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 look at a decent number of new polls out today. They paint a mixed and complicated picture. There’s no other way to put it. Two new national polls have a tied race. On it’s face, that’s not a great sign for Harris. A tie popular vote is very likely to mean defeat. But it’s not that simple. The two polls are from Pew and the Harris Poll. Pew is a very solid poll but generally unfriendly to Democrats in recent cycles. So for instance at the height of the Kamala surge they had her up one point over Trump. Now it’s even. Not a big a difference. The Harris poll (really the zombie Harris poll now owned and operated by Mark Penn) meanwhile is not just extremely unfriendly to Democrats but closer to Rasmussen territory. (Just to avoid confusion, let’s christen it the Penn-Harris poll.) In other words, we’re not just talking a house effect generally unfriendly to Democrats but really a question in my mind whether it should even be considered a legitimate poll. Taken together I think it’s fair to assume there may be some leveling off of Kamala Harris’ support. But I don’t think there’s real evidence of some kind of sea change in the race.

I wanted to share a few thoughts about the Times/Siena poll which has sent more than a few people reeling today. If you haven’t seen it, the new Times/Siena poll shows Donald Trump with a one-point lead over Harris nationally. That’s the first major poll to show Trump in the lead in weeks. What do I make of it? Not a huge amount. And I would recommend the same to anyone else.

It’s certainly possible that this is a leading indicator of a shift in support away from Harris after a month and a half of generally positive news and poll numbers. But you simply can’t change your whole theory of the race around a single poll. I’m not going to get into picking apart all the details of the poll. And I’m definitely not going to try to unskew it. It’s a quality poll. But it does show a very different race than other polls we’re seeing — ones taken over the same time period, ones with which we’re able to make pretty straightforward apples-to-apples comparisons. It’s not just the top-line number that’s different. It shows a more popular Trump, a less popular Harris, key demographics much closer to how they were when Joe Biden was still the nominee.

One of the great mysteries of the world is how the news gets made. Theories abound. The reality is every newsroom is its own little ecosystem with its own way of doing things. I worked in several newsrooms before arriving at TPM, and TPM operates in a way that was vastly different from any other. I noticed the conspicuous lack of meetings and that nobody really had a “beat” — two things I had supposed were universal. But of course, TPM is not your average news gathering operation. So, in this episode of Inside TPM, I spoke to Managing Editor John Light to find out how the news gets made at TPM. We discussed how the team decides what is newsworthy, how the team tries to serve readers, and even how he thinks TPM would cover Tony Soprano if he were a real person. (The answer surprised me!)

All that and more in this month’s episode of Inside TPM.