In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've pointed out recently that, up to Kamala's replacing Joe on the ticket, the polls had been unchanged since last fall, with Trump's lead in the Real Clear Politics aggregate national vote fluctuating from about 0.5 point to 3 points, depending on the most recent poll they ran through their model. Trump's felony conviction in New York, for example, changed nothing. Joe's very public brain freezes in June changed nothing. His loss in the June 27 debate, the clearest and most indisputable loss in any presidential debate, ever, changed nothing. The assassination attempt on Trump on July 13 changed nothing. All of a sudden, the emergence of Kamala as the new Democrat turned everything upside down, or at least this is the story. I've been deeply suspicious of the unchanging polls all year, especially when the consensus simply acknowledges that the poll aggregtes underestimated Trump's vote totals in both 2016 and 2020, but for some reason, nobody seems to w...

Over the past winter and spring, I linked pretty frequently to Nate Silver's Substacks, especially the February essay where he listed a series of tasks Joe Biden needed to undertake to turn his electoral prospects around. Back then, he was especially worried that Joe wasn't doing interviews: This is bad, folks. Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre. That’s why something like turning down a Super Bowl interview ought to be highly concerning. His prescription: Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journa...

If evidence is needed that the stolen valor attacks on Tim Walz are effective, Hillary Clinton, of all people, came out to defend him on X yesterday: Tim Walz served honorably for two decades. Then he joined Congress and worked to pass a new GI bill that helped fund the college educations of millions of veterans—among them, JD Vance. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 12, 2024 This echoes the defense Nancy Pelosi made over the weekend in the story at The Hill that I linked yesterday : “So first of all, he was in the National Guard 20 years, he thought he’d stay 20 years. But then 9/11 happened, so he signed up for four more years. He retired from that to run for Congress months before his unit was assigned to being deployed,” she added. “So it was after he left, so they’re just trying to confuse things.” . . . “[Walz] came to Congress and was respected by our colleagues, elected to be the top Democrat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, where he, and ...

Let's see if I can tease out yesterday's developments. JD Vance was on all the alphabet-network Sunday shows, mostly keeping up the "stolen valor" attacks on Walz, although his remarkable performance on a wide range of issues revealed Trump's wisdom in naming Vance his running mate. This is no Mike Pence. But one of his consistent points was that neither Walz himself nor Kamala was on any such show defending him. In fact, the only Democrat defending Walz yesterday was Nancy Pelosi . Let's look at this. In an interview that aired Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” Pelosi said, “First of all, it’s a sign of the bankruptcy of their ideas. They don’t have anything to say, so they make up things.” . . . Pelosi argued the Harris-Walz campaign should “just dismiss” the allegations. “Yeah, they should just dismiss it, because if people lie, as they are lying, and you hear the lie enough times, it sort of becomes … kind of accepted in...

SAVAGE: Trump plays a compilation ROASTING Kamala Harris’ word salads for 3 Minutes Straight 🤣 pic.twitter.com/qRBWtPGhcj — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 10, 2024 At his Thursday press conference, Trump characterized Kamala as “dumb", “incompetent". and “low IQ." In his Friday Montana rally, he introduced the montage linked above that reprises well-known clips from interviews or statements she's given over the past several years. They suggest she's dumb, incomptent, and low-IQ. This isn't new. Politico noted a week ago , Donald Trump broadsided Kamala Harris in a string of derisive social media posts on Saturday, focusing his attacks on the vice president’s intellect after a week that saw her both out-fundraise him and surpass him in some battleground state polls. In a succession of Truth Social posts after calling off his planned ABC debate with Harris, Trump called Harris “low IQ,” “dumb,” and said she lacked the “mental ca...

I'm still thinking about the effect of subliminal images on the presidential campaign, most recently last week's story of Kamala's husband , the cheesy predator Doug Emhoff and the affair with his kids' nanny that ended his first marriage. According to the UK Daily Mail , the news sparked "panic in Harris's camp". Ever since Kamala announced that Tim Walz was her running mate on Tuesday, that story was eclipsed. But in the runup to the announcememnt, the consensus was , [I]t's unclear exactly how much a running mate helps the candidate at the top of the ticket -- and the downside of picking someone not ready for the bright lights of a national campaign are severe, possibly making the lack of negatives superior to any possible positives a contender brings. "At the end of the day, the most practical thing is, do no harm," said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., a Harris ally. "Who's the governor of which state? Who's ...

The Trump-Biden polling was uniform for at least eight months since last fall -- the Real Clear Politics aggregates were predictable, the pro-Trump and pro-Biden polls balanced out, with Trump generally running from 0.5 to 3 points ahead. And no event affected this -- there were no bounces or craters resuiting from the New York civil judgments, the State of the Union, the collapse of the Fulton County case, Trump's conviction in the New York hush money case, Hunter's conviction in Delaware, Biden's visible decline from the D-Day commmoration onward, or even the June 27 debate. Yet even though the polls never really moved during all these events -- and Biden himself pointed this out repeatedly -- the people who really made the decisions, viz, the people who tell Obama and Pelosi what to do, decided by early July that it was time for Joe to go, he couldn't win in November. What does this say about the polls? UPDATE: Biden's former top adviser Anita Dunn agrees. ...