Welcome to the Kamalaverse
It's like the Multiverse™ but with brat memes.
Guys, Kamalamentum is real. I’ll do a general recap of the week hitting on:
The fight between media and the GOP about Harris being called the “border czar.”
Trump potentially replacing J.D. Vance.
More Kamala stuff.
Should-reads.
Let’s get to it.
Let’s talk about Kamala.
She has had quite the week. After she was announced as Joe Biden’s replacement, Kamala1 raised over 100m in just under 36 hours, setting a new fundraising record. On Thursday night, an online event for her had so many people sign in it broke Zoom and raised another 2m in 90 minutes while doing so. And then there are the brat memes.
She has completely turned the race on its head and currently has the wind at her back. Her personal polling has also improved and she is now viewed more favorably than Trump. A lot can change in a week five days! The ultimate question is if she can keep it going and actually excite the Democratic base.
Here is the thing about Trump: He has a ceiling, and it is around 46.8%. Kamala does not have a ceiling yet, because most of the public is unfamiliar with her. This is going to be jarring, but it’s important to remember that somewhere around 40% of the public can’t even name the vice-president.2
Harris gets a little bit of a chance to re-define herself and start her own campaign. So, that brings me to the polls: Yes, some polls show Kamala gaining on Trump and even leading him in areas where Biden was continually falling behind. At a first glance, they look pretty good:
However, I would ignore polls right now because they are going to include what is called a “response bias.” Basically, pollsters will call people at their homes and normally ~99% of the time people do not answer (or they’ll send out a text and get the same response rate). But now people who are fired up for Kamala may be more likely to respond and say they love her. Or, people who support Trump are annoyed by the Kamala news and are more likely to respond and say they love him! It makes all of the polls a little messy right now.
The polling aggregator guys have all turned off their prediction models, so this isn’t just me being nuts. Give Kamala room to breathe and re-visit her polling in a week or two. But remember: The race begins in earnest after the Democratic Convention.
Donald Trump is afraid to debate Kamala.
Trump started laying the groundwork pretty early on, but he has now officially backpedaled from the scheduled debate in September. His team is trying to spin it and say, “Well, we agreed to a debate against Biden and not Kamala,” but in truth it’s clear that Trump is scared.
Trump’s team had a game plan going into November, which was putting up a more energetic Trump against an older and more frail-looking Joe Biden. The first debate worked out really well for them and had great results, but if Trump debates Kamala the argument gets reversed. Suddenly, she is the young and vigorous one and Trump is the aging, old man (who may also be experiencing cognitive decline).
Maybe Trump will re-schedule, but it’s one more thing that factors into Kamala’s great week. It’s also important to remember this: To date, he is the only candidate who has refused to debate (2024 Primary) and who has pulled out of debates (2020 Presidential). He should not get a pass for that.
J.D. Vance had sex with a couch?
If Kamala is having a good week, J.D. Vance is having a terrible week. Every new clip of him that springs up seems to get more and more embarrassing, to the point where Republicans are openly musing about replacing him on the ticket. Trump’s infamously short-lived communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, says Vance’s days are numbered.
His rollout has also been the worst in modern history. Generally, you want your VP pick to enhance your ticket, and not weaken it, but Vance is clearly doing the latter. He is the first pick since 1980 to have a net-negative rating, which is an impressive feat. The more people hear from him, the less they like him. And then there’s stuff like this:
Yeah, he’s weird. He also says really offensive and awkward things that will repel normal people, like childless cat ladies are running the government, and that people without children should be taxed at a higher rate than those with kids. Vance’s comments on abortion are also a major turnoff to women and will be a burden for Trump, who is trying to convince people he is not the architect of Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
I have said this before, but the current GOP base is Too Online™ and does not realize that they just sound super weird to normal people. Vance embodies this problem in a way that the other VP candidates did not.
Vance is also on the receiving end of some pretty hilarious jokes. This week, a claim circulated on Twitter alleging that he had sex with a couch and that he detailed this himself in his book, Hillbilly Elegy. The Associated Press ran a factcheck “debunking” the story, which got conservatives angry and ultimately led to the story’s deletion. That only seemed to make things worse, because liberals then went around and claimed that the Associated Press deleted the factcheck because they could not prove J.D. vance never had sex with a couch. Funny stuff.
I was naturally super curious about this, so I took it upon myself to call Vance directly and clear it up. Off the bat, I’ll say he was super receptive and kind on the phone call. He did confirm with me that he had sex with the couch, but then weirdly continued to emphasize over and over that it was consensual and that the couch liked it. It was only a six minute phone call, and about four of those were him talking about how much the couch really liked having sex with him. He told me I could call the couch and that “she” would verify everything that he’s saying, but the number he gave me was for a Denny’s located in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. So, we’re back at square one.
I think the funniest part of this story is that it gained so much traction because it sounds like something that Vance would do. Just look at Vance’s face:
He looks like the love child of Fozzie Bear and Roseanne Barr, i.e., someone who would definitely have sex with a couch.
Can Trump get rid of him?
So, will they kick Vance off the ticket and replace him with a better pick (like Marco Rubio)? My guess is that they won’t, because doing so would show profound weakness at a time when the Trump Campaign already looks weak.
But if they did, they will have to do it soon. I looked at the ballot deadlines for various states and the general rule is that they must be solidified somewhere between August 9th and August 30th. For instance, Georgia is an important swing state, and their deadline is August 9th. They’d have to remove Vance, get a replacement, and certify them on the ticket before that date. It would be super weird to replace a VP after the Convention, but it has been done before.
Kamala Harris, the Border Czar™
There was another story that popped up this week, which was mostly a fight between conservatives and the media over a title bestowed upon Kamala Harris in the early days of the Biden Administration.
It started with a story from Axios, which said:
In the past few days, the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the "border czar" title — which she never actually had.
This set conservative Twitter on fire, with multiple accounts pulling up the various times Axios itself had referred to Kamala as the “border czar.” Here is the thing: Axios is right and conservative Twitter is wrong.
It is true that conservatives called Kamala the border czar in the early days of the Administration, but the Administration itself pushed back on that title. Here is a story from CNN in 2021, and it lays out clearly that Kamala had a narrow role on the border:
Harris’ role – which mimics that of Biden under President Barack Obama – is intended to target what’s driving people to the US. […] Harris has stressed that her role is to address the “root causes” of migration beginning in the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico, rather than the “symptoms” of it manifesting at the border, which are being addressed by the Homeland Security secretary. Without a diplomatic push in those countries, “we are just in a perpetual system of only dealing with the symptoms,” she said in April.
The opening paragraph even says that Kamala’s staff wants to make one thing clear: “She does not manage the southern border.” So, how did she get labeled the “border czar” by so many media outlets? Let’s go back to the Washington Post in 2021:
In the article, it lays out that it was Republicans who sought to connect Harris to the border, maybe in it smart and shifty way to wed her to unpopular policies should she eventually become the Democratic nominee. It says:
As the vice president wades into a new role addressing the root causes of migration out of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, Republicans are rushing to connect her to the surge in migrants at the border, losing few opportunities to use “Harris” and “border” in the same sentence, often with “czar.”
In fact, the CNN article (again, from 2021) says that Harris is “thought to be a leading Democratic candidate for the 2024 presidential race should Biden not run for reelection.” That’s fun to look back at almost four years later. But Harris’s team was pretty savvy, even then. Here is CNN again:
But she and her staff appeared wary of becoming a scapegoat for Republicans for any and all problems at the southern border – a not-unfounded concern, especially after GOP lawmakers photoshopped her face onto a milk carton and accused her of being “missing” at the border.
The problem here is that Republicans have a point: Media outlets did repeatedly refer to Kamala as the “border czar” and it looks a little weird that they are now correcting it, some three years later (and, conveniently, just when Harris starts running for president).
I said this a few weeks ago, but Republicans are extremely good at “working the refs.” In other words, they get their talking points organized, engage in strict message discipline, and then (in this instance) repeatedly refer to Kamala as the border czar over and over again until the media gives in and does it too. They do this even with little things, like referring to the Democrats as the “Democrat Party” instead of the “Democratic Party,” because “Democratic” sounds more…democratic. They are good at it and it worked here.
So, Kamala literally wasn’t the border czar and media outlets got it wrong, but I have to wonder: Does it even matter? An overlooked story over the past few weeks is that the issues at the southern border have largely subsided. Illegal crossings have declined by 50% over the past year, and are now lower than they were when Trump left office. Add it to a long list of accomplishments from the Biden Administration over the past few months.
Maybe Kamala should just own the border czar title and say,
“Yes, after Donald Trump tanked the bipartisan immigration deal, our Administration took action and reduced the number of illegal crossings. Because of the methods we used, there will be litigation and it probably won’t address every problem immediately, but we have made significant progress.”
I think that’s a compelling argument!
Should-reads:
The New York Times has a detailed analysis of the assassination attempt on Trump and determines that it was a bullet that hit his ear. This has become a story over the past few days because FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that they were still trying to determine if it was a bullet or a glass fragment that hit Trump’s ear. The glass fragment explanation would be in line with early reports from Pennsylvania police.
I will say this: Always assume that Trump is lying. Just because he said he was hit by a bullet doesn’t mean that he was, and there is no lie that is beneath him.
The Times’ analysis is really compelling to me, and it’s worth noting that Secret Service mostly affirmed that a bullet hit Trump’s ear.
The entire episode has been bizarre: Trump has not released any medical records. We have not gotten a statement from any of the doctors who treated Trump aside from Ronny Jackson, who ran a drug ring out of the White House and is not credible. We haven’t gotten an update on his condition either!
Trump should release his medical records. In fact, we should have gotten a press conference immediately after the assassination attempt that explained what happened to him. This is standard, normal practice in a campaign.
If Trump has been lying about being hit by a bullet over the past few weeks (and that is a big, caveated if), it has to get a ton of attention from media and Harris’s Campaign. It is a gross, evil, and odious lie and not one that is “no big deal” as some people in media are suggesting. He walked around with a bandage on his ear at the Convention and repeatedly says he “took a bullet” for democracy.3 You’d think that milking an assassination attempt would be below even someone like Trump, but there is currently some evidence suggesting you’d be wrong.
I said this last week, but CNN confirms it: Harris will be able to get on the ballot in all 50 states.
Tim Alberta has a great piece on why the Trump Campaign is freaked out.
So, some housekeeping: August is generally a time where the Jackal slows down. I will be on vacation next week, so I don’t think I’ll put one together. But I will try to get stuff to you every now and then; they will just be shorter, lightning-round Jackals instead of the “Too Long for Email” ones you typically get.
Have a great weekend, and remember: Have a talk with your couch and emphasize the importance of using protection with someone like J.D. Vance.
There is always some debate about whether or not a woman should be called by her first name or last name. The feeling from some is that women in politics tend to be called by their first name and men are called by their last name, lending to a general feeling of sexism. But I disagree! Nobody calls Bernie Sanders “Mr. Sanders” or “Senator Sanders,” unless they are a square. Everyone calls him “Bernie.” Kamala is part of her brand! And while I have heard some people refer to Gretchen Whitmer as “Big Gretch,” she is generally referred to by her last name. I am going to call her Kamala or, if I feel the need to poke fun at Drew Barrymore, Momala.
The polling on this is pretty dated, so maybe it has changed as the general public has become more politically engaged.
Also worth noting: A lot of pictures circulated of Trump playing golf the day after the shooting or appearing without his bandage. All of those turned out to be from a couple years ago or earlier this summer. He did not golf the day after the shooting (it was pouring rain in Bedminster) and he did not appear anywhere publicly until the Convention.