Harry Enten explains “How Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump” at CNN Politics: “Kamala Harris seems to have more appeal among voters of color and younger voters than Joe Biden did before he got out of the presidential race. Still, the 2020 results show that Harris can make up even more ground with these groups in her expected matchup against Donald Trump….Take a look at our newly published CNN/SSRS poll. Harris leads Trump among Black voters 78% to 15%. Among these same voters (the poll recontacted the same respondents), Biden was ahead by a smaller 70% to 23% in CNN polling data from April and June….The same holds to a somewhat lesser degree among Hispanic voters. Harris comes in at 47% to Trump’s 45%, while it was 50% for Trump to 41% for Biden among these same respondents in the April and June data….Voters under the age of 35 demonstrate a similar shift. It’s Harris 47% to Trump’s 43% now. In April and June, these same voters put Trump up 49% to 42% over Biden….Despite the improvement, the results should leave much to be desired for Harris. She is doing at least 5 points worse than Biden did among these same groups in the final 2020 polls….Among Black voters, Biden led Trump 84% to 9% at the end of the 2020 campaign. Even more notable is that Biden led among Hispanic voters by a 58% to 32% spread….Finally, even as Harris has become a meme favorite among young voters, Biden’s 60% to 31% advantage over Trump at the end of the 2020 campaign is massively larger than where Harris is right now….This may seem like bad news for the Harris campaign, and, in one clear way, it is. Without improving among these groups, Harris likely cannot win against the former president….The good news for Harris, though, is that she’s showing that she can make up some ground with this group relative to how Biden was doing earlier this year….As Harris continues to define herself separately from being Biden’s vice president, there’s a real chance she could carve out her own political identity that may appeal more to voters of color and young voters….A big reason Biden struggled in those Sun Belt states is that each has a significant share of either Black or Hispanic voters. By doing better with those groups, Harris may reopen the possibility of more electoral paths….If, for instance, Harris won all four Sun Belt battlegrounds mentioned above, she wouldn’t need to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin….Perhaps more likely, Harris could get to 270 electoral votes by winning some mixture of northern battlegrounds and Sun Belt swing states….Harris now has a bunch of paths toward victory, while Biden’s options seemed to be closing rather quickly.”

“Florida’s ballot initiative to protect abortion is winning and has more support among voters than either Vice President Harris or Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a new poll shows,” Nathaniel Weixel writes in “New poll shows Florida abortion amendment winning, outperforming Democrats” at the Hill. “According to the poll from University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL), 69 percent of respondents said they would vote for Amendment 4, which would prohibit laws from restricting or banning abortion until fetal viability. …Constitutional amendments in Florida need 60 percent of the vote to become law…. “We have yet to see campaigns on either side of this really get moving,” PORL faculty director and political science professor Michael Binder said in a statement. “Factor in the highly contested and contentious financial impact statement recently added to the ballot summary, and I would expect to see support for this amendment drop before November.”….The poll also showed an amendment to legalize recreational cannabis has enough support to pass, with 64 percent of respondents supporting it….If the presidential election were held today, 49 percent of respondents said they would vote for former President Trump, while 42 percent said Harris….Respondents were also asked about the Senate race between incumbent Sen. Rick Scott (R) and Mucarsel-Powell (D). The poll showed 47 percent said they would vote for Scott, and 43 percent said they’d support Mucarsel-Powell….The polling differences between candidates and the amendments show why abortion supporters have been trying to keep the issue separate from party politics out of fear it will sink their effort….Among backers of the abortion amendment, 53 percent identified as Republican, and 51 percent said they voted for Trump in 2020. There are almost 900,000 more registered Republican voters in Florida than Democrats.”

At Politico, Christopher Cadelago writes “Harris tripped herself up in 2019 by straying too far from what was then her political North Star: crafting an image as a tough-minded and empathetic prosecutor….In the run-up to the Democratic primaries, Harris allowed “Kamala is a cop” critiques from activists and members of her own party to get inside her head. While Harris was progressive by the standards of her era in law enforcement, she was nowhere near as permissive as today’s crop of liberal district attorneys. Still, she readily submitted to the left’s endless purity tests, and backtracked on key pieces of her record as a prosecutor and attorney general. In doing so, she undermined what Harris and her closest advisers viewed as one of her greatest strengths: her career-long commitment to pursuing justice through the legal system….The act of creating a policy platform on the fly while simultaneously trying to prove her ideological bona fides yanked her further left and outside her comfort zone. At different moments in the primary, you could almost see her calculating answers in real time during TV interviews, which had the effect of making her appear wishy-washy….Harris won’t need to worry about liberal carping about her prosecutorial background anymore. It may have been a liability in a Democratic presidential primary, but in a general election, it’s more likely to be an asset. And whereas she once struggled to articulate her views on broader issues like health care, she now can largely rely on the policy framework created under the Biden-Harris administration….One of the most serious flaws of Harris’ 2020 bid was the inability of the messenger to settle on a consistent, coherent and compelling message….Now that she’s about to be handed the Democratic nomination, Harris doesn’t need to compete for eyeballs against a massive field of serious competitors. She’s free to focus on a straightforward mission….It won’t be enough for Harris to just be the anti-Trump candidate. Her task will be laying waste to Trump while also articulating a forward-looking vision of a brighter future….Balancing those ideas and integrating them into a cohesive message won’t be easy. But Harris has already gotten started, showing a zeal for attack in her characterization of Trump as a fraudster and an abuser of women while wrapping her campaign around the theme of fighting for the middle class.”

From “Old and quite weird”: Democrats finally discover new effective attack — and Republicans hate it” by Charles R. Davis at Salon. The Democratic meme about Trump and Vance being just plain weird got a pretty good workout during the last week. As Davis explains, “President Joe Biden won in 2020 largely by promising to a return to normalcy and baseline competency. In 2024, Democrats are making a similar argument but more forcibly: They’re pointing, laughing and dismissing Trump and his circus as a total freak show to which we can’t return….“The fascists depend on fear,” as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz put it over the weekend. “The fascists depend on us going back. But we are not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we are not afraid.”….They’re strange guys with sick obsessions, as the two-term Democratic governor and former congressman put it on MSNBC last week….“You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom — freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz said. “That stuff is weird. They come across as weird. They seem obsessed with this.”….Republicans, including Fox News anchors, “will take a look at Donald Trump and say he’s perfectly fine, even though he seemed unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi; even though he’s rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter; even though he’s clearly older and stranger than he was when America got to know him,” Buttigieg said….The Harris campaign, if anything, is leaning into what works. In a press release over the weekend, addressing a “78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance,” the vice president’s staff noted Trump’s failed attempt to distance himself from his ally’s hard-right Project 2025 agenda. But there was also a fact that the campaign did not want reporters to miss: the man with 34 felony convictions to his name is also “old and quite weird.” They are weird and pretty creepy, especially to younger voters, who don’t appreciate neo-fascist meddling with their reproductive rights. Democrats should rock that meme.