Josh Marshall

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Josh Marshall is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TPM.

Thanks, Folks

As 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.)

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Some Thoughts on the Harris Momentum Shift Prime Badge
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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.

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Finally Word from the FBI—About The Trump Story The Press Has Refused To Question Prime Badge
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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.

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Help Us With This

Today 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 Prime Badge
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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.

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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.)

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Can You Help With This?

I 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.

Status Check

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.

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Expectations Setting Prime Badge
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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.

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The Curious Lure of Writerly Anti-Politics Prime Badge
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We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

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