Welcome to Thunderdome. For the past several cycles, Donald Trump has been an anchor around the necks of Republicans running for federal office across the country, forcing them to respond to his every statement of wavering obnoxiousness. “Will you denounce” was practically an autofill statement from journalists, with exasperated Republicans having to suddenly come up with spin on the fly about whatever their top candidate was on about at the moment.

This time around, that weight seems far heavier on Democrats. Witness the reaction to Kamala Harris’s endorsement, after previously calling for getting rid of the filibuster for climate issues and voting rights, to codify Roe v. Wade. The position — in typical fashion, adopted after she previously was emphatically on the opposite side — puts all Senate Democratic candidates in an awkward space of breaking with their presidential nominee or risk being exposed as an anti-democratic radical. What’s more, her off-the-cuff positioning to a public radio interviewer served to deny her an endorsement from Joe Manchin and led to a denunciation from Kyrsten Sinema for an “absolutely terrible, short-sighted idea.” The idea advocated for by biased media members that Harris has any appeal outside of the partisan Democratic coalition continues to prove itself as absolute fantasy. 

The problem for incumbent Democrats and those running for open seats across the country is that unlike Harris, they have to be exposed to the media, doing one interview after another where they have to defend the agenda of a candidate incapable of defending it herself, even to a thoroughly sympathetic interviewer and audience. Even the New York Times couldn’t help but denounce her failure to answer basic questions from fangirl Stephanie Ruhle: 

Ms. Ruhle’s first question was about how Ms. Harris might respond to people who hear her proposals and say, “These policies aren’t for me.” The MSNBC host’s second was about why voters tend to tell pollsters that Mr. Trump is better equipped to handle the economy.

Ms. Harris responded to the fairly basic and predictable questions with roundabout responses that did not provide a substantive answer.

Instead of offering any explanation for why Mr. Trump polls better on the economy — a matter that has vexed Democrats as President Biden has overseen a steadily improving economy — Ms. Harris instead blasted Mr. Trump’s record. She blamed him for a loss of manufacturing and autoworker jobs and said his tariff proposals would serve as an added sales tax on American consumers.

She said nothing about why voters think Mr. Trump and Republicans would be better on the economy. But she did say her policies are for everyone.

“If you are hardworking, if you have the dreams and the ambitions and the aspirations of what I believe you do, you’re in my plan,” Ms. Harris said.

She avoided a looming scenario: what if Democrats lose the Senate? Ms. Harris has been eagerly promoting the big-ticket items on her agenda. A middle-class tax cut, tax increases for the rich and for big corporations. More money for child care and health care.

Ms. Ruhle brought up the elephant in the room: how could any of this happen without Democratic control of the Senate?

This is a key question that hangs over the Harris campaign as Democrats increasingly fear Senator Jon Tester of Montana is in a perilous political situation. If he loses his re-election bid, Democrats would need to flip at least one Republican-held Senate seat to retain control of the chamber — an unlikely prospect given this year’s daunting map for the party.

Ms. Harris skated past Ms. Ruhle’s question about where Democrats would find the money for such proposals without addressing her party’s Senate prospects.

“But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,” she said. “We’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it. It’s about paying their fair share. I am not mad at anyone for achieving success, but everyone should pay their fair share.”

That is an argument she may find herself making to very skeptical Senate Republicans next year if she wins the White House.

Harris’s incompatibility with any questioning whatsoever, particularly any that includes inquiries with depth, is going to be a continual problem for Democrats across the country this cycle, and it’s one reason why Republicans are so confident that even should Trump lose, they’ll be in a position of power in the House and Senate that could capably fend off Kamala’s radicalism.

Where will Trump or Harris overperform?

Patrick Ruffini writes:

The most dramatic gaps, those in Wisconsin and Georgia, come down to basic demography: Wisconsin has many more whites and rural voters than the rest of the country, but votes to the left given what we would expect based on those factors alone. And Georgia has very similar demographics to Maryland, with a highly urban population and 3-in-10 voters who are African American, but Maryland will vote Democratic by well north of twenty points while Georgia remains competitive.

This might be a good time for common sense to enter the chat. Of course Georgia votes to the right of how it “should” vote: it’s a southern state where the whites are more conservative than they are in Wisconsin, with little history of racial strife and a progressive movement dating back to the early twentieth century.

But not only does north-south regional variation matter a lot: so do differences between states in the same region. North Carolina would be a far less Democratic state than Georgia, at D+3, compared to Georgia’s D+14. And Wisconsin would be well to the right of Michigan (R+4) or Pennsylvania (R+1).

The 2024 results will obviously look nothing like this, but running this thought experiment can help us break down where the parties have longer-term upside, and where they might be poised for a breakthrough this fall. Existing political performance — a majority party having more more room to fall and a minority party more room to gain — is one factor that can cause states to shift over the long haul. It’s no accident that Trump’s 2016 gains came mainly in places where there were lots of working class whites who voted for Obama: mathematically, there were more voters available to flip.

What else can cause states to vote to the right or left of where demographics says they “should” vote, and which parts of these states are the most “out of step” with national trends, indicating possible upside for Trump or Harris?

Does the Electoral College favor Dems?

By Nate Silver.

Here at Silver Bulletin, we’ve repeatedly emphasized the idea that the Electoral College is much more likely to hurt Democrats than to help them — as it did in 2000 and 2016. This is a conclusion borne directly from our model. As of Thursday, our forecast is that Kamala Harris is a 3:1 favorite in the popular vote — but the Electoral College is basically still a toss-up. That’s because the model figures there’s a 20 percent chance that Harris wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote, but only a 0.3 percent chance of the same thing happening to Donald Trump.

At the New York Times yesterday, however, Nate Cohn offered a dissenting view. Cohn isn’t predicting an Electoral College split favoring Democrats, but he thinks the penalty Harris faces will likely be smaller this year. On that point, the Nates agree — though we differ on the extent of the difference.

In 2016, there was nearly a three-point gap between Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin and the result in the tipping-point state, Pennsylvania. The gap grew even wider in 2020, to nearly 4 points, although Joe Biden won the popular vote by enough that he still just barely carried the tipping-point state, Wisconsin. This time around, with Pennsylvania projected to be the tipping point state again, the gap is only 0.7 points instead, according to the Times’s polling averages — that’s the difference between Harris’s small lead in Pennsylvania in their numbers and her slightly larger margin in national polls.

We have the gap a bit wider. In our averages, Harris leads by 2.8 points nationally but by 1.5 points in Pennsylvania. So we’re splitting hairs here, but that’s a 1.3-point difference, not 0.7.

And if you scroll down and look at our forecast, the difference gets just a bit wider again. We project Harris to win the popular vote by 2.5 points, but Pennsylvania by 1.0, a 1.5-point difference.

Zelensky campaigns in Pennsylvania, angering GOP

It seems like this bit of partisan “diplomacy” was ill-advised.

Former US president Donald Trump lashed out at Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday for not making concessions to Russia, giving his strongest indication to date he would stop backing Kyiv if he wins the US presidential election.

Trump, speaking at a campaign event in North Carolina, said Ukraine should have “given up a little bit” to appease Moscow and avoid a bloody conflict with its invading neighbor, which he said “didn’t need to happen.”

“We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal, Zelensky,” Trump railed in a lengthy tirade.

He added that “any deal, even the worst deal, would’ve been better than what we have right now,” referring to the Kremlin’s destruction in Ukraine, which accelerated with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

“Ukraine is gone, it’s not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns and you can never replace the dead people, so many dead people,” the Republican candidate said. “If we made a bad deal, it would have been much better. They [Ukraine] would have given up a little bit and everybody would be living.”

Trump has frequently claimed Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he was president and has repeatedly vowed to negotiate an end to the conflict if he is returned to the White House — though he has declined to give further details, wouldn’t say whether he wanted Ukraine to defeat Russia when pressed at the presidential debate with opponent Kamala Harris earlier this monthand ignored that the conflict has raged since 2014, including during the entire period he was US president.

He has also threatened to cut US aid to Kyiv and vowed Wednesday that he would not send American troops to “die” in Ukraine.

“They’re [the Democrats] not going to be satisfied until they send American kids to Ukraine, and that’s what they’re trying to do,” he said. “And the moms and dads of America don’t want their kids fighting Ukraine and Russia, and we’re not going to have our soldiers die across the ocean.”

Zelensky, who is currently in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, is unlikely to meet with Trump in the coming days, a campaign official for the ex-president said.

Earlier this week, the Ukrainian leader visited a munitions factory in Pennsylvania — a critical swing state in November’s knife-edge election — as part of a tour to shore up support for Kyiv’s resistance against Russia’s war, giving a boost to the Harris campaign and riling Trump’s camp.

The Scranton shop-floor trip was slammed by Republican US House speaker and Trump ally Mike Johnson, who called it “short-sighted and intentionally political” and demanded Zelensky “immediately” fire his country’s ambassador to the US.

One more thing

Mark Cuban is an arrogant entitled idiot who happened to be first to the post to purchase the “broadcast.com” domain, convinced Yahoo to buy it at the height of the bubble for $5.7 billion ($10k per user), only to discover that it was a house of cards and utterly defunct within just two years. This experience fleecing a major internet company with one of the worst acquisitions in the history of mankind makes him eminently qualified to be a commentator on television. But it has been particularly amusing to view his public incapacity at arguing with people outside of a Shark Tank he controls, where his mistakes aren’t edited out and his leaps of illogic are there for all to see. Here he is now claiming that conservatives control the mainstream media, a claim which has literal no factual support whatsoever and is not borne out by surveys of journalists, of consumers or literally any measure that one can find. Fox News is number one on cable news but its consumption is tiny compared to the combination of other networks, newspapers, podcasts and the rest. How someone who is viewed as smart in the public can be so dumb when they enter a space they don’t understand is an indication of how out-of-touch even our most trusted reality stars turn out to be. Disappointing!