Josh Marshall
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.
Read MoreEven now I never cease to be amazed when we find out years later about some new Trump scandal that despite all the scrum and fury managed to remain secret for all this time. The investigation into the President of Egypt trying to put some cash into Trump’s pockets is yet the latest example. How many stories like this will we only find out about a decade from now, or never?
To stay on track to meet our goal in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund annual drive we need to get to $300,000 by the end of this evening. We’re close. We’re at just over $292,000 $296,928. If you’ve been considering contributing this year, could you take a moment right now? It’s just a quick moment out of your routine and we put every dollar to very good use. Just click right here. Thanks.
Today Donald Trump appeared at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, attacked the organization, disrespected the journalists interviewing him and then proceeded to claim that Kamala Harris is in fact a fake Black person who only recently decided to become Black. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went — she became a Black person,” he said, “I think somebody should look into that too.”
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Blitz
I have various people I chat with through the day to compare notes about what’s in the news. I can’t remember who the conversation was with or whether it started with me or the other person. But in one of these conversations over the last few days I got to talking about the particular dynamics of a three-month campaign, something totally unheard of and unprecedented in modern American political history. American presidential campaigns last at least 18 months. In some ways they’re perpetual. But there’s nothing in recent American history to compare to what Kamala Harris is doing right now.
The Trump campaign is obviously furious about the switch. Vance called it a sucker punch. They essentially wasted their convention on the wrong candidate. You can understand why they’re mad.
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