Josh Marshall
The middle period of a drive is the most difficult part. You’re past the initial rush of contributions (thank you!). But it’s before you start approaching the finish line, at which point the pace starts picking up again. The middle period is where we are right now — but we’re now getting close to a big, big milestone, because over the last 53 hours, TPM readers have contributed just over $44,000. Which is friggin’ amazing! Now we’re coming up on the last big milestone ($400,000) before we hit our goal of $500,000. We think we can get there this weekend. We’re now just over $378,000. If you want to help nudge us toward the big four-zero-zero, just click right here.
The Times-Siena poll has been among the least friendly to Democrats through this political cycle and the previous one as well. It’s always important to remember: that doesn’t mean it’s “wrong” or “biased.” In every election you have a range of pollsters making slightly different assumptions about the electorate. You only know which assumptions are right, or most predictive, when you get the election results. Today Times-Siena released a new poll showing Harris up 50-46 over Donald Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Same result in each.
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Kamala Dog Walked Trump Right Back Into the Debate 
One thing that gets a bit lost in all the helter-skelter of the last few days: Trump caved big time. Harris said he needed to show up on September 10th. And after three weeks of threats and whining he agreed.
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Times and WaPo Jump On Board Trump Camp Swift Boating of Walz
The Post’s and the Times‘ pieces on Tim Walz service record are more egregious and spurious than you’re probably able to imagine. The accusations come from two members of his unit who are clearly MAGA partisans and who floated them during his 2022 reelection campaign for Minnesota governor in coordination with Walz’s Republican opponent. The attacks aren’t just “like” the Swift Boat attacks from 2004. They’re literally the work of the same guy. Chris LaCivita was the strategist who ran the Swift Boat attacks in 2004 and cut the commercials. He’s now the co-manager of the Trump campaign. He started this and then handed it off to Vance. As David noted, even Politico headlined it as a “Swift Boat” attack. Politico!
The accusation, such as it is, is that Walz retired from service just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.
Read MoreHave you been planning to contribute to our TPM Journalism Fund drive but haven’t had the chance? We’re now in the second half of the drive. It’s always the hardest slog, the part when it seems like we may not reach the goal we need to reach. Can you take a moment and make a contribution today if you’ve been considering it? I would, we would really appreciate it. It’s a key part of what keeps TPM going strong. It keeps us ready for whatever is next. It’s super easy to do. You can just click right here. Any amount truly helps and we absolutely put your dollars of support to good use.
UPDATE 4:55 PM 7:23 PM 8:45 PM 12:18 AM 9:25 AM: We’re now just over $334,000 $340,000 $343,000 $346,000 $348,000 (Almost here! LFG!!!!! – 12:19 AM). If we can get to $350,000 by the end of today we’ll be within shooting distance of the pace we’ll need to get to our goal of $500,000 by the end of the drive.
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.
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