Editors’ Blog
JD Vance, Awkward and Discomfiting Ragelord
One thing that has driven JD Vance’s rising unpopularity is his crusade against people without children. He’s proposed punitive tax policies to punish people who do these “bad” things like not having children and he’s even suggested diluting the voting rights of non-parents.
The odd thing about the tax policy side of this is that the U.S. tax code is actually filled with tax advantages and subsidies for people with kids. And generally speaking no one has much problem with that. There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools. Public schools are generally funded by property taxes. And almost everyone pays those, childful and childless alike, either directly or indirectly. Lots of people have kids and U.S. political culture is pretty pro-kid and pro-family (in the narrow sense of the phrase rather than the right-wing Christian sense). So generally it’s uncontroversial, even something politicians go out of their way to support.
Read MoreAs we go into the weekend I want to thank everyone who’s contributed so far to this year’s drive for the TPM Journalism Fund. We hit the half way point to our goal of raising $500,000 early yesterday morning. Even though we’ve gotten a lot more experience at holding these drives they remain nerve-wracking. They amount to a collective trust-fall – hopefully – into the arms of the larger TPM community. So it always feels really good, at many different levels, when you’re there for us. If you have had a moment to contribute yet you can click right here. It’s easy and quick.
We’ve always gained quite a few new members recently. Which is wonderful. And we want to welcome all of you. We’re still trying to understand the precise reasons for it.
One reason seems to be our new membership system in itself, by which I mean the software that runs it. As you know, our business is almost entirely based on membership fees. So a smoothly running system to manage memberships in all its dimensions – processing fees, authenticating users, record keeping and user experience – is mission critical. (Neither the old or the new system ever touch or store your credit cards. For that we use the industry-standard security and fulfillment of Stripe dot com.)
Read More
Some Thoughts on the Harris Momentum Shift 
We’ve now had a round of polls of the Harris-Trump race since she became the Democrats’ de facto nominee. All of these polls must be viewed as snapshots in an extremely fluid and unsettled political moment. But we can draw out some early patterns. I averaged all the post-Biden drop-out polls and they come out to Trump up by 4/10ths of one percentage point. That’s about the high water mark that Biden ever got to all year. That average also includes CNN and Times, which have been two of the worst polls for Democrats this year. So the mix of just who has released a poll probably slightly favors Trump.
More interesting to me are the polls out of the swing states, which we’ve already gotten a decent number of. They now show all three Blue Wall states (MI, WI, PA) as ties. Notably, they now show Georgia as a margin of error race, with Harris one or two points back. That’s a major shift. Trump has held a consistent lead of 5 or 6 percentage points there. I only saw one poll each out of Arizona and Nevada and those didn’t show the same shift. Unclear whether that’s unique to these states or whether more polls will show a clearer pattern. The relevant point is that early evidence seems to show Harris significantly growing the map, giving her multiple potential paths to an electoral college win.
Read More
Finally Word from the FBI—About The Trump Story The Press Has Refused To Question
As you know, I’ve been on this story for a while: why there was never any law enforcement briefing or qualified medical report on the Butler, PA shooting incident or information of how Donald Trump was injured. I was especially interested in this because originally Pennsylvania State Police briefed reporters that Trump had been hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire. The storyline changed when Trump went on Truth Social and announced that a bullet had hit his ear. From that moment that was the story followed universally in the press.
But yesterday FBI Director Christopher Wray said, ironically in response to a question from Rep. Jim Jordan, that it’s not clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or debris kicked up by the gunfire. I think in context that’s likely a bureaucratic and gentle way of saying Trump probably wasn’t hit by a bullet. But let’s stick to the precise words. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
Here’s the actual exchange.
Read MoreToday is the end of the first week of this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re doing everything we can to get to be half way toward our goal by the end of the today. That means ending the day having raised $250,000. We’re currently at $228,612. I know this sounds like I’m going full PBS telethon. But the annual drive is a critical part of the mix that makes TPM possible. If you value what we do, if you rely on us, if you think it’s important that TPM exist, please consider contributing to the drive. It takes just a moment and you can do so by just clicking this link.
We all appreciate it.
Thunderdomism’s Last Stand
According to some of the country’s most prominent news publications, the Democratic establishment moved quickly beginning Sunday afternoon to lock down the Democratic presidential nomination for Kamala Harris. Said Axios this morning: “It’s over. The Democratic establishment pushed out Biden and locked in Kamala Harris with astonishing speed and efficacy.” The Times published a piece entitled “How Democrats Learned to Love the Smoke-Filled Room Again.” But the idea that the ‘establishment’ anointed Kamala Harris and locked the nomination down for her turns the whole matter pretty much on its head. What locked in Harris was the overwhelming resistance of Democratic voters and activists to anyone else. It was national columnists and a significant number of Democratic elites who were pushing for the thunderdome primary.
A good bit of this was support for Harris herself. A lot of it was the fact that with the incumbent president and presumed nominee out and no time to run anything other than a fake primary Harris had democratic legitimacy on her side. Eighty million voters literally chose her in 2020 to be the person who took over for Joe Biden if he couldn’t serve. Democratic primary voters in effect reconfirmed that this Spring since Biden and Harris were again running as a package deal. Few things are more embedded in American political culture than the idea that vice presidents succeed presidents.
Read More
The Battle Is Joined
As we’ve noted a few times, we’re now in the midst of a race for each campaign to define Kamala Harris. What focus groups have shown in recent weeks is that many swing voters or marginal voters have vaguely negative impressions of Harris but basically know little about her. So she’s largely a blank slate for these and actually many other voters. That was always going to be very different for Biden and Trump. Voters know who they are and tend to have very fixed opinions about them. Not so for Harris.
The Trump campaign – actually one of its allied SuperPacs, as far as I can tell – went on the air last night with a series of attack ads in the Blue Wall states. (They’re probably appearing in other places too. But that’s where I have direct reports of their appearing.) They focus on what I believe is Harris’s key vulnerability. (Ed.Note: I’ve subsequently heard these ads may only be running in the Philly and Detroit metros – more information on that as I learn more.)
Read MoreI want to send a huge thank you to the 1601 TPM Readers who have given so far to this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We are currently at just over $212,000 and we really want to get to the halfway point of $250,000 toward our goal of $500,000 by the end of the first week of the drive. So if you’ve been considering contributing, can you take a moment and make it today? It is, I believe, a great and important cause, keeping TPM here, vital and robust for the future. If you’re ready, just click right here. We thank you, our whole team.
We now have three polls post-Biden departure: One with Harris 2 points up, another with Trump 2 points up and a third with Trump up by 1. I would call these numbers encouraging.
Read More
Expectations Setting
I wanted to do a short post on expectations setting now that we’ve absorbed the stunning and sometimes euphoric news of the last 48 hours. What will the polls say about this new race? What are Harris’s chances of winning? As my colleague David Kurtz has rightly stated, we’re truly flying blind here. There are so many unprecedented variables we can’t be certain about anything. My own best guess is that we should be not so much expecting but prepared to see Harris roughly where Joe Biden was before the late June debate. That speculation is based mostly on the fact that the polls have been primarily driven by the size of the Republican and Democratic voting blocks with a large percentage of voters supporting third party candidates.
Read More