There is a lot going on in the presidential race, but one issue stands out, as I suggested at New York:

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics. There are two ideas about Harris this barrage is intended to reinforce: One is that she’s at heart a radical leftist, and the other is that she’s a dishonest shape-shifting politician whose word cannot be trusted.

So far, Harris is largely ignoring these attacks on her past record and her integrity, but she will eventually need to clarify her policy views, if only to buttress the impression that she indeed represents something other than Biden 2.0. And to the extent her “new way forward” contradicts or at least sounds different from her past positions, she’ll need a rationale for any “pivot to the center” that Republicans will describe as insincere or unprincipled.

In a New York Times op-ed, veteran political consultant James Carville offered an excellent formula for Harris to follow in this complicated situation:

“To be the certified fresh candidate, Ms. Harris must clearly and decisively break from Mr. Biden on a set of policy priorities she believes would define her presidency …

“At the same time she must break from Mr. Biden on some policy measures, she has one lingering liability she will not be able to outrun: the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, in which she and a gaggle of candidates favored more exotic positions within the Democratic Party. As last week’s CNN interview with Ms. Harris showed, this will be a consistent plotline deployed at her throughout this campaign. It’s vital that she give the same answer every time to these attacks. The retort can be simple: I learned from my time governing in the White House. These are my positions. Take it or leave it.”

Harris must repeat this over and over until the notion that she is vacillating or calculating or prevaricating dies of starvation. If she decisively lays out popular policies that distinguish her from Biden, and then sticks to her guns, her critics could soon be the ones who appear to be wandering all over creation in an effort to find some blows that land and sting. Indeed, just as Biden’s withdrawal drew attention to Trump’s age and questionable mental faculties, an opponent who “pivots to the center” and stays there could reverse the narrative and expose the former president to charges of incessant flip-flopping and political opportunism. But there’s no time to waste for Kamala Harris to plant her flag on solid ground and then defend it. It should happen during if not before she goes head-to-head with Trump at the September 10 debate.

One of the underlying issues in the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard endorsements of Donald Trump is the bizarre claim that he’s a man of peace. I addressed that idea at New York:

Donald Trump is famously hostile to U.S. aid to Ukraine and to national security alliances generally, even such time-honored institutions as NATO. He has also been outspoken for years about his opposition to “forever wars” like George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. At the same time, he is one of the most belligerent men ever to occupy the Oval Office. He loves military pomp and circumstance, he pushed regularly for increased Pentagon spending as president, and his basic formula for peace is to terrify potential adversaries with his remorseless willingness to inflict unimaginable casualties while ignoring or violating every traditional principle of limited war. He is also very interested in deploying the U.S. military against migrants from Mexico, domestic protesters, and even criminal suspects. He models himself on Andrew Jackson, who similarly stood for a policy of strict neutrality in overseas affairs matched with a clearly announced determination to kill anything that moves if malefactors cross him or his country. Some observers call this posture “isolationism,” but it is more accurately described as unilateralism, in which national interests unmodified by treaties, alliances, or moral considerations justify any conceivable military action (or inaction).

So it’s interesting to watch ex-Democrats famous for their opposition to “militarism” embracing Trump as an antiwar candidate. These include former Democrat then independent-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, and 2020 Democratic-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. In his long and rambling speech endorsing Trump on August 23, Kennedy listed Trump’s willingness to end (presumably on Russia-friendly terms) the war in Ukraine as one of three “existential issues” on which the two men agree. Shanahan similarly called “antiwar” one of the key principles supporting a “unity movement” between MAGA and her own preoccupations.

In endorsing Trump on July 26, Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 after calling it an “elitist cabal of warmongers,” said of the Republican that she was “confident that his first task will be to do the work to walk us back from the brink of war.”

The very idea of Donald Trump as a man of peace is problematic, but presumably if the only national-security issue you care about is ending U.S. support for Ukraine, he’s your guy. Yes, some “doves for Trump” credit him with a determination and willingness to reduce the risk of nuclear war, notwithstanding his opposition to the nuclear nonproliferation treaties that kept the Cold War from turning hot. But a more honest assessment of the 45th president’s posture is that he has perfected the so-called “madman theory” once embraced by his predecessor (in office and in spirit) Richard Nixon, which means keeping the peace through sheer terror at the president’s unpredictability and indifference to human life. You can argue that Trump might succeed in intimidating other leaders into accepting his policy dictates. You cannot genuinely believe he will make the world a less violent and more stable place.

There are, to be clear, other reasons for the conduct of these and other doves for Trump. Kennedy and Shanahan are clearly angry at Democratic efforts to keep them off the ballot and at establishment liberal mockery of their subscription to a vast range of conspiracy theories involving alleged corporate capture of government agencies (not that this is a concern of Trump’s). Gabbard has revived an old cultural conservative strain of her political career and is regularly blasting Democrats for “wokeness.” It seems unlikely that there is a reservoir of voters concerned principally with the power of the military-industrial complex and the resources devoted to national defense who look at Trump and see a comrade. If he stands up at one of his rallies and flashes a peace sign rather than the clenched fist of vengeance, maybe it would do him some good.

We all look at poll numbers, but it’s important to read them in a way that improves your knowledge rather than making you doubt they matter at all, as I tried to explain at New York:

With Democrats’ substitution of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, it’s looking very much like the very close election we originally envisioned for November has returned. And why shouldn’t it have? There has been exactly one comfortably decided election in this century (Barack Obama’s 2008 victory over John McCain), the two major parties are in equipoise, and three-time Republican nominee Donald Trump has polarized American politics to an almost incredible degree.

Now, an increasingly attentive public is paying a lot of attention to the presidential election. It’s a good time to review some of the mistakes people tend to make in seeking to follow and interpret the polls.

Don’t get fooled by outliers.

When a poll favorable to one candidate or the other comes out, that “team” is very likely to hype the numbers as absolutely true and predictive of a great landslide to come (that’s particularly true of Trump’s MAGA fans; Democrats have been burned by poll-driven irrational exuberance too many times). Some pollsters are prone (deliberately or not) to partisan bias, but any one survey by any pollster can, for statistical reasons, turn out to be an outlier.

There are two simple ways to avoid the temptation to overreact to individual polls: (1) utilize polling averages, which tend to greatly reduce the importance of outliers, and (2) look at trends in the results found by specific pollsters over time.

This year, there are a host of polling averages available. Some (notably RealClearPolitics and, to a lesser extent, Decision Desk HQ) use simple arithmetical averaging without any adjustments or weighting of results, while others (FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and FiveThirtyEight founder and now independent analyst Nate Silver) have sophisticated methodologies that seek to place a premium on higher-quality and more recent data. I personally prefer FiveThirtyEight’s averages, which are easy to navigate and aren’t quite as loaded with junk polls as RCP’s. But any of the above averages are a lot better than reliance on any one pollster or any one result.

Pay attention to margins of error and other methodological issues.

In close races where small swings in polling results can seem huge (particularly those in which the lead, however small, changes hands), it’s easy to forget that every reputable poll is accompanied by a “margin of error” reflecting the size of the sample and thus the likely range of possible underlying numbers (which, in turn, is modified slightly by a “confidence interval,” which is typically 95 percent). A recent national poll from Emerson College showing Harris leading Trump by a 50-46 percent margin had a margin of error of 3 percent, which means the results for either or both candidates could be off by that percentage. Thus a relatively robust Harris lead is actually “within the margin of error” (amounting to 6 percent in terms of the difference between the candidates) and could be misleading. To put it another way, no really close lead is safe and could represent an illusion.

The margin of error can become really large in subsamples of particular parts of the electorate (e.g., voters under 30, voters with or without a college education), which some pollsters compensate for with “oversamples” of particular groups of interest. When you see a poll with a finding that seems really odd (such as Trump leading among young voters or ringing up 30 percent of Black voters), always look for the size of the sample and the margin of error. This is why large-sample polls (all else being equal) are generally more reliable and why state polls are typically less accurate than national polls.

Until fairly recently, there was a very strong preference among polling experts for surveys based on live telephone interviews, until (a) cell phones began replacing landlines in households and (b) the unwillingness of Americans to respond to phone-poll solicitations began making it very difficult (and expensive) for old-school pollsters to get a representative sample. Now there remain “gold standard” pollsters (e.g., New York Times–Siena or Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll) that rely almost entirely on live-caller surveys but that now pay extra attention to the design and weighting of samples (e.g., by comparing them to verified voter files from the most recent election). There are also perfectly reputable polls that utilize refined, online voting “panels” and other methods. Pew found after the 2022 midterm elections (when pollsters had an excellent record) that “17% of national pollsters used at least three different methods to sample or interview people (sometimes in the same survey), up from 2% in 2016.”

FiveThirtyEight’s database of pollster ratings remains an essential tool for separating good from bad polls, based not just on accuracy but on transparency (pollsters who won’t tell you how they reach their results should not be trusted). But in general, you should beware of small-sample, one-day polls that are clearly designed to grab headlines.

Don’t confuse poll release dates with survey dates.

For varying reasons, pollsters (or, more often, the media outlets that pay for and sponsor polls) don’t always release polling data the minute it’s collected. So it’s possible a “new” poll will represent old data. For example, some media folk jumped on a Fairleigh Dickinson poll of the Harris-Trump race that was released the day after the Democratic National Convention ended and that showed a “post-convention bounce,” even though much of the polling was conducted before the DNC began. Keeping in mind the gap between the surveying and the reporting of results is important any time people look for a “bounce” from some significant event (particularly a candidate debate). Indeed, it’s wise to wait a few days after such an event to look for polling data since much of the impact is likely to come from secondary coverage rather than live viewership.

Pay attention to respondents’ likelihood to vote.

It obviously matters a lot whether the people polled and reported as favoring one candidate or another actually turn out to vote. But it’s not always easy to separate the participating sheep from the nonparticipating goats until fairly close to Election Day. This is why most pollsters stick with samples based on registered voters until they conduct a “switchover” to likely-voter surveys shortly before early voting begins (others, like Times-Siena, offer both registered-voter and likely-voter results much earlier).

There are different forms of “likely-voter screens” with different strengths and weaknesses. Some focus on stated voter intentions, which can overestimate turnout because people don’t like to admit they might find something better to do on Election Day than fulfilling their civic obligations. Others emphasize past voting behavior, but that obviously doesn’t work for newly eligible voters and may miss surges in turnout among voters who did not participate earlier (this has been one factor frequently cited as contributing to the underpolling of Trump voters in 2016 and especially in 2020). Likely-voter screens are especially important in non-presidential elections, when turnout is often low and variable.

Much higher percentages of registered voters participate in presidential elections, making assessments of likelihood to vote somewhat less essential. In the past, the application of likely-voter screens has often produced improved numbers for Republican candidates since they were disproportionately drawn from segments of the electorate most likely to vote (e.g., older voters). That may be less true in the Trump era, in which Democrats have improved their performance among both highly educated and older voters, while Republicans are doing better among non-college-educated voters who aren’t quite as likely to vote.

Finally, it should be noted that some polls (typically “issue polls” that don’t measure candidate preferences and some job-approval or favorability polls) don’t even screen for voter-registration status but use samples of “adults.” These results should be taken with a few grains of salt.

Be aware of polling errors.

One by-product of this era of close elections and partisan balance is that polls can get the outcome “wrong” even if they are reasonably accurate. It’s also important to note that national presidential polls estimate the national popular vote, not the results in the Electoral College (both George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 won the latter while losing the former, and in 2020 Trump came within a whisker of winning while pretty decisively losing the popular vote). So, for example, in 2016 the final polling averages at RealClearPolitics showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 3.2 percent. She won the national popular vote by 2.1 percent. That’s a pretty small error. But sparse state polling gave no hint that Trump was going to win the historically Democratic states of Michigan and Wisconsin — and thus the election. So when Trump did win by the equivalent of an inside straight, a lot of shocked observers felt betrayed by the polls, and some concluded they were worthless. They weren’t — at all — but they were, of course, not flawless.

Polling error was actually more evident in 2020. RCP’s final averages showed Biden leading Trump by 7.2 percent; he actually won the popular vote by 4.5 percent, a margin small enough to get Trump within reach of another inside straight in the Electoral College. Postmortems of this relatively poor showing didn’t reach any clear conclusions, but explanations often focused either on the pandemic conditions that greatly affected both polling and voting or on a continued problem pollsters were encountering in identifying Trump voters. Either explanation was consistent with the excellent record of the polls in 2022, when the pandemic had subsided and Trump wasn’t on the ballot. So there’s no reason to assume the polls will be right or wrong in 2024. But Harris supporters will pray that she is far enough ahead as voters vote that she can win in the Electoral College. And a big win might also reduce the very high odds that Trump and his supporters will again fight against certification of a defeat.

Like a lot of Democrats, I’m exhausted at the end of this exhilarating week, but did want to offer my insta-reaction to Kamala Harris’s big speech in Chicago that I wrote for New York:

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was relatively simple, almost stripped back, but laser-focused on a few objectives: introducing herself with autobiographical details that other speakers have been citing all week; defending herself forcefully against the attacks to come on her intelligence, strength and common-sense policy objectives; and making a clear and concise case against Donald Trump. She did not bother to defend the Biden administration’s record, and presented herself as focused on the future. It will not be easy for Republicans to depict this tough-sounding, highly articulate woman citing traditional American values and speaking to a crowd of flag-waving delegates as a “communist” or a “radical leftist” or unintelligent, as Trump has often done. And while she did not descend into wonkiness, she did describe enough of a policy agenda to create a real debate with Trump and his party.

As for her delivery, the contrast between Harris’s crisp, forceful, coherent and succinct presentation and Trump’s rambling screed in Milwaukee will be grist for the mill for some time. Indeed, this should make Democrats savor the upcoming debate, where there is every prospect for Harris to show up her opponent as the narcissistic would-be tyrant she spoke of in this speech. It was a fine start for the short sprint to November 5, and it showed she is not complacent but is determined to fight for swing voters while keeping her base excited.

Now on to the debate!

One of the odd subplots of this strange election cycle is the possibility of an electoral vote being purloined by Nebraska Republicans, as I warned at New York:

If you like to play with interactive maps laying out a host of presidential-election scenarios, you may be acutely aware that two of the 50 states award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district rather than allocating them statewide. These would be Maine, which adopted the practice in 1972, and Nebraska, which started splitting electoral votes in 1992. Until 2008, when Barack Obama snared an electoral vote from deep-red Nebraska’s Omaha-based Second Congressional District, it was all kind of academic. Then in 2016, Donald Trump won the Second Congressional District of Maine even though Hillary Clinton was the statewide winner. In 2020, both Nebraska and Maine split their electoral votes, essentially canceling each other out.

It was the general expectation that the same thing would happen this year in a Biden-Trump rematch. But then in April, Trump activist Charlie Kirk came to Nebraska and ignited a MAGA grassroots effort to convince the state’s Republican governor and legislative leaders to change the state back to a winner-take-all system to keep Democrats from again winning the Second District’s electoral vote. With a special legislative session focused on property-tax issues already pending, Governor Jim Pillen offered to go along only if he could be assured the votes to overcome a certain Democratic filibuster. Meanwhile, these developments were being monitored in Maine, where Democrats control the legislature and the governor’s office. Maine Democrats threatened to take countervailing action to deny Trump a shot at an electoral vote in their state if Nebraska fired first.

Things quieted down after Pillen decided against including the electoral-vote issue in the call for a special session. But then the presidential race retightened after Joe Biden handed off the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris, who proceeded (though there’s no evidence the Second District issue was at all a factor) to choose native Nebraskan Tim Walz as her running mate. For whatever reason, the Trump camp is again putting pressure on Pillen to call a second special legislative session in September to ensure the 45th president gets all the state’s electoral votes, as the Nebraska Examiner reported:

“Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Eric Underwood confirmed what state senators have told the Examiner privately, that the issue is not dead for 2024, and Pillen and legislative Republicans are waiting for the right moment to bring it forward. …

“’It’s a delicate opportunity,’ Underwood said. ‘When we’re ready to go I’ve connected with the Trump Force team. I’ve connected with Turning Point Action. … When this opportunity presents itself, what we need to do is to be the support network for those individuals because this will be a national change.’”

In deciding whether and when to pull the trigger on this effort to rig Nebraska’s electoral votes for Trump, Republicans will presumably want to make sure Maine is not in a position to carry out its earlier threat to retaliate. Maine’s legislature has been out of session since May.

Does a single electoral vote really matter? It seems far-fetched, but there is a very common scenario in which Democrats win the “blue wall” battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while losing the Sun Belt battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. That would give them 269 electoral votes — with the Nebraska Second District vote putting them over the top. That’s a bit less likely with Kamala Harris, who seems stronger in the Sun Belt states than Biden, heading the ticket, but it’s still feasible.

It’s certainly worth noting that Tim Walz is headed to Omaha for campaign appearances this very weekend. This could present Nebraska Republicans with a red flag (or perhaps more appropriately a blue flag; the Second District is often called “the blue dot” in the red map of Nebraska) that motivates them to act, or perhaps just a vivid Harris-Walz demonstration that the heartland does not entirely belong to Trump.

The more we look at the kind of voters who seem to be returning to the Democratic banner under Kamala Harris, the more it seems she could become the real “change” candidate, as I explained at New York:

When Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential contest and endorsed his vice-president as his successor, Kamala Harris enjoyed as quick and thorough a coronation to become party nominee as anyone could have imagined. All the talk of an “open convention” or a “blitz primary” that would find some ideal candidate without Harris’s perceived shortcomings vanished almost instantly as every party faction and every interest and constituency group dutifully, and soon enough joyfully, embraced the long-time heir apparent. All the comparisons of Biden’s situation to that of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 fell apart upon the realization that totally unlike LBJ’s veep, Hubert Humphrey, Harris would be in an unassailable position going into her party’s convention. And in addition to a united party, she inherited Biden’s formidable campaign organization and sizable treasury.

But it has gotten even better than that for Harris: Because Biden’s age and deteriorating vigor and communication skills had become an even bigger problem than dissatisfaction with his record or policy platform, the substitution of Harris for the 78-year-old president felt like the arrival of a fresh breeze, and not just to Democrats worried about a loss to Donald Trump. A grim rematch between two unpopular old white men, which much of the country seemed to dread, was reset overnight by this relatively young, multiracial woman who offers a very different option.

Or does she? Harris isn’t an AOC or a Pete Buttigieg, signaling a millennial wave finally sweeping away boomer pathologies. She’s 59 years old, and this is her seventh race for public office (she’s climbed from district attorney to state attorney general to U.S. senator to vice-president). Her refreshing running mate, Tim Walz, is another boomer, a year older than her and often described as everyone’s favorite grandpa. Neither Harris nor Walz has been a conspicuous dissenter from any of Biden’s policy decisions or issue positions; indeed, Harris has been universally praised for the intense loyalty she displayed toward Biden as he slowly came to recognize the need to pack it in.

So potentially the Harris-Walz ticket can enjoy the best of two worlds, leading a united incumbent party without all of the baggage of the incumbent president. More importantly, Harris can offer something Biden obviously could not: a way out of the political era symbolized by both Trump and Biden, for which there was a sizable constituency just waiting to be mobilized. It was an absolutely poisonous symptom of Biden’s basic problem that for the first time in living memory, Democrats were hoping for a low-turnout election while seeking to blow-torch non-major-party options like the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to which voters unhappy with the Biden-Trump choice might resort. And much as Kennedy’s own claim that Democrats and Republicans are an indistinguishable “uniparty” is completely absurd and dangerous, there’s not much question that voters were becoming equally tired of the octogenarian leadership of both major parties. It’s probably not a coincidence that Harris’s advent has been accompanied by a decline in support for Kennedy.

Republicans may grumble that Harris cannot avoid responsibility for the unpopular aspects of Biden’s record, particularly on issues like immigration and inflation where voters mistakenly but clearly think Trump had the more successful presidency. But Harris’s sudden appearance at the top of the Democratic ticket is presenting them with a real dilemma: Do they simply treat her as Biden 2.0 and continue the 2024 campaign as originally planned (without all the references to a senile or puppetlike opponent), or do they acknowledge Harris’s distinct persona by focusing on politically vulnerable positions she took during her brief 2020 presidential campaign, or in the Senate, or as a state official in wicked California? It’s looking more and more as though they will take the bait and depict Harris as far more of a radical leftist than Biden, if only they could get their own candidate to lay off the blatant racism and sexism and nursing of stupid grievances long enough to point at Harris and yell: “Communist!”

Perhaps this old-school McCarthyism will work once again to distract persuadable voters from Trump’s and the GOP’s own extremism. But it could also help free Harris from Biden’s shadow and allow her to stand for a political future full of possibilities that Trump would destroy instantly in a self-absorbed second term dominated by vengeance.

If we hear more and more about “the future” in Harris’s communications going forward, it will be clear she’s aiming at voters who are less interested in “making America great again” than in putting the past firmly in the rearview mirror. Her novelty as a presidential candidate has already turned around a Democratic campaign that was floundering on the very edge of viability. If she can take shrewd steps to avoid being McCarthyized (which she will be free to do given her party’s unified determination to take down Trump) and take advantage of the fresh start she has come to represent, then she can win over voters who had written off Joe Biden entirely. And what was looking to be a teeth-grinding effort to convince the country that anyone would be preferable to a vindicated 45th president could remain joyful and upbeat right up to and beyond November 5.

As someone who was reasonably close to the John Kerry campaign twenty years ago, there is no term that riles me up more than “swiftboating.” Some of the same people are trying to same tactic on Tim Walz, and I explained at New York why it was unlikely to succeed.

In an effort to undermine the highly positive vibe among Democrats surrounding Tim Walz’s unveiling as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Team Trump is trying to depict the jovial Minnesota governor as a grim leftist whom progressives pushed into the veep nomination. But the former football coach, avid hunter and school teacher from a distinctly rural background is hard to typecast as a faithful disciple of Karl Marx. So the GOP is deploying an old playbook item that Trump campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita knows well from his deep involvement in the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry in 2004: an attack on Walz’s military record, one of his strongest credentials in rebutting the idea he is some sort of anti-American zealot.

LaCivita is front and center in the attack on Walz, unsurprisingly, as Politico Playbook reports:

“’The two biggest sins in the military are claiming credit for decorations you don’t have or claiming combat action that you did not participate in … And this much is certain: He’s guilty of at least one of them,’ LaCivita told our colleagues Jared Mitovich, Meridith McGraw and Connor O’Brien yesterday. ‘Nothing regarding his lies has been weaponized in a political sense. That’s about to change.’”

The hit man in this attack was, appropriately enough, Walz’s counterpart, J.D. Vance, who much like Walz enlisted right after high school (Vance in the Marines, Walz in the Army National Guard). As the New York Times reports, Vance came in very hot on the accusations to which LaCivita alluded:

“Speaking at the police department in Shelby Township, Mich., on Wednesday morning, Mr. Vance said Mr. Walz had effectively deserted his fellow soldiers to avoid serving in Iraq because he retired from the National Guard in May 2005, several months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy there …

“Mr. Vance also seized on a remark by Mr. Walz in a video clip that the Harris campaign had promoted on social media on Tuesday, in which the governor told a crowd about support for gun control, saying that ‘we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.’

“Mr. Walz never served in combat, however, which prompted Mr. Vance to accuse him of ‘stolen valor.’

“’I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did,’ Mr. Vance said.”

Will this effort work as it did (to some extent) against John Kerry? Probably not.

First of all, the facts underlying the LaCivita-Vance line of attack don’t appear to justify all the angry passion. No one is disputing that Walz served honorably in the Guard for 24 years. The first charge, and perhaps the most serious, is that Walz retired at the end of those 24 years (as he was fully eligible to do) in order to avoid deployment to Iraq. Two former Guard colleagues, apparently infuriated by Walz’s opposition to the Iraq War, first raised this charge as part of an earlier political attack on Walz when he ran for governor in 2018. But other colleagues documented that Walz had been talking for quite some time about retiring in order to run for Congress (which is precisely what he did) and that he had no way of knowing about the subsequent deployment when he retired. There’s really no more evidence of Walz’s alleged cowardice than an assertion by two dudes who clearly didn’t like his politics.

The second charge, which Vance dressed up with the lurid term of “stolen valor,” really just refers to a single ambiguous reference Walz made to carrying a gun “in war,” though others have pointed to a claim in a 2006 Walz press release that he served in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (the official name of the Afghanistan deployment). Whatever viewers of that press release thought, the claim is actually true since Walz and his unit were deployed to Europe in a support capacity for that war.

Though Vance didn’t mention it, his conservative allies have also charged that Walz inflated his rank in descriptions of his service. This attack line is probably the flimsiest: Everyone concedes Walz achieved the rank of command sergeant major in the Guard, the highest rank attainable by an enlisted service member. But he didn’t complete some coursework required to retire at that rank. So are a few references on campaign websites to Walz as a “retired command sergeant major” some sort of “lie?” I don’t think so; he was retired, and he did achieve that rank.

All in all, the attacks on Walz’s military record come across as pretty weak tea. Even the most serious — the claim that he dodged serving in Iraq — requires an asterisk: J.D. Vance’s running mate, Donald Trump, has endlessly described that war as a disastrous mistake. By the time he retired from the Guard, Walz shared that view. Should he have stuck around to see if he could be deployed there?

But, facts aside, there are two big-picture reasons the attempted Swiftboating of Tim Walz won’t work. First, we’re in a different era of American experiences with war. 2.9 million young men were drafted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War; John Kerry’s service there resonated with a lot of voters. In the post-conscription era, people like Walz and Vance (a public-affairs officer deployed to Iraq) who chose to put on the uniform are the exception rather than the rule. More typical is Donald Trump, who was ahead of his time in finding a way to avoid military service (via his father’s influence, some claim).

And the second reason this won’t be a replay of 2004 is that the Kerry campaign largely ignored the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacks on his war record, after setting them up for success by overemphasizing that record at the Democratic National Convention (the candidate famously began his acceptance speech by saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty”). Walz hasn’t made his Guard service his principal credential for election as vice-president. And the Harris-Walz campaign definitely isn’t falling silent and letting the smears stand.

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.

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.

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.