I wanted to tell you about a new election news site which is actually a very old one. You’re likely familiar with Daily Kos Elections. If you’re not, it’s long been a section of the Daily Kos website which specializes in downballot races. In other words, all the races besides presidential races. They don’t totally ignore presidential contests, of course. But their bread and butter is everything else. That means congressional races, especially ones operating below the radar. They’re even more priceless on everything below the level of federal elections: state legislatives contests, state secretaries of state, state Supreme Court elections, district attorneys, etc. As we’ve learned over the last decade, those offices are the true taproots and ballast of political power in the United States. Presidents are the great lumbering apex predator of the political ecosystem who exist and survive only because of all the lesser known parts of that ecosystem.

Over a couple decades, DKE became an irreplaceable source of information for all the nitty-gritty of electoral life in American politics. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the quality of their work is that their following was bipartisan. If the information is solid and you can’t find it anywhere else, everyone wants to have it, regardless of who they want to win the election. This has always been my standard in the world of independent and engaged media: have your reporting be good enough, clear enough and sufficiently free of cant that it becomes a must-read even for those who don’t share your political viewpoint. That’s their calling card. They’re really that good. It’s an ironic day to make this recommendation since we begin today the quadrennial four-day festival of worship in the cult of presidenting. But I’m telling you this because DKE is now hiving off from Daily Kos and relaunching as a independent website called TheDownballot. They actually launched at the end of last week. I can’t recommend their work strongly enough. It’s where you go to get the details, to find out which races are really going to matter, and to find leads on where change is happening, where you go to see the cacophony of data kicked up by political life corralled into usable datasets. It’s also the kind of work worth supporting with your dollars, sort of like the coral reefs of nitty gritty political knowledge, if you will.

So that’s my pitch. Needless to say, I’m not involved financially or otherwise with TheDownballot. My only relationship is as a consumer of their work over many years. Check them out.

One of the things that happens in the world of digital media is that your published writings are always at your fingertips and can vanish in an instant. Some publications go under entirely and their back catalog disappears. Today I was discussing a new Maureen Dowd column about the “coup,” as she put it, against Joe Biden (good lord…) and I was reminded that the first piece of journalism I ever published in an actual publication was about Dowd. I tried to find it and realized it was no longer online. But I didn’t want to leave it there, so I went back to my email archive, found the emails with the person who edited it and got the original URL. With the original URL I was able to track it down on the WayBack Machine. My memory was a bit off. But I was close. It wasn’t the first piece I published. That was two years earlier. I conflated the two because they were both published in the same publication, Feed Magazine, one of the great now-departed publications from the first wave of Internet journalism.

I was excited to find it. It was a piece I was kind of proud of because I was still very early in my journalism career and I was able to hit a number of themes that were important to me. Reading it again I realize that a number of those are ones that have been constants through my writing at TPM. I realized that since I own the copyright and the publication was defunct (for at least 20 years) I should simply republish it here at TPM so it’s resurrected digitally and I can refer back to it whenever needed.

It was published on April 19th, 1999, on the occasion of Dowd receiving a Pulitzer for her commentary on the Lewinsky scandal. The original, as published 25 years ago, you can find after the jump.

I flagged this on social media, but I wanted to make sure you knew. Trump just announced a “crime and safety” rally for next Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, a town that has for decades been heavily associated with the KKK. Indeed, just late last month, white supremacists marched in the town chanting, “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” Some but not all of the town’s reputation comes from the fact that a long-time Grand Drago of the Michigan Klan lived there and his farm was a sort of home base for the Klan. (I just found out this afternoon that a good bit of the 1991 documentary Blood in the Face — great doc, by the way — was shot there.)

This is the kind of move that will be lost on many reporters and especially most out-of-state reporters. But it won’t be lost for a moment on Blacks and Jews from Michigan. It’s a bullhorn, not a dog whistle. I had to have the connection pointed out to me too though, once I did, the connection with the Blood in the Face documentary which I saw when it first came out placed it for me.

We’re closing in on $450,000 raised in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re currently just over $438,000 $446,000 $447,000 $452,000. Can we get there tonight? Click here to give us an extra push.

I got another note from TPM Reader NS this morning. He expresses rightful frustration with the way that elite media continues to focus on Trump’s recent antics as an extended tantrum or flawed strategy when it is much more appropriately seen as a mental and cognitive state which is manifestly unfit for holding public office. Trump is also not morally fit for office. But that’s different, and that’s always been the case. The normal rejoinder is that Trump’s mental fitness is sort of irrelevant since most of us already know that and his supporters don’t care. Those conclusions are mostly true as far as it goes. But it represents a failure of journalistic logic which is remarkably widespread in media today. Put simply, that reasoning is mainly above the pay grade of journalism. It’s not the job of journalism to adjust the editorial choices or insights of daily news coverage based on driving electoral or public opinion outcomes. It’s to cover the news. There’s no single way to cover the news and no single, objective version of what constitutes the news. But that reasoning about impact is not an appropriate one and it is deeply damaging to journalism in myriad ways.

Here’s NS …

I got an email last night from a reporter doing a piece on Ezra Klein and his prominence in Democratic politics. They asked me how I felt my own piece criticizing his Thunderdome primary proposal held up given recent events and whether I saw Klein’s arguments differently now. It was an interesting question. So I thought I’d share with you what I wrote. I’m not identifying the journalist or the publication. Because I’m not trying to get a jump on them or get in the way of their piece. I’m doing it because it’s a good and interesting question. I took some time to write out a response and I thought you might be interested in seeing it.

Here it is.

TPM Reader KJ sent me this in response to yesterday’s Backchannel. At first I thought these might be made up headlines. But they’re each real. I linked them.

It’s fun to split screen this email with today’s headlines:

The New York Times: Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Detail

The Hill: Harris is trying to run a no-substance campaign. Does she believe in anything?

The Washington Post: Opinion | Does Harris need a serious policy agenda? Only if she wants to win.

Poynter: Opinion | When will Kamala Harris meet the press?

I’ve come at this debate in my head from a bunch different directions over the last few days. I gave my overarching view in yesterday’s Backchannel. But there are so many different dimensions to it. Kate and I knocked several of them around in today’s podcast. I actually got in a minor spat today with a reporter who I’d dinged for an article description which presented Harris as a sort mystery candidate verging on a Manchurian Candidate, with unknown views and barely detailed ambitions. Are we kidding with all of this?

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