Josh Marshall
Inside the Galactically Over-Determined Story of Tim Walz’s Governing Ideology 
Right now we’re seeing a parallel race to define Tim Walz, much as we saw and were seeing with Kamala Harris beginning in the last week of July. The stakes of defining the veep nominee are nowhere near as high as they are for the race to define the person at the top of the ticket, where so far it’s gone all in Kamala Harris’s direction. But I wanted to note some of the dimensions of this battle to define. Paradoxically, it’s going on both between the parties and also within the Democratic Party. The Democratic left and the GOP both seem joined in wanting to portray if not Walz than the Walz pick as a sign of rising left-wing power in the Democratic Party or a de facto veto over any VP pick that would validate or express support for Joe Biden’s policies on Israel and Gaza. I don’t think either point is so much wrong as misleading and a simple misreading of the actual political dynamics which are shaping the current moment or politics going back the last six or seven years.
Let me start with a related observation.
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Kamala Goes Electric and Trump Melts Down
Last Thursday the Harris campaign began offering tickets for a campaign rally in Detroit the following Wednesday (tomorrow, August 7th). Over the first 24 hours they received 47,000 requests for tickets. 47,000. That spurred a multi-day search for a Detroit area venue that could handle the demand to see the Vice President. As Donald Trump never grasped, there’s no straight-line connection between rally attendance and votes. But at that scale they signal enthusiasm and energy that neither campaign (Trump or Biden) has seen at any time in this cycle. They demonstrate a purchase into the larger popular culture that President Biden never had and Donald Trump, for all his greater currency on social media, doesn’t either.
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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.
As we move into the third week of this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive, I wanted to remind you of one thing the Fund does. Your membership fees account for the overwhelming percentage of our revenues. But we also give free memberships to readers in financial need (part of our program since we introduced membership in 2012) as well as all registered students, full-time or part-time (since 2017). Your contribution to the TPM Journalism Fund is what makes those no-cost Community Memberships and Student Memberships possible. It’s how we square the circle of funding our operation through member fees while not excluding people whose finances may be under strain. Our annual TPM Journalism Fund drive is critical to keeping TPM vital and moving forward. But our free membership program is one key part of that. If you’d like to help us fund these memberships and keep TPM strong and vital, please consider contributing to the drive by clicking here.
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.
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