This is huge: In a new poll released Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has taken an enormous lead on former president Donald Trump among independent voters. Harris is up nine points with that group (53%-44%) after being down 14 points with them when she launched her campaign just two weeks ago Kamala Harris and Tim Walz debut at Philadelphia rallyKamala Harris and Tim Walz debut at Philadelphia rally In early July, Trump was beating President Joe Biden by four points with independents. Overall, Harris has built a 51%-48% lead over Trump, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. That’s a four-point improvement for Harris, who became the Democratic choice when Biden bowed out. Harris maintains a three-point lead (48%-45%) when third-party choices are included. Harris leads by 13 points with women (55%-42%), but is losing men by nine points (54%-45%). Here are other breakdowns, according to NPR: Fueling her rise are Black voters, white women with college degrees and women who identify as political independents.
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Providing tampons for high school students is something the Trump people seem to think is very weird. I think most people probably think it’s weird not to. Why do they care about this stuff so much? Former President Trump’s campaign and supporters are going after Vice President Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), dubbing him “Tampon Tim” in reference to a bill he signed last year requiring schools to provide free menstrual products in all public school bathrooms. The Minnesota law, which went into effect Jan. 1, mandates menstrual products — including pads, tampons and other items — “must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades 4 to 12 according to a plan developed by the school district.” State Republican lawmakers pushed back on the legislation at the time, but ultimately failed to amend the bill to apply only for girls’ bathrooms. […] The primary super PAC supporting Trump called Walz a “weird radical liberal,” as part of a new campaign ad against the governor.
Brian Beutler says moderates should stop worrying that the Real Americans are going to run for the hills: The implicit premise, familiar to every Democrat in politics, is that Republicans will declare all progressive ideas “socialism” whether their contents or proponents are socialist or not. One school of liberal thought holds that Democrats should thus downplay these kinds of ideas—avoid bad-faith GOP backlash and seize the center through the absence of controversy. Another holds that Democrats can defeat Republicans in a contest to define the issues. As a liberal politician, you can run away from the idea of universal school lunch, because Republicans will call it socialism, or you can run toward it, while persuading people that it isn’t socialism, it’s neighborliness. If you opt for the latter, you can go a step further by noting that stripping free lunch from hungry children, or making school lunch programs a source of stigma for the children of poor parents, are ideas that only animate people of troubling character.
I keep hearing that we needn’t take Trump and company seriously about this fascist stuff. Really? Maduro is not a right winger. This is not about ideology. It’s about authoritarianism. That’s what he cares about. So when you hear people saying that the “threat to democracy” isn’t worth talking about, keep this in mind.
Time is running out to be on it “It’s OK to vote against Donald Trump,” Mesa, Arizona’s Republican mayor, John Giles told a press conference on Monday. Giles remains a registered Republican but is stumping for Kamala Harris. He hopes to see the GOP “get away from the personality cult our party has become.” “I think the time has come for us as Arizona Republicans to admit the obvious,” Giles told reporters, “which is that our party’s nominee is not qualified for office and that we need to vote for the adult in the room, and that is Kamala Harris.” “Character matters,” said former GOP state Rep. Robin Shaw. The Harris campaign days ago named Giles and Shaw to head up a task force to do outreach to Arizona Republicans: “As a lifelong Arizonan and longtime Republican, I strongly believe in defending democracy and standing up for our personal freedoms. Donald Trump and JD Vance represent the greatest threat to American values and institutions that I have seen in my lifetime – and that’s why I am committed to defeating him in November,” Giles said in a written statement.
Middle-American White Dad I felt that all the choices were pretty good and Walz is one of the best. He’s a progressive who knows how to talk about progressive issues in ways that sound very accessible to middle Americans. He’s an American archetype — a football coach. I think he makes a very good pair with Harris.
The more people see that decrepit Liberace clone the Republicans are running for president up against Kamala Harris, the worse he looks: A Morning Consult poll published Monday revealed that voters are suddenly viewing Trump as the decrepit candidate after Biden dropped his campaign. Americans are apparently far more likely to describe Vice President Kamala Harris as healthy, mentally fit, and a strong leader than the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee. According to the poll, 71 percent of respondents agreed that Harris was “in good health,” while 52 percent said the same about Trump—6 percent fewer than believed the same about Trump when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee. The number of respondents who thought that Trump was “mentally fit” for the job also dropped. Roughly 64 percent of respondents believed that Harris was mentally fit, while just 48 percent believed the same about Trump—a 5 percent drop from before Biden withdrew. Meanwhile, the number of respondents who believed that Trump is too old for the job rose.
I’d forgotten this:
Bunch writes: On Friday, the Washington Post broke a bombshell story about a credible allegation of bribery involving the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Egypt’s dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and a mysterious $10 million all-cash withdrawal from an Egyptian state-run bank just five days before Trump became president — and adopted a more friendly aid policy toward the Middle Eastern nation. The rumors of such an investigation have kicked around for years — most famously in the latter days of Trump’s term when part of a federal courthouse was closed off while prosecutors pushed for records from the Egyptian bank, although few details were known at the time. The new Post investigation revealed a stunning detail — that the Cairo bank had received a note from an agency believed to be Egyptian intelligence to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million in two, 100-pound bags full of U.S. $100 bills, five days before Trump became 45th president. The case, which kicked off with a tip from a credible U.S.
Monkey-wrenching the democracies “The real threat to democracy is a failure to imagine the worst-case scenario,” Tony Gerber, co-director with Jesse Moss, told NPR Monday in an interview about their new documentary War Game. The film simulates U.S. officials responding to a post-election coup after a disputed election. “Insurgents take capitals, questioning the president’s military control,” says IMDB. Officials must counter a “Red Cell” radical faction coordinated by a fictional “Order of Columbus.” Gerber is wrong here. The real threat to democracy is the flagged-bedecked Americans in diapers who have rejected democracy, the Constitution, and America’s founding vision for strongman rule. (And Supreme Court justices prepared to prop it up.) Republicans plan to open a second front after November 5. The election they expect to lose at the ballot box they plan to win, or at least thwart, in court. Georgia is just one battlefield. But the threat of violence War Game postulates is real. For those not paying attention, right-wing riots broke out over the weekend across England and in Ireland. Police arrested hundreds.