Like everyone else, I had an opinion about the vice presidential choice, though I ultimately thought the most important thing was to have someone who is qualified to serve as president and meshes well with Harris on the campaign trail. Beyond those factors, here’s my case for Walz being a good choice, which I offered at New York:

Much of the Democratic veepstakes debate — which just ended with Kamala Harris picking Tim Walz as her running mate — involved the highly disputed premise that a running mate could have a tangible impact on the outcome of the race in the Electoral College. If you accepted that premise (and most political scientists more or less reject it), then Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania was a bit of a no-brainer, given the essential position of his state in the easiest path to victory for Harris. Arizona senator Mark Kelly also made sense as an electoral-vote magnet. Tim Walz? Not so much, since any scenario where his state of Minnesota was in play was one in which Democrats were already losing nationally.

There is a vague sense that Walz could help regionally, as he’s from an upper Midwest state that borders two battleground states (Michigan and Wisconsin). But Walz’s main asset may be that he does not have the overtly moderate ideological image that made Shapiro and Kelly the favorites of those concerned about Harris’s alleged vulnerability as “too liberal.” Progressives unhappy with Shapiro’s position on school vouchers and Gaza or Kelly’s weak labor record stampeded into Walz’s camp as speculation reached a frenzy during the last week.

So we are now hearing complaints that in choosing the Minnesotan Harris has thrown away a potential ticket-balancing option. The counter-argument, as my Shapiro-favoring colleague Jonathan Chait conceded, is that Walz is super-normie and a bit hard to square with the standard image of a “radical leftist:”

“A somewhat modified version of the left’s belief that moving left can increase political viability is that personal style can make up for a deficit in substance. Rather than move to the center on policy, they hope nominating candidates with a reassuring personal affect and personal biography can reassure moderate voters.

“Walz generates so much enthusiasm on the left in part because he represents the apotheosis of this strategy. He is jolly, fun, a rural veteran and former football coach with a personal comfort with white rural voters.

“There is probably something to this theory. If Harris had nominated a pink-haired professor from Brooklyn with a centrist voting record, that candidate probably would not provide a huge political heft.”

There is no doubt that Republicans will nonetheless try to depict Walz as a sort of heartland Trojan horse who conceals a grim anti-American devotion to Marxism beneath his jovial exterior (just as they would have smeared Shapiro or Kelly, truth be told). But before assuming that tactic will work, as Chait fears, let’s look a bit more closely at Walz’s “personal affect and personal biography” and their possible impact.

Walz is authentically a product of the rural and small-town Midwest. He was born in West Point, Nebraska, a small town in the northeast segment of that famously agricultural state, and raised in Valentine, Nebraska, an even smaller town in north-central Nebraska, then in Butte, Nebraska, a tiny village not far from there. Far from the Ivy League campuses at which Donald Trump and J.D. Vance received degrees, Walz got his undergraduate education at an open-admissions teachers college in northwest Nebraska (Chadron State College). After he launched a public-school teaching career and got married to another teacher, he earned a master’s degree from Mankato State College in his wife’s home state, where he was indeed a football coach and also adviser to his school’s gay-straight student alliance. He eventually ran for Congress in the largely rural and relatively conservative First Congressional District, winning reelection there five times. There’s just no whiff of elitism or radicalism in his background.

His military service, moreover, isn’t just a line on a résumé or a brief engagement prior to a real adult career. He spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, beginning right after high school, and ultimately obtained the highest rank available to an enlisted person. He was named Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year in 1989. Walz was never deployed in a combat role, but neither was Marine public-affairs officer J.D. Vance or the draft-evading Donald Trump. In Congress and as governor, Walz has made veterans affairs an emphasis. No one, and certainly not the keyboard warriors of the online right, will be able to malign Walz’s patriotism or respect for the flag and the uniform.

Yes, as governor of Minnesota, Walz was able to compile a progressive record, particularly after his party won a trifecta in 2022. But as his remarkably successful quasi-candidacy for veep has illustrated, he hasn’t lost his folksy manner or cracker-barrel sense of humor. He isn’t just normie; he’s super-normie and will present a constant contrast to the distinctly radical intellectualism of Vance — which you might even call weird. Walz may or may not be able to help Harris gain votes in some tangible way, but he adds toil and trouble to every Republican effort to depict Democrats as a party in the grip of un-American forces (one example of a problem he presents is that both of his children were conceived via IVF treatments, which the anti-abortion lobby has frowned upon). And unlike the last Democratic veep chosen to offset fears about a female president, Tim Walz (so far) does not come across as boring.

Should both Harris and Walz do everything possible to rebut allegations of radicalism and strengthen their reputation as sensible centrists, as Chait recommends? Absolutely. But in Walz, Kamala Harris has given herself a running mate who won’t look out of character campaigning among rural or small-town Americans, or among military veterans, or among people who’ve worked real and relatable jobs instead of managing real-estate fortunes or hanging out with Silicon Valley’s tech bros. His appeal should extend well beyond the Midwest to voters all over the country who share elements of his life trajectory. And it’s a good start for the short sprint to Election Day for the Democrats’ new presidential ticket.

I hope you tuned in to the Harris-Walz Rally in Philly, and saw the barn-burner speeches by Governor Shapiro, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. In the euphoric aftermath of the rally, however, please focus your attention on what the Republicans are up to, because it merits attention. The following article, “A red flashing light at the dumpster fire” by Tom Baxter cross-posted from  Saporta Report explains it well:

It can be hard to sort out what’s news in the middle of a dumpster fire.

There were a lot of storylines stemming from former President Donald Trump’s Atlanta rally Saturday, beginning with Trump’s bitter attack on Gov. Brian Kemp, his congratulating Vladimir Putin for last week’s prisoner swap, his swipes at Georgia State University, and somewhere in there, his shots at Vice President Kamala Harris.

But in the midst of all this clickbait, something really serious happened, and it hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Trump publicly recognized three members of the State Election Board, who were sitting right in front of the speaker’s podium.

“They’re on fire. They’re doing a great job,” Trump said to cheers from the audience. He said the three board members, Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares and Janelle King, were “all pitbulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and integrity.”

The first line in the election board’s code of conduct states that members “shall be honest, fair, and avoid any appearance of conflict and/or impropriety.” If sitting on the front row of a major rally basking in praise from a presidential candidate doesn’t look conflicted and improper for an election board member, what does?

Here is why this is a much, much more important story than the crowd size at a couple of rallies or a self-defeating spat over the last election.

Four years ago, the election board was chaired by Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger. The legislature stripped that job from him because he wouldn’t contradict the outcome of three recounts and “find” the votes Trump asked him for. All five current members — appointed by the governor, the House, the Senate and the Democratic and Republican parties respectively — joined the board after the 2020 election.

That puts a majority of the board — Johnston, the Republican Party appointee; Jeffares, the Senate appointee; and King, the House appointee — in the hands of people who have questioned the thrice-recounted results of the last election, and implicitly Raffensperger’s conduct. Already, because of their votes, the election board has been warned by the attorney general’s office about running afoul of the open records law and sued by a citizen’s group, causing it to walk back a controversial action.

This doesn’t appear to be just a small part of Trump’s strategy for winning Georgia. On the contrary, after his speech Saturday it looks like most of it. For all the talk there’s been about the Trump campaign losing no time in defining Harris, the candidate didn’t seem too focused on that Saturday. He mispronounced “Fani” more than he did “Kamala,” which is one indication where his mind was wandering.

If Trump had been narrowly focused on getting the most votes in Georgia this November, he wouldn’t have veered into a lengthy attack on Kemp, who has what is hands-down the best voter turnout operation in the state.

A word, incidentally, about Trump’s seemingly gratuitous swipe at Marty Kemp. For a few months there’s been a rumor, not substantial enough to make much of, that the Kemp camp was taking a look at how the state’s first lady might fare if she rather than her husband challenged U.S. Sen. John Ossoff.

Could Trump have gotten wind of the same rumor? Anything’s possible, when you’re getting advice about Georgia politics from Bill White, the former New Yorker and current Floridian who headed the failed Buckhead City movement. According to Greg Bluestein of the AJC, White, who held sway briefly in Atlanta as a sort of Northside Nigel Farage, was among those who got Trump stirred up about Kemp before the speech.

In a statement published Monday, the Georgia League of Women Voters, not exactly a fiercely partisan group, voiced its frustrations with the board over the new rules it wants to impose.

“Our State Election Board, the very body empowered to back up that guarantee (of fair elections) with rules and procedures, now seems bent on undermining it. Over-complicating an already complicated process does nothing but introduce potential failure points. Making it harder does not make it better,” the statement said.

Also, two Republicans, former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former Gov. Nathan Deal, and two Democrats, former Gov. Roy Barnes and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, have formed the Democracy Defense Project, part of a national effort to restore trust in the election process.

Saturday’s rally was a flashing light warning that these efforts haven’t come a minute too soon.

If there are similar improprieties going on in other swing states, now would be a good time for investigative reporters to expose them.

From “Trump seems to forget it’s not 2016 anymore. And he’s frustrated” by E. J. Dionne, Jr. at The Washington Post: “Enter Harris, 59, who instantly flipped the age issue against Trump. His often-disjointed screeds suddenly felt like the ravings of a grumpy old man, not entertaining breaks from politician-speak. Trump had always fed on the energy of his crowds. “Low energy” is a favorite Trump epithet against his foes. Now Harris has the energy, and her audiences seem positively rapturous….Harris was not afraid to put aside a decorousness that came naturally to Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972. She has gone after Trump hard, thrilling her crowds even more. “I know Donald Trump’s type”became a T-shirt-worthy battle cry for Democrats weary of feeling like punching bags. Worst of all, from Trump’s point of view, Harris shoved him out of the lead spot in the campaign news. She was new, and her identity as a biracial woman excited many constituencies, especially younger voters who had been checking out of politics before her arrival….But here is why 2024 may be Trump’s undoing: We have been here for nine long years. When Trump went after Hillary Clinton in 2016, the media didn’t know what to do with him, and Democrats did not know how to respond. Journalists debated for years over whether Trump’s lies should, in fact, be called lies. (Pretty much all outlets finally decided a lie is a lie.) In 2016, Democrats underestimated Trump right to the end. There’s none of that now….Trump’s act has grown tired and often boring, as his Republican convention speech showed….Trump and the media will make a big mistake by fighting and covering the last war.”

Some nuggets from “Kamala Harris must lean in: The left doesn’t have to pick between woke and working class” by Michele Lamont at Salon: “Conservatives have already begun attacking Vice President Kamala Harris as an unqualified “DEI hire,” language that evokes the broader right-wing narrative that the left has become too “woke” and no longer represents the average American. With Harris’ ascension to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, many political commentators have expressed fear that voters may buy into the idea that liberals have, indeed, become too woke to connect with voters in the swing states needed to secure an Electoral College victory. But this election doesn’t have to be a clash of the “woke” versus the working class, and liberals don’t have to sacrifice one to win over the other….Americans without a college degree have steadily moved to the right in recent decades, resulting in a diploma divide where political views are largely split along educational lines. In 2021, progressive groups surveyed working-class voters in five swing states and concluded that “‘woke,’ activist-inspired rhetoric is a liability” to winning them over – a perspective echoed by other recent analyses….Our media praises entrepreneurs for disrupting the status quo and CEOs for creating jobs. For a fleeting moment during the Covid-19 pandemic, essential workers were celebrated, but that quickly faded. Working-class people were back to feeling invisible and undervalued….Unions have traditionally been the biggest source of working-class dignity. They’ve also been a reliable supply of left-leaning voters. With unions on the decline for decades in the U.S. (the rate of union membership among workers is half what it was in the 1980s), it is high time for the left to forcefully refocus on shared dignity as an electoral strategy….Liberals should use their movement-building magic – and the Gen Z passion for social justice – to build a movement that prioritizes the humanity of all people, including the working class.” Lamont goes on to discuss “four strategies hey can take from past successes,” and you can read about them right here. Lamont concludes, “Progressives know how to stand up for the dignity and respect of different groups and create a big tent where everyone feels valued. It’s time to do that for the working class.”

Wondering about the future of health care under the different presidential candidates? Then read “Obamacare is stronger than ever. Trump and Vance vow to kill it” by Joan McCarter at Daily Kos. As McCarter writes, “Republicans will never stop trying to destroy the legacy of our first Black president. Despite a decade of failure in repealing the Affordable Care Act, and the fact that the law is stronger than ever, gutting it still looms large in their aspirations. And this week, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, is banging the repeal-and-replace drum….“Well, I think we’re definitely gonna have to fix the health care problem in this country,” Vance told the news outlet NOTUS this week. “The problem with Obamacare is that for a lot of people, it just doesn’t provide high-quality health care, right? So you have a lot of people paying out the ass, paying very high prices for health care that isn’t high quality.”….As a matter of fact, premium costs for people with subsidized ACA plans have decreased 44%, or $705 per year, according to a recent analysis by KFF, a nonpartisan organization focused on health policy. That’s 21.4 million people with Obamacare plans who have enjoyed those lower costs thanks to President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress that increased those subsidies….While Trump kept up the fiction that he was working on a plan to replace the ACA, that plan never materialized. On top of that, his Department of Justice was arguing before the Supreme Court, trying to get them to overturn the law—and yes, that included ripping coverage away from people with preexisting conditions….In this election cycle, Trump has regularly talked about getting rid of Obamacare, even though Republican lawmakers want him to stop talking about it. (Again, the law is popular.) While he might not find much congressional support to repeal the law, that doesn’t mean the ACA would be safe in Trump’s hands if he wins this November….When he couldn’t repeal it during his administration, he did everything he could to sabotage it through executive actions. Biden had to undo that damage, and it worked—there are more people enrolled in its plans than ever before. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe.” McCarter concludes, “There are still necessary improvements to the ACA, and to the health care system in general, but who would you trust to oversee that?”

By now, no one should be too surprised by the information contained in the headline “Half of Trump’s former Cabinet secretaries haven’t backed his 2024 bid: During Donald Trump’s term, 42 people served in his Cabinet. Nearly half of them haven’t endorsed his 2024 candidacy. There’s no precedent for this” by Steve Benen at MaddowBlog. As Benen explains, “Imagine you were an employer looking to hire someone for your workplace team. You’ve collected some résumé, but to help make a decision, you decide it’s best to check with applicants’ references. After all, to get a sense of how someone would perform on the job, it makes sense to ask those who’ve worked with him/her in the recent past….Then imagine you reach out to an applicant’s former colleagues, and when you ask whether they’d extend their support, nearly half of them hesitate. In fact, some are quite explicit in warning you not to hire the applicant….Would you hire the person anyway?” Probably not, is my guess. Benen adds, “By the Post’s count, 42 people, at some point between January 2017 and January 2021, served in Trump’s Cabinet. Based on the latest tally, 24 of them — roughly 57% — are publicly supporting their former boss’s ongoing candidacy.”….The rest either won’t take a position or have declared publicly that they won’t support the Republican Party’s 2024 nominee….this is an exceedingly tough dynamic for Republicans to defend. Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve been preoccupied with this angle for quite a while is because it simply has never happened before: Presidents have been known to clash from time to time with individual members of their administrations, but Trump is unique in facing so much opposition from his own team.”….As ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos recently summarized during an appearance on MSNBC, “His secretary of state called him a ‘moron.’ [Former Defense Secretary James] Mattis says he doesn’t even respect the Constitution. John Kelly says he’s the worst person he ever met. Think about that applying to any other president of the United States at any other time….“Their chief of staff, their defense secretary, their secretary of state, their national security adviser are the ones who had the most damning judgments of his competence and character. That is chilling.” Thoughtful swing voters, moderates and Independents ought to give this reality due consideration. This election is not only about defending democracy; it is also about avoiding global catastrophe.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

These are heady days for Democrats. After a near-death experience with the fading Biden candidacy they have been revived by the Biden-Harris switcheroo. The presidential race has tightened considerably and, though Trump is still favored to win, they’re feeling mighty good about themselves. Inspired by their historic standard bearer, exuberant partisans proclaim the second coming of the Obama coalition, which will decisively sweep away Trump and his deplorable legions. They’re getting the band back together!

Or are they? In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition…but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition…but with far fewer white working-class voters. Indeed, that people would analogize Harris’ emerging coalition to Obama’s shows how much they’ve forgotten (or perhaps never knew) about the Obama coalition and how little they understand about how the party has changed in the last 12 years.

Here are some facts about the Obama coalition (based on 2012 election data from Catalist):

1. In 2012, Obama carried both college-educated and working-class (noncollege) voters. And there wasn’t much difference in the margins; he carried the college-educated by 6 points and the working class by 4 points.

2. Obama carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points; overall he carried nonwhites by 64 points.

3. Obama lost both the white working class and college-educated whites, the former by a comparatively modest 20 points and the latter by 8 points.

All this is very far from the Harris coalition today and how it seems to be evolving. The following data illustrate this. I use the post-switcheroo New York Times/Siena poll (one of only four pollsters rated “A+” by Nate Silver) for comparison. I also provide intermediate figures—Clinton, 2016 and Biden, 2020—so that the political evolution from the Obama coalition to today can be clearly discerned.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Timespoll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today. That’s because Democratic support in the two groups has gone in completely different directions. You miss this and you can’t possibly understand the Obama coalition and why it is so different from the Democratic coalition we see today.

Similarly, consider the class trajectories within the white vote. In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points.

The trajectory of the white college vote has gone in the completely opposite direction. Obama lost these voters by 8 points. Then Clinton moved this demographic to the break-even point, followed by Biden’s solid 9-point lead among these voters in 2020. Now Harris has a 15-point lead over Trump among white college graduates. That’s quite a trend. And it’s taken the class gap among white voters from 12 points in the Obama coalition to 53 points (!) today.

The trajectory of the nonwhite working class also highlights another key difference between the Harris coalition and the Obama coalition. Recall Obama’s massive 67-point margin with these voters in 2012. That margin dropped to 60 points for Clinton in 2016 and further to 48 points for Biden in 2020. Now Harris, despite her progress relative to this year’s fading Biden campaign has only a 29-point margin among these very same voters. Moreover, this reverses the class gap among nonwhites that had existed under Obama—he did 11 points betteramong the nonwhite working class than among the nonwhite college-educated. Now Harris is doing 11 points worse among the nonwhite working class than among nonwhite college voters.

Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

Of course, none of this means Harris can’t win. But no one should kid themselves that, even if successful, Harris’ coalition will represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the whitecollege-educated vote.

This seems consistent with how the nascent Harris campaign has been unfolding. Layering on top of Biden’s themes before he dropped out—”saving democracy” and abortion rights (particularly the latter)—we have seen a great deal of emphasis on social media and the production of memes that capture the “vibes” of the Kamala! campaign. The latter has certainly garnered a lot of attention but, as Freddie DeBoer acerbically remarks, Harris is not running for President of Online America but rather America as a whole. He detects, not without reason, a whiff of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their misplaced faith in online success.

Related to this, we have seen a rather strange online manifestation of the identitarian politics that still dominates the Democratic Party and is certainly alive and well in the Harris campaign. This is the raft of sex- and race-segregated zoom fundraisers for Harris. This has included the “White Women for Kamala Harris” fundraiser and the just plain embarrassing “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” extravaganza.

On the white women call, the following wisdom was imparted by social media influencer Arielle Fodor:

As white women we need to use our privilege to make positive changes…If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on…So, do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people we have a lot to learn and unlearn, so do check your blind spots.

Shades of 2020! It is hard to see a persuadable white working-class woman—a type of voter where Harris desperately needs help—responding positively to talk of her “privilege” etc. Really, the call should more properly have been labelled “White Liberal College-Educated Women for Kamala Harris.”

The same could be said of the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” call. The call’s organizer averred that when white men organize “it’s usually with pointed hats on” and that the call and supporting Harris was a way for the trope (?) of masculinity to be properly channeled. This is how to be one of the good white men. I can’t imagine white working-class men of practically any flavor responding positively to this sort of appeal. Again, the call should really have been billed as “White Liberal College-Educated Men for Kamala Harris.”

And there were many other and more finely-grained identity group fundraising calls for Harris. This aggregation of identity and interest groups approach to organizing and coalition-building is exactly what Obama wanted to get away from. As Obama memorably put it 20 years ago:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

We need to get back there….and fast. And that includes the Harris campaign. Right now, they’re on a narrow, polarized path to November and their reckoning with Donald Trump. They can do better, starting with remembering what the Obama coalition really was and  really was about.

As one in a series of ruminations on the Biden-Harris switch, I offered some thoughts at New York on the very different message and strategy the new Democratic nominee might offer:

Even for Democrats who had faith in Joe Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump, the Biden strategy and message were unquestionably a bummer. Having apparently lost the ability to convince swing voters his administration was doing a good job on the key issues of inflation and immigration, Team Joe had to make the election about the terrifying prospect of a Trump presidency rather than any happy thoughts about a second Biden term.

To use the language of political strategy, Biden had to avoid a “referendum” election like the plague and try to make swing voters focus with great intensity on Trump’s lawless character and conduct, recognizing all the while that his own age made it impossible to paint an optimistic picture of America’s future under his guidance.

So even before his horrific performance in the June debate brought his candidacy to a crisis point, the best-case scenario for the Biden campaign was a long, hard slog designed to make voters even more fearful and discouraged, driving both his and Trump’s favorability ratings to the bottom of hell in hopes he would win a lesser-of-two-evils contest. It tells you a lot that for the first time in living memory, Democrats were hoping for a low-turnout election to save their bacon from a sour and mistrustful electorate.

Kamala Harris’s replacement of Biden as the Democratic nominee has changed all these dynamics, and accordingly her strategy and message are looking very different as well, as Axios reports:

“Instead of portraying Trump as a dictator-in-waiting, Harris has dismissed Trump as ‘weird’ and mocked him as scared to debate while also calling his agenda ‘extreme.’

“She also initially signaled the campaign was not all about Trump, telling a rollicking crowd in Wisconsin: ‘Let’s also make no mistake: This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump. This campaign is about who we fight for.’

“Harris, more than twenty years younger than Biden, has also tried to portray herself as the candidate of the future as she has embraced the tagline ‘we’re not going back.’

“In her Atlanta rally Tuesday evening, Harris also did not mention Biden by name. The main super PAC supporting Harris’ candidacy also began running a new ad Wednesday that concluded with ‘let the future begin.’”

Harris appears to be adopting a “two futures” message, comparing her agenda to Trump’s instead of mostly offering dark warnings about her opponent. It enables her to promote the most popular elements of the Democratic platform — most notably a restoration of reproductive rights along with practical steps to help the middle class address high living costs, along with some targeted bashing of corporations — without an extended defense of the Biden record. It’s a decidedly upbeat message that accompanies a big strategic shift: With young, Black, and Latino voters beginning to return to the Democratic column, Harris’s potential winning coalition is beginning to look at lot like Biden’s in 2020, which would benefit from higher, not lower, turnout and open up the possibility of wins in Sun Belt states Biden had all but written off this year.

This doesn’t, to be clear, mean Harris won’t “go negative” on Trump; she will, particularly if she manages to get into a debate with the 45th president. It simply means her Trump-bashing will be more forward-looking and probably less apocalyptic. Axios suggests that Team Harris believes Biden’s efforts to get voters to dwell on Trump’s responsibility for January 6 just didn’t work, so we will probably get less of that, at least up until the moment MAGA preparations for overturning another loss go into high gear.

But it’s not just the tone of her campaign that will represent a big change from Biden’s: It’s the timeframe as well. Biden was engaged in a four-year struggle with Trump. Harris needs to navigate fewer than 100 days. If, as many Republicans believe, the veep’s big vulnerability is an ideology too far left of center for comfort, there will be less time for Team Trump to dramatize (or fabricate) it. As RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende argues, Harris is a candidate better suited for a sprint than a marathon:

“I don’t think Harris is probably viable over the course of a year-long campaign …

“She doesn’t have to run a year-long campaign, though … Consider: Harris will almost certainly pick her vice presidential candidate this week. She has a large number of attractive choices from which to select, which will earn her another week or two of positive press.

“That gets us to mid-August, when the Democratic National Convention begins. It will likely be a carefully scripted, well-managed event …

“Then, in mid-September, Trump will be sentenced following his conviction in the New York fraud/hush money case. Regardless of whether or not he receives jail time, it’s another distraction from any substantive discussion of the issues in 2024. The attention is diverted from Harris and falls on Trump in a relatively unflattering light … [T]he election actually shapes up as a referendum on Trump at this point.”

Harris can wage a campaign that’s brighter, sharper, and shorter than what could have been expected with Biden as the candidate. You can expect more of a traditional Democratic effort to mobilize the party base while giving swing voters an attractive and, above all, fresh alternative to the ever-alarming Trump. The voters who will decide this election won’t be asked to face their greatest fears head-on before choosing a flawed incumbent.

Lighten up, America! Maybe even laugh a bit with “Laffin’ Kamala” Harris.

Some insights from “‘He wants to take us back’: Democrats eye new strategy against Trump’s attacks on Harris: The former president’s attacks have proven to be effective in the past at sucking up the political oxygen” by Myah Ward and Megan Messerly at Politico:

It didn’t take long for former President Donald Trump to return to his well-worn playbook of resorting to attacks based on race and gender — familiar tactics he has used against political rivals, including in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s not 2016 anymore, and Democrats assert that the lessons learned from Trump’s campaign eight years ago guide their strategy now: Respond aggressively, use his attacks to bolster the campaign’s message and don’t let them distract from the issues.

That thinking guided their response to Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday, where he questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ Black ancestry and suggested she was chosen for the job only as a “DEI hire.”

Harris was quick to counter: On Wednesday night, she dismissed Trump’s attacks as “divisiveness” and the “same old show,” in what Democrats and campaign allies pointed out was the new framework for the party’s strategy.

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.

With so much going on in the major-candidate presidential race, it’s easy to forget there is a one-formidable indie candidate still in the game, so at New York I took a look at how the very new contest created by Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden has affected RFK Jr.:

Most of the buzz surrounding Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden as the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee has come from the revived intraparty enthusiasm she has generated and her stronger performance in general-election polls against Donald Trump. But separately from and perhaps contributing to this Democratic comeback narrative has been a notable fall in the political standing of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In the RealClearPolitics averages of national presidential polls that include Kennedy and other non-major-party candidates, RFK Jr. dropped from 8.7 percent before Biden withdrew from the race to 5.8 percent now. Looking at longer trends, Kennedy was at 10.3 percent in the RCP averages as recently as July 6. So it’s been a pretty steep downward drop for the former Democrat. And in terms of his personal favorability, he’s been struggling for a while. FiveThirtyEight’s averages showed RFK Jr.’s favorability ratio going underwater on May 14, and is now at 33.7 percent favorable–41.5 percent unfavorable.

A number of factors are hurting Kennedy’s candidacy. Perhaps the most obvious is the abrupt decline in the supply of “double-haters” (voters who gave both major-party candidates unfavorable ratings) from which the indie candidate naturally fed. The Times-Siena pollsters showed double-haters declining from 20 percent before Biden dropped out to 8 percent afterward. That seems to be the consequence of improvements in favorability for both Trump and Harris, squeezing Kennedy from two directions. An additional problem for Kennedy is Harris’s gains over Biden among Black, Latin, and under-30 voters, all major reservoirs of support for RFK Jr.

What’s unclear is whether the apparent reset of the presidential contest is the principal source of Kennedy’s misery or if instead (or in part) we’re just at that point in the election cycle when non-major-party candidates tend to fade. Kennedy has some additional problems that don’t directly stem from Harris’s or Trump’s standing, most notably a money shortage, as The Hill reports:

“Federal Election Commission filings show Kennedy spent nearly $1 million more than he took in last month and that the campaign is also carrying debt of approximately $3 million …

“His biggest super PAC, American Values 2024, brought in a modest $228,000 in June, according to the FEC.”

It’s unclear how deep RFK Jr.’s most important funding source, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, is willing to dig into her personal wealth to keep the campaign going. But it is clear most of the dough is going to the very difficult and intermittently successful effort to get the ticket onto general-election ballots. According to the New York Times, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in just 13 states at the moment, including just one battleground state (Michigan), though that number is sure to rise.

As for Kennedy’s strategy moving forward, it’s not very clear. His conversations with Trump during the Republican National Convention fanned Democratic fears that the wiggy anti-vaxx pol might be joining the MAGA cause. If that’s not in the cards, RFK Jr. still has his previous strategy, which focused on making the stage in the second presidential debate in September that Biden and Trump agreed to back in June. But it’s unclear if the ABC debate for September 10 is still on. And Kennedy’s lagging poll numbers (he’ll need 15 percent of registered or likely voters in four high-quality national polls, a level he hasn’t reached in a good while) mean he likely won’t make the grade even if he meets the debate’s ballot-access requirements.

In retrospect, the end of the much-loathed Biden-Trump rematch probably spelled the end of the Kennedy campaign as an ongoing enterprise. But he and his supporters can still make a difference on the margins, where close elections are often decided.

There’s always plenty of jabber about swing states the summer before a presidential election. But, really, “swing states” are often made by the trends in swing counties. Steve Kornacki explains at msnbc.com, highlighting the critical importance of two of them in Georgia and Pennsylvania:

Pass the political humility, please. Many people who live in conservative communities are hyper-sensitive to liberal arrogance. More rural conservatives than you would think share at least some liberal views. But you are probably not going to hear them say so because those who advocate liberal views frequently broadcast their political attitudes in a way that condescends to or disparages non-liberals. As a rank-and-file problem, this probably intensifies polarization between liberal and conservative voters. There is no quick fix for bridging this particular gap between ideological voting groups. That’s a long-term project. But there is a hard lesson that must be learned, and quickly, by Democratic political candidates. Leaders may not be able to do much to stop their supporters from condescending toward those who disagree with them on particular policies. A visit to any social media outlet will quickly confirm the reality of liberal to conservative disparagement at the rank-and-file level. What can and must be changed, however, is that candidates who want to win elections have to do better. They must become hyper-sensitive about not projecting liberal arrogance. It falls to Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting Kamala Harris to set the instructive example here. She must be ever on-guard against projecting liberal condescension, not only making comments about “deplorables” or bashing conservative cultural icons, but also a whole range of lesser blunders, like cutting people off in conversation, or anything that says “I don’t have time for your nonsense,” which former prosecutors often do. Presidents Obama and Biden both did a good job of avoiding such self-set booby traps, which are the surest road to defeat. Yes, it is true that conservatives, leaders as well as rank-and-file, also often disparage liberals in equally-arrogant ways. But that is their problem, not something Democrats can do anything about. Let them hurt their own cause. But our candidates need not serve their campaigns as clueless accomplices. The key behavioral consideration is to treat all adversaries with respect, humility and courtesy, no matter how abusive they may become. MLK was the Zen master of leveraging these values to build bridges of goodwill across chasms of division. Avoid at all costs the temptation to pander to rude supporters who do otherwise.

Yes, he went there….again. “In four years, you won’t have to vote again. we’ll have it fixed…”

Thomas B. Edsall has a scary essay about “What the Trump-Vance Alliance Means for the Republican Party” air the New York Times. He quotes scholar Ariel Malka, who notes, “A notable segment of the U.S. population combines a culturally based conservative identity with some degree of affinity for left-leaning and protectionist economic policy. Trump’s brand of populism — combining anti-immigrant nationalism with worker-oriented economic appeals within a framework denouncing left-wing and globalist elites — is attractive to these citizens.” Edsall continues, “I asked Malka what share of the electorate simultaneously holds culturally conservative and economically liberal views. He replied that when measured by specific policy preferences, “a substantial segment of the population reveals a culturally conservative and at least somewhat economically left-leaning attitude combination,” citing one study showing that over a quarter of voters fit this combination….Voters holding these views, Malka noted, “were a good deal more inclined to support the Republican than the Democratic Party.” Edsall adds, “Economic attitudes, according to Malka, are more complicated. Those “high in need for security and certainty tend to show a leaning toward left economic attitudes, when they are not highly exposed to political discourse that cultivates a right versus left attitude organization. When they are highly politically engaged, however, they have tended to move their economic attitudes to the right to match their culturally based conservative identity.”

Edsall continues, “For many years,” Elizabeth Suhay, a political scientist at American University, wrote by email, “the Republican Party managed to persuade many working-class whites to support their economic agenda not only by contrasting it with Democrats’ emphasis on racial equity but also by arguing that small government, economically conservative policy rewards hard work….The persuasiveness of this message waned, however, with increasing inequality, low income growth, rural job loss, etc., creating an opening for Trump. His 2016 campaign directly addressed working-class whites’ economic concerns, even if his policies in office generally did not….With the Vance pick, we are seeing an even greater rhetorical shift toward economic populism aimed directly at working-class and rural voters, and it is likely that a second Trump term would advance more populist policy than the first….It is certainly the case that the two parties’ recent agendas have put many working-class people in a bind: The Democratic Party’s economic agenda suits them, but the Democrats’ social agenda has been far more progressive than the modal working-class person. This is true regardless of race; however, Democrats’ emphasis on affirmative action (broadly construed) will be perceived as threatening by white working-class folks for both economic and cultural reasons.” Edsall concludes, “This year, each political coalition — left and right — is fraught with contradictions. In a situation in which the vote count threatens to be close, defections of any kind, especially if they’re concentrated in the wrong places, can be extraordinarily costly.”