2024 presidential election

No one with an open mind — you can even scratch the adjective — no sentient sapiens period can have witnessed Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally without a frisson of awe. Even the most tireless Trump supporter must be a little jaded with Trump’s rallies by now. Just as in 2016, they have been building to a crescendo in both size and frequency. And even avid politicos might be forgiven for thinking they had been there, done that.  But Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden was something different. Perhaps other rallies were as large. We’re told that the MSG event boasted a capacity crowd of nearly 20,000 with more than 70,000 lined up to view the festivities on screens set up outside.

It’s easy to summarize the two sides’ closing arguments. For Kamala Harris, the closing argument is “Trump is really, really bad.” Asked to expand, it is “Trump will end abortion rights” and “Trump is a fascist.” For Trump, the argument is, “Things were great when I was president, and I will make them great again.” Asked to expand, it is “I will be better than Washington and Lincoln. Everybody says so.” And “Kamala is a left-wing nut job.”  After discounting the hyperbole (a gargantuan task), how is the final stretch going? Rocky for Democrats, encouraging for Republicans. That’s the message from polling trends and political betting markets. The polls are essentially tied in battleground states, but have moved slightly in Trump’s favor.

Can a single podcast episode change the outcome of a presidential election, and consequently, of history? If former president Donald Trump has his way, the answer may be yes. Trump joined Joe Rogan in Texas for just under three hours for a wide-ranging episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the crown jewel of the podcasting universe; each episode nets millions of views, and its stats in coveted younger demographics are off the charts. If Trump was successful with the interview, he could motivate several thousand possible voters off their couches — and succeed he did.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBMoPUAeLnY&ab_channel=PowerfulJRE Within hours, millions of people had tuned in across YouTube, Spotify and X.

It’s official. Donald Trump is “like Hitler” and Kamala Harris — even though she does “pray everyday, sometimes twice a day,” can’t seem to answer questions. Her "joyful" campaign took a confusing turn in her CNN town hall in Pennsylvania Wednesday night. She opened with an attack on Donald Trump, in answer to Anderson Cooper’s question about John Kelly’s claims. Kamala says Donald Trump is “increasingly unstable,” “unfit,” “fascist to the core” and that “he himself has said he would terminate the constitution of the United States.” It wasn’t until much later that “joy” and “optimism” were mentioned. The audience at the Delaware County town hall consisted of undecided voters.

Small wonder that Donald Trump is dodging a new debate with Kamala Harris. If her latest television interview was anything to go by, she is a much smoother public performer than only a few months ago. She was quite steely, making her points with concision and snap.  Harris may like to talk about joy, but she displayed little of it in her interview with Hallie Jackson of NBC News. Instead, Harris, in fending off several pointed questions, ensured that what was on display was her formidably stern side. “I’m not going down that rabbit hole with you right now,” she snapped at one point.

I’m a registered Independent voter, part of the coveted suburban mom vote, and as I file this in the dying days of September, I have no idea how — or if — I’m going to vote for president in the upcoming election. I’m not deciding between Kamala and Trump — does that even exist? Folks are trying to decide between Kamala... and Trump? That’s like trying to decide if you prefer listening to Insane Clown Posse or the Boston Philharmonic. I’ll let you decide who’s who. I’m sure they do exist, the ones waiting to pick, but I think a much more common question is, “Do I vote for one of these two clowns — or not at all?” I went with no one in 2020. I might do it again. The coward’s vote. The non-vote.

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.

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.

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.