Newer Questions Keep Popping Up Every Time There's A New Question

In this morning's news,

In the coming days, Kamala Harris and surrogates for her campaign are doing events in blue states that are supposedly safe for her.

Well and good -- but then I said, "Surrogetes? She has surrogates? Who are they?" The story quotes Breitbart, which says,

The campaign is sending Harris and her top surrogates — ticket mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and husband Doug Emhoff — to blue states after a weekend of planned swing state visits.

So her top surrogates are a couple of cheesy old white guys, especially Doug Emhoff, whom the press has called a sex symbol. So I asked myself off the top of my head who Trump's surrogates are, and I answered J D Vance, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Byron Donalds, Don Jr, Eric, Lara, the 13 Gold Star families in the Arlington controversy, Rep Elise Stefanik, Gov Kristi Noem -- the list keeps getting longer. Why does Kamala have so few surrogates?

But the main story at the links above has to do with Kamala traveling to New Hampshire, which since Joe's withdrawal has not been thought to be in play. Thus Newsweek as of just this morning:

Donald Trump's team's claim that New Hampshire will be "in play" at the 2024 election looks unlikely to come to fruition, with polls and experts suggesting Kamala Harris will win the Granite State in November.

It was recently reported that a former GOP official will no longer be involved with Trump's campaign after he determined that New Hampshire should not be considered competitive, urging fellow volunteers to focus their attention on the swing state of Pennsylvania instead.

Tom Mountain, a Massachusetts volunteer for the Trump campaign, said in an email obtained by The Boston Globe that Trump was "sure to lose by an even higher margin" in New Hampshire in November than he did in 2016 and 2020, citing "campaign data/research."

Trump lost New Hampshire to President Joe Biden by 7 points at the last election. At the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton managed to win the state over Trump by just 0.3 percent, or around 2,700 votes.

But Breitbart quotes Mark Halperin on X suggesting this may not be the case:

2. “New Hampshire may not be in the top tier of swing states in the 2024 election, but Granite Staters are still poised to get some attention this week from one of the presidential candidates.
News 9 has learned that Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to the greater… https://t.co/JLBPjZVlV2 pic.twitter.com/MKM9RSdSF2

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) September 2, 2024

Halperin raises the possibility of other explanations, but he acknowledges these are unlikely. Gateway Pundit concludes,

If Democrats are worried about Minnesota and Virginia, their internals must look absolutely awful.

But why would they look so bad, with the legacy media in gaslight overdrive for Kamala? Public polling in Minnesota doesn't look good:

KSTP/SurveyUSA poll: MN presidential race tightens after DNC, Walz pick After what many consider a successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz launched their campaign as running mates, our new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll shows Harris’ lead in Minnesota cut in half from a month ago.

According to our poll, Harris now leads Republican Donald Trump by five points, 48% to 43%, with four percent preferring another candidate and five percent undecided. Last month, Harris, in her first appearance in our poll as the Democratic presidential nominee, had a 10-point lead, 50% to 40%.

. . . Former Minnesota DFL Party Chair Mike Erlandson agrees, saying the 10-point lead for Harris last month might have been the result of excitement about a shake-up in the race with President Joe Biden dropping out.

Since Trump consistently outperforms public polling, a five-point lead isn't reassuring. The overall sentiment among commentators seems to be turning in the direction that with excitement subsiding over Joe's exit from the race and Kamala taking over, conditions are returning to roughly where they had been before Joe's exit, with Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia potentially back in play.

But this also comes back to the question of time and resource management. Where should Kamala, or Democrats generally, be spending their time and money with a little over 60 days until the election? Typical analyses of Kamala's strategy say her path to 270 Electoral College votes involves winning Pennsylvania and two other key states. In one scenario, the other two are Michigan and Wisconsin; in another, the others are North Carolina and Georgia.

In other words, her main effort should be going to five states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina. Why are her handlers sending her and her few surrogates to Minnesota, Virginia, and New Hampshire at all? One possibility is that we're back to Nancy Pelosi's expressed reason for pushing Joe out of the race, down ballot candidates. She anticipated Joe would lose, but she hoped a replacement, even if it lost the top of the ticket, might be able to bring off House and Senate majoritiea and thwart Trump.

This says that the lzard people, who are probably controllng how their large donations are spent, may be discounting the likelihood of a Kamala victory -- as are the bookies and now again, Nate Silver. But another intriguong questoni is where, if anywhere, Kamala herself thinks she should direct her main efforts. Based on the controversies of the past few days, especially over her fake black accent, he main goal is reasserting her blackness:

She seems mostly to be trying to address her deep insecurity over how the African-American community sees her -- but that has little to do with winning the November election. I'm not sure if hwer situational awareness or sense of proportion is any better than Joe's, and it could well be worse.