Welcome to Thunderdome, or as David Axelrod calls it, Word Salad City. Kamala Harris’s closing argument played out in a CNN town hall last night, and it wasn’t much of an argument at all. On question after question, Harris reverted to talking points that often had little or nothing to do with the query posed to her. On the border? No answer on why the administration took so long to act. On taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal migrants? I was a prosecutor. On a border wall? It’s a dumb idea that I now say is a good idea. On taxes? It’s a very complicated situation. On food inflation? Greedy price gouging grocers. On her weaknesses? They’re actually strengths. On any mistakes she’s made? She’s very well versed on issues. On the one single legislative priority she’ll have as president? Here’s a list to rival the Cheesecake Factory. On the filibuster? Apparently it’s in the House now — and we need to get rid of it to have Roe.

Other than that, everything went off swimmingly.

So here’s what we’ve got: a candidate who really does seem to be incapable of finding her way into bettering her closing message outside of abortion abortion abortion and Trump being Orange Hitler.

This is really all they can come up with? It’s a decidedly joyless way to finish this race, and it has seeped into the minds of Democrats, frustrating their voters as they wish she’d come up with something, anything, to fire back at a Trump-Vance ticket that has settled into a combination of McDonald’s-style showmanship and savage media bashing that is comfortably in their wheelhouse. The late-breaking anti-Trump stories aren’t making a dent, and the late-night hosts can only do so much covering for her. As Mark Halperin has been saying recently: it’s no longer even a contest between which candidate is having more fun on the trail. And it’s not hard to see why:

The national survey finds that Trump is leading Harris by two percentage points, 47 percent to 45 percent, compared with a Harris lead of two points in the Journal’s August survey on a ballot that includes third-party and independent candidates. Both leads are within the polls’ margins of error, meaning that either candidate could actually be ahead.

The survey suggests that a barrage of negative advertising in the campaign and the performance of the candidates themselves have undermined some of the positive impressions of Harris that voters developed after she replaced President Biden as the presumed and then confirmed Democratic nominee. 

Views of Harris have turned more negative since August, when equal shares of voters viewed her favorably and unfavorably. Now, the unfavorable views are dominant by 8 percentage points, 53 percent to 45 percent. Moreover, voters give Harris her worst job rating as vice president in the three times the Journal has asked about it since July, with 42 percent approving and 54 percent disapproving of her performance. 

That’s not where you want to be. The more voters have seen of Kamala, the less they like her — and the more questions she leaves hanging in the air, the more times the takeaway is that she can’t or won’t answer. If she wins, expect it to come down to more traditional factors than the message — which is why at this point Democrats need to be hoping and praying for a ground game machine that doesn’t need to run on joy.

About that Atlantic piece

I wrote my take on why you shouldn’t trust Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeff Goldberg’s latest hit piece yesterday, but as usual, David Harsanyi did it better:

It’s not that the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffery Goldberg, has the journalistic ethics of a drunk National Enquirer reporter. It’s that the entire media spreads his gossip without a hint of skepticism.

A new hit piece from the Atlantic, reminiscent of an old hit piece from the publication, reported that former president Donald Trump belittled a dead soldier and praised Hitler’s generals (and what self-respecting piece about Trump doesn’t mention der Fuhrer?)

The first thing to remember is that Goldberg could literally make up any quote from an alleged “anonymous” source, and he would face no repercussions. No major outlet will challenge the veracity of his shoddy work, which breaks numerous journalistic norms, because his accusations are aimed at the right target. The media, after all, is now the democracy-saving business.

The owner of the famed magazine certainly doesn’t give one wit about its integrity either. The Atlantic, which loses tens of millions of dollars every year, is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who isn’t worried about the magazine’s 164-year tradition of “challenging assumptions and pursuing truth.” Rather, as she explained to her ”close” and “genuine” friend, Vice President Kamala Harris, at an event not long ago, she wants to lift up “cultural narratives” that will create “a more just and equal society.”

Goldberg’s 2024 narrative is suffering from the same problems his 2020 “suckers and losers” hit piece did. Anonymous sources make claims that a bunch of on-the-record people contradict. There’s a 0 percent chance that any reputable newspaper, ten-twenty years ago, would have run a story about a president demeaning fallen American servicemen based on an anonymous source without any corroboration.

Recall that, back in 2020, the entire establishment media and numerous social media platforms refused to share the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop, which richly detailed how the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and his son were involved in an international influence peddling scheme. The story, they said, could not be independently verified.

Now, it was funny because the media had spent over four years decimating their reputations by spreading histrionic conspiracy theories about Russian collusion. Indeed, the New York Post exercised a far higher standard of professionalism than any of them. Incidentally, every part of the Hunter Biden story was confirmed true not only by numerous on-the-record sources but also by Hunter Biden himself.

It was also funny because a month earlier, Goldberg published his “suckers and losers” piece, and virtually every media outlet spread the story as a fact, though none had verified the story. They’re doing the same thing again.

No matter the result, populism is winning

From Brad Todd.

Candidate Joe Biden, who was once fluent in the language of populism before he was neutered by a career’s worth of Capitol cocktail parties, limped into office as the latest tool of the elite. A man whose peers were far too old to form an administration, Biden instead borrowed the talent of the activist coastal left.

Dragging through a 2024 race he was too addled to steer, Biden spent the first year of his re-election effort reading tele-prompter screeds meant only to juice the derangement his base feels toward Trump, the man. Harris, once thrust onto the ticket’s top chair, has braided a different and more coherent platform.

If you watch the veep’s ubiquitous TV ads or suffer through the word salads of her interviews, when she’s not prattling about abortion, you pick up a thick common chord: a populism that’s at least a distant cousin of Trump’s spiel on one of his good days.

Harris talks about whacking the rich and corporations with new taxes, while cutting taxes for the middle class. She pitches deductions for small businesses and a new child tax credit that Trump also endorses. She promises new federal laws to target price-gouging corporations, the villains in our inflation age, by her telling. These little vs. big narratives take up at least half of what she’s saying — never mind that they fly directly in the face of what she’s said and done for most of her career as a California elitist.

Trump, for his part, says he’ll make insurance companies pay for fertility treatments and make interest on car payments tax deductible — as if he didn’t have enough populist street cred already.

Gone are the days of GOP nominees chiding Democrats for government giveaways. Gone too are the honest liberals unafraid to say the middle class must sacrifice to redistribute to the poor.

This indie female voter is backing Trump

From Cat Castellanos.

On Election Day 2016, I returned to my California home after a surf and turned on CNN to find my dad prophesying Trump’s victory.  I proudly tore the “I VOTED” sticker from my wetsuit: I’d just voted for Hillary.  

It wasn’t just Republican shame that sent me dripping to the polls. I remained a fiscal conservative. I believed in trickle-down economics, tax cuts to propel bottom-up growth, and the government staying out of my damn business. Socially, however, I leaned liberal. I wanted to inhabit the Everyman persona attributed to Democrats, someone who fights for social equality, supports welfare programs, and cares about the turtles.   

Fast forward again, this time to 2020. Like many, I moved home during the pandemic. Unlike many, I stayed. With my parents. Yes, you read that right. I am sleeping in my childhood bedroom. To be fair, my parents have provided tremendous support as I’ve been ill for the last four years.  Why this digression? Because when you are too sick to get off the sofa, you are too sick to combat a constant stream of Fox News. An eternal optimist, I chose to lean into this unexpected circumstance, creating a family rallying cry of “Let’s get outraged!” every night before we turned on The Five.   

Whenever The Five said something… outrageous, I’d make my father pause the TV and ask, “Why are the Dems saying Trump wants to stop IVF?  That can’t be true, can it?  If I were on David Axelrod’s sofa right now, what would he say, other than ‘Why are we watching Fox?’”   

“It’s not true,” my dad said. 

I did the research. He was right.  

Like many voters in our polarized world, I’m straddling the divide between Democrat and Republican. Our nation has never been angrier and more torn apart by Twitter, attack ads and our desperation to make things right.  I refuse to let fear guide me. Here is where I come down. 

I do not know what Kamala Harris stands for. I don’t think she does, either. I find her obtuse and ill-prepared. She has shared her talking points, not her values. As a card-carrying member of the vagina club, however, the idea of voting for Trump is painful. He is caustic and hyperbolic. Voting for either one is voting for a Magic 8 Ball. Who knows what answer it will provide? 

In the end, I do not trust the government to make the best decisions for me, about my body or my business. This time around, I will vote for the party, not the person.  

Don’t let me down, @realDonaldTrump. I’m trusting you with my vote November 5. Consider it a victory for good parenting: Mom and Dad raised an independent soul.  

One more thing

It’s the stuff of campaign nightmares: in a planned shooting event featuring Adam Kinzinger, Missouri Democrat Lucas Kunce — who is headed for likely defeat in his attempt to challenge incumbent Josh Hawley — attempted to show off his military background mettle on the gun range. The range, which is apparently unofficial and housed on a supporter’s land, had the pair shooting AR-15s at steel targets at a range of ten yards. As any smart gun owner can tell you can happen in such a jury rigged close range set-up, a ricochet hit a nearby journalist covering the event, necessitating a turn to the first aid kit and a slew of embarrassing stories. And now it looks like there’s some question of the range owner’s ability to even possess firearms as conditions of a legal dispute with his ex-wife. As the Kansas City Star reports, “Hawley and his campaign spent much of Wednesday sharing jokes about the incident on social media – including by mocking a video Kunce made in 2021 saying he didn’t need to shoot guns in political ads to prove his masculinity.” Sure, but it doesn’t hurt — except if you happen to do everything wrong.