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Stuart Stevens tweeted this about the Trump campaign. It’s so, so true: Watching the Harris campaign vs. Trump, it’s striking how much of a higher level the Harris campaign is operating. It’s NFL vs. Division 2 college, at best. Why? Part of it, of course, comes from Trump, who has made a mess of every organization he has ever controlled. But there’s another factor: Democrats have developed a much deeper bench of skilled political operatives. In 1999, the Bush campaign assembled the best Republican political talent in Austin. In the 2000 campaign, the Bush campaign performed at a significantly higher level than the Gore campaign, which was sort of a mess, moving HQ from DC to Nashville, etc. Cut to 2016. Most top level operatives did not want anything to do with the Trump campaign. It assembled a collection of second and third-stringers, weirdos, all the sort of people who had been trying to work at the presidential level, but nobody would let them in. Yes, Trump won, but it’s hard to say that his campaign performed at a higher level.

Oh, I hope so. I really hope so. Tomorrow is election day, the last day of voting in this tumultuous 2024 campaign. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Just a year ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was challenging former president Trump for the GOP nomination by saying the word “woke” at least a hundred times a day while former S. Carolina Gov Nikki Haley competed for what’s left of the “normie” Republican vote. A clown car full of grifters and kooks, meanwhile, used the primaries as an opportunity to suck up to Trump, whom everyone knew would inevitably be the nominee. After all, he’d been running non-stop since 2015. Meanwhile on the Democratic side, incumbent president Joe Biden was an unchallenged shoo-in for the Democratic nomination and most people felt he’d probably be able to replicate his 2020 win despite being unpopular due to a lingering hangover from the pandemic. After all, Trump had incited an insurrection and was facing lawsuits and felony trials in federal court and two different states stemming from a variety of alleged crimes. Surely, he couldn’t possibly win after all that?

He actually thinks that in a close election you can count all the votes by 9 o’clock on election night. He’s is literally brain damaged. If he didn’t need Artizona and Nevada I wouldn’t be surprised if he declared victory at 9 pm est tomorrow night, long before the polls have closed in the rest of the country. In fact, he may just do it anyway, declaring that he has it won in already in the Blue Wall and Georgia/N Carolina regardless of the count. I wish I believed that his cult would see how ridiculous that is but they won’t. He has nothing to lose by declaring victory immediately because the actual results don’t matter either way. If he wins, he’ll say he should have won bigger and if he loses, well … we know how that goes. This is lunacy.

I think we can call that “low energy” don’t you?

So, right-leaning pollsters dropped a whole bunch of new polls showing Trump doing well today. There’s no reason for it except to gin up the expectations among the Trump cult so that if he loses they can … do what? Write amicus briefs? Stand outside courtrooms holding signs? I don’t think so. Here’s a little preview of what they may be planning: Brandon Matlack, a coordinator for a group boosting former president Donald Trump’s election effort, was camped outside an election office in Pennsylvania’s Northampton County when he posted a video Tuesday on the social network X asking his 3,000 followers for help identifying a “very suspect” man he’d seen just drop off “an insane amount of ballots.” Within minutes, his video had gone viral — cross-posted to Facebook groups, Rumble videos, Telegram channels and pro-Trump forums as visual evidence of election fraud. On X, the video raced to the top of a special “Election Integrity” feed newly promoted by its billionaire owner Elon Musk, where posts sharing the man’s face and license plate were viewed millions of times.

This from Dan Pfeiffer: Looking at the fundamentals, we shouldn’t even be in this race. This is a brutal political environment. Three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Two-thirds are unhappy about the economy. The incumbent President ran for reelection despite huge misgivings about his age and then had a debate so disastrous that he had to drop out only a few months before the election. Nate Cohn summed up the challenges in the New York Times: For the first time in decades, Republicans have pulled even or ahead in nationwide party identification. Polls also find Republicans with an edge on most key issues — with democracy and abortion standing as significant exceptions. The Democrats’ challenge appears to be part of a broader trend of political struggles for ruling parties across the developed world. Voters appear eager for change when they get the chance. The ruling parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and most recently Japan all faced electoral setbacks or lost power. Mr. Trump himself lost four years ago. France and Canada might well join the list. Trump should be running away with it.

This gold standard poll, which called the last two presidential election when everyone else had it wrong, in September had Trump 47 and Harris 43. This is all about women including independent women and women over 65 breaking hard for her in the last month. I wonder why? The analysis from most of the strategists say that this portends victory, at the very least, in the Blue Wall states and could indicated a massive shift from women, particularly white women (Iowa is almost all white), elsewhere. Let’s just say that Democrats are pretty stoked right now.

Your vote, your citizenship, still means something Don’t it always seem to goThat you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone? @whistlingvivaldi knows what he’s got and what it means. Don’t let that Big Orange Garbage Truck take away any more of what you’ve got. @whistlingvivaldi https://www.vote.org/ #election #politics #dnc #rnc #election2024 ♬ original sound – Whistling Vivaldi 🇭🇹 🇺🇸 >

Millionaire garbage and billionaire fools American politics look different with a little geographic perspective. 7News Melbourne has plenty of distance for it. I had to check to be sure this wasn’t an Australian version of SNL’s Weekend Update. Stuart Stevens says what we’ve all known about Donald Trump’s subcontracting the RNC’s GOTV operation to Elon Musk and PACs like America Pac, Turnout for America, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and America First Works. The con man is being conned: One of the more amusing aspects of this campaign has been watching @elonmuskmake a fool of himself babbling on about a subject he is completely ignorant. The consultants he is paying to set up an “organization” are taking advantage of him like an 18 year old frat boy with $1,000 in a strip club. They tell him what he wants to hear, and he puts in more money. There is a view that Musk is not some genius, that he stumbled into making a fortune in PayPal (which was a stumble; read Peter Thiel’s biography, “The Contrarian”) and had a lot of ambition and passions and a high risk tolerance.

A great surrogate speech: Some people just surprise you. She’s really good at this.