Josh Marshall
First Thoughts on the VP Pick 
A few thoughts on today’s big news.
My first reaction was shock that it was Tim Walz and not Josh Shapiro. Not “shock,” disappointment, or “shock,” it was a bad decision. But “shock” in the simple sense that I really thought it was pretty much definitely Shapiro for the last week. There were lots of reasons I thought this but what sort of sealed it was hearing that Harris would do the roll out in Philadelphia. Just didn’t add up to me she’d roll out anyone but Shapiro in the state where he’s governor and in what is essentially his home town.
Obviously, that was wrong.
Read More- No way of getting around this: What we’re now seeing in the campaign is at the very outer bounds of what I thought was possible with a Biden-to-Harris switch. We’re now looking at a four-to-five point move in Harris’ direction over just two weeks. My bullish scenario was Harris resetting the campaign to the status quo ante before the big debate — at which point Biden was not in a bad position but was clearly if slightly behind. From there, a more dynamic Harris campaign uses the remaining three months of the campaign to battle its way into a lead. That’s not what we’re seeing. Harris is holding all of Biden’s strength in the Blue Wall states, adding to it and then also moving the southern tier states into contention. Her current popular vote margin is moving into the range a Democrat needs to win the election.
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This note from TPM Reader MW made my day …
Read MoreI was reading Josh’s post about No One Left Behind. My wife (now deceased) and I have benefited from your program for a long time. This is something I am very grateful for. It isn’t that we could not get good news somewhere else. It is very much about the quality, the people involved in making it work, the connection you have with the readers, the fellowship between the readers, and even something beyond all of that. The dream Josh and you all have brought forward with this project is infectious.
When I mentioned this before to Josh I am not sure he understood how or why readers would become so involved with what TPM is. TPM is inclusive of all people and not just members. That is the best part. But the quality and drive behind the reporting is unmatched in my opinion. And that certainly is not just my opinion. I am sure since then that others have said the same thing. I think you all realize you have a lot of people cheering you on and if you don’t you should.
If you look at the 538 national average, Harris went from a .2 percentage point lead on July 28th to a 1.9 percentage point lead today. That is a substantial move over one week.
Annals of Fed Misses
It’s not easy running the Fed. For years Jerome Powell got a lot of credit for navigating the U.S. economy with an unexpectedly loose monetary policy, through the COVID crisis and with a lot of “soft landing” credit during the Biden years. But through 2024 there’s been a backdraft of criticism that, having waited a bit too long to react to the inflation surge, he’s now holding the brakes too long, even after inflation has fallen pretty close to the central bank’s target rate. Last Friday’s jobs report was interpreted as providing key evidence that the Fed had in fact waited too long and that the U.S. economy now faced a real risk of recession. Today there’s a big market sell-off apparently kicked off by fears of slowing U.S. growth.
A couple quick thoughts on this.
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Campaign Status Check, Two Weeks In
Two weeks into Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, I wanted to give you a polling and campaign-status gut check. The short version is that Harris is now slightly but measurably ahead in the Blue Wall states. She remains behind but now only barely in the southern tier states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. The margins in both directions are mostly between one and two points. Those are nominally margin of error numbers. But when they’re based on multiple polls they become a bit sturdier than that. (I’m following 538’s averages on this. They have Nevada tied.)
What this means is that Harris now has very small leads in the states she needs to win the election. Just as critically she’s now in shooting distance in all of the southern tier states, now including North Carolina. Together these represent a pro-Harris shift of 3 to 4 percentage points which is more or less matched by the shift at the national level.
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Old Man Trump
Here’s one thing that’s been in the back of my mind for some time and with a greater focus since Joe handed the football off to Kamala. Donald Trump is old. If you look, he’s much older than in 2016 and 2020. People say these kinds of things as part of the rather dismal “who’s older?” scuffling that’s been going back and forth all year between the two candidates. Here though I mean it in a basic descriptive sense. The difference between being 70 and close to 80 is a big one. It happens to everyone.
Trump doesn’t get held to these standards as much because his raging gives a feeling of focus and edge that Biden lacked. But just in a basic sense, he is not the candidate he was in 2016, not even the one he was in 2020. This was hidden in a way so long as Biden was the nominee and it was hidden or perhaps rendered meaningless as long as Trump was ahead. If your candidate is old but he’s winning … well, whatever. If Joe Biden had spent the last year sitting on a five point lead, the whole campaign, clearly, would have gone quite differently.
Read MoreEven now I never cease to be amazed when we find out years later about some new Trump scandal that despite all the scrum and fury managed to remain secret for all this time. The investigation into the President of Egypt trying to put some cash into Trump’s pockets is yet the latest example. How many stories like this will we only find out about a decade from now, or never?
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