Stuart Rothenberg is one of those old school election watcher/analyst types, from the pre-poll aggregator, pre-538 era. Rothenberg, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato etc. His new column out from him in Roll Call caught my eye. The gist is simple enough. While he’s not predicting this outcome, Rothenberg says we shouldn’t be surprised if the 2024 presidential actually turns out not to be that close, despite the fact that a photo finish is the one thing everyone on every side of the race seems to agree on. He points to new high quality polls out of Pennsylvania and Iowa which suggest the race may not be quite as close as we all universally assume. And Rothenberg is not the type you’d generally expect to predict or hint at something like this. As Rothenberg puts it, after detailing this universal consensus: “[I]f you are something of a gambler and everyone you know believes the 2024 presidential contest is and will remain extremely close, you probably should put a few dollars on the possibility that November will produce a clear and convincing win for Harris.”

When a young man took a shot at Donald Trump in July it was the first time political assassination, attempted or otherwise, had intruded into presidential politics in more than 40 years. Now it appears to have happened a second time in two months. What’s going on here? It comes almost a week after Donald Trump and JD Vance began a campaign of racist anti-immigrant incitement focused on Springfield, Ohio, an effort so destructive and reckless that the Republican mayor and at least two of the three Republican County supervisors have either begged Trump to stop or publicly questioned whether they will even vote for him because they’re so upset about it. The city has been rocked over the last week by repeated bomb threats, school evacuations, the shuttering of one local college which has moved to remote study. This isn’t even counting the experience of Haitian migrants who are being terrorized by the pro-Trump extremists Trump and Vance have incited against them.

TPM Reader DB pressed me yesterday to connect the dots. Because of JD Vance’s racist incitements to violence, now joined by Donald Trump, immigrants from Haiti in Springfield, Ohio, are cowering in their homes, holding their children back from school. Bomb threats have forced evacuations of the town municipal buildings and schools. We can only hope that it doesn’t escalate from here to assaults and murders. But there’s no question this is a community under siege. Vance says full speed ahead, tweeting to his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing” or, in other words, keep pushing the story.

I wrote soon after Kamala Harris become the de facto Democratic nominee that I did not think that Donald Trump had the mental acuity, stamina or energy to fight for the presidency from behind. As long as he was a bit ahead — very durably a bit ahead — his energy and focus didn’t seem to matter. Everything I’ve seen since then has confirmed this judgment. Tuesday’s debate did so perhaps more than anything. But what I’ve also been increasingly aware of is that Trump has two campaigns in a way that is almost unique in modern presidential politics.

First, there’s Donald Trump, the guy we saw in the debate, the guy we see at the rallies and the guy Trump is, mostly, on social media. (People like Dan Scavino tweet for him sometimes. But even then it’s more an impersonation of feral Trump.) This persona was really the entirety of the campaign in 2016 because there just wasn’t any campaign infrastructure around, though a bit was built up in the last couple months. This campaign is mostly about Trump’s anger and grievances and shows all the signs not only of his longstanding degeneracy but his cognitive and personal decline over the last decade. Let’s call it the Trump campaign. But then there’s an entirely distinct and relatively traditional campaign being run by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. That campaign wants to talk about inflation and the southern border. That campaign is running a vast and complex TV air war across all the swing states. Let’s call this the “Trump” campaign.

I wanted to share a few more thoughts about last night’s debate. You can find my overnight wrap-up here.

There are two realities: First, the race is going to remain close. It’s going to be a slog right up to Election Day, and Trump could win. Second, Harris thoroughly dominated and even humiliated Trump from the first minutes of the debate right through to the end. These things are both true. We just don’t know exactly how those two realities are going to interact over the next two months as they combine with other developments, news cycles and possibly new shocks we can’t predict.

Kate and I just recorded this week’s podcast which was basically all about the debate. In those conversations there’s some urge to hold back on saying just how thoroughly Harris dominated him because you don’t want to sound too frothy or exuberant or give people any sense that that thoroughness will be reflected in changes in the polls. My best guess is that it may have a small impact on the horse race polls and drive some negative news cycles for Trump.

Tonight we have the second presidential debate of the 2024 campaign cycle and the first for this presidential campaign. Much as I would like to buck the conventional wisdom, the stakes are genuinely quite high. One poll I saw this morning showed a remarkably high, really impossibly high percentage of voters said that the debate would have a major impact on their vote: 30%. But as debate watchers we come back to a basic conundrum: if you’re paying enough attention to be worked up about the debate you are almost certainly not the intended audience. And not only are you not the intended audience but your experience of the campaign and politics generally is so totally different from that of the intended audience that absent a real suspension of disbelief, a real effort to separate yourself from your own impressions, you’ll have a hard time knowing how each candidate did for the audience that matters.

I wanted to update you on the mailers story I discussed with you yesterday. Before getting to the details, I want to thank everyone who sent in reports. Really, really helpful. In fact, what I’m doing would be completely impossible without them. I’m going to assume you read yesterday’s post, which has various caveats and context. If not, you can read it here.

• First, there are a lot of people talking about this independently in different swing states. Like, it’s really a thing. I was listening in on a Zoom call yesterday about a state legislative race in North Carolina and the topic actually came up — how we’re all getting spammed by these Trump mailers. And to be clear, this was a call where everyone was either a party official or a partisan Democrat or actually a candidate. From this and other discussions with TPM readers it’s clear this is being discussed as a minor mystery among Democrats in each swing state but with everyone thinking that it’s just their town or state and not something that’s happening in all the swing states.

I wanted to share with you some of my findings about the mass mailing of Trump mailers to registered Democrats in swing states across the country. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole. So in part, understand it as such, an entertaining mystery. But I think it’s potentially a bit more than a rabbit hole. It also sheds some light on the dynamics of the campaign, specifically on the Trump campaign, which has firepower heavily weighted toward a series of super PACs and outside groups both for messaging and ground operations.

As I’ve discussed in a few posts, I started hearing from readers who are registered Democrats with long histories of straight-ticket voting who are being inundated with Trump mailers. In some cases it’s as much as two or three mailers a day everyday. Others aren’t quite that level of saturation. But lots of readers who fit in what we’ll call the category of “poor target” are getting them. The reports come from all the swing states, though they’re concentrated in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina. They’re also in Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, but it seems to be a bit less there. In all cases the recipients have never seen anything like it before. So it’s not just that this is what always happens in swing states. Getting this many flyers from any Republican campaign is totally new. It all seems to have started in the last couple weeks.

Here are just a few facts and observations to keep in mind as we move toward Election Day.

• I have heard from numerous TPM readers in swing states, registered Democrats with long histories of voting for Democrats, who are being deluged by Trump flyers, sometimes as many as two or three new ones a day. I’ve heard from enough of them that I don’t think this is just a few people on the wrong list. I think it’s something more general. In the cases where I’ve been able to ask, it’s either mostly or all from Trump super PACs rather than the campaign itself. I don’t know yet whether this is evidence of very inefficient spending or whether the spending is so mammoth that this is in effect the splash created by unprecedented levels of spending.

I wanted to flag two articles to your attention, one from the Post and the other from CNN. They both cover similar ground but in different ways. The gist is that the Trump campaign has essentially given up on trying to improve voters’ impression of Donald Trump and decided the only path to victory is driving down Harris’ favorability numbers. When I first read the Post piece, it had the feel of what journalists call a “source greaser” — a favorable piece aimed at generating good will on the part of the subject and sources of the piece. The quote from GOP consultant Josh Holmes captures the tone of the piece: “I think it’s a serious paper tiger we’re dealing with here. I don’t think for 60 days they can keep the train on the tracks.”