News chief criticized for Democratic donations.
Does the Guardian need reminding Hamas are the bad guys?
Mika Brzezinski calls Trump hateful racist bigoted narcissist in day ending in “y”.
Ephemera
Elon Musk unveils Tesla Robotaxi.
Review: Lonely Planet is for Laura Dern superfans.
Survivor Season 47 is deploying massive editing tricks.
Martha Stewart says James Comey should be put in a Cuisinart turned on high.
Podcast
Quote
“Life is just one damned thing after another, whether it is private or public life. And looking back upon history (which in reality, of course, has never stopped happening, even during our brief halcyon days), one can see that in almost every age in almost every part of the world, human beings have had to live their normal lives and do their normal business under conditions of uncertainty, danger and distress.”
— Arnold Toynbee