The State Of The Honeymoon

Just yesterday, of all things, Nate Silver announced that the race is a toss-up.

Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump. At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a “toss-up”, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory. As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock.

This, of course, is based on a model, and I would suggest that putting the percentages down to a decimal point is at best misleading. The problem is that, as this memo from a pollster to the Trump campaign points out, the fundamentals of the race haven't changed.

The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars. Before long, Harris' "honeymoon" will end and voters will refocus on her role as Biden's partner and co-piiot.

An additional problem is Kamala's weakness as a candidate, versus Trump's quickness at seizing opportunities. A good many commentators are misreading the Real Clear Politics numbers, for instance Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:

Although early polling still shows Trump ahead of Harris, she has managed to narrow the gap to a startling degree.

The RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head polls shows Trump 1.4 points ahead of Harris by a margin of 48.1 to 46.1 percent. Before Biden withdrew from the race, Trump led by 3 points.

The RCP national average fluctuates from day to day, depending on how the most recent poll has been plugged into the model. A pro-Trump poll will raise the average for a few days until the next pro-Harris poll comes out and knocks down Trump's standing by maybe 2 points. Comparing a day in mid July when Trump was up by 3 to a day in August when he was up by 1 is meaningless, this same thing has been going on since last year.

But dealing with Trump at his best, as I've been saying, is a question of subliminal messaging. Let's look at the latest controversy over Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists. For starters, Jesse Watters is correct in the simple observation that it ripped the news cycle right out of Kamala Harris's hands by creating a new controversy that put him back as the center of attention. But Joy Reid at MSNBC pointed out the subliminal message it conveyed:

To the president and board of NABJ: Y’all got played. Donald Trump showed up at the convention for exactly three reasons. . . to try to dispel the notion that he’s scared to debate a Black woman. Second, to steal the attention that Vice President Kamala Harris has hijacked from him because she’s just more interesting, and her support is more joyous and rooted in popular American culture. Three, to create clips to play for his very white, very right-wing mega fan base of him standing up to the Blacks.

The piece at Gateway Pundit goes on,

Joining Reid, April Ryan, White House correspondent for The Grio and an MSNBC contributor, said “It was a shock and awe moment. I’m still trying to deal with it.”

But Gateway leaves uut what was revealing about the Harris campaign: Kamala was invited to the event, but Trump himself pointed out that she didn't attend. Trump characterized this as bad faith on the part of NABJ, but had she attended, this would effectively have been at least a quasi-debate. We must assume that Kamala's handlers wanted to avoid any such opportunity. Scott Adams, who underatands subliminal messaging, outlined the actual message Trump sent:

How much did I enjoy that? 10/10.

Who changed the conversation about all of politics? Trump did.

Did you hear the word weird yet today?

He managed to changed the entire cycle to 'Why are you being such a bitch' basically.

Basically she was just a total bitch, and he just treated her like a bitch.

. . . it's the best thing I've ever seen in politics.

Now if you tell me that the men sitting in the audience hated that, did they?

I don't think they're going to tell you if they liked it.

Wasn't this precisely Joy Reid's point? This reminds me of the time Barbara Bush characterized Hillary as "a word that rhymes with witch", becasue we're getting into Hillary territory here, as Kamala's mentor and sugar daddy Willie Brown also pointed out, in the context of Trump's political acumen:

“He’s an entertainer, that’s all it is,” Brown argued.

And that can overcome everything else, all of Trump’s manifest liabilities?

“Oh yeah, if the public is fascinated with your antics, you survive,” he said, before lowering the boom. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t really tell the voters they’re idiots.”

Brown was far more candid about Harris at lunch, before the debate, when Biden’s renomination seemed inevitable and his vice president was more unpopular than he was.

Brown worried out loud that Harris had “the Hillary syndrome” — that “people don’t like her” — and fretted it was not fixable. Thinking through Harris’s future if Biden were to lose, Brown said: “You need a Black woman on every goddamn corporate board in America!”

But the comparison to Hillary goes deeper, to the changed nature of the Democrat coalition. According to Ruy Teixeira,

In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition. . . but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition. . . but with far fewer white working-class voters.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today.

. . . Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

. . . Right now, [the Harris campaign is] on a narrow, polarized path to November and their [they're?] reckoning with Donald Trump.

In oher words, much more even than with Obama, Harris is running a campaign aimed at bourgeois white women, the sort of target Groucho Marx could take on -- and one side of Trump is the entertainer truth-teller who has just a dash of Groucho Marx. This is what Scott Adams and Willie Brown both instinctively see.

"Short Race"?

Two pieces in two days at Real Clear Politics say Kamala has the benefit of a "short" presidential campaign. Yesterday, Sean Trende concluded:

In short, we can’t think of this campaign as a traditional campaign. It’s a sprint, and a shorter sprint than people acknowledge.

This morning, Karl Rove echoed:

This presidential election was one of America’s longest: . . . But with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, it suddenly became one of the shortest.

Regular visitors know that my estimate of both Karl Rove and Sean Trende isn't high, but here I think they've about pegged out on the obtuseness meter. The traditional start of the presidential campaign season is Labor Day, but even if we put the start farther back at the summer nominating conventions, which is when we learn for sure who the actual nominees will be, I don't see how this year's schedule differs much from any other.

In fact, it's very similar to 1972, the campaign nobody wants to mention. That year, Thomas Eagleton was replaced as George McGovern's vice presidential nominee on August 1, which forced a campaign reboot much like this year's replacement of Joe with Kamala -- but we're on almost precisely the same schedule now.

Karl Rove's op-ed at The Wall Street Journal is behind their paywall -- normally, aggregators aren't supposed to link to something behind a paywall -- but from the little we can read, I think his argument must be very close to Trende's. Trende says,

This campaign is a lot like the old kids’ game of “don’t let the balloon touch the ground.” . . . Kids bounce a balloon around, and they do so until the balloon touches the ground. In the long run, kids can’t really win the game, as gravity inevitably wins out. But if the goal is to pass time while parents pull together some last minute aspect of the party, the kids can theoretically win.

Well, I must have gone to a lot of well-run parties when I was a kid, because I never played this game and hadn't heard of it. But Trende's implication seems to be that this is something parents use to distract kids' attention from the fact that the magician didn't show up, or maybe the party store was out of piñatas. In other words, this is a suddenly improvised Plan B, which simply doens't bode well. Trende himself acknowledxges that gravity is likely to win.

As I've been saying since Joe withdrew, the basic Democrat problem is there's been no serious Plan B, not just for this year's campaign, but since Obama's second term, when he had no clear successor. Obama chose Biden as his running mate in 2008 because, as a white Catholic from a southern state, he balanced the ticket, but he was also, even as of 2008, too old to upstage Obama and not terribly bright as well. Obama clearly never thoujght Joe was any sort of credible successor.

Obama favored Hillary, the 2016 election turned out to be a fluke, but let's recognize that the Democrats had no Plan B to replace Hillary after she lost, and Joe turned out to be more of a Plan Z than a Plan C; he barely squeaked by in 2020, helped by COVID and a basement campaign, as well as the ability of his handlers and press enablers to conceal his actual condition.

I think where Trende's analogy fails is when he suggests that only the period from now to November is the bouncing ball. He seems to think Joe's withdrawal from the race is analogous to Aunt Lizzie forgetting to check if the party store had piñatas, and Mom and Dad suddenly had to improvise the afternoon of the party. It isn't like that. Joe's party store never had piñatas in stock at all, and everybody pretended this wasn't the case long before the party.

The main problem, even before we try to look at individual candidates, is that so many parts of the Democrat New Deal coalition have already left the party -- southern whites, Catholics, labor, and now many Jews -- that the remaining stalwarts -- radical feminists, minority agitators, LGBT++, parlor socialists, and Ivy Leaguers -- aren't enough to win a national election. Joe, a token southern white Catholic, was the last candidate who could credibly maintain the fantasy of the New Deal coalition.

In fact, Joe's handlers effectively acknowledged this problem by cooking up the "lawfare" campaign against Trump -- Joe coulsn't run a campaign based on the traditional New Deal imterest groups, because they'd begun to see the Republicans were doing a better job at representing those interests, so the handlers had to find distractions. In effect, Joe's handlers wanted to bypass the electoral process, which they succeeded in doing with the Democrat primary season, and which they wanted to do with the national campaign by putting Trump in prison.

In other words, the problem wasn't that the campaign season would be long or short, the problem was that there was still a campaign season at all. On one hand, Trump beat back the "lawfare" threat -- nobody says "convicted felon" any more, that's been overtaken by events -- and on the other, Joe, the last credible southern white Catholic Democrat, collapsed as a candidate.

His replacement is a faux generic minority woman cipher who right now is being pumped up by legacy media. On one hand, the traditional summer-fall presidential campaign season is plenty long enough to sort the candidates out -- Dukakis was ahead in the polls in the 1988 campaign; Kerry in 2004 -- and here was plenty of time for the electorate to review the issues. On the other, no amount of time can compensate for a clearly flawed candidate, like McGovern in 1972, Mondale in 1984, or Hillary in 2016.

It almost seems like both Trende and Rove are trying to forget that Joe put himself into what amounted to a premature fall campaign by early June, when it became clear that the "lawfare" strategy had backfired. He then underook European trips to look presidential, while hoping to knock Trump out in an early debate. The difficulty was his underlying weakness as a candidate, which included his failing health, and he withdrew, apparently in exhaustion, after only six weeks of serious campaigning.

Trende wants to use an obscure kids' party game as a metaphor for the current state of the post-Joe campaign. I think a better paradigm for how things are going is Murphy's Law, which applies to bouncing balloons as much as anything else:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

Or, put another way, for Kamala as a candidate, what could possibly go wrong, especially over the course of 100 days?

Well, This Whole Thing Is Hinky, After All

Jennifer Van Laar at Red State broke the initial story, at least on a national platform, that there may have been an as-yet-undisclosed medical event, not just a positive COVID test, that caused Joe's sudden premature departure from his Las Vegas campaign tour on July 17. But this is just one of the whole series of events between the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, PA, and Joe's July 21 announcement on Twitter from his Delaware basement that he was withdrawing from the November race. The juxtaposition seems at minimum incongruous.

The most extensive analysis of that chain is on Seyumour Hersh's Substack behind a quasi-paywall, which I've so far been unable to bypass, even though it's theoretically possible. However, Van Laar now provides a pretty good summary in this piece at Red State. In her interpretation of Hersh's story, there are many unanswered questions:

According to Hersh's latest reporting the Democrat inner circle plan was to keep Joe's impairment covered up, apparently until he was re-elected. . . . What was the end game, then? For Biden to be re-elected and for whomever is running the country currently to continue? Or for Biden to be re-elected and for Harris to take over when the decline was too big to deny? That doesn't really make sense, since they could have had Harris invoke the 25th Amendment and take over at any point - unless they didn't think Kamala could get elected on her own.

. . . Until thnat fateful debate.

But the additional question for me is that the debate was on June 27, and whatever may have been said behind the scenes, the official line from Obama on down was that it was just a "bad night", and in fact, as commentators have been saying ever since, it didn't affect Biden's standing in the polls. Although Pelosi in particular had begun to make noises about Joe deciding to "do the right thing", there was no public sense of urgency -- until after the assassination attempt, which had nothing to do with Joe. That bothers me. Van Laar continues,

Hersh went through the days leading up to Biden dropping out, beginning with Monday, July 15, when Biden flew to Nevada. On the 16th he spoke to the NAACP and was successful in quashing some of the "He must drop out!" talk. On the 17th he was scheduled to give a speech to a Latino group, but after a meet-and-greet at a Mexican restaurant that speech was canceled, Biden's motorcade sped toward the airport - and the President wasn't seen publicly for a week.

. . . The official story was that Biden had tested positive for COVID and had some symptoms, so was rushing back to Delaware to isolate. But everyone saw the writing on the wall, and the events in Las Vegas set off a cascade of events culminating just a few days later in Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. It didn't help that Biden was unreachable[.]

But Van Laar makes it clear that while there had been some pressure for Joe to drop out, things didn't become urgent until the weekend of July 13, in other words, after the assassination attempt:

Congressional leaders were involved in pressuring Biden for at least a week before Obama was "deeply" involved, and Politico reported that Pelosi had an arm-twisting meeting with the Bidens over the weekend of July 13 imploring him to drop out.

But Obama didn't start the final, decisive push until Joe was back in his Rehoboth basement. This confirms for me yet again that the June 27 debate, while problematic, wasn't a decisive factor for the lizard people -- they could continue to discount or excuse it as they'd been doing all along for earlier episodes like his wandering away toward the skydivers at the G7 meeting or freezing at the Hollywood fundraiser. Bad as all this was, it apparently didn't get urgent until the weekend of July 13.

As homicide detectives say, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Hersh's version, reported widely, is that Obama called Joe the following Sunday morning, July 21, and threatened to have Kamala invoke the 25th Amendment. Apparently Joe had been unreachable since July 17, and maybe this was the soonest Obama could get hold of him. But what was the efficient cause of the call? An unspecified medical episode in Las Vegas, something to do with the business in Butler, or some combination of those factors?

Now we get to the FBI. The official statement from the FBI's deputy director as of yesterday is,

Thus far, though absolutely nothing has been ruled out, the investigation has not identified a motive nor any co-conspirators or others with advance knowledge.

Nevertheless, in the same statemeent, the FBI deputy director said,

Something just very recently uncovered is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature.

While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did belong to the shooter, we believe it important to note, particularly given the general absence of information to date reflecting on the shooter’s potential motive.

Yeah, and while the FBI doesn't know for sure, maybe the security guard Richard Jewell planted the Atlanta Olympic bomb. Deputy Director Abbate's version was immediately contradicted by the platform on which Crooks is thbought to have posted:

BREAKING: The FBI is now claiming that the Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks had an unspecified "social media account" in 2019/2020 (when he was 14/15 years old) that posted "anti-immigrant and anti-semitic" content.

This is not consistent with Gab's understanding of the… pic.twitter.com/UPPJSAkPqp

— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) July 30, 2024

Elon Musk replied,

It sure looks like the FBI leadership engaged in perjury … https://t.co/tU1M7fs9lj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2024

As homicide detectives say, a lie is as good as a confession. If I had to come up with a working theory of the case, I would say that if the July 13 Butler attempt had been successful, it would have left the November race wide open. Trump hadn't selected Vance as his running mate yet, and Joe was still the presumptive Democrat nominee. It would have been possible -- maybe a stretch, but just possible, with Trump out of the picture -- to present Joe as the stable alternative to a Republican nomination process thrown into chaos, especially absent the medical emergency on July 17 that supposedly did change the picture for Joe.

The weekend before the Rpuublican convention was in fact both the perfect and the last opportumity for the insiders to pull this off -- but as far as I can see, that particular window is now shut, with Vance as Trump's backup and Joe out of the running, and now people are starting to ask questions. As I said on July 21, the unexpected set of circumstances of the prior week has left the lizard people without a Plan B.

I don't think we've heard the end of this, and it's at least strange that so many days after the event, we've been told so little.

Whew, That Was A Short Honeymoon!

Here's what's plain as day, but nobody mentions it. First, when people say "the polls", they mean the Real Clear Politics "averages", which is the word they use, but these numbers aren't the "arithmetic mean", they're something cooked up in their "model", which is the same sort of thing that told us there'd be mass graves in public parks in 2020 after the hospital ships ran out of beds or something. But second, the polls on which they base their models are a select group of approved pollsters that release predictable results on a monthly basis.

What happens every month is one pollster releases predictably favorable results for Trump -- let's say Rasmussen has him up by 6 over Joe or Kamala. RCP feeds it into their model, which spits out Trump up 3. Then a pro-Harris poll comes out, maybe Reuters/Ipsos, with Harris up 2. RCP runs its model, and it comes out with Trump now up only 1.2 -- or whatever. This goes on all month, every month, and the results have been exactly the same since last year: depending on what poll just came out, Trump has been up on RCP ("the polls") between maybe 0.7 and 3 depending on what day, month after month.

There are people who are paid -- I'm not sure why -- to look at these meaningless numbers and think they're finding a "trend", when the differences come only from the day of the month you're looking at. This piece in the Never Trump National Review is at least aware of the odd consistency of "the polls" month to month:

Substituting Harris for Biden has helped Democrats claw back to the position they occupied before the first presidential debate — both at the national and swing-state levels. But Democrats were losing the race for the White House even before the debate.

This is another way of saying that if you looked at "the polls" after the June 27 debate, early in July, the latest Rasmussen would have kicked the RCP model up to Trump ahead 3. But a week or two later, WSJ and Reuters/Ipsos would have brought the model back down to 1.7, which was what had been happening all year anyhow, debate or no debate, Harris or no Harris. This is the same "trend" commentators were finding after Joe's State of the Union, which had Joe gaining ground against Trump the same way -- until he wasn't, and Obama and Pelosi finally told him to get lost, even though "the polls" hadn't changed at all.

That, of course, was the point Joe kept trying to make, it was a margin-of-error race and a tossup, but it did him no good. But doesn't that suggest that the Democrat insiders weren't taking "the polls" seriously? No matter how you sliced "the polls", as far as the lizard people were concerned, Joe was going to lose. But the legacy media, and even some on the right, were ginning up a "honeymoon" narrative.

The polls ["the polls"!] are in after a chaotic few weeks in the 2024 presidential election, and they point to a newly hyper-competitive race.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ elevation has jolted the race and blunted the momentum former President Donald Trump could have seen coming out of the Republican convention and the assassination attempt that preceded it. Though polling showed Trump building a lead over President Joe Biden following their debate last month, that advantage has mostly evaporated against Harris in the fresh round of surveys conducted since she became the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.

Translated: the predictable monthly fluctuation in the RCP model has fluctuated yet again, and the fluctuation continues in precisely the range it's had since the start of the year. Depending on where you are in the month, Trump "has a lead", or his previous "advantage" has "mostly evaporated". At least, that's for public consumption. The lizard people, though, aren't buying it:

Democrats are privately expressing concerns over Harris’s candidacy. One source familiar with the internal discussions told the Hill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was “lukewarm” about Harris becoming the nominee, a view that appears to be widespread among the party elites.

“She wasn’t a great candidate,” a Democrat senator told the Hill about Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Harris ended her campaign before the Iowa caucuses. “And she may not be as a political campaigner as good as Biden was in his prime,” the senator said.

Another story makes an important point:

After numerous gaffes as vice president, Harris shied away from the press and has not sat for a single one-on-one interview with the media since becoming the de facto nominee.

Any interview, and especially any debate against Trump, is likely to be as disastrous for Kamala as Joe's June 27 debate --but at the same time, it isn't going to be reflected in "the polls", just as Joe's June 27 debate wasn't, and just as the assassination attempt in Butler wasn't. But if "the polls" weren't affected by such momentous events, why did the lizard people force Joe out? Were they disingenuous?

Democrats at the highest levels are making a critical push for President Joe Biden to rethink his election bid, with former President Barack Obama expressing concerns to allies and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi privately telling Biden the party could lose the ability to seize control of the House if he doesn’t step away from the 2024 race.

My view continues to be that whatever finally influenced the lizard people, it wasn't "the polls". They let Joe dither for fully two weeks after the June 27 debate, but something between the assassination attempt on July 13 and his abrupt retreat to Rehoboth June 17 changed things irrevocably, and apparently after a final nudge from Obama, he withdrew on July 21.

Did the lizard people seriously expect something to change if they swapped out Joe? I would have to guess that they didn't if the replacement was Kamala, which might be reflected in the Seymour Hersh report that Obama's first choice was Mark Kelly -- but even there, Kelly wasn't, and isn't, a national figure; at 60, he's the same age as Kamala but looks older; and he isn 't a cheerful or optimistic figure. If he was the best alternative, well, fine, but they couldn't choose him no matter what, because Kamala.

The coup had to be some sort of desperate last resort when everything else failed, but whatever it was, it wasn't, and isn't, "the polls". Nor is swapping Joe out for Kamala, however desperate a move it may have been, going to change a thing. Why they did it is still a puzzle.

The Power Of The Image

Remember Fani Willis? Seems like years ago, but just last January, the Georgia racketeering case, according to CNN,was "key",

because as a state case, it’s not something that could be dismissed through a presidential pardon, which applies only to federal matters. Trump’s lawyers have long considered this case the most significant legal threat given the jury pool and the fact that it is beyond pardon powers.

Within weeks of that assessment, that "most significant legal threat" had disintegrated amid jokes about Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs. This is just one example of Trump's extrordinary combination of luck and deftness that's driven his campaign, especially his ability to exploit subliminal cues. This is a factor with the insertion of Kamala Harris into the race that's so far completely eluded commentators.

Let's take the latest Democrat talking point that emerged over the weekend, which seems to have come simultaneously from so many different people that it must be coordinated, Trump and JD Vance are "weird":

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz continued making his increasingly popular argument that Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are “very weird.” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker echoed Walz . . . .

“Listen to the guy. He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said of Trump on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me, that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye — if he has laughed, it's at someone, not with someone — that is weird behavior, and I don't think you call it anything else.”

Walz, a progressive former congressman serving in his second term as governor in Minnesota, made waves last week when he said of Republicans in another TV appearance “these guys are just weird” and that Trump and Vance seem like they are running for “He-Man Women Haters Club” of “The Little Rascals” fame.

On MSNBC, Jen Psaki called Vance Trump's "weirdo running mate". But what on earth makes Vance a weirdo? He's a successful straight white guy with a stable marriage and kids? That kinda turns the whole definition of weirdo upside down. But let's look at what's weird, for instance, Second Dude Doug Emhoff's purported family arrangement:

The ex-wife of second gentleman Doug Emhoff on Wednesday defended Vice President Kamala Harris against sexist criticisms about her lack of biological children, calling them “baseless” and expressing her gratitude for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

Are there boundaries here, or not? What kind of "family" is this? And that takes us back to that weird smooch at last year's State of the Union:

What's up with all this extended family stuff, anyhow? Talk about weird:

Trump doesn't even need to say a word, but likely he will:

The War Of The Assassination Narratives

Isn't it odd how the composition of the photo above very faintly echoes Michelangelo's Pieta, just as the more famous one of Trump pumping his fist beneath the flag echoes the photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima? Says something important, I think -- and neither of those photos was remotely posed, they were lucky catches by the photographers. This is part of the underlying authenticity of the whole event.

As I noted yesterday, it seems as though the most momentous events of the campaign so far don't seem to move the polls. There are several possible explanations. One is that the impact of certain events isn't easily quantifiable, or at least not over a short time. Another is the Rush Limbaugh theory, that the polls are carefully curated and massaged to shape the news, not to report it. Another is that some of the most momentous events don't even reach the news, and as one example, here is a report from Seymour Hersh via The Gateway Pundit:

As The Gateway Pundit’s Kristinn Taylor reported, Biden suffered an “undisclosed medical emergency” while in Las Vegas on July 17 that was never disclosed to the public.

Now, according to a report from a respected longtime investigative journalist, an equally explosive incident followed just a few days later.

On Saturday, Seymour Hersh wrote on his substack that sources told him that Barack Obama had called Biden three days after the disturbing incident. Obama reportedly told Biden on July 20 that he had Kamala Harris’s approval to use the 25th Amendment to kick him out of office.

Now, I'm not going to try to vouch for either The Gateway Pundit or Seymour Hersh; Gateway is often wrong, and Hersh has always been overrated. But the story exists because of all the unexplained gaps in the post-June 27 timeline. The calls for Joe to "pass the torch" intensified after the debate, but he stubbornly resisted for two weeks until the strange few days between the July 13 assassination attempt and whatever it was that sent him suddenly back to Rehoboth the following Wednesday.

Was it an "undisclosed medical emergency"? It's hard to believe it was just COVID. It's also hard to ignore the juxtaposition of whatever it was so soon after the Butler assassination attempt. Joe had clearly been under a great deal of stress at least from his trips to Europe in early June; the mere fact of the assassination attempt and the almost immediate surge of enthusiasm for Trump, whether reflected in the polls or not, may well have triggered some type of health event for Joe.

Whatever happened, it's hard not to take the assassination attempt as the efficient cause that led to whatever it was, medically or in the schemes of Pelosi and Obama, that broke Joe's stubborn insistence on becoming the 2024 nominee. It's also hard to explain otherwise the strange war that broke out last week over the assassination narrative: was Trump hit by a bullet, or maybe just a piece of flying glass from a shattered teleprompter? The clear subtext was the need to minimize what happened in Butler, because clearly it was very, very important -- the subliminal effect of the photos in the immediate wake of the event is too powerful.

The first major battle in the war, following the initial skirmishes of media speculation that it wasn't a bullet, or it wasn't a wound at all, the bandage was fake, was the testimony of Secret Service Director Cheatle in front of the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday. Cheatle effectively refused to answer any questions, deferring to some sort of final report that would be completed 60 days hence.

There have been bipartisan calls in Congress for Cheatle’s resignation and a push by Republican lawmakers to impeach her. Lawmakers were particularly incensed after her appearance in front of the House Oversight Committee on Monday, where she was unwilling to answer many of the committee’s questions.

During her House Oversight appearance, Cheatle acknowledged that there were “significant” and “colossal” problems with the security at the rally, but still rebuffed demands for her resignation.

“I think I am the best person to lead the Secret Service at this time,” Cheatle said Monday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that the resignation is “overdue.”

The following day, despite her insistence that she wouldn't resign, and despite words of support from both Joe and Secretary Mayorkas, resign she did. Like the question of who phoned Joe and told him it was over, we know nothing of who phoned the Director and said what, and we may never learn anything more, except that someone must have decided that Kim Cheatle was not a hill to die on.

Something similar happened to FBI Director Wray later in the week:

Friday, during an appearance on Fox News Channel, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), also a former White House physician, blasted FBI Director Christopher Wray, who appeared on Capitol Hill a day earlier and called into question whether a bullet actually hit former President Donald Trump during an assassination attempt earlier this month.

Jackson called Wray’s effort “politically motivated” and suggested that Wray and other elements of the so-called D.C. establishment felt threatened by what was happening in American politics at the time.

. . . "I think that the establishment in general, in D.C., the D.C. establishment, and I will include the FBI director in that category, I think that they are completely threatened by what’s going on right now. You know, President Trump is an American icon and he is so to a lot of people that didn’t consider him that before this happened.”

On this, I think Dr Jackson is completely correct, and somehow, the FBI as an organization mysteriousy but officially backtracked on its Director's assertion the following day:

FBI statement:

“What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) July 26, 2024

It's plain that the organs of state security felt threatened by the subliminal effect of the Trump assassination attempt and did whatever they could, with the assistance of legacy media, to deflect the narrative. And they lost that particular war. But the whole war was fought over an issue that, as the link in yesterday's post indicated, caused barely a blip in the polls. But Trump himself is fully aware of how the narrative shapes his message:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Saturday said he will continue to hold outdoor rallies just two weeks after a bullet grazed his ear during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.

In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, the former president said:

"I WILL CONTINUE TO DO OUTDOOR RALLIES, AND SECRET SERVICE HAS AGREED TO SUBSTANTIALLY STEP UP THEIR OPERATION. THEY ARE VERY CAPABLE OF DOING SO. NO ONE CAN EVER BE ALLOWED TO STOP OR IMPEDE FREE SPEECH OR GATHERING!!!"

Beyond that,

In a post on the social media platform Truth Social, Trump said on Friday that he is coming back to Butler County for a rally to honor Corey Comperatore, who was shot and killed during his July 13 rally in Butler Township on the Butler Farm Show grounds, and the two men who were injured. Trump did not say the date or location of the rally, only stating, "Stay tuned for details."

A gutsy guy. He underatands the enormous power of the authentic non-verbal image. The polls are missing this. Of course, that's what the polls are set up to do. Hey, they're scientific!

Why Is So Much Happening, When The Polls Are So Stable?

An uncharacteristically insightful piece at Hot Air this morning leads in passing to an intriguing question:

First, Biden didn't really crater all that much from the debate. On June 27, the day of the debate, Biden's RCP average was 45.1, and it bottomed out on July 3 at 43.6. By the time Biden withdrew, though, he'd recovered most of that lost ground to have an RCP average of 44.8. Trump went from 46.6 on June 27 to 47.9 on July 21, but much of that gain came after the assassination attempt and then the GOP convention.

Second: Harris only negligibly improves on Biden, even in the honeymoon week. On June 27, before the debate, Biden was 1.3 points behind Trump in the RCP average. Trump had a 3.1-point lead on Sunday, when Biden withdrew. Now, at the end of what should be the friendliest news cycle Harris will ever get, Trump still leads by 1.7 points -- slightly better than his lead when the debate aired.

The writer thinks this is about Kamala, but I think the bigger question is the stability of the polls, not just since the debate, but since last fall. The fact is that statistical chatter has put Trump ahead in the meaningless Real Clear Politics national "average" between 1 and 3 points for the better part of a year. The June 27 debate didn't change the polls, and Joe dropping out of the race in favor of Kamala didn't change them, either.

Nevertheless, the story, at least for now, seems to be that the Lizard People decided that the June 27 debate was the factor that said it was time for Joe to go -- when, as I pointed out yestesrday, it was time for Joe to go at least a year ago, and the Lizard People missed it. Nevetheless, if the debate was what drove their decision over the past month, why did they discount the polls?

After all, right up to last Saturday night in Rehoboth when Joe is said to have met with his handlers who finally told told him it was over, Joe was insisting that the polls were stable in a margin-of-error race, and he was in fact correct. One answer might be that the RCP national "average" is in fact meaningless, but Trump was ahead in enough of the battleground states to put the race out of reach -- but even there, even if Joe consistently trailed Trump in each of them, it was often by margin-of-error amounts.

And in fact, respectable opinion had been stable since late last year that the race was a tossup. What put the Lizard People into such a panic after the debate? I think there are several explanations. One is almost certainly that the Lizard People don't take the polls seriously, especially the RCP "average". The polls underestimated Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections by around 3 points, so a 1-point margin for Trump in the polls is actually 4 points on election day.

The second issue isn't the movement in the national "average", but the increase in the actual number of battleground states. This is a trend that had begun before the debate. The week before, RCP expanded its list of of battlegrounds to include Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire, and by the end of last week, Trump was leading in Virginia and behind by roughly 3 points in the other two, which allowing for poll bias against Trump was worrisome.

But now we have a puzzle: even though the polls have been stable since Kamala replaced Joe, and we night expect them to continue his way in the new battlegrounds as well, RCP has removed the new battlegrounds from its list and reverted to the old standbys of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. I noted on June 16,

It seems to me that the "close election" paradigm hinging on the "battleground" states of 2016 and 2020 is beginning to fail. As of right now, it seems likely that Joe can at best carry only two or three of those "battlegrounds", which makes his chances of a narrow Electoral College victory slimmer and slimmer. But with polling data coming in that Minnesota and Virginia are already in play, this puts a potential wider Trump Electoral College victory within the realm of possibility, which renders the whole "battleground" model inoperative.

But this was never reflected in the RCP "average", which was still unchanged even when the Lizard People realized it was time to dump Joe. So there must be another factor, which I think is the fallacy behind the Hot Air piece at the top link. A bigger factor driving the Lizard People's decision, I think, was the failed assassination attempt in Butler on July 13. Back in June, before Butler, I mused on the subliminatl effect of two other unsuccessful assassinations:

Many years ago, I read someone suggesting that Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election simply because he was the subject of failed assassination attempts by two women ( Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme in Sacramento September 5, 1975; and Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco on September 22, 1975).

Of all the other possible reasons for Ford's loss -- especially his pardon of Nixon -- this one immediately struck me as most persuasive. On one hand, that the attempts would be unsuccessful goes to the stereotype of the incompetent woman. On the other, that bumbling women would target Ford canceled his standing as an alpha male.

So the attempts against Ford somehow reinforced a subliminal context that Ford himself was bumbling and feckless. The attempt against Trump, on the other hand, was deadly, well-planned, and certain, enabled by the weaponized incompetence of a deep state agency. That this wasn't just a bumbling attempt like those against Ford was demonstrated by the death and wounding of bystanders. A credible explanation for Trump's near-brush with a Lee Harvey Oswald-style assassination was the intervention of the Almighty, not the incompetence of the assassin.

The powerful subliminal effect of this image was something Trump immediately and instinctively grasped after the shooting when he stood, pumped his fist, and uttered exclamations that might have been "Fight!" or maybe another F-word. This, I think, was the image the Lizard People grasped when, a week later, they finally impressed on Joe that it was time to go. It had nothing to do with the polls, or even the debate. It had everything to do with Trump's astonishing political instincts, which he'd been demonstrating repeatedly since last fall.

I'll have more to say about the subliminal aspect of the campaign.