Americana

1. On the trail with Harris-Walz
2. Vance the attack dog
3. We have a debate!
4. A big GOP primary night
5. Behind Cori Bush’s loss

Also: A new book tracks Donald Trump’s post-2020 exile.

Behold: The normal presidential campaign! For the first time in eight years, I’ve just gotten back from a Democratic rally that featured both halves of the ticket with no COVID or masking requirements and a strong presumption they would actually be the nominees come November. It felt like a good moment – maybe the last moment – for a heat check on what’s become a recognizable election, with two competing campaigns holding normal events and fighting minute-by-minute for the news cycle.

The Harris-Walz ticket goes large

For the first time in a long time, Democrats wanted to talk about their crowds. Their voters were trudging a mile from mud-bound cars to see the newly completed presidential ticket. They were fainting in the heat as they stood through warm-up speeches and ran out of bottled water. They were pinning new lime green “brat” buttons on their shirts and wearing fresh “Cat Ladies for Kamala” gear. They were chanting (“KA-MA-LA”) over the protesters who’d showed up to demand an arms embargo on Israel — protesters who used to get heard more clearly over the nervous is-he-okay quiet of Joe Biden’s speeches.

“I feel a lot better than I did in 2016 at this time,” said Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, gazing out at 15,000 people in a hangar of Detroit’s international airport on Wednesday. She was one of the few Democrats to warn that Hillary Clinton was vulnerable in the state in that election.

“I don’t know how I can explain it to you,” marveled Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, 36 hours into his role as the Democratic candidate for vice president. “Walking into that arena in Philly, or that field out in Wisconsin, or right here — to what I have been told is the largest rally of the campaign.”

The presidential nominee delivered a drum-tight stump speech, which has differed so little from state to state that anti-Harris accounts on X have already spliced videos together to try to drum a scandal out of the repetition. In the hangar, for people hearing it for the first time, every line hit — denunciations of Donald Trump and Project 2025, the slogan that “we’re not going back,” a thank-you to Joe Biden, and promises to lower prices and help “build wealth” for the working class.

“Understand: In this fight, we are joyful warriors,” Harris said. “We know that while fighting for a brighter future may be hard work, hard work is good work.” The cheer was loud enough to set off decibel warnings on Apple watches, and she repeated the line: “Hard work is good work.”

JD Vance’s side mission

JD Vance had a mission this week: Chase Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. In every city where they rallied, he showed up for a press conference, deriding the Democrats for not taking questions, ribbing the media for not demanding them. In Eau Claire, Wis., Vance and his entourage walked over to Air Force to (“I just wanted to check out my future plane”) and said he felt sorry for the Harris traveling press. One day later, for the first time, that press pool got to throw questions at Harris from the tarmac.

Vance’s biggest success: Elevating questions about Tim Walz’s retirement from the Army National Guard. On Tuesday, the Harris-Walz campaign shared a video of Walz talking to a crowd about limits on certain firearms, like the ones he “carried in war.” In Eau Claire, Vance questioned the “stolen valor crap” coming from the Democrat – Walz had deployed to Europe for Operation Enduring Freedom, but not seen combat in Afghanistan.

“I think that’s going to follow him around, because veterans, and I think non-veterans, are really pissed off that he claimed to do something that he didn’t do,” he told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott in an interview from the campaign plane.

Trump and Harris agree to Sep. 10 debate

ABC News will host the first Trump-Harris debate on Sept. 10, after the GOP nominee agreed to the network and date and the Democrat matched him. Trump confirmed the details on Thursday, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference, reversing the position he’d staked out six days earlier — that he couldn’t show up because he was “in litigation against ABC Network and George Slopadopoulos, thereby creating a conflict of interest.”

At that time, Trump had proposed a Sept. 4 debate hosted by Fox News, with a live audience, resurrecting a demand that Republicans had made for years; the party announced in 2022 that it would seek partners outside the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. One reason, given by then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, was a need to start “hosting debates before voting begins.” The Sept. 4 date fits that bill, but the Harris-Walz campaign never agreed to it. “I’m happy to have that conversation about an additional debate after Sept. 10,” Harris told reporters on Thursday, in her first exchange on the tarmac with her traveling press corps.

No vice presidential debate has been scheduled yet. When Biden still led the Democratic ticket, the parties were discussing two possible dates — July 23 or Aug. 13. The first date came and went as Joe Biden quit the race and Harris was securing the nomination, and Vance has since ruled out debating Tim Walz before the DNC. “Would it shock me if the Democrats pulled another switcheroo?” Vance asked rhetorically, on Wednesday, when reporters followed up on debate plans. “No, it wouldn’t.”

What the latest primaries say about the GOP

The Republican establishment battled conservative insurgents in Tuesday’s primaries, in races where Donald Trump gave up on trying to anoint a candidate and spread his endorsements between multiple Republicans.

In Missouri, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe captured the nomination for governor, holding off conservative state Sen. Bill Eigel, who ran to the right of a GOP that controls every office in the state and a supermajority in the legislature. Eigel won some conservative exurbs, but nearly two-thirds of the primary vote went to Kehoe or Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, Republicans Eigel had clashed with as he condemned Kehoe’s calls for “civility” and an effort to add exceptions to the state’s abortion law.

State Sen. Denny Hoskins won the race to succeed Ashcroft, a win for the GOP’s right flank; declaring victory, he promised to ensure that “none of the electoral fraud that took place in 2020 and stole the election from President Trump happens here.” The bizarre candidacy of Valentina Gomez, who had no political experience and spent the campaign accusing opponents of being corrupt, “weak,” and “gay,” went nowhere: She got 7% of the vote. Attorney Gen. Andrew Bailey carried every county over Trump attorney Will Scharf, who pointed out that some of Bailey’s high-profile pro-Trump cases were stunts, but never got traction.

In Michigan, Trump-endorsed ex-Rep. Mike Rogers easily won the party’s U.S. Senate nomination, defeating libertarian Trump critic Justin Amash; in Washington, Trump-endorsed ex-NASCAR driver Jerrod Sessler led the top-two primary over Rep. Daniel Newhouse. (Trump also backed veterans advocate Tiffany Smiley, who entered the race late and faced questions over a PAC she founded that spent little on other candidates.) Newhouse, one of two remaining House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, will now need Democratic votes to beat a MAGA candidate in November.

How Cori Bush lost

Missouri Rep. Cori Bush lost her primary on Tuesday, making her just the second House Democrat, and the second member of the progressive “squad,” to lose re-election this cycle. Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, beat her by 5 points, carrying his home base by 11,000 votes; Bush won the city by just 4,000 votes.

Turnout was up significantly from 2022, when Bell held off a weak challenger. But Bush got fewer votes this year, despite locking down far more local support than New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the other progressive pushed out of his House seat this summer. St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones backed Bush, and her endorsers condemned AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups for trying to oust a working class nurse-turned-congresswoman who came straight out of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It didn’t work. Like Bowman, Bush was hobbled by her vote against the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill – a progressive negotiating tactic that AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, and other critics characterized as an attack on the Biden agenda. And she never recovered from an investigation into her use of campaign funds for personal security, which benefited her husband. DMFI chairman Mark Mellman’s polling initially gave Bush a lead over Bell, with vulnerabilities. And for six months, her opponents effectively attacked those vulnerabilities.

Ads

• Vote Alaska Before Party, “Extreme Three.” Rep. Mary Peltola has benefited twice from Alaska’s top-four voting system – every candidate competes in a primary, four advance to November, and voters rank their choices. This PAC, a pop-up Democratic project, is working to help three Republicans join Peltola in the general election, on the theory that an independent or third party candidate might give her stronger competition. It uses the logic of every primary-meddling ad, calling the GOP candidates “too extreme,” encouraging Republican voters to support them.
• Colin Allred for Senate, “Right Here.” Allred’s been the Democratic nominee against Sen. Ted Cruz for five months, but he’s still introducing himself, as Cruz and allies attack him over old immigration quotes and votes. “I stood up to the president when he’s wrong,” Allred says, citing energy and border policies as his breaks from the Biden administration, and “protecting Medicare and Social Security” as his Democratic priorities.
• Tony Wied for Congress, “Trump Endorsement.” When Rep. Mike Gallagher retired from his safe GOP seat, Donald Trump saw a chance to replace an occasional critic with a loyalist – Wied, a convenience store chain owner who’d never run for office before. Trump is the only voice in this ad, calling ex-State Senate President Roger Roth a fake conservative who “should drop out of the race immediately because Tony is the guy.” There’s no policy, just the Trump endorsement.

Polls

Democrats were in denial all year about the Biden-led ticket’s ability to rebuild the 2020 coalition. The Harris-led ticket has recovered for two reasons. One: A rebound of her personal favorable rating, driven by Democrats and liberal independents, which few Republicans expected. (They had hoped and assumed that her low ratings would stick.) Two: New Democratic enthusiasm, which Republicans did expect, given how depressed their opponents were about the president’s stumbling and weak messaging. The top of the ballot in Wisconsin is tied, but for the first time all year, Democrats are as excited to vote as Republicans are.

Democratic enthusiasm for the new ticket has surged even though that ticket is running behind Biden at this point in the 2020 election. But Harris has closed some of a gap we’ve seen in every competitive Senate state — Democrats, out-spending their opponents everywhere, running much stronger than their presidential candidate. Gallego, who’s out-raised Lake by a 3-1 margin, runs 18 points ahead of her with independents. Harris leads with those voters by 8 points. In 2020 and 2022, Arizona Democrats slightly underperformed their final polls, with one exception — Lake led going into election day, and lost by 17,000 votes.

Scooped!

Democrats are being admirably chatty right now about the decisions that ended Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. “I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” Nancy Pelosi said in a sit-down with David Remnick. Ryan Lizza’s interview with Anita Dunn gets the perspective of someone Pelosi was talking about. Democrats are aware of how much Donald Trump didn’t want Biden to quit, and they don’t care: “I don’t regard it as a coup,” explained Dunn.

Next

• four days until primaries in Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin
• 10 days until the Democratic National Convention
• 11 days until primaries in Alaska, Florida, and Wyoming
• 25 days until primaries in Delaware and Massachusetts
• 32 days until the ABC News presidential debate
• 88 days until the 2024 presidential election

David recommends

How long had Donald Trump wanted to run for president again, after his 2020 defeat? How much did he believe that his defeat was a fraud, and could be reversed in court? Why and how did the Republican Party shake off its concerns and embrace him again? All of those questions get answered in “Trump in Exile,” Politico reporter Meridith McGraw’s new book about the days between the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s easy re-nomination win, six months ago. It’s got too many rich moments to highlight here; I’m fond of the golf game that saved JD Vance’s Trump endorsement, the awful alternative names for Trump’s social network before “Truth Social” got settled on, and the origins of the Ron DeSanctimonious nickname that, against all odds, really clicked.

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