Election

In the past two months, the Harris-Walz campaign has texted five times asking me to join its door-knocking efforts in Virginia. I am a young woman living in Northern Virginia, so I am statistically likely to be a Democrat. But a data file of reasonable quality would also tell you that I have voted in every Republican primary since 2012, that I am a weekly Mass-attending Catholic and that I am married: three signs that I am probably not going to spend my weekend pounding the pavement for Kamala. This is anecdotal evidence, but it suggests to me that contrary to mainstream media reports, the Harris-Walz campaign doesn’t have the most sophisticated ground-game operation. “In 2020 the DNC actually wrote a press release bragging about appending cell phone numbers to the voter file.

Former president Donald Trump spent his Sunday afternoon sporting an apron standing in the drive-thru window of a McDonald’s in Featersville-Trevose, Pennsylvania. From the window, the candidate handed out some fries and fielded some questions in what made for a masterful PR stunt. Oh and it was also Vice President Kamala Harris’s birthday. “Happy birthday Kamala! She’s turning sixty. I think I’ll get her some flowers. Maybe I’ll get her some fries... I’ll get her a McDonald’s hamburger. Happy birthday Kamala,” the former president riffed from inside the fast-food restaurant.  https://twitter.

State College, Pennsylvania Cockburn wandered curiously up a bustling College Avenue in State College yesterday toward the State Theatre, where Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was set to take the stage and stump for the Harris-Walz campaign. He was waylaid along the way by a group of Republicans waving flags and ringing a cowbell alongside a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump. The “counter-protesters,” as they described themselves, were garnering numerous supportive honks and thumbs-up from cars driving by. They told Cockburn only one person had yelled an obscenity. So much for the Divided States of America! Down the street, two lines had formed half an hour before AOC’s scheduled showtime.

Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with Fox News’s Bret Baier for a half-hour interview in which Baier politely took no prisoners, pressing Harris on the issues most voters cite as their top concerns. Harris took almost zero accountability for the Biden-Harris administration’s failures and offered few answers on her specific policy positions, pivoting instead to besmirching rival Donald Trump and provide offerings from her platitude grab-bag. Baier hit the ground running by asking Harris how many illegal immigrants she thought her administration has released to date — “One, 2 million?

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo found five instances of plagiarism in Kamala Harris’s book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, he revealed in a Substack article Monday. Harris, or her ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, lifted five passages almost word-for-word from an NBC News, Urban Institute and Bureau of Justice Assistance report, as well as a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release and, most embarrassingly, Wikipedia. The book, though some of the wording is changed slightly, cites none of these sources. “Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here,” Rufo writes.

Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election. “Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator. Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.

Dr. Raul Garcia seems to follow a long Republican tradition in Washington State. He’s a fifty-three-year-old, Cuban-born ER physician who’s emerged from the primaries to challenge the four-term Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell for her US Senate seat this fall. On the face of it, Garcia’s candidacy is just the latest in a line of plucky but ultimately doomed bids by a GOP outsider to unseat a tenured politician in this part of the world. A couple of years ago, a self-described farm girl from the Seattle suburbs with the striking name of Tiffany Smiley gave Washington’s other senator Patty Murray a run for her money, but in the end the incumbent scraped through for her sixth turn at the public trough.

Another day, another spat between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Fox News’s Peter Doocy. This time Jean-Pierre, dressed in an outlandish pinstripe suit, snatched up her fastidiously labeled binder and walked out after attempting to answer Doocy’s questions about hurricane relief funds, which she claimed were based on “misinformation.” Karine Jean-Pierre faced reporters Tuesday in an oversized gray — male? — suit and a bright purple collar shirt. After giving her “topper,” which mainly memorialized lives lost on October 7 and addressed the devastation and conspiracy theories surrounding Hurricane Helene, Jean-Pierre took questions from reporters. “Thank you, Karine,” Peter Doocy said in minute forty-four, after thirty or so minutes of questions.

When the sitting president is not running for reelection, the party typically turns to his vice president as the “natural” nominee. That’s true again this year, now that the Democratic Party powerbrokers forced Biden out of the race, fearing he would not only lose the White House but sink down-ballot Democrats alongside him. So, the party turned to his vice president to lead the ticket. That’s commonplace in the modern era, but it’s a relatively new development. It wasn’t true before the 1950s. That change raises three questions: 1. What was the earlier role of the vice president? 2. Why has that role changed? and 3. Why do those changes make it likely, though not certain, the VP will become the party’s next nominee?

The media told us that Trump made a colossal blunder in picking JD Vance, the childless cat lady hater and impostor hillbilly, as his running mate. It sure didn’t seem like it on Tuesday night. Neither he nor Walz had an easy brief — Trump is a polarizing character with a lot of baggage and Harris is a grating, flip-flopping, vacuous empty suit with an unclear agenda and a track record of incompetence. I expected Vance to come out swinging, but was surprised at how deftly he was able to bloody his opponent while remaining calm, collegial and likable at the same time. Its been hard for me to watch Trump debate for a long time now. Sure, he did fine against Biden in July, but that was about as challenging as striking the final blow on a half-shattered piñata.

It’s not always easy to tell who wins a political debate. Sometimes performances need time for people to process them and have key moments emerge that connect with American voters. And sometimes you witness a debate performance so dominant, so one-sided, that one party in the spin room is left arguing more out of hope than belief that debates just don’t matter.  Tonight was one of those nights for Democrats — and this one wasn’t even close. J.D. Vance was smooth, empathetic and emphasized his life experience with hardship and poverty. Tim Walz was nervous and unsteady from the opening question and didn’t seem to find his footing until more than an hour into the debate.

America has a peculiar — indeed, unique — way of deciding national elections. Instead of a cumulative national vote, the president and vice president are determined by fifty separate state elections. The top ticket in each state (except Nebraska and Maine) receives all that state’s electoral votes, no matter how slim the margin of victory. Each state’s electoral votes are equal to its number of House members plus its senators. The winner needs 270 electoral votes.  What if, in this razor-thin election, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris fall one vote short? Fortunately, that’s only a remote possibility, but it’s not impossible. It all depends on how some six or seven closely divided “swing states” split between the two candidates.

The Harris-Walz team has a plan to coax Trump into another debate. According to NBC News, the Democratic National Committee will accuse Trump of being a chicken in the hopes of getting under his skin: “The chicken billboards, which will first appear at Trump’s rally Monday in Indiana, Pennsylvania, include a digitally altered image of Trump in a chicken suit alongside the words ‘There’s no debate: Donald Trump’s a chicken.’” The tactics here aren’t subtle, but considering Trump’s penchant for taking the bait, it just might work. But if Operation Chicken lays an egg, then the last big televised event of this campaign season is next week’s vice presidential debate, when Ohio senator J.D.

Democrats have an Israel problem that isn’t going away any time soon. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer illustrated why this weekend in a CNN appearance that had her dodging the actions of her fellow partisans. At issue is the actions of Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, who is Jewish — and who has targeted eleven campus protesters from the University of Michigan, several of whom allegedly engaged in acts of violent obstruction against police officers charged with clearing their illegal encampment. The blowback against Nessel’s decision to charge the protesters, seven of them with felonies, led to Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to accuse her and her office of anti-Palestine bias: We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest.

One of the entertainments that every election season brings revolves around polling. Every season seems to bring more and more and more frequent polls. The measure registered voters and (for all I know) unregistered ones. They register people who are designated “likely voters” and they claim to filter for gender(s), age, race, ethnic back, party affiliation or non-affiliation, ZIP code, income, and favorite pastimes, and what seems like a thousand other things.    Like everyone else who is interested in politics, I pay fretful attention to the results of these surveys and questionnaires beginning about a year out from the election itself.