AMA Thursday
Swift boat veterans, forsooth!
The Kamala Harris campaign blitz continues, now with running mate Tim Walz.
As I wrote earlier this week, and mentioned a few times on the podcast, I think Walz was the best choice in a field of good candidates and has remarkable political gifts. Now comes another week-and-a-half of barnstorming swing states before the Democratic convention in Chicago. If all goes well there, we’ll get a sense in the ensuing days of Harris’s high-water mark.
The story of her campaign so far has been one of strong and steady growth. She’d obviously like that to continue through the convention, but already she’s overseen something like an eight-point swing in her direction, such that she now leads Trump in most national and Blue Wall-state polls.
That’s why the metastory of the campaign is about the desperate efforts of the Trump campaign—along with elements of national media that want a competitive race, or even a Trump victory—to arrest her momentum. In the case of the Trump campaign, it’s through the deployment of smears; in the case of the national media, it’s through laundering those smears, and slagging Harris for not doing any unscripted interviews in her first two weeks on the trail.
That raises an obvious question: Will Harris’s early success dominating campaign narratives last into the fall campaign, or will the forces that want to blunt her momentum succeed? Here’s a rundown of my view of the question for discussion in the comment thread, or this afternoon’s member chat.