Hints Of Kamala's Debate Strategy

As I've already noted here, I was puzzled that the Harris campaign had chosen to die on the hill of unmuted mics in trying to renegotiate the rules for the September debate, since Trump's record in debates is that he wins them whether or not mics are open (the second Hillary debate in 2016) or muted (the June 27 debate this year). Most commentators thought Kamala's handlers were pinning their hopes on the slim chance that Trump would embarrass himself trying to interrupt Kamala, giving her the opening to scold him with "I'm speaking!"

Big whoop, huh? It turns out, at least based on this story in Politico, that they actually had something else in mind:

Kamala Harris had planned to object, fact-check and directly question Donald Trump while he was speaking during their debate next week. But now, with rules just finalized to mute the candidates when their opponents speaks, campaign officials said Harris advisers are scrambling to rewrite their playbook.

Harris and her team — holed up in Pittsburgh for a multi-day debate camp — wanted unmuted microphones so that the vice president could lean on her prosecutorial background, confronting the former president in the same way she laced into some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet members during Senate hearings.

Instead, four Harris campaign officials argued that she will be “handcuffed” by the rules, which were negotiated by President Joe Biden’s team earlier this summer.

What this suggests to me is that she wasn't so much intending to defeat Trump with ordinary argument -- after all, even US senators must speak when recognized by the chair and adhere to time limits -- but intended instead to use a prosecutorial strategy we occasionally saw in Trump's New York cases, whereby the prosecutor would continually interrupt the defense with rapid-fire objections -- "Objection, asked and answered!"

"Sustained!"

"Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence!"

"Sustained!"

"Objection! Argumentative!"

"Sustained!"

"Objection! Hearsay!"

"Sustained!"

And so forth. The intent is to keep the opponent from even finishing a sentence. If, as in New York, the prosecutor and the judge are in cahoots, this might work, especially if the jury is on the prosecution's side as well, and as long as the political machine doesn't give a flip about appearances, also as in New York. The problem for Kamala is that she simply isn't in court, she's working under a different set of rules where she can't just stop an argument with a legal objection.

Thus she needed a different set of rules that would allow her to keep breaking into Trump's presentation with shrieks. This would put her at an advantage, since on her own, she tends toward incoherent generalities. Another theory of the open mic strategy in the story is remarkably unobservant about Trump:

David Axelrod, who advised Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, was one of several Democratic operatives who noted that Harris’ complaints about the muted microphones also could serve to “get into Trump’s head.”

“What the [Harris] team is saying is that Trump’s campaign does not trust him to control himself,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think Trump likes to be depicted as someone being handled, so I do think there’s an element of trying to psych-out their side, too.”

But as we saw in the June 27 debate, Trump isn't just a politician, he's a successful entertainer who has a standup comic's sense of timing. He's fully capable of waiting for just the right moment to plant his responses, and attempts to bait him into destructicve outbursts never quite come off. A strategy aimed at trying to do this is a waste of time. Besides that, he's already been in so many debates and hostile interviews that it's difficult to imagine an attack that would throw him off balance and cause a spontaneous destructive outburst.

There's another subtle effect of the existing rules:

Trump says Kamala will not get a box to stand on 🤣 pic.twitter.com/UbK9rE94a9

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 7, 2024

As I posted a week ago,

Joe Biden is 6'0"; Trump is 6'3". As long as they aren't precisely side by side in a shot, this isn't noticeable. But if Kamala is 5'4" -- almost a full foot shorter than Trump -- and is standing behind a lectern identical to Trump's, this is going to be a problem. Even if she wears heels and stands on a box, it's going to be awkward. I'm sure this is why the Harris campaign is said to have tried to get ABC to change the rules to allow a seated debate -- but ABC didn't budge.

This may be a reason beyond the mutred mics that Trump insisted that the rules of the June 27 debate not be changed, although it looks like ABC will allow an audience -- but when the June 27 debate didn't have an audience, this was thought to favor Biden. But now, even if there's no long shot on both candidates that shows Kamala, even with heels, much shorter than Trump, she'll still be looking up at Trump when she addresses him, and he'll be looking down at her. The Kamala-in-the-kiddie-seat effect is still going to be a problem.

So why did ABC decide to continue with rules that clearly disadvantage Harris? Good question. I don't rule out that the lizard people know she's a loser.

Nobody Believes The Real Clear Politics Average

Here's the conundrum leading up to the debate, from David Strom at Hot Air:

Kamala could appear on stage drunk out of her mind, vomit on the moderators, and do a striptease revealing she is a lizard person, and her poll numbers would only drop by 3 points.

Everybody anticipates this, because it's what happened after Joe Biden's disastrous June 27 -- his performance was so outlandishly bad that Nancy Pelosi had him off the Democrat ticket within a month -- but the polls didn't shift a bit in the wake of the debate. In fact, this was the basis of Joe's own argument for why he should stay, the polls hadn't changed, the race was still within the margin of error. Nancy Pelosi didn't believe it, and the rest is history.

I think it's also understood that by "the polls", people mean the Real Clear Politics average, but nobody will quite come out and say this. And as of this morning, it has Harris leading the notional popular vote by 1.8, the top battlegrounds by 0.2, and the Electoral College 273 to 265. And nobody believes it, not even RCP. Yesterday it ran a piece by Byron York, a doyen of conventional wisdom, Key state polls: Another mess in the making?

The purpose of a polling average is to avoid some of the errors of individual polls by grouping a bunch of them together. So instead of looking at one or two particularly accurate or terrible polls, look at how the group performed. But some averages are better than others, and all can be wrong if the underlying polls they include are wrong.

. . . In [2020], according to the Brookings calculation, the combined RealClearPolitics average missed a state’s final result by an average of 1.1 points, while the combined FiveThirtyEight average missed the final result by 2.1 points.

. . . Now look at those numbers and apply them to today’s Harris-Trump race in the seven states. Almost all of the poll averages are closer than the average error even in the more accurate RealClearPolitics average and certainly in the less accurate FiveThirtyEight average. There’s just no safe way to say who is leading right now, much less who will win in November.

CNN's data analyst concluded the same thing last night, again without directly mentioning RCP:

CNN’s enthusiastic Senior Data Reporter Harry Enten said Friday that the presidential contest is historically tight and that the slightest shift in momentum could alter the outcome. Moreover, he added, if Donald Trump outperforms current polling by a mere point—which is certainly possible, if not likely, given recent presidential elections—he’ll be strolling into the Oval Office in January 2025.

Yesterday, Nate Silver posted an analysis whose subtext is that "the polls" aren't reflecting the real state of the race:

[T]he Electoral College is starting to look like a challenge for Kamala Harris. This was a problem for Democrats in 2016, of course, and also in 2020 — when Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points, but the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, went for Biden by only 0.6 points.

But wait -- doesn't RCP say this morning that Harris has the Electoral Col;ege by 273-265? Apparently Nate Silver doesn't believe this. He goes on farther down,

The problem for Harris is that Donald Trump has been gaining on her in our polling averages, too — at least in the most important Electoral College states. If, say, Harris had gained 1 point, when the convention bounce adjustment was expecting her to gain 2 points, that would look like more of a rounding error in the model. Instead, though, she’s actually losing ground since the start of the convention in swing state polls.

. . . Harris is ahead by 3.0 points nationally, a tick better than the 2.3-point lead she had coming into the convention. Although I’d note that this is down a bit, too. Her lead peaked at 4.3 points on August 23 in our last model run before Robert F. Kennedy dropped out and we removed him from our model. Still, her national polls are fine; it’s the state polls that are the big issue.

In fact, relative to the start of the DNC, Harris has lost ground in 6 of these 7 states.

. . . This remains an extremely winnable election for Harris, especially with the debate looming next week. But there’s now a 20 percent chance that she wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College.

Silver's latest projection, according to Newsweek:

gives Trump a 60.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, compared to Vice President Kamala Harris' 39.7 percent, with the former president taking 277 electoral votes to the vice president's 260.

The latest prediction gives Trump his highest chance of winning since July 30.

The model also shows that the Republicans have made a net gain of between 0.1 and 2 points in every swing state other than Georgia and Wisconsin in the past week. Meanwhile, Trump leads in every battleground state other than Michigan and Wisconsin, where the candidates are tied.

I've been highly skeptical of Real Clear Politics, both its poll aggregates and individual commentators like Sean Trende, all along. It's especially puzzling that "the polls" have consistently shown so little movement this year in the face of so many unprecedented developments.

Again, Where Are The Harris Surrogates?

Joe Biden, back from vacation, was out and about yesterday, but it had nothing to do with Kamala, whom he at least nominally supports. Via the New York Post:

President Joe Biden visited a small town in western Wisconsin Thursday to talk up his infrastructure and energy spending in the swing state at a local electrical supply company.

The visit to the Dairy State, his first since stepping out of the presidential race, was on official presidential business and unconnected to the Harris-Walz campaign — but that didn’t stop Biden from mentioning his “predecessor” Donald Trump several times during his twenty-five-minute speech. according to CNN, this is fine:

Harris’ political momentum and her chances in November hinge partly on her success in painting herself as a fresh option for voters and dispelling any notion she’s pitching for the second term of the unpopular president, Joe Biden.

But Kamala was in New Hampshire Wednesday, and none of the usual suspects like Bernie Sanders was campaigning with her, even though Sanders had been a Joe Biden surrogate there just a year ago:

Joe Biden’s effort to strip New Hampshire of its first-in-the-nation primary could keep the sitting president from campaigning in the state in the run-up to the 2024 primaries.

But his allies can.

Onetime rival-turned-cheerleader Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont crossed state lines Saturday to deliver an economic policy speech — with plenty of praise for the Biden administration — at presidential pit-stop Saint Anselm College. California Rep. Ro Khanna headlined a major state Democratic Party fundraiser in May. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is keynoting New Hampshire Democrats’ annual convention next month.

So where's Ro Khanna now?

Progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) warned Vice President Kamala Harris Wednesday against pursuing a tax on unrealized capital gains despite Harris signaling support for President Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal that would do just that.

“Let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, you create a company, it gets to $100 million or $200 million on paper. Now if you’re taxing that, you’re probably going to force that person to sell it,” Khanna, whose Silicon Valley-based district is the wealthiest in the US, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“Do you really want the entrepreneurs to be forced to sell their companies to larger institutions and to decline in value? I don’t think that’s what you want for a startup ecosystem,” added Khanna, who did not mention his fellow Californian by name.

What about Josh Shapiro? In fhe wake of what appears to have benn a polite thanks-but-no-thanks to Kamala after his interview for running mate, he was full of brave words about how he was going to campaign for her nonetheless:

President Joe Biden says he and Gov. Josh Shapiro will travel around Pennsylvania this fall on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Mr. Biden, who was born in Scranton, told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in an interview that the two men would campaign for Ms. Harris in the nation’s most populous battleground state. Pennsylvania is all but a must-win state for the Democratic ticket this fall as most paths to the 270 electoral votes needed for victory involve winning the Keystone State.

Except now Joe says he won't be doing this, the Secret Service won't let him. The story goes on,

"I was talking to Governor Shapiro, who's a friend,” Mr. Biden said on CBS. “We have got to win Pennsylvania, my original home state. He and I are putting together a campaign tour in Pennsylvania. I'm going to be campaigning in other states as well. And I'm going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most."

Mr. Biden did not offer any further details. The Democrats hold their national convention in Chicago beginning Monday.

So far, nothing more has materialized from either Joe or Josh. But again, it may not be just the Secret Service who won't let Joe campaign for Kamala:

When Kamala Harris took to the stage during a Democratic primary debate before the 2020 election and implied that Joe Biden was racist, his wife, Jill's, response was crystal clear.

'Go f**k yourself,' the then-future first lady vented, as she allegedly admitted during a conference call with supporters.

And the relationship between the two women – that began badly enough during that contentious battle for the presidential nomination – has only gone downhill from there.

. . . According to one former Democrat operative in Jill's circle, the women's long-seated animosity is 'one hundred per cent' part of Jill's resistance to having her 81-year-old husband step aside.

Because the truth, according to a source who knows the First Couple well, is that Jill's is now the only voice to which the 46th president listens.

And as far as Jill, 73, is concerned, the only thing worse than her husband stepping down would be Kamala stepping up to replace him.

I get the feeling that if Dr Jill has anything to do with it, that campaign tour Joe was going to take with Shapiro in Pennsylvania isn't going to happen.

As for Shapiro, I'm just not sure how much enthusiasm there actually is among any Democrat insiders for either Kamala or her prospects. They're looking to 2028 already and don't want to be associated with a loser.

Kamala's New Hampshire Rally: What Problem Was She Trying To Solve?

I guess they showed up. 😂😂

pic.twitter.com/LVx7cGEqVr

— Faith In America (@NWIPatriots) September 4, 2024

Mark Halperin (for instance, here) has been among the few observers trying to figure out, as I have, why Kamala had a rally in New Hampshire yesterday. Some of the questions include whether New Hampshire is in play, as was thought possible before Joe left the race -- but if it is, the race is effecively over, so why go to all the trouble of holding a rally there? But if New Hampshire isn't in play, the same question applies: New Hampshire has 4 electoral votes. Wouldn't the time and money be better spent in Pennsylvania?

On top of that, the September 10 debate is coming up on Tuesday. The New Hampshire rally took one day away from debate prep, something Kamala badly needs. But beyond that, the rally, ostensibly in New Hampshire, imported people from Massachusetts in 27 buses, according to the count by one bystander, so that the operative purpose of the rally couldn't even have been to influence or encourage New Hampahire voters.

I spent my whole working career in dysfunctional organizations, including one where the CEO went to federal prison for securities fraud, so I know a thing or two about organizational dysfunction. I keep going back to the question my former colleague Phil used to ask in staff meetings, "What problem are we trying to solve?" He asked it because the perceived problems always seemed so trivial yet so intractable, and the proposed solutions always seemed so irrelevant. There had to be a better use of everyone's time.

So let's apply that question to Kamala's New Hampshire rally and see if we can come up with whatever the real problem was that it was meant to solve, because among other things, the actual purpose of the rally wasn't clear, especially to analytically oriented observers like Mark Halperin.

It had nothing to do with New Hampshire voters, because the audience was imported from Massachusetts. But if it was meant to influence Massachusetts voters, why not hold the rally there instead of bussing them to New Hampshire? And Massachusetts's 11 electoral votes aren't in play; they're safely Democrat anyhow.

But let's say some Democrat power player, like maybe Nancy Pelosi, got a bee in her bonnet and told campaign head Jen O'Malley Dillon that she was worried about New Hampshire and demanded that Kamala hold a rally there irrespective of the real situation on the ground. That still doesn't explain why the campaign had to charter 27 buses to bring in a phony crowd from Massachusetts -- the Kamala campaign could have just gone through the motions without spending all the extra money for the buses (and probably the people, too).

Here's where the subtext of my former colleague Phil's question offers some help. Whether Phil even understood this or not, the main problem any staff meeting is actually meant to solve is the need to reinforce the grandiosity of the bosses -- and that goes as well to any solution such a meeting comes up with. The problem makes the bosses seem important, and the solution makes them seem indispensable. But that's the way it often works with or without a staff meeting; the bosses create the problems the bosses pretend to solve, but if anyone actually solved those problems, they wouldn't need those bosses.

Thus I think we can surmise that the problem the Kamala campaign is trying to solve is that the bosses need to look important. But important to whom? I've already posted on the disorganization in the Harris-Biden-Walz campaign, with Biden holdovers in the Wilmington headquarters, Obama inserts like David Plouffe adventitious in the new org chart, and Kamala's own people like Doug Emhoff, her brother-in-law Tony West, and her sister, Maya. At this stage, I'm not sure who in the campaign benefits from a boodoggle like the New Hampahire rally -- actually, I'm not sure if it benefits anyone, except that whoever followed arbitrary orders and set it up gets to keep their jobs.

But it does solve one problem, which I postulate will always be related to reinforcing someone's grandiosity. In this case, the only real beneficiary I can see is Kamala herself, along with her inner circle. Kamala is able to look like she's solving a problem. Exactly what the problem is, smart guys like Mark Halperin are unable to figure out, but she's solving it, and the best I can tell is that so far, she's convincing people like Jen O'Malley Dillon and David Plouffe that she's solving it, or at least she looks like she's solving it. Apparently it has something to do with New Hampshire, anyhow.

But here's the payoff: her yes people assemble a fair-sized crowd that reassures Kamala and whomever else that she's still got momentum, and this feeds her grandiosity, which I think is the main point. There may be a subsidiary benefit in that it keeps Kamala away from debate prep for one more day, and it's understood that she disdains things like briefings or preparation for meetings and then blames her staff for not prepping her.

The only comment I would make is that this sounds like a really, really dysfunctional organization, and on the whole, these do not survive. I also wonder if people like Jen O'Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi are really being fooled. Frankly, I wouldn't bet on it.

More Puzzling Questions About The Harris Campaign

I posted yesterday about the lack of Harris surrogates, which seems tro be forcing the campaign to send its top candidates plus the Second Dude to put out seemingly minor fires in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia. I'm still scratching my head about this -- but now there's a piece in Politico that has other commentators puzzled:

Kamala Harris’ campaign and the Democratic National Committee said Tuesday they are sending nearly $25 million to support down-ballot Democrats — an earlier investment and far more money than the top of the ticket has sent in past election years.

The funding in part reflects the Harris operation’s ability to spread money around after record fundraising over the past six weeks. But it is also a recognition of the importance of this year’s down-ballot races — which overlap with many of the swaths of the country that could decide the presidential election, and whose outcomes will substantially affect how Harris, or former President Donald Trump, will be able to govern next year.

The mention of down-ballot races -- which I also thought was a factor in yesterday's visits to states thought to be safe -- brought to mind again Nancy Pelosi's strategy in pushing Joe out of the race:

. . . Pelosi, in a July 10 interview, declined to directly answer when asked if Biden had her support in his reelection bid after his ruinous debate performance.

"It's up to the president to decide if he is going to run," Pelosi told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" co-host Jonathan Lemire. "We're all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short."

. . . Her comments blunted any progress Biden was trying to make persuading congressional Democrats that he was up for the job. And Pelosi's ambiguous public comments instead created space for rank-and-file Democrats to pressure the president to drop out.

She and other leading members of the Democratic Party raised concerns that his staying in the race could have a negative impact on Democratic candidates down-ballot.

But this again feeds my thinking about the missing surrogates. The closest thing Kamala's had to a new surrogate lately has bwen Joe Biden, but after appearing with Kamala at a Pittsburgh Labor Day event, he made it plain that this wouldn't be a regular thing:

President Biden lamented late Monday that his Secret Service protective detail doesn’t let him get up close and personal with audience members at events — despite him having the authority to overrule their advice.

Biden, 81, who has a lengthy history of accusing his handlers and security of getting in his way, made the complaint to reporters as he returned from campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania on Labor Day.

“Feels good,” the president told a reporter who asked how it felt to be on the stump again, “except I’m not able to go out into crowds anymore, the Secret Service doesn’t let me.”

But it appears that Joe would be of little help in any case:

Say what you will about Joe Biden, the man is a great communicator. Because I would absolutely agree we are the greatest alsbnzittnkssnsd… manufac….. jakahn ndkfnfm.. county…. Aaaljdnddmmmmmmmmm… state…. Hahajs mmmm.. city in world world. You tell em Joe. pic.twitter.com/azUmr57STO

— Jay (@jaysonica) September 2, 2024

But this still leaves open the question of why, although they made token appearances at the Chicago convention, neither the Clintons nor Obama seem eager to campaign for Kamala. And where's Bernie Sanders, or for that matter Elizabeth Warren or AOC? This comes as Democrats behind the scenes are scaling back expectations. In a memo to staff over the weekend, Harris campaign chair Jen O'Mally Dillon said Democrats are "the clear underdogs":

[M]ake no mistake: we head into the final stretch of this race as the clear underdogs. Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more support and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020." In nine days, "Vice President Harris will face Trump on the debate stage, where we expect him to be a formidable opponent. In 2020, the election came down to about 40,000 votes across the battleground states. This November, we anticipate margins to be similarly razor-thin."

David Plouffe, an Obama strategist sent to beef up the Harris campaign, has a similar take:

“There’s not a scenario here that’s easy,” Harris senior adviser David Plouffe told the Associated Press. “The pathway to beating Donald Trump, the pathway to 270 electoral votes for Kamala Harris is exceedingly hard but doable. And that’s just a reality.”

I'm continuing to think that 1972 is the closest parallel we have to this year's environment for Democrats. So far, for instance, although Michigan Gov Gretchen Whitmer is co-chair of the Harris campaign, we don't seem to be seeing her campaigning on Harris's behalf in Michigan, a key state -- and she withdrew from consideration as a Harris running mate. The same seems to be true of Pennsylvania Gov Josh Shapiro -- Joe Biden made a token appearance in Pittsburgh on Labor Day, but Shapiro wasn't around. He also appears to have withdrawn as a potential running mate after a bad final interview with Harris.

And where's Gavin Newsom? I'm wondering if, as in 1972, prominent Democrats don't want to be closely associated with the candidate, because their instancts are telling them to stay away.

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.

The Harris-Walz Campaign Has Become The Butt Of Jokes

Here's an example of the pickle Tim Walz is in. Via ABC News, Republicans want voters to think Walz lied about his dog. False GOP claims could cause real damage:

Republicans turned Tim Walz’s outing at a dog park nearly three years ago into an attack on the Democratic vice presidential nominee this week, working on a false online narrative to paint Walz as a liar.

The intended takeaway was that Walz somehow lied about the identity of his dog, Scout, by describing two different dogs as his beloved pet in separate X posts. Social media users shared screenshots of the posts as alleged proof that the Minnesota governor exhibits a pattern of deceit, garnering thousands of likes, shares and reactions across platforms.

In one post, from June 2022, Walz is pictured hugging a black dog. The caption reads, “Sending a special birthday shoutout to our favorite pup, Scout.” The other, posted in October 2022, showed Walz beside a brown and white dog with the caption: “Couldn’t think of a better way to spend a beautiful fall day than at the dog park. I know Scout enjoyed it.”

In response, Walz supporters shared posts on social media showing that Walz was simply playing with someone else's dog while mentioning Scout in the caption.

The seemingly innocuous post was not the only fodder that has been used against Walz in recent days. A joke he cracked in a campaign video with Vice President Kamala Harris about eating “white guy tacos” was used to accuse him of lying about how much he seasons his food. Opponents have also taken issue with Walz describing himself as a former high school football coach, pointing out that he was the defensive coordinator.

Those dastardly Republicans! But all this does is add to the list of Walz's fabrications and embroiderings that have come to light since Kamala named him as her running mate. The most recent one surfaced Friday:

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has long described the moment in 2004 that inspired him to run for public office. In Walz’s telling, the “folksy” high school teacher and two of his students attended a campaign rally for President George W. Bush as an educational experience. However, Walz says, all three of them were denied entry upon event staffers noticing a John Kerry sticker on one of the students’ wallets — an exchange that the Atlantic dubbed a “KGB-style interrogation.”

There’s just one problem: This version of the political origin story for the Democratic vice presidential nominee, who is already facing “stolen valor” accusations over claims about his military service from combat veterans, contains significant inaccuracies.

For one, Walz was admitted into the Bush rally, according to a source familiar, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the August 2004 event. The two teenagers Walz arrived with, Matt Klaber and Nick Burkhart, were not his students, the Washington Examiner confirmed.

Moreover, the teenagers were barred from the event after a confrontation that made local news earlier in the week — leading to them initially being denied tickets.

Here's what makes all these stories good standup material. What makes a joke funny?

1. “The presence of some sort of norm violation, be it a moral norm violation (robbing a retirement home), social norm violation (breaking up with a long-term boyfriend via text message), or physical norm violation (purposefully sneezing directly on a child).
2. A ‘benign’ or ‘safe’ context in which the violation takes place (this can take many forms).
3. The interpretation of the first two points simultaneously. In other words, one must view, read, or otherwise interpret a violation as relatively harmless.”

. . . The structure of a joke varies, but the general format includes setup, which introduces the characters, settings, and situation; and punch line, which delivers the plot twist or benign violation. Jokes also have narrative elements: character(s), story arc, conflict, and resolution.

If you want to write a longer joke, consider peppering the entire anecdote with smaller joke clusters: mini setups and punch lines within the larger structure of the story. These “jab lines” incorporate humor throughout the entire joke-text.

Tim Walz is turning into a perfect standup routine: he's a bloviating politician, complete with cheap suits and cheesy affect. He commits repeated and predictable norm violations -- he tells lies about himself, but these are safe and more or less harmless, although some involve circumstances that can be construed as shirking duty and pretending he didn't. Each of these more or less harmless lies is resolved with a predictable but safe humiliation that still leaves him deflated.

By the way, the ABC story at the link says the Republican claims about Walz and a dog could cause "real damage" -- to whom? The comic context here is that this is "safe". Someone can't understand a joke.

But now we add another joke to the set:

In April, Harris appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show, where she was asked if she worked at the fast food restaurant.

'I did. Yes, I did work at McDonald's,' the vice president said. 'When I was at school...I did fries. And then I did the cashier.'

. . . Speaking to workers at a labor rally in Las Vegas in 2019, the future vice president first referred to her time at the Golden Arches.

'I worked in McDonald's,' she said to the crowd. 'I was a student when I was working at McDonald's.'

Trump himself, the ultimate foil, popped this particular balloon:

Trump was speaking at the Moms for Liberty convention in Washington on Friday when he expressed skepticism over this piece of Harris's biography, which she has used to proclaim her ordinary background.

'She also said, "I worked at McDonald's.'' Turned out she didn't work at McDonalds," the former president mentioned to the audience.

'Did anyone see that?' he continued. 'After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there.'

Yes -- as soon as I heard about her McDonald's claim, I realized that if she'd worked there, they would have deducted her Social Security payment from her check, and they (as well as Social Security) would, or in this case wouldn't, have a record. (As far as I can see, this also wouldn't be a violation of confidentiality, because in this case, McDonald's would simply be confirming that there is not an employment record, which could otherwise be confidential.)

Several points are worth noting here. All these stories make up a single comedy set, and they fit the definition, which includes the requirement that they be "safe"-- they are politicians predictably telling harmless lies about themselves. There are resolutions -- the truth is revealed, and in one case, it's revealed by Trump, who is himself an acknowledged master of standup. But the revelation, especially in Walz's case, reopeatedly makes him a buffoon, and indeed a buffoonish sidekick to an annoying bossgirl-wannabe who tells the same sort of lies.

But what's telling is that even if each of these resolutions is "safe", they nevertheless trivialize both Walz and Harris, and each iteration of the routine trivializes them a little more. It isn't good for a candidate to become the butt of jokes. Think of Gerald Ford in a pratfall that became comedy gold on SNL, Jimmy Carter and the killer rabbit, Mike Dukakis riding a tank, or John Kerry windsurfing. If history is any guide, I don't see a good outcme here. I continue to think Trump is in controi of the subliminal campaign.