Nobody knows how long last night’s presidential debate impressions are going to last among the voting public, or even of there is going to be a second debate before election day. There is also the unanswered question about whether or not debates matter much, regardless of who ‘wins.’ So the importance of the debate as a determinant of the outcome of the election is unclear.

Harris is nonetheless getting plenty of good reviews for her ‘performance’ last night, while positive takes on Trump’s comments are scarce outside of right-wing media. Better that for Democrats that the opposite. Here are seven choice takes from commentators:

In “CNN Flash Poll: Majority of debate watchers say Harris outperformed Trump onstage,” Afriel Edwards-Levy writes that “Registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agree that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS. The vice president also outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year, the poll found….Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia. Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would. And afterward, 96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.”

“Her pointed digs on the size of his rally crowds, his conduct during the Capitol riot, and on the officials who served in his administration who have since become outspoken critics of his campaign repeatedly left Trump on the back foot,” Anthony Zurcher writes at BBC.com. “The pattern for much of this debate was Harris goading her Republican rival into making extended defences of his past conduct and comments. He gladly obliged, raising his voice at times and shaking his head.”

Zac Anderson observes in “Who won the debate? Harris’ forceful performance rattles a defensive Trump” at USA Today: “Nervous Democrats saw a significantly stronger advocate than Biden, who repeatedly stumbled when he squared off against Trump on June 27 in Atlanta. In addition to delivering a much more fluid and coherent message, Harris often looked more poised than Trump as she calmly prosecuted the case against him, prompting a series of angry outbursts.”

Nandita Bose, Gram Slattery and Joseph Ax write in “Harris puts Trump on defensive in combative debate” at Reuters.com that “Democratic candidate Kamala Harris put her Republican rival Donald Trump on the defensive in a combative presidential debate on Tuesday with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes….A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.”

“Kamala Harris showed up — and then some….The vice president’s performance against Donald Trump, in which she repeatedly baited him and knocked him off balance, was a far cry from President Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate. And it gave Democrats the role reversal they had hoped for after their switch at the top of the ticket,” Politico’s staff writes in “Harris won the debate — and it wasn’t close.”

From “Democrats see attack ad gold mine in Trump’s debate comments” bye Andrew Solender at Axios: “Democratic lawmakers and strategists were elated at what they saw as an “unhinged” former President Trump repeatedly taking Vice President Harris‘ bait at Tuesday night’s debate….Why it matters: “Everything this dude says right now is an attack ad line,” said one Democratic strategist….Another told Axios during the debate that the ads are probably being produced “literally right now.”…What we’re hearing: Democrats in Congress cited multiple comments by Trump that they believe hurt the ex-president and his party….”

“The former president’s alternate reality conflicts with that of others, including his current and former GOP allies who said he blew it on stage Tuesday night against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Even Elon Musk agreed that Harris “exceeded most people’s expectations.”….The conservative aggregation site, the Drudge Report, declared: “The End.” Republican spinmeisters in the debate spin room in Philadelphia couldn’t sugarcoat the situation.” From “Who Won the Debate? Even Republicans Agree it Was Kamala Harris” by Mary Ann Akers at The Daily Beast.

Republican spin doctors don’t have a lot to work with regarding last night’s presidential debate. But they can take some comfort in knowing that there are seven plus weeks left in the race.

Regarding the muted-mic, no-audience in the room presidential debate tonight (rules here), my sage advice for Vice President Harris is to look more presidential. Forget all that media-hyped stuff about provoking her opponent into saying something silly. If she does that, she runs the risk of appearing manipulative. All he has to do is not take the bait and he wins the night, plus a few days of positive media coverage. Besides, there is a very good chance he will look unhinged, no matter what she does. Why re-fight a battle she has already won? Because Harris is the debate favorite with her much-noted prosecutorial skill set, Trump is the debate underdog and he gets bonus points by doing “better than expected.” If he shocks everyone and appears surprisingly dignified, he wins big. Yes, the muted mic helps Trump in that regard. But them’s the rules. Harris’s job is not to manipulate Trump; It is to show that she is the ‘adult in the room,’ the one who can be trusted to make sober presidential decisions. Don’t assume everyone already knows that. Many voters like Trump; Many can’t stand him. People know him already. Her, not so much. She has to sell herself, not squander her credibility by trying to trap her opponent. Forget the Perry Mason theatrics. Just be smart, more relaxed and warm and likable, persona qualities she already has.  A little humor wouldn’t hurt. Sure, have a couple of zingers for the opponent, and attack when appropriate. But, think JFK vs. Nixon – the way the former revealed himself to an audience who already knew the latter. Let Trump be the angry, yammering fool. Don’t be too defensive or explain too much. Roll out an eloquent vision of a more hopeful, prosperous and united America.

On the eve of the presidential debate, the polls mostly indicate that, nationally, the presidential race is pretty close, with a trend in the right direction for Harris. But another numerical consideration is the numbers of the demographic change, and for Dems, the news from North Carolina is pretty good. As “the team at Carolina Forward” writes in an e-blast: “Since the 2020 election, North Carolina has added almost 400,000 new residents. With natural growths, deaths, comings-of-age and new neighbors, hundreds of thousands of new voters will be casting ballots for the very first time in our state this fall….In 2020, Trump won North Carolina by his slimmest margin of victory in the entire country: just 73,000 votes, or 1.3%. So the dynamic “churn” in our state’s electorate matters a whole lot. This week, we’re doing a deep-dive into what those population changes might mean politically. Further, “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, North Carolina has gained about 396,000 new residents since 2020. Nearly all (95%) of this growth has been from net in-migration – people moving to North Carolina. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the top state sending new residents to North Carolina is Florida, followed by New York, Virginia and South Carolina, in that order. According to the NC State Board of Elections, there are over 217,000 more registered voters in the state today than there were during the 2020 election, and many more than that are net-new– in other words, voters who were not registered here four years ago….In 2020, Donald Trump scraped out a narrow win in North Carolina by about 73,000 votes out of approximately 5.5 million cast….In 2024, Kamala Harris is quite likely to hit a 30-point margin in Wake county over Donald Trump. It’s entirely conceivable that she could hit an eye-watering 40-point margin in Mecklenburg county.”

In addition to demographic trends, the latest NC polls are also pretty decent for Dems. As TonyDem4life notes at Daily Kos, “A Survey USA poll that dropped today has Harris leading by 3 points….According to WRAL,, “Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are in a statistical tie in North Carolina, but Harris appears to have a slight edge, according to an exclusive WRAL News Poll of the 2024 presidential race….Harris leads Trump by 3 percentage points — a close result in this key battleground state, but one that represents a substantial improvement for Democratic hopes in North Carolina from the last WRAL poll, in March, that found Trump leading by 5 percentage points.”…..

• Harris is up in the suburbs 49% to 44%, a result that almost entirely matches the overall statewide result.
• Trump leads Harris among suburban men, 47% to 45%.
• Harris leads Trump among suburban women, 54% to 40%.

UPDATE:

ANOTHER POLL just dropped. New Quinnipiac poll finds Harris leading Trump in North Carolina by 49-46, same as Survey USA poll earlier today. ”

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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:

As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi famously said: “Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.” That might well serve as the slogan of today’s Democrats as they enthusiastically line up behind the newly-minted presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Doubts about Harris’s political history and positions, what she really stands for, what she might actually do if she is elected—all have been completely submerged to the sacred goal of beating Donald Trump.

This is understandable. They thought they were toast. Now the race has been reset and winning looks within their grasp. They subbed out their aging leader for a much younger model who can hit her marks in scripted settings and excites Democratic voters. But she is much less good in unscripted settings, has not had to put her personal views before voters for five years, and has an extensive history of commitments to policy goals that would be crippling liabilities in the upcoming election. Solution: keep her in scripted settings, make her policy commitments vague and deny, without explanation, that she now holds the unpopular positions she formerly did. Democrats, including progressive Democrats, who at other times might have been ostentatiously displeased with some or all of this have cheerfully—joyfully?—accepted this approach as a cheap price to pay for defeating Trump.

Will it work? There are two big problems with Vince Lombardi Democrats as the new, improved version of the Democratic Party. The first is that, even in the limited, short-term sense of beating Trump this November, it might fall short. Consider that, while Harris has dramatically improved the Democrats’ position compared to Biden and now leads in all national polling averages and in some key swing states (how many depends on which poll average you look at), her position is still not all that great. Even after weeks of extremely favorable press coverage, rapturously-received rallies, and near-flawless execution of her campaign’s roll-out strategy, followed by a national convention that was judged a great success, she still lags far behind where Biden was at this point in 2020 cycle and, indeed, lags behind Biden’s final popular vote margin in 2020. Nate Silver’s influential election forecasting modelnow has Trump a slight favorite, at 58 percent to a 42 percent win likelihood for Harris.

As has been widely noted, Harris has recovered a considerable proportion of Biden’s 2024 underperformance among key demographics. But it is also the case that she is still considerably below Biden’s 2020 performance among many of these demographics. Aaron Zitner and Stephanie Stamm have an illuminating article in the Wall Street Journal making these comparisons. According to their analysis, comparing Harris’s current margins vs. Biden’s in 2020 shows the following:

• Harris’s margin among black voters is 15 points below Biden’s in 2020;
• Harris’s margin among Hispanics lags Biden’s by 9 points;
• Harris’s margin among young (18-29 year old) voters is 20 points below Biden 2020; and
• Harris lags Biden’s 2020 margin among men by 6 points and, surprisingly, among women by 2 points.

In addition, their analysis shows Harris doing slightly better than Biden among white college voters but slightly worse among white working-class voters. While available data are sparse, they tend to indicate that Harris is also running behind Biden 2020 among nonwhite working-class voters, a likely culprit for much of her underperformance among blacks and Hispanics.

It’s a bit ironic, no? As Zitner/Stamm remark:

If Harris can’t match her party’s 2020 showing among these groups, where might she make up the votes? Many analysts say she can look to white voters, especially among women responding to her promises to work to restore access to abortion. If they are right, the first Black female president could have a winning coalition that relies more on white voters, and less on those from minority groups, than did the white man elected just before her.

Put another way, as I noted in a recent piece on how the emerging Harris coalition differs from the Obama coalition overly-enthusiastic Democrats believe she is replicating:

[E]ven if successful, Harris’s coalition will [not] 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 [such as in 2020] with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the white college-educated vote.

This is nicely illustrated by new CNN data from Pennsylvania. By general assent, Pennsylvania is the most important state in this election, with by far the highest chance of being the tipping point state in this election. If Trump wins it, and only carries Georgia in addition to the states he carried in 2020, he will be the next president. Looking at the CNN crosstabs and comparing these findings to States of Change data from 2020, we have the following:

• The CNN poll has Harris carrying Pennsylvania college-educated voters by 23 points; Biden carried them by 18 points in 2020.
• In the poll, Harris loses Pennsylvania working-class voters by 16 points; Biden lost them by just 9 points last election.
• Looking at Pennsylvania’s white college voters, Harris has a thumping 22 point advantage among them compared to Biden’s lead of only 10 points in 2020.
• Finally, the white working class in Pennsylvania prefers Trump over Harris by 32 points, more than his already-large 28 point advantage over Biden in 2020.

This pattern translates into a tie between Harris and Trump in the state (close to the running average of Pennsylvania polls). This is not terrible and she could certainly wind up winning the state. But it does suggest the precarity of her position; the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats has not fundamentally altered—and probably can’t—the underlying nature of the Democratic coalition.

Which brings us to the second problem with the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats: it is no solution to Democrats’ longer-term problems with building a coalition sufficiently broad in class and geographic terms to dominate American politics. Therefore, even if successful in the short-term goal of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, we are likely to see a continuation of what Yuval Levin and I term “Politics Without Winners” in a forthcoming paper:

In the American political system, the purpose of parties is to form a national coalition that endures. Look in on almost any point in our history and you would find a majority party working to sustain a complex coalition and a minority party hoping to recapture the majority. Today, however, American politics is home to two minority parties and neither seems interested in building a national coalition. Close elections and narrow majorities dominate our electoral politics more than at any point in our history.

The rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats seems highly unlikely to change this situation. This seems obvious, but one of the surprising things about this change in Democratic approach is how many formerly critical Democrats seem convinced Democrats have solved their underlying problems through the new approach. They are happy Harris and her campaign have emphasized gauzy themes like “freedom” instead of the imminent end of democracy, backed off her former support for politically toxic positions like decriminalizing border crossings and ending fracking, and drenched the Democratic National Convention in patriotism instead of identity politics-coded rhetoric.

It’s the new centrism and the new “big tent” Democrats! But how plausible is it that Vince Lombardi Democrats have, in a few weeks, reinvented the Democratic Party and decisively jettisoned its cultural radicalism, climate maximalism, and other baggage that prevents the party from broadening its coalition? It seems far more plausible that Democrats are “maximizing within constraints”—moving to the center just enough that they might gain some electoral advantage but without really changing the underlying commitments and priorities of the party their liberal, educated base holds dear.

In short, it’s more a purpose-built, curated centrism than a full-bore move to the center. As such, it fits the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats like a glove but is profoundly inadequate to the task of building a broad and durable political coalition that can do more than squeak through the next election.

Despite the recent return of Democratic optimism associated with the Harris-Walz ticket, there are a few stubborn fears that keep partisans awake at night. Here’s a review of four of them that I wrote at New York:

Democrats are in a vastly better state of mind today than they were a couple of months ago, when Joe Biden was their presidential candidate and his advocates were spending half their time trying to convince voters they were wrong about the economy and the other half reminding people about how bad life was under President Trump. While it’s possible this would have worked in the end when swing voters and disgruntled Democrats alike took a long look at Trump 2.0, confidence in Biden’s success in November was low.

Now that the Biden-Harris ticket has morphed into Harris-Walz, there’s all sorts of evidence from polls, donor accounts, and the ranks of volunteers that Democrats can indeed win the 2024 election. But at the same time, as Barack Obama and others warned during the Democratic National Convention, the idea that Kamala Harris can simply float on a wave of joy and memes to victory is misguided. She did not get much, if any, polling bounce from a successful convention, and there are abundant signs the Harris-Trump contest is settling into a genuine nail-biter.

While the September 10 debate and other campaign events could change the trajectory of the race, it’s more likely to remain a toss-up to the bitter end. And many fear, for various reasons, that in this scenario, Trump is likelier to prevail. Here’s a look at which of these concerns are legitimate, and which we can chalk up to superstition and the long tradition of Democratic defeatism.

Republicans’ perceived Electoral College advantage

One reason a lot of Democrats favor abolition of the Electoral College is their belief that the system inherently favors a GOP that has a lock on overrepresented rural states. That certainly seemed to be the case in the two 21st-century elections in which Republicans won the presidency while losing the national popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016). And in 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by a robust 4.5 percent but barely scraped by in the Electoral College (a shift of just 44,000 votes in three states could have produced a tie in electoral votes).

However, any bias in the Electoral College is the product not of some national tilt, but of a landscape in which the very closest states are more Republican or Democratic than the country as a whole. In 2000, 2016, and 2020, that helped Republicans, but as recently as 2012 there was a distinct Electoral College bias favoring Democrats.

To make a very long story short, there will probably again be an Electoral College bias favoring Trump; one bit of evidence is that Harris is leading in the national polling averages, but is in a dead heat in the seven battleground states that will decide the election. However, it’s entirely unclear how large it will be. In any event, it helps explain why Democrats won’t feel the least bit comfortable with anything less than a solid national polling advantage for Harris going into the home stretch, and why staring at state polls may be a good idea.

Recent polling errors

For reasons that remain a subject of great controversy, pollsters underestimated Donald Trump’s support in both 2016 and in 2020. But the two elections should not be conflated. In 2016, national polls actually came reasonably close to reflecting Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote advantage over Trump (in the final RealClearPolitics polling averages, Clinton led by 3.2 percent; she actually won by 2.1 percent). But far less abundant 2016 state polling missed Trump’s wafer-thin upset wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, largely due to an under-sampling of white non-college-educated voters. The legend of massive 2016 polling error is probably based on how many highly confident forecasts of a Clinton win were published, which is a different animal altogether.

There’s no question, however, that both national and state polling were off in 2020, which is why the narrow Biden win surprised so many people. Two very different explanations for the 2020 polling error have been batted around: One is that the COVID pandemic skewed polling significantly, with Democrats more likely to be self-isolated at home and responding to pollsters; the other is that the supposed anti-Trump bias of 2020 polls simply intensified. The fact that polls in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections were quite accurate is consistent with either interpretation.

So we really don’t know if polling error is a given in 2024, or which candidate will do better than expected. A FiveThirtyEight analysis of polling error since 1998 shows a very small overestimation of the Democratic vote across 12 election cycles. It might be prudent, then, to expect that Trump might exceed his polling numbers by a bit, but not necessarily by a lot.

Fundamentals in election forecasts

A lot of election forecasts (or model-based projections) incorporate, to varying degrees, what are known as “fundamentals,” i.e., objective factors that are highly correlated historically with particular outcomes. There are models circulating in political-science circles that project presidential-election results based mostly or even entirely on macroeconomic indicators like GDP or unemployment rates. Others take into account presidential approval ratings, the positive or negative implications of incumbency, or historical patterns.

While forecasts vary in how to combine “fundamentals” with polling data, most include them to some extent, and for the most part in 2024 these factors have favored Trump. Obviously the substitution of Harris for Biden has called into question some of these dynamics — particularly those based on Biden’s status as an unpopular incumbent at a time of great unhappiness with the economy — but they still affect perceptions of how late-deciding voters will “break” in November.

The high chances of a chaotic overtime

A final source of wracked Democratic nerves is the very real possibility — even a likelihood — that if defeated, Trump will again reject and seek to overturn the results. Indeed, some MAGA folk seem determined to interfere with vote-counting on and beyond Election Night in a manner that may make it difficult to know who won in the first place. Having a plan B that extends into an election overtime is a unique advantage for Trump; for all his endless talk about Democrats “rigging” and “stealing” elections, you don’t hear Harris or her supporters talking about refusing to acknowledge state-certified results (or indeed, large batches of ballots) as illegitimate. It’s yet another reason Democrats won’t be satisfied with anything other than a very big Harris lead in national and battleground-state polls as November 5 grows nigh.

Do Democrats need an actual landslide to win at all? The question arises from two disturbing possibilities.

1. The Trump campaign, likely in league with Putin, will surely try to steal the election. We have already seen a massive influx of GOP laws to gain control of the count put in place in various states. They have all but announced it. In addition, new evidence of Russian meddling in our election machinery has resurfaced, which is not exactly a shocker, but it does merit more attention.
2.  Even if Dems narrowly win the presidency, they could fail to win both houses of congress, rendering them all but impotent with respect to enacting anything substantial on their agenda. The best antidote for this outcome is a Democratic landslide – to win so big that Trump and the cat-lady hater are washed away in a cleansing blue tsunami. Easier said than done, but it could happen

Although most pundits are saying it’s a toss-up, Harris-Walz are scoring well in polls, so far dodging major screw-ups. They are the fresh faces in this race, while the GOP ticket marinates in their increasingly bitter take on America.  Harris’s youthful persona, Walz’s authentic middle class narrative and their ticket’s exuberant spirit have flipped the script; Growing numbers of likely voters see the GOP ticket as stale, tired and angry. Many of Trump’s own appointees have turned against him. Careerists RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard add to the GOP ticket’s “It’s all about me” vibe. The Republican campaign now has an aging preppy’s bilious ‘get-off-my-lawn’ spirit. Not a good look.

Democrats should amp up messages like”Harris-Walz for a More Joyful America,” “Let’s Move On – Harris-Walz 2024,”  or “Trump Is So Yesterday.” Just underscore the glaring reality that only one party’s leaders are pointing the way forward to a more hopeful future for all Americans, while the other party’s leaders wallow in a whining personality cult. As a result, poll numbers show a trend away from Republicans, toward Democrats.  Democratic activist James Carville put it well in a recent NYT op-ed, “The most thunderous sound in politics is the boom of a single page as it turns from one chapter to the next.”

The current Republican Party is more concerned with stroking Trump’s fragile ego than representing conservative causes. The only fix leading to a healthier Republican Party is a Democratic landslide. Only then is there a chance that they will finally get the message they missed during almost two years of electoral defeats. A few Republican leaders, including former U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger have figured out that defeating Trump decisively is the only way they can save their party, and they have endorsed Harris-Walz.

Democratic campaigns should understand that policy voters have already chosen sides. From now on, it’s all about the image that each party communicates to swing voters. For now, at least, advantage Democrats. Above all, hold that edge.

From “Harris goes her own way on capital gains tax hike” by  Brian Faler at Politico: “In a break with President Joe Biden, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris called Wednesday for a smaller capital gains tax increase on the rich than he’s proposed….Harris would hike the top total rate on people making more than $1 million to 33 percent, including a special 5 percent surcharge, well below the nearly 45 percent levy Biden has pitched….“We will tax capital gains at a rate that rewards investments in America’s innovators, founders and small businesses,” she said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire….Her shift toward what her campaign considers a more “moderate” capital gains increase comes ahead of her first debate with former President Donald Trump, and as Republicans try to paint her as a creature of the extreme left….It’s also part of an effort to woo business owners, with Harris separately calling for start-up firms to be allowed to deduct more of their costs. She also proposed creating a type of standard deduction for businesses.” Faler notes that “Biden has proposed requiring people making more than $1 million to pay taxes on capital gains — which include things like appreciation in the value of stocks — at ordinary income tax rates, instead of a special preferential rate. He has also proposed raising the top marginal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 37 percent and increasing an investment surcharge on high earners to 5 percent from 3.8 percent.” Harris’s new position on taxes may help get  more contributions from business leaders and win more support from conservatives. It may also encourage media reporters to think a bit longer before stereotyping Harris as a left-winger and undercut the Trump campaign’s efforts to ‘brand’ her as a crazed left winger who hates business.

So the new presidential debate rules are set, as M.J. Lee reports at CNN Politics: “Kamala Harris’ campaign has accepted the terms of next week’s presidential debate with former President Donald Trump, including the fact that the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak, according to a person familiar with the debate negotiations….However, in a letter to ABC News Wednesday afternoon agreeing to the rules, the Harris campaign again laid out their objections to the muted mics condition, insisting that they believe the vice president will be “disadvantaged” by the format….“Vice President Harris, a former prosecutor, will be fundamentally disadvantaged by this format, which will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones,” the letter from the Harris campaign to the network, shared in part with CNN, said.” However, “The network, according to the source familiar, has offered assurances to the Harris campaign that if there is significant cross talk between Harris and Trump, it may choose to turn on the mics so that the public can understand what is happening, the moderator would discourage either candidate from interrupting constantly and the moderator would also work to explain to viewers what is being said….“Notwithstanding our concerns, we understand that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format,” the campaign said. “We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones.”….The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.”

NYT opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall shares a boatload of new polling results, including: “Adam Carlson — a Democratic polling analyst whose work I previously cited — has recently compiled demographic voting trend data comparing the levels of support for Biden in multiple surveys taken from July 1 to July 20 with levels of Harris’s support in surveys taken from July 22 to Aug. 9. Nationwide, Carlson found a net gain of 3.4 points for Harris….Harris’s improvement over Biden’s margins among specific constituencies has been much larger: voters 18 to 34, up 12.5 points; independents, up 9.2 points; women, up 8.2; Hispanics, up 6.3. While Harris’s gains are larger than her losses, she lost ground compared with Biden among white college graduates, down 0.5 points; men, down 2.2; Republicans, down 3.9 and voters over 64 years old, down 3.9….The RealClearPolitics averaging of multiple polls in battleground states found Trump up by tiny margins in three states (by 0.5 percent in Arizona, 0.7 points in North Carolina and 0.2 points in Georgia) a tie in Nevada and Harris ahead in three states (by 1.4 points in Wisconsin, 1.1 in Michigan and 0.5 points in Pennsylvania). All these percentages are within the margins of error….For comparison, on July 21, the day Biden dropped out, Trump led nationally by 4.3 points and was ahead in all seven battleground states….VoteHub, an election tracking website, followed presidential polling from Aug. 5 through Sept. 3 and found Harris going from slight underdog status to steadily building a lead over Trump….On Aug. 5, Trump held a statistically insignificant lead of 46.4 to Harris’s 46.2. By Aug. 24 Harris had pulled ahead by 2.6 points, 48.4 to 45.8, and by Sept. 3, she led by 3.3 points, 48.8 to 45.5.”

Edsall notes further, “Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, responded by email to my inquiry, noting that Harris has benefited from a closely divided electorate because it “was not difficult for a Democratic nominee without the concerns voters had about Biden’s age to consolidate the Democratic vote.”….McInturff provided The Times with an analysis of the state of the election based on his firm’s polling for NBC. Among McInturff’s findings:

• Harris has closed the gap on who is better on handling the issues. When voters were asked in July who would “make our economy work better, they chose Trump over Biden by 11 points; in August, they chose Trump over Harris by one percentage point. Similar, when asked which candidate was “competent and effective” in July, Trump led Biden by 10 points, but in August, Harris led Trump by four points. The biggest shift was on the question of which candidate “has the energy and stamina needed to serve.” In July, Trump led Biden by 27 points; in August, Harris led Trump by 11 points.

• Crucially, Harris has substantially reduced Trump’s polling advantage on key issues that are pillars of the former president’s campaign. Asked which candidate was better on immigration and border security, Trump’s 35-point edge over Biden in July fell to nine points over Harris in August; on inflation and cost of living, Trump’s advantage dropped from 22 to three points; on crime and safety, from 21 to two points.

• Harris’s net favorable rating has appreciably improved and now is better (46 favorable, 49 unfavorable) than Trump’s (40 favorable, 55 unfavorable).

Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and the director of its Center for Politics, emailed me the center’s analysis of the 2024 presidential election:

We have the Electoral College at 226 safe/likely/leaning to Harris, 219 safe/likely/leaning to Trump, and 93 electoral votes’ worth of tossups (seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).

Every other electoral vote beyond these seven states is rated as likely or safe for one party or the other — the only electoral vote in the leans category (as leans Democratic) is the single electoral vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional District.

A number of poll-based forecasting models suggest that the race is basically 50-50 or maybe there’s a small edge to Harris.”

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.

John Sakellariadis flags a scary vulnerability in America’s vote counting systems. As he writes in “Hacking blind spot: States struggle to vet coders of election software” at Politico:

When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists.

So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.

But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.

The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.

The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.

The public has no way of knowing how extensive of a U.S. vote hacking project Putin has in place. We can only surmise that Russia’s hackers are focusing on the swing states, counties and maybe even larger precincts. Nor do we know how good our anti-hacking operation is in these localities and the nation at large.

Like Trump, Putin must realize that his legal status may ultimately depend on the outcome of the U.S. elections. Trump is his lapdog, and it would be folly to deny that Putin will do all that he can to help defeat Democrats. Americans have short political memories. But let’s not forget Trump’s “Russia, if you are listening….” remark, and let’s more safely assume that he has reached out to Putin in some way.  Sakellariadis also writes,

The supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.

The technology vendors who build software used on Election Day face razor-thin profit margins in a market that is unforgiving commercially and toxic politically. That provides little room for needed investments in security, POLITICO found. It also leaves states with minimal leverage over underperforming vendors, who provide them with everything from software to check in Americans at their polling stations to voting machines and election night reporting systems.

Many states lack a uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure. When both state and federal officials have tried to bring greater attention to these flaws, they’ve had to contend with critics who resist “federalization” of state election processes.

Further, Sakellariadis reminds readers, “Russian hackers probed election systems in all 50 U.S. states and breached voter registration databases in at least two, according to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. Four years later, Iranian hackers penetrated inside an unnamed state’s database, then used data stolen during the hack to mount a targeted voter intimidation campaign, the Justice Department found.”

Also, “In the worst-case scenario, hackers could manipulate a state’s voter list, adding fictitious people to the rolls, changing real voters’ information or directing voters to the wrong polling places on Election Day.” Sakellariadis has much more to say about the extent of the problem, and what is, and is not, being done to address it.

Democrats have enough to worry about in just getting out the vote. It would be indeed tragic, not only for Democrats, but for the world, if Dems lost the election as a result of vote theft, instead of a fair count.

Ezra Klein interviewed Ruy Teixeira for the New York Times on February 1, 2024, long before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. But the interview is more about the Democratic Party, than the presidential race, specifically some of the party’s blind spots as identified by Teixeira. The Times is featuring the interview, which serves as a reminder that even more is at stake than selecting our next president. The transcript follows below. You can also listen to the interview on “The Ezra Klein Show” at: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Ezra Klein

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So last week on the show we had Simon Rosenberg giving the very optimistic case on the Democratic Party, the view that the Democratic Party is doing great, they are winning at a rate we have not seen since F.D.R., and that all of this panic about the state of the party, about its prospects in 2024, is misguided.

Today is the other argument, the argument the Democratic Party is not doing great. That, in fact, it’s doing quite badly. That it is losing something core to who it is, core to its soul, and it’s losing it because it is making bad strategic and even, as you’ll hear in his views, substantive decisions. So Ruy Teixeira is very well known in Democratic policy circles, longtime pollster and political strategist. And he wrote in 2002, alongside John Judis, a famous book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”

When this book comes out, things are looking real bad for Democrats. It’s the 9/11 era, George W. Bush is super popular. And here come Teixeira and Judis to say, actually things look pretty good for Democrats, that if you look at how the country is changing, the growth of nonwhite voters, the growth of the professional class, if you look at how those and other groups vote for Democrats, that just based on demographics you should expect the Democratic slice of the electorate to really grow. And if it grows, Democrats are going to begin winning.

Now it’s a weird time for that book to come out. George W. Bush wins again in 2004. But in 2008, reality begins to look a lot like what they’ve been describing. And then in 2012, when Obama wins on the back of huge, huge turnout among nonwhite voters, he has a share of the white electorate that is about what Dukakis had when he loses in 1988.

When Obama wins with that coalition, it really looks like Teixeira and Judis were right. And even the Republican Party seems to think so. It begins to think it has to moderate on immigration and put forward a kinder face. And then, of course, comes Donald Trump and upends us once again, wins when people think he cannot. And that sets off a set of soul-searching. What was wrong in the emerging Democratic majority? What did Teixeira and Judis get wrong? What did Democrats get wrong?

And so now they have a new book out called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” And this book’s fundamental argument is that most of what they said came to pass. But one thing happened that they had worried about in that book, and people didn’t really pick up on, which is that in order for that Democratic majority to happen, Democrats needed to keep the working class. And they, in particular, needed to at least hold down the ground they were losing with the white working class. And that did not happen — Democrats getting stomped among the white working class. There is some evidence of them losing at least some working-class Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

So the question is, why? It’s a question that Judis and Teixeira are trying to answer in the new book. You will hear in here that the view is both political and, I would say, substantive. Right? There’s an argument about what is good policy and also an argument about why that policy, why a much more moderate Democratic Party would be a more politically-effective one.

And so I wanted to offer this as the second way of thinking about the Democrats right now. That they have lost a constituency that, at their very soul, they are built to represent, and that they should be treating that as a real emergency. And then there’s the question of, what do you do about it? It’s a place where I think Ruy and I have some different views, but I was grateful that he joined me here.

Ruy Teixeira

Hey. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra Klein

So I want to begin with the older book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which gets published in 2002 and later takes on this status as a kind of artifact of a certain era of Democratic triumphalism. But it was helpful to me to remember that it was in 2002, which was a really bad time for the Democratic Party. So tell me what you were seeing then that made you write the book. What was the context for it? Because at that time it was counterintuitive.

Ruy Teixeira

The context in which John Judis and I wrote the book was looking at the way the United States had evolved away from the Reagan coalition through the Clinton years and the very early part of the 21st century. If you looked at how their political base was changing and how the country was changing, it was clear that Democrats were going to benefit from the sort of inevitable rise of the nonwhite population, which was heavily Democratic. We saw the realignment of professionals toward the Democrats. We saw dramatic shifts in the voting patterns of women, particularly single, highly-educated working women.

And we looked at the more sort of dynamic Metropolitan areas of the country that we called ideopolises, and it was clear they were realigning toward the Democrats. So you could put these sort of demographic, ideological, and economic changes together and say, well, it looks like the way the country’s changing overall is moving in a direction that’s consistent with what we called at the time Democrat’s “progressive centrism,” and if they played the cards right, could conceivably develop a dominant majority that might last for some time. Even though, of course, it didn’t mean they’d win every election or even the very next election after the book was published, which was 2002.

Roiling underneath the surface there, Ezra, was a caveat we had in the book about the white working class, because we were very careful to note that secular tendency of the white working class to move away from the Democratic Party was a problem, and the Democrats really needed to stop the bleeding there and keep a strong minority share of the white working class vote overall nationally, maybe around 40 in the key Rust Belt states that were heavily working-class, more like 45. And if they did that, they could build this coalition. But the political arithmetic would get vexed and difficult if the white working class continued to deteriorate in their support for Democrats.

Ezra Klein

You mentioned something there, which is the ideological trends of the time, like the professional class becoming more Democratic. That hadn’t always been true. So what did you see happening ideologically in the parties around that time that was shifting these coalitions?

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, the professionals part was really important in our analysis. And if you looked at professionals, not only were they becoming a much larger part of the US occupational structure and of the electorate and, of course, they vote way above their weight in terms of turnout, but they were moving in a direction in terms of their views on cultural issues which was quite liberal.

Then also professionals, by virtue to some extent of their position in society and their occupational structure, they tend to be more public-spirited. They tend to be more sympathetic to the role of government. And those views seemed to be strengthening as professionals became a larger part of the American electorate. And we thought that was really going to help the Democrats. And, in fact, that turned out to be true, in a strict quantitative sense. They did, in fact, realign heavily toward the Democrats. It really starts in the late ‘80s, kind of strengthens in the ‘90s, and goes forth in the 21st century to the point today where professionals, by and large, can almost be considered a base Democratic group.

Ezra Klein

So then tell me what happens on the way to the Democratic majority. So you have this new book called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” It just published in late 2023, and it’s a bit of an update. Why didn’t this durable Democratic coalition emerge?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, point number one is something that we foreshadowed in “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which was that the Democrats had a potential Achilles’ heel in their coalition in terms of the white working class. If that group started moving away smartly from the Democrats again, that would throw the whole thing into question. And that did, in fact, happen after Obama’s victory in 2008.

If you look at 2010 election where the Democrats get crushed to lose 63 seats, it’s a lot because white working-class voters bail out from the Democratic Party in lots of areas of the country, particularly the upper Midwest. 2012, Obama manages to get re-elected, and that was viewed or characterized as the return of the Obama coalition. But the part of the Obama coalition they missed is, he ran a kind of populist campaign against the plutocrat Mitt Romney, running on the auto-bailout and other things like that, and he really managed to grab back a lot of those white working-class voters in the upper Midwest. And if he hadn’t done that, he would have lost that election.

But the coalition of the ascendant kind of analysis that Democrats had been playing with becomes ever stronger. In fact, after 2012, in an odd sort of way, the Republicans even embraced it with their post-election autopsy. The Democrats were riding this demographic wave, it was going to wash over the country, and the Democrats were going to potentially be dominant.

But I think Trump —

Trump had a different opinion. He thought that, in fact, there was a wellspring of resentment among the working class in the United States that a politician like him could tap, and that the Democrats were going to have a lot of difficulty defending against, and that turned out to be the case.

So that’s part of what happened to the Democratic coalition. Another part of the Democratic coalition that is — I mean, the change that’s really still unfolding today that’s very important is, if you look at 2020, even though Biden did manage to squeak through in that election, not nearly as big a victory as they thought they’d get, he managed to hold what white working-class support they had, in fact, increase it a little bit. But what was really astonishing is the way Democrats lost nonwhite working-class voters, particularly Hispanics. There was big, big declines in their margins among these voters, declines that we’re still seeing today in the polling data.

So one way to think about 2020 and where we are today, is that racial polarization is declining but class polarization, educational polarization, is increasing. And that’s a problem for a party like the Democrats which purports to be the party of the working class.

Read more…

In her Labor Day article, “Both Trump and Harris claim to support the working class: Where do they stand on labor?,” Kinsey Crowley writes at USA Today: “While Trump performed better than expected among Union workers in 2016, some of that support shifted back to President Joe Biden in 2020. Experts say that Biden’s popularity among union workers is likely to carry over to Harris. And unlike 2016, unions may be energized by the recent wins from several major strikes….”It suggests labor’s got some muscle and some fire in their tank,” Bob Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told USA TODAY in an interview. “If you think you can win…you’re really gonna push a whole lot harder….The Harris campaign seems to tout Biden’s record as a pro-union president to justify the labor movement’s draw to Harris, and Celine McNicholas, policy director at nonpartisan research organization Economic Policy Institute Action, agrees….”There are parts of the Biden administration… (his) record on benefiting workers that I think Harris deserves unique credit on, because she was essentially the tie-breaking vote,” said McNicholas said….Harris also chaired the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment aimed at reducing barriers to unionization….The Harris campaign memo on working with unions detailed her pro-worker record dating back to her time as California Attorney General, when she addressed wage theft. While in office as a U.S. Senator, she walked picket lines in two strikes….if elected, Harris would pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Known as the PRO Act, the bill would give workers more power to organize, and has passed the House multiple times but has not been signed into law.”

From an e-blast, “New GQR poll shows Americans want Increased Oversight on Corporate Greed”: “A recent GQR survey for More Perfect Union Foundation of 1,700 likely voters in seven battleground states—multimode survey in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (multimode survey taken August 9-15, 2024; margin of error +/- 2.38– demonstrates broad support for government action to break up corporate monopolies and stop the price gouging that has raised the cost of every from groceries to rent to prescription drugs.
Key findings include:

• Voters still struggle with costs and majorities struggle to afford groceries (56 percent) and health care costs like premiums, deductibles and copays (51 percent).
• However, they are more likely to blame corporate greed and price gouging (61 percent) than high costs (51 percent) for inflation and rising costs.
• An 81 percent majority are “concerned that big corporations and businesses are becoming too powerful.”
• Huge majorities of voters support Biden’s efforts to rein in corporations including “right to repair,” reducing costs of cancer drugs, investigating big oil and breaking up monopolies.  However, few voters know about these efforts.
• Voters respond better to an economic narrative that centers in controlling corporate concentration than a conservative nationalist argument.”

“The Latino vote has transformed over the last 15 years — and it’s now disproportionately younger than other groups, explains Mark Hugo Lopez from the Pew Research Center,” Adrian Carrasquillo writes at Politico. “Nationwide, 21 percent of young eligible voters in the U.S. are Latino. But in critical Southwest states, the numbers are even greater: Latinos comprise 39 percent of all 18 to 29 year old eligible voters in Arizona and 36 percent of those young voters in Nevada, according to Pew data from 2022….Today, of the roughly 4 million new Latino voters since 2020, about 3 million are U.S.-born Latinos who have come of age and are eligible to vote in 2024….Harris must now take a Hispanic voter engagement plan built for an 81-year-old white man and retrofit it on the fly for a lesser known, 59-year-old woman of color. Control of the White House could depend on that rebuild.” Carrasquillo cites “early data showing Harris far ahead of Biden with those [younger] voters. [Pollster] Barreto showed internal polling that had Harris’ net favorability advantage over Biden at 24 points with 18 to 24 year old Latinas, plus 17 with Latino men of the same age, plus 18 with Latinas aged 25 to 29, and plus 12 with Hispanic men 25 to 29….“This is extremely important,” Barreto later explained. “Younger Hispanic men looked problematic for Biden. They don’t look problematic for Harris. They start out pretty open-minded about her….In an expansive August 14 survey of 2,183 Hispanics, the polling firm found Harris leading Trump 56 percent to 37 percent across seven battleground states. Harris’ support among Latinos under 40 was especially robust — 17 points higher than Biden.”