 Ads - Friends of Mark Robinson, “Unscripted.” The challenge for North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, as he runs for a promotion, is how to square the fire-breathing rhetoric that made him famous with a softer image that could win swing voters. This spot presents a Robinson no voter had seen before, sitting with his wife and sharing that she once had an abortion — choking up as he talks about the pain of it. “It’s why I stand by our current law and it provides common sense exceptions for life of the mother, incest, and rape,” said Robinson. That’s a shift. Robinson previously wanted to supplant the state’s 12-week ban with a six-week “heartbeat” law.
- Cori Bush for Congress, “Deserved Justice.” If Bush prevails today, progressive supporters will credit this spot — a very rare intervention into partisan politics by the family of Michael Brown, whose father and sister say that Wesley Bell promised them justice and didn’t deliver. “I feel like he lied to us,” says Brown. “He never brought charges against the killer.” Bush only appears, looking stricken, to approve the message in the final seconds.
- United Democracy Project PAC, “Progressive Priorities.” The pro-Israel PAC went on the air before Bush, and pounded one message: Bell, not her, was the reliable progressive vote. It outsources that argument to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which backed Bell over the incumbent, dismissing her as “good at getting headlines but bad at actually accomplishing anything.” This is exactly what worked in New York to unseat Jamaal Bowman, but he had a tougher district, and a challenger with deeper roots there.
Polls Republicans were happier on Tuesday than they’d been since Joe Biden quit the presidential race, for one reason: They had a chance to define Tim Walz. None of Harris’ VP finalists were known by a majority of voters, but Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly was the most recognized — he was famous as a gun control advocate and astronaut before he ran for office — and would have started the election with a 13-point net favorable rating. Shapiro had a 2-point net favorable rating. Half as many adults recognized Walz; just 19% of Republicans viewed him negatively.  At the nadir of the Biden campaign, Siena’s polling found the president slipping to a single-digit lead in New York, worse than any Democratic presidential nominee since Michael Dukakis. That’s changed after the Harris swap, driven by a gigantic gender gap — Harris leads Trump by 34 points among female voters. Kennedy, whose father was a senator from New York, and who spent the crucial years of his environmental law career in the state, was strong in prior editions of this poll, and has since faded — just 28% of Democrats now view him favorably. But the Democratic ticket is still polling worse than it has in any New York race this century, and Gov. Kathy Hochul is unpopular. That could affect Democrats’ hopes of flipping back House seats won by Joe Biden in 2020, but lost by Hochul in 2022. Scooped!Losing a story hurts a little less when you’re on vacation. I knew, when I took last week off, that there’d be no Americana take on the ground from the GOP primary in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, where 2022 also-rans Blake Masters (who didn’t live there) and Abe Hamedeh (who also didn’t live there) were tearing each other apart. Alexander Sammon’s dispatches from the Sun Valley told the story well, with a lesson for JD Vance, the other pro-natalist candidate whose political career was shepherded by Peter Thiel: “Vance’s first prominent endorsement went to Masters, who promptly lost his election.” Next - seven days until primaries in Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin
- 13 days until the Democratic National Convention
- 14 days until primaries in Alaska, Florida, and Wyoming
- 28 days until primaries in Delaware and Massachusetts
- 91 days until the 2024 presidential election
David recommendsWalz’s rise was so sudden — years in the making, then sped-up — that he hadn’t gotten the big profile treatment of some younger and more obviously ambitious Democrats. The first fresh look at Walz’s life before politics comes from Ben Terris, who talked to former students and other people who knew the governor as a teacher, remembering a man who would “get all sweaty and really passionate about whatever he was talking about,” enough to inspire that man to become a teacher himself. |
