Some perceptive observations from “At the Convention in Chicago, Kamala Harris Can Seal the Deal” b y Jeet Heer at The Nation:

Writing in The Atlantic, the veteran political analyst Ronald Brownstein makes a powerful argument that this week’s Democratic National Convention could be one of the history-making ones, thanks to the fact that Kamala Harris, like Clinton before her, remains for much of the public an unknown quantity—a blank slate ready to be filled in. Brownstein contends that “no presidential nominee in decades has approached their convention with a greater opportunity to reshape their public image than Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Aside from the comparison with Bill Clinton, Brownstein also notes, “Harris is the first nonincumbent since Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to claim either party’s presidential nomination without first enduring months of grueling primary contests. Because Harris did not experience the setbacks and triumphs that come from waging such a fight, public impressions of her are uncommonly shallow for a nominee on the convention’s eve, strategists in both parties agree.”

While acknowledging that the current era of partisan polarization means candidates have only a narrow room to rise (or, conversely, to sink), Brownstein makes a convincing case for 2024 offering Harris the chance to solidify her standing in a way that is essential to her presidential bid.

Harris heads into the convention already riding a wave of enthusiasm. But if Brownstein is accurate in gauging the opportunity the convention presents, Harris has a chance to catch an even bigger wave—one that would ensure a solid electoral victory.

Heer notes further, “It seems America is hungry for a fresh face—a fact that has already allowed Harris to take a lead in polls and election models (notably that of Nate Silver, who was bullish on Trump but now sees Harris as the favorite). Political analyst Joshua A. Cohen estimates that more than 100 Electoral College votes that were previously leaning toward Trump have shifted toward Harris—an astonishing reversal that puts the Democrats in a far more favorable position.” Also,

Harris has the wind at her back precisely because many Americans who hate Trump had also been dispirited by Biden. So far, they seem willing to give Harris a chance. Harris’s challenge is to turn these feel-good vibes into a fully mobilized electorate ready to flood the polls on Election Day.

Harris will be helped by the fact that she is not just a fresh face in the campaign. She also has a gripping biographical story that speaks to the emerging America. Harris’s late mother was an immigrant from India, and her father is an immigrant from Jamaica. Donald Trump has tried to use Harris’s multiethnic family history as a wedge to divide Black voters by absurdly claiming that Harris is not really Black. But the meeting of Harris’s parents is a very American story, one that speaks to an optimistic vision of the country as a haven for all. It is also a story that serves as an eloquent rebuke to Trump’s xenophobia and racism.

So far, Harris has been chary of defining herself as anything more than a generic Democrat, a profile reinforced by her pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Harris has made a few policy pitches that are gratifyingly progressive, notably her promise to fight corporate price gouging on food and to provide financial support to low-income first-time homeowners. With the eyes of the nation watching the DNC, Harris would be well-advised to offer many more such policies to help economically struggling Americans. That would turn a feel-good event into durable political support.

Heer adds, “Barack Obama, the most skilled living orator in American politics, will take the stage on Tuesday. Former first lady Michelle Obama will speak the same evening, as will Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff. Emhoff’s prominent role at the event stands in contrast to Melania Trump’s silent, sullen presence at the GOP convention. The following evening’s highlights include speeches from Bill Clinton and Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate. Harris herself will be the primary speaker on the final night of the convention on Thursday.”

Heer concludes, “The danger of a divided—and divisive—convention is real. Harris’s ability to navigate the Israel/Palestine divide is the first big test of her political acumen. Harris has a difficult task ahead of her, but if she can manage to secure the votes of wavering parts of the Democratic coalition, this convention will truly be historic.”

Some signs that Georgia is already confounding Trump’s electoral college strategy from “1 big thing: Trump’s devil-in-Georgia problem” by Jim Vandehei and  Mike Allen: “Polling released yesterday by the N.Y. Times and Siena College showed Harris opening up a Sun Belt route through the fast-growing, diverse states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. That gives her an alternative to the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which were President Biden’s only plausible path….Harris had narrowed Trump’s lead among likely voters in Georgia to 4 points (50% to 46%, with a margin of error of ±4.4 points). In the Times-Siena poll in May, Trump enjoyed a 9-point Georgia lead….Between the lines: Harris’ rise in the state is partly, but not entirely, due to Black voters, who make up one-third of the state’s electorate….Harris is a more effective messenger on reproductive rights in a state with a controversial ban on abortions after about six weeks….A top Democratic operative told us Harris “is just a much better fit than Biden for the Georgia electorate, which has younger and more Black voters. Much easier to see Stacey Abrams and [Sen. Raphael] Warnock firing up the pews” for Harris than for Biden….As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Trump’s campaign and biggest aligned super PAC spent four times as much on TV ads in the Peach State in the two weeks after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee than in the rest of 2024 combined….Of the $37 million in ad buys the Trump campaign has placed over the next week or so, almost $24 million (65%) are in Georgia, Democratic campaign strategist Doug Sosnik points outin The New York Times….The growing urgency of Georgia can also be seen in the Trump campaign’s long-range ad buys. The Trump campaign’s share of TV spending planned in Georgia doubled from 21% in August to 43% in September and 46% in October, according to calculations for Axios by the ad-tracking firm AdImpact….Trump has placed advance ad buys for this fall in only two states. Wait for it … Pennsylvania and Georgia.”

At The New Republic Greg Sargent reports that a “Brutal New Poll for J.D. Vance Reveals a Big Trump-MAGA Weakness,” and observes regarding Vance ”

• He is viewed favorably by only 24 percent of independents, versus 39 percent unfavorably.
• He is viewed favorably by only 23 percent of self-described moderates, versus 41 percent unfavorably.
• He is viewed favorably by only 22 percent of 18- to 39-year-olds, versus 44 percent unfavorably.
• He is viewed favorably by only 32 percent of women, versus 40 percent unfavorably (interestingly, Vance fares a tad worse among men).
• He is viewed favorably by only 28 percent of Hispanics, versus 39 percent unfavorably.
• He is viewed favorably by only 9 percent of Blacks, versus 50 percent unfavorably.
• He is viewed favorably by only 32 percent of suburbanites, versus 42 percent unfavorably.
• He is viewed favorably by only 33 percent of college-educated whites, versus a striking 55 percent unfavorably.

Unsurprisingly, Vance is viewed positively by non-college whites (+9 points), rural voters (+13 points), and white evangelicals (+37 points)….To be fair, Vance has more time to improve his image, as large percentages of voters still have no opinion of him.”

Here’s an encouraging graph:

“Kamala Harris, as widely previewed, gave her first major economic address today,” Robert Kuttner writes at The American Prospect. “Two key themes were cutting housing costs and resisting corporate price-gouging of consumers. She also proposed restoring the refundable Child Tax Credit and topping it up to $6,000 a year for new parents in the first year, as a baby bonus. Take that, J.D. Vance….The toughest of these policy areas is housing. Unless the federal government spends massive sums to increase the supply of affordable housing, the cost of both rental and owner-occupied homes will continue to outstrip incomes….In the absence of a supply strategy, Harris’s proposal of a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers, though beneficial, will bid up prices. Her commitment to build three million new affordable units over four years, using a mix of tax incentives and grants to local governments for innovative approaches, is a decent start, but only a start. Two other good housing ideas that chime with her attack on predatory corporations are measures to remove the tax advantage from Wall Street speculators in housing and stopping predatory AI tactics for raising rents….Harris’s general emphasis on price-gouging is a policy area where government can make a huge constructive difference without spending large sums. It is good economics and smart politics on several counts….First, it vividly connects with the issue of inflation where ordinary people feel it. Grocery store prices have increased only slightly over the past year, but consumers remember exactly what a quart of milk or a dozen eggs cost before the supply shocks of the pandemic. In addition, supermarket profits are notably higher than before the pandemic, which means that prices should have moderated more….Second, the plan reframes the issue from whether Biden or Trump was better at containing an abstraction known as inflation to how corporate concentration opportunistically drives price hikes. The right remedy for that ill is not slowing the economy generally, as the Federal Reserve has done, but going after the root cause. This is also a useful shot across the Fed’s bow…Third, the approach recasts the struggle as ordinary people vs. predatory corporations rather than impersonal forces, with Harris in the role of champion of beleaguered consumers….There has been a lot of chatter about whether Harris is positioning herself to the left of President Biden and whether that is a good idea. Supposedly, by moving left, Harris risks alienating swing voters. But swing voters also buy groceries. The only voters whom Harris risks alienating by championing consumers are large corporations and their allies. They have few votes.”

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:

There’s been a lot of good news lately for the Harris campaign. Every national polling average has her ahead of Trump with margins ranging from 1 point in the New York Times average to 3.1 points in Nate Silver’s average (average lead = 2.1 points).

Silver’s state-level polling averages, which are relatively aggressive in incorporating new information, have Harris enjoying big improvements relative to Biden every swing state and now has her ahead in all these states except for Georgia and North Carolina. Moreover, his forecasting model makes her the favorite in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and tips her as a 57 percent overall favorite to take the Electoral College.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Harris is still running significantly behind where Biden and Hillary Clinton were at this point in the 2020 and 2016 cycles. Using the RCP averages (538 does not provide 2016 averages but their 2020 average closely tracked the 2020 RCP averages), at this point Biden was ahead of Trump by 7.7 points and Clinton was ahead by 6.8 points. That compares to the current RCP average of 1.1 points.

Moreover, looking at the “Rustbelt three”—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—which loom so large in this election, here are the RCP averages for this point in the cycle for 2024 Harris-Trump, 2020 Biden-Trump, and 2016 Clinton-Trump in that order and for each state:

Michigan: +2.4/+6.7/+6.8

Pennsylvania: -.2/+6.4/+9.2

Wisconsin: +1.2/+6.5/+9.4

Given that Clinton lost all three of these states in 2016 and Biden carried them by an average of only 1.6 points in 2020, this pattern does not inspire confidence. In general, and particularly with these data in mind, the race is still way too close for comfort.

Of course, just because the polls tended to underestimate Trump support in 2020 and 2016 both nationally and in key states doesn’t mean they are today. But that remains a possibility. As Sean Trende notes:

[T]here is a sound social science concept of which we should be aware. In fact, it is particularly dangerous right now. It is known as partisan non-response bias. The idea is this: When events favor one political side or the other, partisans become more (or less) likely to take a poll.

The intuition is this: After Biden’s disastrous June debate, Democrats really didn’t want to talk about the election. Republicans on the other hand, wanted to talk about nothing else. It was probably the best time to be a Republican in a presidential election since, well, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama in the first presidential debate. Some of Trump’s poll lead in July probably was due to a newfound Republican eagerness to respond to polls.

At the same time, Democrats are overwhelmingly engaged right now. They have reason to believe they just avoided a near-death scenario and potential wipeout. They have a new presidential nominee, about whom they are overwhelmingly excited, and they like the vice presidential selection. They would love nothing more than to talk to you, or a pollster, about the 2024 election.

Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure whether this is happening or not. But it could be in which the case the race, already close, may be closer than it looks. If you’re the Harris campaign you want to keep this in mind and take appropriate evasive action. “Kamalamania” may be more fragile than it appears.

A relevant cautionary tale is provided by an earlier example of a politician suddenly ascending to be their party’s standard-bearer and rocketing into the lead. This is the example of “Jacindamania” where Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand in 2017 replaced Labour leader Andrew Little who appeared to be headed to a landslide defeat (sound familiar?). Her candidacy caught fire and very soon her party was in the lead. But the conservative party, the National Party, counter-attacked, aiming withering fire at Ardern’s considerable vulnerabilities. By the time the election arrived the National Party actually out-polled Labour and Ardern by 7 points. (She was still able to form a government, but only by forming a coalition with New Zealand’s right-populist and green parties.)

This suggests a missing part of the current Trump campaign that is no doubt helping Harris—disciplined, withering fire directed at Harris’s vulnerabilities, of which there are many, has been lacking. Trump, by general consensus, has done a poor job on this politics 101 part of his campaign, indulging his proclivities for dwelling on various pet beefs, rather than concentrating attacks where they would most hurt his opponent (see this brutally effective ad from the McCormick Senate campaign in Pennsylvania for how this could be done). If he continues on the former course, the Harris campaign may continue to dominate; if he and his campaign take the latter path, Kamalamania may go the way of Jacindamania.

The question for the Harris campaign therefore should be how to armor themselves against such a turn in the campaign. This is where recovering the ancient wisdom of the Obama era could come in handy. Harris is perfectly willing to disavow previous unpopular positions on controversial issues and allude in very general terms to a current position that is closer to the center of public opinion. But what’s she’s not willing to do is piss off the left. And unless you’re willing to piss off the left, you can’t convincingly and durably occupy the center of American politics. That’s the real insurance against a counterattack by the GOP.

Obama understood this. He was willing to piss of the left in pursuit of a broader coalition. Here are a couple of examples but there are many more.

On immigration:

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants to this country.”

He added that those who employ people living in this country illegally “disrespect the rule of law.”

On energy/climate change:

“We need an energy strategy for the future—an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.”

He added that his administration had “quadrupled the number of operating oilrigs to a record high” and “opened up millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration.”

Different times, different politician for sure. And of course the progressive left within the Democratic Party is much stronger now than it was then. But the principle remains valid. If you want to define yourself as being in the center of American politics you have to be willing to piss off those who are constantly trying to push you out of the center.

This is particularly important for the Harris campaign among difficult demographics like white working-class voters, where recent improvement—particularly in the Rustbelt—has been key to the campaign’s improved fortunes. These voters could stick or they may be just visiting; much will depend on whether the Harris campaign can convince them she is truly a different kind of Democrat than what she used to be.

It seems like a long time ago but it really wasn’t when Democrats generally understood the need to aggressively capture the center and, if the left stood in the way, the need to push them aside. Clinton and Obama understood this and they prospered accordingly. What seems to have happened is that intense criticisms within the party of various policy actions of these leaders—some justified, some not—have induced a collective amnesia about that era’s political wisdom. As a result, today’s Democratic leaders are now absolutely terrified of pissing off the left even where it would be greatly to the party’s benefit to do so.

It’s time to recover that ancient wisdom. The stakes are high and the time is short. Democrats can’t afford to rely on Trump’s incompetence to cede them the center of American politics. They must seize it.

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.

Political junkies talk a lot about various constituencies based on race, class, age, sex etc., and who they do and don’t support and why. But we tend to overlook one of the largest groups of American voters who share some unique concerns — people running and employed in small businesses, which had less than 12 employees on average in 2023. Many of them are working-class contractors, while some of them have managerial or professional training. But they are all engaged in private enterprise, often competing against huge corporations and sometimes working on government contracts. For starters, consider that 61.7 million people were employed in more than 33 million small businesses in 2023, according to the small Business Administration. 

So, please check out “How Kamala Harris can win over small businesses” by Gene Marks, founder of The Marks Group, a small-business consulting firm, which is cross-posted from The Hill:

Pew Research reports that two-thirds of the nation’s 33 million small-business owners have fewer than four employees. Also, 85 percent of them are white and 76 percent are men. More than half are over age 50.

Today, these small-business owners are not a happy bunch. Despite a surge in startups, lower inflation, a softening labor market, fewer supply chain issues and a growing economy, their sentiment and confidence levels are still at historic lows.

Not surprisingly, more than half of small-business owners in one recent survey say they believe another Donald Trump administration would have the best impact on their businesses, compared with only 14 percent for Joe Biden. In another recent survey, 33 percent of small-business owners believe that Trump winning the election will positively impact their business, versus 16 percent for Biden.

Today, Kamala Harris has taken over for Biden as the Democratic nominee. So now this is her challenge. Can she win over small-business owners this election year? I believe there is a way.

When government is friendly toward business, businesses feel more comfortable investing, hiring and taking risks. Taxing “the rich,” going after “the wealthy” to “pay their fair share” and vilifying “big corporations,” on the other hand, makes businesses seem evil. This may be a great plot line for a Hollywood movie or for populist fringe groups, but it’s not a terrific strategy for a government that needs to win over a large swathe of voters.

Remember that there are many small-business owners who, with their spouses, do make more than $400,000 per year (the “wealthy”) but use a substantial amount funds to reinvest in their companies. Also remember that countless small businesses — from pizza shops to landscapers — rely on big corporations and their employees for their livelihoods. And while it’s important to help business owners of color or in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods, it’s also important to recognize that 85 percent of us would not be included in that group. We need support and a little love too.

As I’ve previously written, the Republicans will work hard to make permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which includes many provisions that benefit small-business owners. Without that, my tax bill personally will increase between 20 and 30 percent.

Harris has so far been mostly silent on this issue, so most of my clients are assuming she’ll continue with Biden’s policies, letting the tax cuts expire. My advice for her is to compromise and champion a few of the TCJA’s provisions that specifically benefit small businesses — most importantly the Qualified Business Income Tax. She should also support making permanent first-year deductions for capital equipment and research and development expenditures. That would make me, and many of my clients, much less concerned about a tax increase if she were elected.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen many new regulations emerge from various government agencies working under Biden’s direction that require all businesses to reclassify certain independent contractors, pay more overtime wages, eliminate non-compete contracts and be subject to new and more rules (and fines) for safety, harassment and discrimination violations. These are important. But they come with significant costs.

Big corporations can absorb these costs, which is why an overwhelming number of both Republican and Democratic small-business owners say business policies today favor large companies over small businesses. Small businesses struggle to keep up with and pay for these regulations. A blanket exemption on many of these rules for employers with less than 10 employees or so would win over many voters.

Isabella Guzman is perhaps one of the best Small Business Administration leaders I’ve ever seen. She’s worked hard and travelled extensively. She deserves a promotion to the Department of Commerce or Department of Defense, where she can do the same thing for the many small-business programs there that need attention. And she should be significantly involved in choosing her successor at the SBA to ensure that her work continues.

Harris also needs to set forth a plan on immigration, which needs to be a priority. Congress must compromise and pass a bill already. No one wants to see families physically deported, but everyone knows that illegal immigrants are breaking the law and creating a burden. Sort this out with Congress, secure the border and create a better legal path for citizenship. Small businesses need workers. The economy needs more entrepreneurs. Law-abiding business owners need help competing with those that flout the law and hire illegal workers. The country needs a strong president who will work with Congress to fix this major problem.

Finally, consider a new funding program for succession. As mentioned above, the majority of small-business owners are over the age of 50 (the average age is about 55). Many of my clients are thinking hard about exiting their businesses over the next few years, and many others have already gotten started. Sales of business are up more than 20 percent from a year ago. But tax, financing and other obstacles remain.

Harris would do well to support and expand the tax benefits for Employee Stock Ownership Plans, so that more workers can have equity in their workplaces and business owners can get help cashing out. Direct the SBA to create special financing programs for those looking to buy businesses. This is not only an enormous opportunity to provide for retirement but also a chance for younger generations — and even employees — to own businesses.

I’m a moderate Republican business owner. My vote is still up for grabs. Taking the above actions would go a long way toward winning my support — and the support of many other business owners — for Kamala Harris.

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.

Caitlin Jewitt and Geoffrey Skelley address a question of interest, “Will Harris’s late start help or hurt her in the general election?” at 538/abcnews.com, and write that “there is also a school of thought that long, competitive nomination contests like the 2008 Democratic primary can energize the party base, generate excitement and enthusiasm, and help the eventual candidate create campaign infrastructure across the states….Harris’s campaign, with its unusual circumstances, may still feature aspects of both a short and long nomination fight. Not unlike past nominees who secured their spots after lengthy primary campaigns, Harris has had to quickly pivot to a general election campaign relatively late in the election calendar. Yet the 2024 cycle for Democrats actually had many trappings of a short nomination battle, exemplified by the party’s efforts to rally to Biden and a lack of serious opposition to him in the primaries and even the fact that Democrats were already looking to speed up the vote to confirm Biden as the nominee when his candidacy began to come apart after his poor showing in the June 27 debate….Democrats’ moves to unify quickly behind Harris ensured that it did not result in the type of prolonged infighting sometimes characteristic of lengthier primary races. The party even set a new precedent to confirm Harris as quickly as possible — though the Democratic convention doesn’t begin until next week, Harris has already officially become the party’s nominee, by virtue of a virtual vote of delegates to nominate a candidate….This expedited timeline — prompted in part by concerns about ballot access laws in a few states, the time needed to vet a vice presidential candidate, and guarding against Republican legal challenges — also likely insulated Harris from other challengers materializing..”

Jewett and Skelley continue, “Harris’s situation differs in other key respects, too. For one thing, because she did not wage a primary campaign, she was not battered by attacks from party rivals in the ways Ford or Mondale were, which can give the other party fodder for attacks heading into the general election….She was able to raise record amounts of money in a short timeframe as her candidacy energized Democratic voters. Plus, she has been able to more easily utilize the already-existing Biden-Harris campaign infrastructure, unlike the alternative choices Democrats may have considered….Ultimately, it’s unclear if there’s a meaningful relationship between when a candidate becomes the presumptive nominee and their success in November: Out of the eight races that were settled in June or later (excluding the 2020 and 2024 races because they didn’t have protracted nomination fights), the nominee went on to win the general election in three.” I like the late winning of the nomination for a different, but related reason: Campaigns get stale. even I, a  partisan Democrat, simply got tired of hearing all about the ‘excruciating minutiae’ of campaigns. to cop a phrase from Seinfeld. There is more political news coverage now than ever before, and it is only a matter of time before your favored candidate chucks in a distracting gaffe, or some reporter magnifies a trifling incident, which has little or nothing to do with major issues and gets an insane amount of coverage (e. g. Hunter Biden). There is such a thing as too much political news, which is why a lot of voters don’t pay much attention until October. The truncated campaign also makes candidates seem fresher, while the years-long slog has the opposite effect. Democrats ought to re-design their process to take this phenomenon into consideration. Let the Republicans have long, constipated campaigns, while Democrats do quiet organizing and fund-raising behind the scenes, do localized videos instead so much travel and have our candidates lay comparatively low as much as possible until late Spring or Summer. It might also result in less wear and tear on our candidates.

The “no tax on tips” idea favored by both Trump and Harris sounds like a pro-worker idea on the surface. But is it really? Abdallah Fayyad argues against it at Vox: “….The policy doesn’t really hold up under any scrutiny. And that’s because at best, “no tax on tips” looks a lot less like a tax cut for low- and middle-income families, and a lot more like a subsidy for big businesses….“I’m not at all saying that workers won’t get anything,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “But I think that a meaningful share of the [federal] expenditures on a tax exemption like this will go to the employers of tipped workers.”….That might be why industry lobbyists have backed the proposal. “It’s not a surprise that the National Restaurant Association loves this,” Shierholz said, referring to the lobbying group that represents many of the country’s major restaurant chains….At worst, the tax policy might even put a downward pressure on service sector wages by allowing employers to keep their workers’ baseline pay low because the tax cut could instead raise the workers’ take-home pay….“I think there is no question that it would” weigh wages down, Shierholz said. The only question, she says, is just how much….So while “no tax on tips” might make for a good sound bite or campaign slogan, it doesn’t necessarily translate to wise policymaking.” That’s the nut of the strongest argument against it – that it would encourage employers to keep the hourly wages low, currently just $2.13, although a handful os states have abolished the subminimum wage for tipped workers.” (See also this WaPo editorial).  Who could fairly blame tipped workers for not reporting all their tipped income? Many people are also unaware that some foreign restaurant owners split tips with workers, a practice which is not uncommon among restaurants that hire servers from different countries. One of the political problems associated with the “no tax on tips” idea is that it may piss off other low-wage workers, like cashiers who gain nothing from the proposal. There are 3.6 million of them the U.S., one of America’s most common jobs, compared to about 2.7 million wait staff. The Democratic presidential nominee should not get distracted by Trump’s boutique ideas, and hold firm to raising the minimum wage and union membership as the best ways to improve the living standards of all American workers.

Courtenay Brown explains why the “Latest CPI report confirms inflation is easing” at Axios: “For more than two years, the economy’s big problem was inflation — it was the key irritant for policymakers, the White House and American consumers….Wednesday’s Consumer Price Index report confirms that is no longer the case: Prices are no longer rising rapidly, which means the battle to kill inflation appears all but over….Why it matters: Inflation looked to be coming down alongside a still-flourishing economy — until recently. The string of upbeat inflation data is all but certain to allow Fed officials to more comfortably shift their attention to the weakening labor market and lower interest rates….What they’re saying: “[T]he cumulative improvement in the overall inflation data over the past year now gives the Federal Reserve cover to move into risk management mode with the intent of protecting and preserving the soft landing,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at accounting firm RSM, wrote Wednesday….By the numbers: Overall CPI rose 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July, dropping below 3% for the first time since 2021.

• Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, rose 3.2% — the smallest increase in three years.
• By a different measure, inflation looks more benign. Over the last three months, core CPI rose 1.6% on an annualized basis, down from 2.1% in June….
• Grocery costs have been rising at a mild pace since February, including a 0.1% increase in July. Prices are up just 1% compared to the same time last year.
• Used vehicle costs fell 2.3% in July, a bigger drop than that seen the previous month. New vehicle prices fell 0.2%, the sixth-straight month of price decreases.

The intrigue: The bad news was in the housing sector, where prices have kept upward pressure on inflation….The shelter index is a huge component. It accounted for over 70% of core CPI’s 12-month increase through July, the government said….The sector is “solely responsible for core inflation remaining above the Fed’s 2% target,” Preston Caldwell, senior U.S. economist at Morningstar, wrote Wednesday….In the CPI report, the rent index rose 0.5%, up from 0.3%. Owner’s equivalent rent, which the government uses to account for inflation in homes that people own, rose 0.4% after slowing in June….”This is now a labor data-first Fed, not an inflation data-first Fed, and the incoming labor data will determine how aggressively the Fed pulls forward rate cuts,” economists at Evercore wrote in a note Wednesday morning.”….Yes,  many voters will continue to grumble about the high prices for meat, gas and housing. But Dems can at least be assured that they have done nearly all they can to contain inflation. They should now continue to inform the public about the good statistics under Biden-Harris and the price-gouging by agribiz and big oil through social media memes, articles and word of mouth. Those who hold fast to Trump’s doom and gloom preachments are not going to change – they are the die hard MAGA voters. Dems should focus their anti-inflation messaging on the persuadable voters in the swing counties and states. Meanwhile, pundits should give President Biden and the Democrats high marks for economic management and making the best of a tough situation.

Kyle Kondik shares his insights about the effect of 2024 third party/independent presidential candidates at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

A smaller number of “double-haters” naturally will have the effect of reducing the number of voters open to third party candidates. Back in 2016, the national exit poll indicated that third party voters generally had unfavorable views of both major party nominees. Trump and Clinton each won 98% of the voters who were favorable only toward them, with just 1% voting for the other candidate and another 1% voting third party and/or not answering the question. But 23% of the nearly one-fifth of voters who had negative views of each said they voted third party (or did not answer). So those kinds of voters provided the lion’s share of the total third party votes in 2016, which made up 6% of the electorate that year (Clinton and Trump won, combined, 94% of the total votes cast).

With a smaller number of double-haters likely this time, the total third party vote probably will be lower than 6% nationally. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most prominent third party candidate, has already seen his share of the vote dip into just the mid-single digits lately. In the final FiveThirtyEight polling average of the Biden vs. Trump matchup, Kennedy was getting about 9% of the vote. He’s now at about 5%.

Libertarian Gary Johnson—the former New Mexico governor and Republican presidential aspirant who was the 2016 cycle’s most prominent third party option—was polling at 8%-9% for much of the late summer. He ended up getting just 3.3% of the vote in November. With Kennedy now polling clearly worse than Johnson was at this point in the race, Kennedy may end up performing even worse than Johnson ultimately did (and ballot access remains a question for RFK Jr. and the other third party options—RFK Jr. was dealt a setback in New York on Monday, for instance).

Since Harris entered the race, it appears that she has pulled some Democrats back from the Kennedy column, and most polls now suggest Kennedy is hurting Trump more than Harris. This could actually represent a small but still hidden source of Trump growth—if one believes that RFK Jr. is still polling higher than what he’ll ultimately get in November, perhaps Trump will benefit from further Kennedy erosion just as Harris has benefited recently. The other noteworthy third party candidates—likely Green Party nominee Jill Stein, progressive academic Cornel West, and Libertarian nominee Chase Oliver—all appear likelier to see their level of national support measured in tenths of a percentage point as opposed to 1% or more come November.

It is likely that all of the these third party candidates know they aren’t going to be elected and that they are well-aware of their ‘spoiler’ potential. Some soul-searching about the point of their campaigns might serve them well.

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:

The Democrats have had a good two weeks, nosing ahead of Trump in the national polling averages and even in some key swing states. Nate Silver’s prediction model shows the race now as basically a toss-up, with Harris actually on the good end of a 53-47 probability-of-victory split. That’s a dramatic improvement from where the Democrats were in the fading days of Biden’s campaign.

But it’s still a campaign on a knife’s edge that could go either way. Recognizing this, the Harris campaign has sought to remedy Harris’s vulnerabilities on a host of issues where her status as a liberal California Democrat and her publicly-stated past positions put her far away from the median American voter. They know the more voters view her as a moderate and close to the center of American politics, the better her chances of winning the election.

So far, this move to the center has revolved around several strategies. None of them seem very likely to remedy the problem to which they are addressed. They include:

(1) The “I take it back” strategy. Harris has a long record of taking unpopular, even toxic, stances on various policies that played well, at various times, with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party but are not remotely centrist. These include, but are hardly limited to, banning fracking, banning offshore drilling, backing a Green New Deal, mandatory gun buybacks, defunding the police and casting doubt on whether police really improve public safety, abolishing ICE, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and abolishing private health insurance.

Do you, the median voter, see something there you don’t like? The Harris campaign says: no problem. Harris now takes it back! Whatever she said in the past that seems bonkers, she now enthusiastically disavows.

Of course, these position reversals raise many questions. Why did she have these positions in the first place? Why did she change those positions—what accounts for her conversion? And what is her position now on those contentious policy issues—besides not being for dumb position X? That leads to a second strategy in the moving-to-the-center campaign.

(2) The “No questions please—we’re Democrats!” strategy. The Harris campaign’s current approach to the logical and potentially embarrassing questions raised by these policy reversals has the beauty of simplicity: don’t answer them! In fact, avoid questions entirely by confining Harris’s activities to scripted rallies. After all, you can’t get in trouble for your answers if nobody gets to ask you questions.

The downside of course is it makes the disavowals less convincing, leaving voters wondering whether Harris’s views really have changed and, critically, whether and to what extent Harris’s positions are really centrist and close to their own.

The media has been remarkably tolerant of this strategy which has contributed to the almost 100 percent positive coverage of her campaign so far. While it doesn’t seem like that can last, the Harris campaign certainly hopes it will; they much prefer a “vibes” campaign with only vague policy commitments (the campaign website does not even have an issues section), super-broad themes like “freedom” and social media memes around policy-independent things like “brat,” “coconut tree,” and “weird.”

But perhaps not all the voters they need to reach will be susceptible to a vibes campaign, especially non-online, working-class voters in key states. That brings us to a third moving-to-the-center strategy, designed especially to reach recalcitrant working-class voters.

(3) The “Hey, we’re working class too!” strategy. This appears to be part of the thinking behind the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate, instead of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, of course, was not beloved of the progressive left and their campaign against him and for Walz apparently had an effect. But Shapiro also, in terms of background and personal affect, does not code as working class in a way Walz does. The Harris campaign hopes that his persona will help them reach the working class, particularly white working-class voters, whose support they so desperately need in key Midwestern/Rustbelt states.

There are some problems with this. Walz, while he was a relatively conservative Democrat when he was representing a rural district in the House of Representatives, as governor of Minnesota he has been pretty much a down-the-line progressive. Indeed, in his current incarnation he is more a coastal liberal Democrat’s idea of what white working-class guys from the Midwest should be like rather than what they really are like.

Nor does his electoral record suggest unusual blue collar appeal. Shapiro in 2022 won his governor’s race in Pennsylvania by 15 points in a state with a +3 Republican partisan lean. He outran Biden’s 2020 performance in the state by 14 points. In contrast, Walz won his governor’s race in 2022 by 8 points in a state with a +2 Democratic partisan lean. And he ran ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the state but just a single percentage point. Walz also lost white working-class voters in his state by 8 points, 6 points worse than Shapiro did in his race.

An interesting analysis by Steve Kornacki underscores this point. He explains:

Forty-nine of Minnesota’s 87 counties might be considered “Trump surge” counties; that is, Republicans ran at least 20 points better there under Trump in 2016 and 2020 than they had in the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee. Those counties are all part of Greater Minnesota, many are rural, and virtually all are overwhelmingly white. The share of white adults without four-year degrees in those counties 72 percent to 85 percent.

Demographically, those counties almost perfectly fit the mold of the swaths of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania where Democrats have lost the most ground in the Trump era. They were also, before Trump, politically competitive, and some even voted for Barack Obama in 2012. In other words, these are the first counties you’d look at to assess whether Walz has unique appeal where his party has experienced its most dramatic Trump-era slide.

As it turns out, Walz had no special appeal in these counties; his performance was similar to Biden’s but vastly inferior to how Obama did in 2012. Kornacki adds:

“What’s striking…is how different the Walz and Biden numbers are from Obama’s. When Obama won his two elections, he joined strong metro-area support with respectable showings (and sometimes better) among small-town and blue-collar voters. A primary feature of American politics since Obama has been the virtual disappearance of that kind of demographic and geographic balance from the Democratic coalition.

In his ’22 campaign, Walz didn’t restore that old balance. His coalition, instead, looked just like what has become the standard post-Obama coalition for Democrats. He rolled up massive margins in metro areas and took a beating practically everywhere else.

This is consistent of course with my analysis from last week, “The Harris Coalition Is *Not* the Second Coming of the Obama Coalition.” It’s also consistent with a fascinating new piece by the New York Times’s Jess Bidgood on Walz campaigning in Wisconsin, which suggests what the Harris-Walz campaign in the Midwest may really be about:

Eau Claire is a deep blue college town, and it’s far from clear that the appeal of the governor from the other side of the St. Croix will translate beyond liberal bastions like this one and expand his ticket’s competitive terrain. But as I wound my way through the crowd today, it occurred to me that the Eau Claires of the world might be the main point.

In recent years, Wisconsin Democrats have notched major victories by running up their numbers in strongholds like Madison, La Crosse and Milwaukee. That means Walz was here not simply to sound folksy, talk about hunting and reach out to rural voters. His purpose, electorally speaking, is to fire up Wisconsin progressives who wish their state was just a little more like his….

The Harris campaign is betting that leaning into Walz’s unabashed progressivism might work—and, given Wisconsin’s famous swinginess, that comes with some risk. But Dane County, the Democratic stronghold that contains Madison, is growing rapidly….

Tim McCarthy, 60, a teacher from the college town of Ripon, said he was thrilled both to see Walz and to be at a rally with “like-minded people.”

“There’s a lot of conservatism in northern Wisconsin that you’re not going to shake loose,” McCarthy said. “They’ll support Trump no matter what.”

But he thought that Walz would catch on in his town—and suggested that the campaign might not even need to bother with more conservative parts of the state.

Hmm. Very interesting, if questionable as a political strategy. In the end, an attempt to move to the center that does not involve actively embracing centrist, moderate positions—as appears to be the current Harris campaign strategy—may fall short of its political goals. Jonathan Chait makes the case well:

Rather than move to the center on policy, they [the left] 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….

But at the end of the day, issue positioning matters a lot. There is a reason Walz is less popular in a light-blue state than Josh Shapiro is in a purple state—indeed, when Walz shared a ballot in his own state with the moderate Amy Klobuchar [2018], her victory margin (24 points) was more than double his (11.4 points). It’s not because Walz is less likable than Shapiro or Klobuchar. It’s because he’s less moderate.

Walz had a fairly conservative voting record in Congress, where he represented a red district. He used that record to win the governorship, and then moved sharply left. The lesson he seems to have taken from this experience is that there is no cost in adopting progressive positions across the board. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said on a recent call. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

I can’t emphasize enough what a bad idea this is. On issues where progressive values are unpopular, and there are several, Democrats should definitely shy away from progressive values. For example, their stance on socialism, which is an extremely unpopular concept, should not be to liken it to neighborliness, but to say it’s bad and promise not to do it….

What the selection does…is forfeit her best opportunity to send a message that she is a moderate. She needs to take every possible opportunity between now and November to make up for that. Harris needs to adopt positions that will upset progressive activists. She needs to specifically understand that the likelihood a given action or statement will create complaints on the left is a reason to do something, rather than a reason not to.

That is an approach to moving to the center the Harris campaign has apparently ruled out. If that is the case, Donald Trump, with all his unattractive qualities and unforced political errors, is likely to remain competitive through November and, let’s face it, could easily win. As Chait puts it, somewhat wistfully, “I don’t want to bet the future of this country on a coin toss. I want to build a political coalition with a clear majority.” Unfortunately, it looks far more likely he’ll get the former than the latter.

In his syndicated column, “Harris is beating Trump by transcending him: The vice president and her running mate are achieving a radical shift in messaging,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes at The Washington Post: “The sudden and radical shift in the trajecto ry of the 2024 campaign owes to more than the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. To a degree that’s still not fully appreciated, Harris has embraced an entirely new strategy: She’s not just pushing back against Donald Trump’s politics of cultural division. She’s bidding to transcend it….Choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate reinforces the move away from clichés about “coastal politics” and “cultural elites.” Instead, she wants to fight on specific, practical measures government can take to improve lives, from family leave to expansions of health coverage. Both Harris and Walz are speaking a soothing and — to pick up on Democrats’ favorite virtue these days — joyful language of patriotism and national unity….You could tell the Trump campaign was thrown off by the Walz pick when the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, attacked the camo-wearing, gun-owning, small-town Midwestern schoolteacher as a “San Francisco-style liberal.”….Never mind that Vance lived in the Bay Area for about four years while Minnesota’s Walz visited the place for the first time only last month. The tired misfire speaks to how dependent the GOP is on stereotypes about who “liberals” are and what “liberalism” means.” Dionne concludes, “When Harris says, “We love our country,” pay attention to those words “we” and “our.” Harris and Walz are waging war on “inflammatory symbolic politics.” And, yes, it’s a joy to watch.”

Thom Hartmann reports that “A Tsunami of Right-Wing Dark Money Is Barreling Toward Harris and Walz” at The New Republic. No, Hartmann is not implying that the Democratic ticket is going to receive any of that ‘dark money; he is warning that they and down-ballot Democratic candidates are in danger of being crushed by it. As Hartmann writes, “Get ready: Massive pools of dark right-wing money are soon going to clobber us. Will Democracy survive this onslaught by the morbidly rich?….The official beginning of the election season is still almost a month away, and the big money pledged by right-wing and neofascist billionaires hasn’t even shown up yet….While over a hundred million pissed-off women and the widespread concern that Trump and the GOP are determined to destroy the American system of government seem like a powerful force, history tells us big dark money could overcome even those substantial tailwinds.” Hartmann notes that AIPAC political contributions have been used to primary and defeat incumbent Democratic House members, and adds, “But AIPAC is a piker compared to what’s going to be coming down the road as the tech, banking, insurance, and fossil fuel billionaires and their companies weigh in to the presidential race this fall….A previous campaign by the fossil fuel industry is instructive, particularly since that industry sees Harris and Walz as enemies; Harris signed off on the largest climate legislation in world history, and Walz has required the utilities in Minnesota to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2040, a mere 16 years from now.”

Noting another lavishly funded and successful effort to defeat a modest carbon tax in Washington state, Hartmann explains, “This is the brave new world Clarence Thomas’s tie-breaking vote brought America when the Supreme Court, in its 2010 Citizens United decision, legalized both political bribery and massive intervention in elections by corporations and billionaires….Prior to Thomas’s vote on that decision, Harlan Crow—who helped finance the original Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004—and other billionaires had lavished millions on Thomas and his family….Ever since Citizens United legalized literally unlimited contributions to the new category of political action committees it created (super PACs), just in the 15 months from January 2023 to April 2024, over $8.6 billion has been raised for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65 percent of that money—$5.6 billion—running through PACs. And, as noted, they’re just getting started….So get ready. It’s going to get ugly. There’s not a competitive House or Senate race anywhere in America that’s immune from massive dark money that’s been thrown together at the last minute to remain untraceable….As Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, echoing a position held by 72 percentof American voters, “Our democracy shouldn’t be bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful.”….If Democrats survive the onslaught that’s coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic.” The bottom line for all Democratic candidates is that they are going to need more contributions to survive the GOP’s well-funded ad tsunami.

Here is the new Harris-Walz campaign ad re immigration.  I think Dems need an ad with stronger emphasis on the fact that Trump and Republicans killed a solid immigration reform bill. What do you think?