THE HARRIS-WALZ CAMPAIGN HAS FLIPPED THE SCRIPT

HARRIS HAS FLIPPED THE SCRIPT

Now that we are less than three months away from election day, some consensus is forming in the polls. As a reminder, state-level polling has some variabilities and inconsistencies, but polling today might be better than months ago. All the same challenges still exist, so take it with a grain of salt.

The one big consistency across all polls is voter movement toward Kamala Harris. A wave of battleground state polls shows Harris leading Trump in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, and tied in Georgia.

This week, the Cook Political Report found Harris’ success in closing the gap is driven by her consolidation of the Democratic base, and increased support among independent voters.

In May, in the five-way horserace including third party candidates, just 82% of the voters who supported Biden in 2020 were committed to voting for him this November. Harris is now getting 91% of those voters. Among independent voters, Harris leads Trump 48% to 40% in the 2-way head-to-head. In May, Trump led Biden among independent voters by three points - 41% to 38%.

The script has been flipped.

Even though Harris is the sitting incumbent, she is unburdened by what has been.

56% of battleground state voters say she represents a chance to “turn the page of the Trump/Biden era;” 59% see her as representing a “new generation of leadership.” Even though she may serve as Biden’s vice president, she’s winning Biden-Trump “double haters” by 30 points - 54% to 24%.

Harris’ ability to quickly and decisively win over those double haters is a reminder that the 2020 Biden coalition was more anti-Trump than pro-Biden.

The corporate media is big mad at Vice President Kamala Harris because she isn’t letting them define her before she can define herself to the voters. She’s only been too busy to play obsequious with the media and they are not happy.

The elite corporate media is used to calling the shots, being the ones who choose the candidate who “wins” a debate. They are used to being the gatekeepers and the referees, with all of the power.

But not anymore.

When CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Harris-Walz communications director Michael Tyler when they will commit to a press conference, Tyler said they were crisscrossing the country with rallies and their priority is engaging voters. He said Harris would sit down before the end of the month, but when pressed to commit to this week: "We will commit to directly engage with the voters. They're actually going to decide this election."

The media just got put in their place by the Harris-Walz. The campaign’s priority is speaking directly to the voters, not through an intermediary. And certainly not through a bad intermediary with an agenda who has their thumb on the scale to advance the interests of their owners.

Six days ago, Donald Trump held an hour-long "press conference" in which he lied 162 times - better than two lies a minute.. The media would very much like it if the Democrats would now put on a show. Perform! Entertain! For them. Not for the voters. They don’t care what’s going on in rallies they won’t cover, because the rallies aren’t about them.

The media wants a certain kind of press conference and interview. One they can pick apart and lord over. One that gives them their power back.

But if there is value in a press conference or a moral imperative to hold them, that obligation is two sided. The candidate holds a press conference to submit to a time-honored tradition of being asked questions by the media for the purpose of helping voters get to know the candidate for the greater purpose of democracy.

Today, the legacy media is comprised of the self-centric New York Times, owned by the Sulzberger family’s DNA failure, and the Washington Post, led by a Murdoch-trained executive editor.

Politico is now owned by a far right German tabloid owner who has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes, and asked his executives to “pray for Donald Trump” in 2020.

When Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav - who controls CNN - was asked who he supported for president, he wouldn’t say; but he did say that he wanted a president who would allow him to engage in more consolidation by lessening regulations - in other words a president who would do basically the opposite of what President Biden has done.

Much local media is owned by hedge-funds. A huge swath of local TV stations are owned by far right Sinclair Media. Then there’s Faux Snooze, the actual Murdoch owned media destroying this country.

These media only don’t care about democracy, they consider democracy an obstacle for them. So when they behave like they are pro-fascism, believe them.

When Kamala did make herself available for questions from the press gaggle after a campaign rally in Arizona, the first - and only - question was how did she feel about Trump mispronouncing her name.

That kind of shallow stupidity is why she isn’t kowtowing to these otherwise-unemployable morons.

There is no pro-democracy argument for Kamala Harris to do an interview with this media. In fact, there is every reason to suspect that doing it would only hurt the pro-democracy movement.

The script has been flipped, and the corporate media doesn’t understand what happened.

Commenting on Morning Joe today, GOP pollster Frank Luntz said of Republican women in his focus groups who now plan to vote for Kamal Harris, "Harris reminds some men of their first wife. Donald Trump reminds women of their first husband's divorce lawyer.”

In the meantime, “Fat Elvis impersonator” Donald Trump may be getting the old band from 2016 back together to revive the past glory from his first – and only successful – presidential campaign.

Amid reports that Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita - the nominal heads of the 2024 Trump campaign - suspect longtime adviser Kellyanne Conway might be making a play to take over, Trump brought back his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski today.

Lewandowski was removed from a top post with a pro-Trump super PAC in 2021 after a donor's wife, Trashelle Odom, accused him of making unwanted sexual advances towards her at a Las Vegas charity dinner; he was later charged with a misdemeanor.

Tara Palmeri, senior political correspondent for Puck News, reported today that "Lewandowski told allies over the weekend that he was coming back as a campaign chairman essentially a layer above Wiles and LaCivita. This comes as Trump, superstitious and nostalgic, wants the team that helped him win in 2016 back."

Other Trump aides and allies who are joining the campaign include Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump’s 2020 campaign, along with Alex Pfeiffer and Alex Bruesewitz, a pair of top officials with the MAGA Inc. super PAC, whose leader Taylor Budowich already left to join the campaign in a senior capacity.

“As we head into the home stretch of this election, we are continuing to add to our impressive campaign team,” said Trump co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita in a statement. “Corey Lewandowski, Taylor Budowich, Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz, and Tim Murtaugh are all veterans of prior Trump campaigns and their unmatched experience will help President Trump prosecute the case against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the most radical ticket in American history.”

They’re whistling past the graveyard of those who ever believed Donald Trump is not the monster he is.

Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman reports many former Trump backers are bewildered by the way he's conducting himself, and they believe it seems like he's trying to deliberately lose the 2024 presidential race. Others, however, believe Trump cannot get over the fact that President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and that he now has to face off against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump's allies have had an impossible time warning him against making self-destructive attacks on Harris. "Trump’s advisers have implored him to launch policy attacks on Harris instead of using juvenile nicknames like Laffin Kamala and Kamabla," Sherman writes.

Even longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone is among those who want Trump to change tactics. He told Sherman, “I do think it’s counterproductive to call her stupid.” Trump has rejected his team’s advice. According to the Republican close to the campaign, Trump tells his advisers: 'I know what I’m doing.'"

In the course of yesterday and today, Trump attempted to hold “press conferences” about economic issues, and in both events went off into whining about having to run against Harris and how the 2020 election was stolen from him. He demonstrated his complete lack of political self-awareness by holding a conference about food people can no longer afford to buy at his country club in Bedminster, a location none of the people he claimed he was worried for would ever be able to show up at. During 90 minutes in his fake Rose Garden at Bedminster, America got to watch Trump deteriorate in real-time as he went so far off the rails that he spent 15 minutes ranting about the criminal cases against him at a press conference that was supposed to be about economic issues. These press conference disasters are campaign ads for Kamala Harris.

In the meantime, Trump’s VP running mate, Corporal Six Months In An Air-Conditioned Trailer, has now posted polling negatives that exceed those of Sarah Palin in 2008, posting a net negative 9.3% today.

The good news in all the MAGA nostalgia for a past that never was is that a significant proportion of the MAGA Baby Boomer dolts, dweebs, morons and idiots we had to put up with in high school 60 years ago, who only continued their downward trajectories in all the years since we left them behind, are no longer around to lower the national IQ as they did in 2016 and 2020. I read recently that something around half of the Class of ‘62 are no longer here.

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