I’m a broken record on this. But I’m struck by the relative stasis of the Harris-Trump presidential campaign. It hasn’t always felt like that of course. It’s hard on the nerves. And it’s not like nothing has happened. We’ve had a sitting president drop out of the race, a mind-boggling two assassination attempts, a smackdown of a debate, two conventions. And yet stability in the polling numbers has been the calling card of this race. Joe Biden was behind. He fell further behind starting about two weeks after the June debate. After he dropped out Harris immediately moved the race into a tie. Then over a couple weeks she opened up a lead of roughly three points. It’s basically stayed right there for the last two months. The minor undulations have been so small as to likely represent little more than churn and statistical noise.

This note from TPM Reader DK doesn’t answer for us the questions we discussed yesterday about Republican GOTV efforts. But it does point to key questions to ask to find out more. And I found it just a fascinating window into the nuts and bolts of campaign field operations.

I’ve done GOTV for two decades, including my own campaign long ago. A few observations:

So I think this debate was basically a draw. Vance was smooth and organized. He approached normality. He was often clearer than Tim Walz was. Tim Walz is not a terribly articulate debater. That’s something the Harris campaign tried to telegraph last week. And I think it was a good idea to do that. On those fronts, Vance did better. Vance was also on message. He literally tied everything to inflation and immigration. Even the most preposterous things he brought back to those issues. Vance definitely did well on that front too.

But Walz did better than I think some people may realize because with all the jumbliness and clackity clink he got in the story of the women whose lives were lost or endangered by Trump state abortion bans. Again and again, there were key points, key stories that the Harris campaign clearly wanted him to say from the stage and he did, even if they were surrounded by Walzian word fugue. And that really matters more than how focused he was as a speaker. He got those things. That matters more.

10:41 PM: Walz is just bumbly and floppity again and again. But on a number of these issues Vance is just so obviously full of it Walz still wins on points. And that’s happening more as the debate goes on. That happened on Obamacare and on democracy and Jan 6th. Abortion too.

10:17 PM: I just cannot believe that Vance is actually claiming that Trump made Obamacare work.

9:57 PM: There’s an odd dynamic in this debate. Vance is doing well. He’s smooth. He’s hitting his points. Walz is kind of jangly. Not nearly as smooth. He stumbles over sentences. If you look at this and say, who’s smoother? Who’s clearer? I think that’s Vance. But what Walz is doing is hitting the key lines the campaign wants him to say. Often he gets to them in response to questions about other things. But he hits them. The stories of these women who died or almost died from Trump abortion bans. So I think he’s hitting his marks too.

9:46 PM: Sidled up to JD’s menstrual surveillance racket. Appreciate that.

9:44 PM: I really wish Walz would have been more clear on the the fact that for all Trump’s chatter about bringing jobs home it’s actually Biden and Harris who are doing that with the IRA.

9:27 PM: It’s fascinating how both these guys are basically saying each other is great.

9:20 PM: It’s interesting that Vance was not remotely willing to defend mass deportation. Basically wrote it off.

9:16 PM: Okay, I don’t expect Republicans to make a lot of sense on climate but someone’s got to dig into JD’s argument about climate which if I understand it is basically that the best thing for the climate is to do all our manufacturing in the U.S. and also to drill a bunch more oil.

9:14 PM: Okay, I’m not sure JD’s climate answer made any sense. I mean, creative, but not a lot of sense.

9:06 PM: It’s interesting. Just in the first two answers I’d say both guys answered pretty well for their campaigns. Very different answers. But each hitting their marks.

This is a fast moving situation. I’m not a military expert. Watch the military experts for military updates. But some thoughts come to mind. First, it seems unimaginable that Israel won’t retaliate in force directly against Iran. That’s just a fait accompli. It was frankly surprising that the response in April was so limited. But there’s a difference between a show a strength to reestablish deterrence on the one hand and actual strategic gains on the other. It seems to me that the big strategic gain is the one that Israel is in the midst of and what prompted Iran’s missile attack today in the first place. That is, in essence: dismantling or at least seriously degrading the capacity of the Hezbollah militia and rocket capacity. Hezbollah is not solely creature of Iran. But that’s what makes it such a military force. It’s there to be a forward arm of Iran, a source of deterrence vis a vis Israel as well as being part of a longer term strategy of encircling Israel and killing it through a death of a thousand cuts. The biggest gains seem possible against Hezbollah more than in Iran. The exception is Iran’s nuclear plants. Those are of course heavily reinforced. And attacking them in force directly would be a further escalation. But Michael Oren, the former Knesset member and former Israeli Ambassador to U.S., was on CNN this afternoon and he focused on the fact that the killing of Hassan Nasrallah shows Israel has the ability to cut through multiple layers of reinforced concrete. Oren isn’t currently in government. But that message seemed very clear.

Over recent weeks I’ve tried to share with you a series of questions about the campaign or features of the campaign that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Most of these aren’t cases where you say “this campaign has to do this” or “this campaign has to do that.” They’re mysteries to me at least at a deeper level. The one I’d like to discuss today I’ve mentioned a few times in earlier posts.

Remember back in the spring the Trump campaign and really the Trump family did a sort of forced takeover of the RNC and as part of that move they closed down the RNC’s Get Out The Vote or field operations and decided to outsource that work to a series of super PACs of which Elon Musk’s America PAC and the Turning Point USA’s PAC are the biggest? This wasn’t totally out of the blue or not totally without some rationale behind it. The FEC recently made a ruling that gave campaigns and parties greater ability to coordinate with super PACs on GOTV work. So there’s some logic to that. But it’s not obvious on that basis why you’d shut down the RNC’s GOTV operations. So questions about that move have hovered over this. Was this just dumb? Is there some financial interest at work? Is it just part of asserting total control over the party apparatus? Or is it actually just a good idea, allowing the unlimited dollars of these PACs to up the party’s game? The weight of logic and some evidence points to some mix of the first few answers. But it’s been hard to totally rule out the last one.