KAMALAMENTUM

I stole that word from Jeff Tiedrich. You should read his Substack if you aren’t already.

Note that this is a Fox News poll. The walls of Mar A Lardo must coated with ketchup now.

And now the news: Kamalamentum is a freight train, and it’s picking up speed.

The “enthusiasm gap” has been reversed.

88% of Democrats are now “enthusiastic” about voting in November, compared to 82% of Republicans. And importantly, 50% of independents are now enthusiastic for Kamala.

Over ONE MILLION WOMEN have signed up for tonight’s Women For Harris zoom call.

Kamala’s controlling the narrative. Nobody wants to talk about Donny Douchebag and his miracle ear any more. That’s old news.

As national treasure George Takei tweeted: “Trump and Vance are just too weird for America. And I attend Star Trek conventions.”

According to the most recent ABC/Ipsos poll, Kamala Harris’s favorability was 11 points underwater until she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, at which point her popularity spiked to 43-42, giving the party a popular standard-bearer for the first time in three years.

At the same time, Trump ended his convention where Harris began, 11 points underwater, He ended the week seven points less popular than he started - 36-52 (the proper technical term for that is A Fucking Disaster!). Less than 25% of the public views JD Vance favorably.

If Republicans aren’t now just as desperate as Democrats were one month ago, they probably will be if and when the dust settles and Harris enjoys a meaningful lead. And movement toward that lead is now obvious, as witness the Fox News poll above.

The contrast between the Democratic and Republican forms of desperation - and the changes they portend - reflect the elemental differences between them.

Democrats were acting out of desperation when they pressed Biden to stand aside, but not all of them did so for cynical or self-interested reasons. The drastic remedy was the result of a genuine determination to protect the country from the danger of a second Trump time in office. Democrats were desperate, but they were also acting from a place of civic mindedness. The public - and more importantly, the Democratic bas - recognized that and responded positively.

With Harris’s arrival as the nominee, people who had given up on Democrats are suddenly eager to give them another look. Biden’s selflessness has led to Biden himself enjoying a popularity bump all his own.

With Harris as the nominee, the pro-democracy majority was able to take a clear look at the MAGA GOP and remember why the period 2016-2020 was so unpleasant and why they worked to deny Trump a second term.

Without this clarity, Harris’s new mantra, “we’re not going back! would fall flat. Before last Sunday, people seemed happy to go back, But now they suddenly remember how bad the bad years were. They remember why they rejected the cruelty and incompetence and narcissism.

It took the reset with Harris, combined with a certain kind of street-smart thinking that isn’t always found among “professional” Democrats, to recognize that the best way to maintain the anti-Trump coalition is - first and foremost- by defining MAGA as the opposite of normal. Weird.

Trump himself has always been weird, with his bird-nest hairdo and orange face. MAGA is weird : their ideas about economic policy, about women, about the environment - are weird.

Trump holds weird rallies where an obviously declining old cult leader rants about his friend Hannibal Lecter and the choice of being electrocuted or eaten by a shark.

MAGA activists love their guns and puffing chest - they want to inspire fear. But the truth is they mostly just embody a way of life people find bizarre. White Fundamentalist Christianity has always been seen by outsiders as weird; it’s why “The Righteous Gemstones” is a hit.

Recognizing that the majority of people see MAGA as weird, and calling it such, is the flip-side of the resistance mantra “this is not normal.” Those words conveyed fear and helplessness; using “Weird” comes from confidence and resolve. People know “weird” when they see it.

Joe Biden’s style, his brand of politics, never involved calling a political opponent weird; the arrival of Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee has changed things.

Yesterday, Harris campaign national co-chair Mitch Landrieu was on MSNBC with The Weekened political hosts. After watching a clip of Trump he said, “That is an old, tired, grumpy dude who is just cray-cray. He can’t hardly say anything that makes any sense any more. I think they ought to be concerned about his mental acuity and the choices he has made.”

Calling Trump weird and cray-cray won’t work with everyone, but it plays well with the Democratic base and resonates with Independents - a demographic with whomt Harris now leads Trump.

Defining Trump and Vance as a couple of twisted weirdos with extremist policies, the Harris campaign has taken the argument that Trump isn’t normal and stripped it down to a feeling.

The media loves to talk about vibes” - of the economy, of the election. Since the media wants to talk about “vibes,” Democrats are defining Trump and Vance’s vibe.

Democrats have now tapped into the media’s bothsidesism and are using it to define Trump in a simple, but politically deadly way. “Weird” isn’t from a talking point, or a focus group. It is how the majority of Americans feel about a convicted felon found liable for sexual assault who is running to be president and take them back to the weird time of his first term in office.

We in the newly-energized Democratic base shad best steel ourselves for political battle with a GOP that is energized by the knowledge it has everything to lose. We must resolve not to let up in the slightest degree.

If the next 99 days look anything like the last seven, we Democrats will win. Possibly by a wide margin.

If we do win, we will look back on July 21-28 as the moment when the aura of invincibility Trump spent so many years cultivating suddenly dissolved.

Being energized and joyful in support of Kamala Harris, a candidate who epitomizes the renewal of optimism and embodies our America motto of “e pluribus unum,” is the perfect place from which to go forth into the fight of our lives.

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