Let me expand a bit on the RFK Jr. discussion from yesterday. It’s now clear that Kennedy will drop out tomorrow and that he will endorse Trump. I mean, clear as anything with two confirmed weirdos can be. But that’s what all the big publications are reporting, so we’ll assume that’s the case. I went through the numbers again and looked closely at what those most immersed in them think. If we look strictly at the numbers, the odds are likely that Trump gains some modest benefit. But it’s very modest. Elliott Morris, new top guy at 538, has become one of my go-tos on these things. He looked at their data which says that Kennedy dropping out of the race loses Harris two-tenths of a percentage point on her current lead. That’s not nothing in a race we all know will be very close. But it’s not far from nothing.

My only take tonight is that I feel confident that Kamala Harris made the right decision picking Tim Walz. Walz is good in his own right. But he complements Harris, tonally, culturally. This was the right call.

If you haven’t seen, just in the last hour or so there are indications that RFK Jr is planning to drop out of the race and endorse Donald Trump. Kennedy’s campaign has put out word that he’ll be giving a speech about the “path forward” in Phoenix. And people are noting that Trump is supposed to be in Phoenix Friday too. The reporting suggests that the Kennedy people are signaling something like an endorsement. But who knows. That’s what it looks like to me. But we will know Friday, if not sooner.

A few points on this. The first one is that there’s some evidence that Kennedy is now hurting Trump more than Harris. Obviously Trump thinks so or he wouldn’t be trying to get Kennedy to drop out. Polls suggest that the balance changed after Harris got into the race. The more Dem-adjacent supporters basically went to Harris. So in this still very tight race, this could hurt Harris in the horse race numbers.

Well, there it is. We just flew past our goal of raising $500,000 in this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re currently at $503,822. I want to say just a big, big thank you. We started this year’s drive with a relative confidence we could hit this mark. But you simply never know. Each year people’s moods are different. The economy is different. And these are just very big numbers. Each new time is really like a trust fall all over again. I personally want to thank the whole TPM team whose collective work this result is based on. The site promos will stay up a bit longer. And of course you are very welcome to continue contribute. Every extra dollar will be put to very good use. But this was our critical goal. So this will be my last post pitching you on this year’s drive.

Truly, we thank you. I thank you. We couldn’t be happier and prouder.

We are down to under $35,000 $31,000 $12,000 $10,000 before we hit $500,000. We’re in the final countdown. I’m trying to balance my and our excitement that we’re going to hit the goal with whatever encouragement I can give you to help us get past the finish line. But I’ll just say we’re so pumped and also … well, this is a great time to contribute! Just click here.

Victory, success, publishing salvation is now in reach, folks! You’ve stood with us for four weeks of this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. And we’re almost at the finish line. We’re just over 9/10ths of the way toward our goal. 4,157 TPM readers have contributed a total of $456,553 dollars, an immense sum. So we’re just $44,000 short of our goal of raising $500,000, which we are now pretty sure we will hit this week. I like to step back at these moments and marvel at this show of support. It’s an immense sum contributed by more than 4,000 of our members over and above their annual subscriptions. (The vast, vast majority of contributors are also members.)

If you’ve been planning on contributing but haven’t gotten around to it, I encourage you to make today the day. Just click right here. It’s super quick and easy.

I wanted to tell you about a new election news site which is actually a very old one. You’re likely familiar with Daily Kos Elections. If you’re not, it’s long been a section of the Daily Kos website which specializes in downballot races. In other words, all the races besides presidential races. They don’t totally ignore presidential contests, of course. But their bread and butter is everything else. That means congressional races, especially ones operating below the radar. They’re even more priceless on everything below the level of federal elections: state legislatives contests, state secretaries of state, state Supreme Court elections, district attorneys, etc. As we’ve learned over the last decade, those offices are the true taproots and ballast of political power in the United States. Presidents are the great lumbering apex predator of the political ecosystem who exist and survive only because of all the lesser known parts of that ecosystem.

Over a couple decades, DKE became an irreplaceable source of information for all the nitty-gritty of electoral life in American politics. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the quality of their work is that their following was bipartisan. If the information is solid and you can’t find it anywhere else, everyone wants to have it, regardless of who they want to win the election. This has always been my standard in the world of independent and engaged media: have your reporting be good enough, clear enough and sufficiently free of cant that it becomes a must-read even for those who don’t share your political viewpoint. That’s their calling card. They’re really that good. It’s an ironic day to make this recommendation since we begin today the quadrennial four-day festival of worship in the cult of presidenting. But I’m telling you this because DKE is now hiving off from Daily Kos and relaunching as a independent website called TheDownballot. They actually launched at the end of last week. I can’t recommend their work strongly enough. It’s where you go to get the details, to find out which races are really going to matter, and to find leads on where change is happening, where you go to see the cacophony of data kicked up by political life corralled into usable datasets. It’s also the kind of work worth supporting with your dollars, sort of like the coral reefs of nitty gritty political knowledge, if you will.

So that’s my pitch. Needless to say, I’m not involved financially or otherwise with TheDownballot. My only relationship is as a consumer of their work over many years. Check them out.

One of the things that happens in the world of digital media is that your published writings are always at your fingertips and can vanish in an instant. Some publications go under entirely and their back catalog disappears. Today I was discussing a new Maureen Dowd column about the “coup,” as she put it, against Joe Biden (good lord…) and I was reminded that the first piece of journalism I ever published in an actual publication was about Dowd. I tried to find it and realized it was no longer online. But I didn’t want to leave it there, so I went back to my email archive, found the emails with the person who edited it and got the original URL. With the original URL I was able to track it down on the WayBack Machine. My memory was a bit off. But I was close. It wasn’t the first piece I published. That was two years earlier. I conflated the two because they were both published in the same publication, Feed Magazine, one of the great now-departed publications from the first wave of Internet journalism.

I was excited to find it. It was a piece I was kind of proud of because I was still very early in my journalism career and I was able to hit a number of themes that were important to me. Reading it again I realize that a number of those are ones that have been constants through my writing at TPM. I realized that since I own the copyright and the publication was defunct (for at least 20 years) I should simply republish it here at TPM so it’s resurrected digitally and I can refer back to it whenever needed.

It was published on April 19th, 1999, on the occasion of Dowd receiving a Pulitzer for her commentary on the Lewinsky scandal. The original, as published 25 years ago, you can find after the jump.