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A bunch of polls out today showing that a huge majority of Democrats want a different presidential candidate but the race is still within the margin of error. So, as I have said before, Democrats will walk over hot coals to vote for a fetid pile of garbage over Donald Trump;. The question remains how many of those independent swing voters and 3rd party types will do the same. The race is still stuck. This is the NBC poll: In case you’re wondering whether Harris does better well, yes and no, depending: [T]he poll showed Trump doing slightly better among white voters when matched up with Harris instead of Biden, leading her by 16 points among these voters, compared with his 14-point advantage here against Biden. (These subgroups of voters, however, all have substantially larger margins of error than the poll’s overall margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.) Among other demographics — by age, by gender, among Latino voters — there was very little difference between Biden or Harris. But the biggest differences between Biden and Harris in the matchup against Trump go well beyond demographics.

The Midas Cult strikes back Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to. His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them: “Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.” There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy.

Meanwhile: I have serious doubts the Democrats can win with this dynamic. I don’t know that it will change if Biden gets out but it’s guaranteed that it won’t if he stays in. This isn’t the first time the press has put its thumb on the scale of the Democratic choice for president. We know that. In fact, they do it more often than not. Maybe this time it’s for the best but it doesn’t make it right. It usually doesn’t work out well for the good guys.

The new UK government is signaling some reasonably ambitious reforms on the labour policy front (certainly more ambitious than most were expecting, given the Labour Party’s austere pre-election rhetoric and platform). They call the vision a New Deal for Working People . The policy framework is called A Plan to Make Work Pay. Broad features of the plan were mapped [...]

This is frighteningly close to reality.

Trump is getting so cocky. He picks Vance which was a mistake. And then this: Uh huh. Honestly, this surprises me. I thought he’d have her at the convention sitting in the audience for his speech. And maybe he will. But not to have called her immediately was a huge error.

Trump, Vance, Project 2025 Zack Beauchamp over at Vox reflects on his encounter with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) in 2022. In 20 words or less: “He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed.” Also, Vance’s “worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.” Donald Trump selected Vance as his election-denying 2024 running mate on Monday. A mere 18 months into his first-ever elected office, Vance is another in the line of “best people” Trump has selected, and ready to step into the Oval Office when Trump is gone. A second Trump administration, Vance suggests, should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” And if a court objects, Trump should ignore the law. It’s a king’s divine right. Vance is an admirer of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Democrats have the better turnout operation Minutes before the Pennsylvania shooting on Saturday, Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, argued before a Netroots nation audience in Baltimore that the fundamentals of this presidential election still favor Democrats. Don’t panic. Whatever the progressive left thought in 2020, Black voters in South Carolina “picked the least inspiring, most boring candidate” in the Democratic field. What we got for that choice was a win that November and, unexpectedly, “a great president.” Many Democrats who should have second-guessed themselves in 2020 are failing to do it again in 2024. Every day we focus on Biden’s age is a day Donald Trump wins the news cycle. Meantime, Democrats have overperformed the polls in special elections. They’ve won abortion-related ballot initiatives everywhere while Trump underperformed in his primaries. Republicans tell pollsters they support Trump, Markos reminded, but then don’t show up for him. Voters proved polling favoring the right wing wrong in India, in Poland, and in France. You don’t have to be Simon Rosenberg to have Hopium.

I know most of you probably spared yourselves the pain of watching the right wing Trumpfest last night. Here are a few of the more indicative moments of the “unity” convention: It was awful. Of course it was.