I want to send a huge thank you to the 1601 TPM Readers who have given so far to this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We are currently at just over $212,000 and we really want to get to the halfway point of $250,000 toward our goal of $500,000 by the end of the first week of the drive. So if you’ve been considering contributing, can you take a moment and make it today? It is, I believe, a great and important cause, keeping TPM here, vital and robust for the future. If you’re ready, just click right here. We thank you, our whole team.

We now have three polls post-Biden departure: One with Harris 2 points up, another with Trump 2 points up and a third with Trump up by 1. I would call these numbers encouraging.

I wanted to do a short post on expectations setting now that we’ve absorbed the stunning and sometimes euphoric news of the last 48 hours. What will the polls say about this new race? What are Harris’s chances of winning? As my colleague David Kurtz has rightly stated, we’re truly flying blind here. There are so many unprecedented variables we can’t be certain about anything. My own best guess is that we should be not so much expecting but prepared to see Harris roughly where Joe Biden was before the late June debate. That speculation is based mostly on the fact that the polls have been primarily driven by the size of the Republican and Democratic voting blocks with a large percentage of voters supporting third party candidates.

We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

I’ve mentioned a few times that the theme for this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive is “preparing TPM for what comes next.” At the moment not only do we not have a clear idea of what comes next in 2025, we don’t even have a clear idea of what comes next tomorrow. We live in uncertain times. And that’s why we think TPM is as important as its ever been. So if you haven’t found a moment yet to contribute to this year’s drive, please take a moment right now. Just click right here. It’s a great way to start the week. To get 50% of the way toward our goal of $500,000 by the end of the first week of the drive we need to get to $200,000 by the end of today. That’s just less than $10,000 more than we’ve raised so far ($190,340). If you’re ready to take the plunge just click right here.

Our whole team thanks you.