Have you considered that your perception of the Harris campaign is colored by being - no offense - Very Online?
It is easy for you, Freddie de Boer, or any of your readers to say what's too online because we're all it. I am not sure if any of the aforementioned truly knows what it is like to be a low-information voter.
The point being, is the Harris really running for President of Online, or is that just the online bits of her campaign? And the other bits, ones more likely to be seen by the median voter are more like this ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hamD7RueuvA?
Agreed. Kamala is actually campaigning nonstop right now, on-the-ground, in swing states, whereas Trump has zero events scheduled and is just ranting on Truth social
Just because she has a strong online presence doesn’t mean that’s all that’s happening
To your point, I watched a lot of broadcast Olympics coverage at night (a pretty normie move) and the presentation of her in that ad space seems very conventional -- prosecutor, fights for middle class, for you vs Trump for himself, see her at factories, etc. No coconuts.
But it's fair to worry about whether the campaign staffers are dedicating too much time to the meme stuff since D campaign staff are young and online in a too-left way. The fact that the campaign added David Plouffe is probably a good sign that they have someone senior more laser-focused on swing voters and swing states.
To expand a little, i watch a lot of broadcast sports and local news in the Philly market and have had the same experience- the Harris ads are conventional, positive bio/intro to voters ads so far. The Trump ads are the ones making more references to Online, especially the "border czar" one with her dancing, if you've seen that one.
I came here to say basically this. There is something tautological about the complaint that her online campaign very online. Her TV ads, and comments to union audiences, etc strike a very different tone.
Yeah, Harris’s public appearances and TV spots— ie: what the typical voter, who watches a lot of TV but doesn’t read very much actually sees— are very median voter targeted. The policy content is mostly either talking about stuff where the mainstream Democratic position has 60+% approval (keeping abortion, contraception, and IVF legal, protecting Social Security and Medicare, defending the Obamacare pre-existing conditions coverage mandate, negotiating down prescription drug prices, cracking down on junk fees) or tacking to the center on issues where voters lean further right (emphasizing passing the border security bill and allocating more resources to crack down on fentanyl smuggling). The biographical stuff also tacks toward the center—talking a lot about being a prosecutor who punishes murderers and scammers.
I think this is probably the biggest reason why the campaign is doing well. Voters like candidates who cater to their preferences.
I hope, and maybe expect, that swing voters now are like the average American voter, in that they on average want to turn the page on the divisive chaos of the Trump Biden Hillary era. As long as the new page is competent and reasonable enough on big issues (economy, abortion, border, etc). Harris and Walz give us that. A prosecutor who supported the most restrictive immigration bill in decades (opposed by Trump) and who defends choice, and a VP who worked hard to provide meals to poor school kids so they can learn. Let’s do this. Turn out your friends. Let’s turn the page.
Not all swing voters (or maybe even the average one) believe that either candidate is reasonable and competent on the full set of issues that said voter cares about. It could be the case that the swing voter set is defined by the cross-current mishmash of misaligned policy positions on both sides...and whichever candidate articulates the most complete set wins (no supportive data here). Otherwise, are we left to simply vote against the most elderly still in the race provided our state is inside (or close to) margin of polling error. Depressing. I'd rather watch Over The Top again on VHS.
I appreciate the distinction that this post makes between a campaign that is more vibes-oriented than fact-oriented. It also seems important, however, to talk about *which* vibes the Harris campaign is targeting.
In particular, I think a lot of people are sick of being scared all the time. People would like to laugh and smile for a change. The genius of calling Trump/Vance "weird" is not so much that it drags the other side down into the mud, it is that voters don't have to be afraid of weird in order to vote for the side that seems normal.
Contrast this to calling Trump a narcissistic liar, a threat to democracy, and so on. I've been afraid of Trump for almost nine years now, and I just can't take it any more. I am soooo ready for some lighter, happier messages. Judging by the way the Harris campaign has taken off, it sure looks like I'm not the only one.
Why are the Democrats held to standards that Trump is not? I mean he does nothing but lie, he’s old, definitely seems to have cognitive issues, and is a rapist, but doesn’t get dinged in the press for any of that. Why not? If you covered up the name and just laid out the accomplishments, Joe Biden might go down as one of the five best presidents of all time, and yet he was ran out of the campaign because the press kept saying he was too old, ignoring the fact that his opponent is almost 80 and an absolute whack job. I mean, I’m glad Harris is leading, but this should have been a walk for Biden.
Because nothing about Trump has changed, and Biden sounded like he didn’t know where he was. Yes, the media will chase the story, and the story was Biden sounding confused and lost. You can think he did a good job as President and still think any Democrat with a working brain would do better.
Campaigns are won by energizing your base and converting undecideds. You simply cannot tell me that Biden would have been able to do either of those things effectively. Yes, Trump is a liar, rapist, scam artist, bigot, fraud, etc. etc. etc.
And the sitting President lost a debate to him! He lost the battle of public perception to a world historically bad person! This isn’t a controversy or conspiracy. This is reality. I watched it. I am not stupid. Telling me that I’m wrong when my eyes saw a geriatric man malfunction on live TV is not how you win voters. And that’s what the Biden campaign did for weeks before finally doing the right thing.
I think the media really doesn't know what to do with Trump, and it's become self fulfilling over the past eight years. Treating him the way you would any other candidate, it's so obvious he's disqualified, for so many reasons, and yet he won in 2016 despite all of them, and even as events (and the Republican party) have only gotten more and more bizarre over the past eight years, Trump has continued to maintain the support of 45% of the country, or at least the voters, no matter what. And the type of people who work in journalism truly don't understand this, but the lesson they've taken from it is to give up on covering Trump in any sort of 'normal' way, because they've learned, whether correctly or not, that it doesn't have any effect.
I think the reason is that what's going on is conservatives have been building a backlash against the civil rights era and feminism for decades, such that their movement is more or less a vibe sustained by cycles of self reinforcing lies and hate, rather than something with cognitive 'meaning'. Trump is particularly well suited for this because he too is mostly a vibe, a backlash. The best explanation for most of what he says and does is 'deranged pathological narcissist spews nonsense' and trying to make it mean more than that is often a fool's errand. And it's been eight years of the exact same story.
So far no one has found a way to put the country back together again, and the swing voters who will decide the election have to figure out what to prioritize in making their choice. External events may yet play a role but otherwise whichever campaign is more persuasive to them will probably win.
Your comment is spot on, in my opinion. But I would add that American journalism has often shown itself unequipped to deal with demagogues.
Very much like Trump, Joe McCarthy knew how to get himself amplified uncritically by the press. It didn't matter how much lying he did or how crazy he acted -- he was validated as a normal, authoritative participant in the democratic process. The media's cluelessness and toothlessness were necessary elements in his rise to power.
Demagogues have found success in many countries by gouging at the soft underbelly of democracies. It's a paradox that democracies by their very nature enable and feed the very parasites that can destroy them.
In the US, a particular soft spot is the openness of journalistic "norms" to manipulation. It seems elementary that slavish adherence to professional convention is part of the problem. But convention is ensconced as dogma in mainstream American journalism, and dogma is resistant to reform.
"the press kept saying he was too old" I too thought that this was just something the press was saying, but then I saw it with my own eyes: while he may not be too old by just his age number, he is definitely too old by his ability to think straight, follow his own thoughts, and speak clearly. "this should have been a walk for Biden" is now just something you are saying, it is not the reality.
I do agree that Trump shouldn't be given a free pass for all the crap he has done and said, just because it has been a while. It should be repeated every single time anyone mentions anything negative about Kamala.
We're in the middle of a news cycle where the press is pretty aggressively investigating Trump's claim (almost certainly either a lie or such a significant misremembering to be evidence of cognitive decline) that he was in a helicopter with Willie Brown that almost crashed. There was substantial coverage of the E Jean Carroll sexual assault liability case at the time of the verdict. I don't know what more you want from them exactly. Their job is to report news, and news has to be new if you want to keep your audience. Nobody wants to read and nobody is going to pay for articles just constantly repeating all the bad things Donald Trump has said and done in the past.
"Nobody wants to read and nobody is going to pay for articles just constantly repeating all the bad things Donald Trump has said and done in the past."
That's an excuse for media organizations. But it's essentially the problem. Nate misses this when he discusses (above) risks ahead for the Harris campaign. As a result, minor stories about Democratic foibles or even entirely false charges get more coverage than actual gob-smacking flashing red lights about Trump.
Case in point: Trump was absolutely bonkers in his news conference last week at Mar A Lago. I mean bonkers! Even for Trump. Watch it. The big story the next day? The nothing burger of Vance's accusations about Walz' military record. It very much looked like LaCivita, who cooked up the swiftboating of John Kerry, was now swiftboating Walz. More importantly, the political press corps showed that it hadn't learned anything from being manipulated in exactly the same way 20 years ago.
Walz' alleged "stolen valor" may not amount to much because it is such a thin claim. But the incident tells us that reporters -- in their constant search to find a complication for their nifty narrative -- are primed for an absolutely feeding frenzy when they do find something critical of Harris with legs. Meanwhile, Trump could dance naked and take a giant poop on the grave of George Washington, and it will be treated as just another press conference.
I don't think this campaign runs much of a risk of turning into 2016 even if Twitter feeds might look similar. Like Nate said, all the non-Trump candidates are poorly defined. The chronically online discussions in 2016 and the Clinton consensus that emerged ignored how Clinton had been defined by mainstream media for the prior 30 years. She was one of the best defined (and not well-liked) candidates in modern elections. The online discourse pretended that none of that existed.
The Harris campaign currently is successfully contesting media cycles against Trump right now, which is no small feat. And they should probably keep doing it for as long as they can. Trump is at his worst when he tries to regain media attention. What happens when the first truly bad media cycle rolls around? No idea, but until online discourse is wholly out of step with on the ground perception, I think the 2016 comparison is overblown.
Given how quickly everyone moved on from the assassination attempt, I don't think it's likely that Harris will sprint to the finish line unimpeded by hostile news cycles. She's likely to encounter a lot of them between now and November.
I think there's undoubtedly real enthusiasm on the Dem side right now, but also there's an element of fingers-in-ears because Dems simply are tired of feeling enveloped by negativity. In other words, there's some Biden bounce-back happening independent of Harris and which makes evaluating her early campaign nearly impossible.
Still, as a center left voter I do think she has improved immensely over 2019. Or at least the context of a GE is much more favorable to her than a primary. The hope & change aspects of the campaign are being driven by voters, when in fact Harris is a naturally officious person due to her experience as a prosecutor. Right now there's a harmony between the two, and perhaps that part will persist through the election.
I very much appreciate Nate's integrity and incorruptibility about the math. We cannot give in to irrational exuberance and forget that most of our media is from the echo chamber that agrees with us. A sense of inevitable victory in an obama-like Cinderella story plucked from the mind of Andrew Ross Sorkin, it plays wonderful in our imagination. And polymarket does say there is a 25% chance of a Democratic sweep which Moody's estimates would result in 1% better economic growth. The 2026 Senate map has the GOP defending 20 states while the Democrats defend 13. In other words in the 25% probability of a sweep Kamala could potentially have 4 years to deliver biden-like level legislative wins before her likely rematch with Trump in 2028. It is easy to see how those seeking progressive wins like walz delivered in Minnesota can put together a scenario in which we wind up with 8 years of Biden like legislative wins. Such stories are wonderful and weekends are for dreaming. But we have to remember that there are lots of Americans who feel just as passionately in the opposite direction. And it's going to come down to a few hundred thousand swing voters in a handful of states that decides this. Just because the contrast between these two tickets is as wide as you could ever imagine does not mean the right side will win. We have to earn this.
People are graduating from high school with fewer skills than I was required to have in 6th grade.
It's why employers require college degrees for basic entry level jobs. They can't trust that a high school diploma means anything anymore.
I have sympathy for the teachers who are put in impossible positions, but that doesn't make the situation more acceptable.
Is it too much to ask for every high school graduate to be able to calculate how far a projectile will travel based on its angle, starting elevation and starting velocity?
Well, I'm not on that helicopter, but I can collect DNA samples from the corpses, run several genetic markers on each, and get a pretty good idea of who their families are.
It doesn’t bother me much because of how it was fact-checked so hard & quickly by those that oppose Trump & Vance. I’m not the most online person but the first I heard of this was in an explanation that it was made up.
Much of what you say parallels what I have been thinking.
However, there is one other huge variable, and that is Donald Trump. He really does not sound the same. Whether this is the size of the Harris crowds or his age or the strain of his legal challenges, I don't know, but it appears he needs uncontrolled appearances like debates to trip up Harris, as you say. But I think that those present a new sort of risk for him. Not that he will come across as too extreme -- that's just a liberal dream -- but rather that he comes across as crumbling.
I don't know that this is as big a factor as how Kamala ends up being perceived by not-online-centrists, but I do see it as an important factor. And one that I think the Harris campaign is deliberately playing towards with all the poking and mockery. I don't think they are just trying to rally their base, I think they are playing with Trump's mind. Because the not-online-centrists are going to be revisiting Trump in the coming weeks too.
That's a challenge that the Harris campaign will take on at full speed, assumping a fair debate arena. Trump is going to look old and crazy next to her. She's a former prosecutor (by all accounts a very good one) who lives for litigating. Also, all of his talk about her being too stupid to debate him sets her up well if she's on her game. Trump did the same to Biden in 2020 by calling him old and feeble; it backfired.
Trump will only debate because he's falling behind and needs a shakeup. It's a high risk strategy and perhaps the best card he has yet to play, but it definitely pushes all of his chips into the pot. If it goes poorly for him, it's likely the end of his campaign.
I think people underestimate Harris in a debate with Trump at their own peril. The 2020 debate was her strongest moment, and with Trump's penchant for racially tone deaf (if not outright racist) comments, and misogynistic tendencies (remember him hovering over Hillary as if to intimidate her - that did not play with viewers), he could easily spiral out of control. Especially if she starts attacking him as a prosecutor might. We'll see.
The smartest thing she could do would be to lure him into an Archie Bunker response. Boggles the mind...knowing how the last oldest candidate self-destructed, why in the world would Eric (assuming he is of sound mind) make the same mistake Hunter made?
Every single person reading a political Substack is Very Online. Each person posting a comment is Very Very Online. And if you engage in a conversation online in a Nate Silver comment thread, you should really consider going for a walk outside instead.
The comment about Trump wanting to debate Harris speaks volumes. Trump knew Biden was senile but the media protected him. He was willing to acquiesce to nearly every Biden demand (hostile moderators, no audience, etc.) because he just needed Biden on camera showing he is incapable of being president.
Now he wants to debate Harris because once again the media has jumped in to protect Harris. She doesn’t take questions or hold press conferences that aren’t scripted because it would reveal to the masses how poor of a choice she is. The press is doing everything it can to bury her unpopular positions (defund police, gun confiscation, free healthcare for illegals, etc.) and rewrite history (border czar). Trump knows his best odds are getting her in front of a camera for the nation to see. The million dollar question is, “Will the media allow the democrats to run a basement campaign yet again?” When hiding your candidate is your only shot at winning, maybe you have problem with your candidate.
That's a blinders-on take. Just yesterday, the NYT ran an article that I'm paraphrasing as the title "Trump's enconomic proposals are popular with voters: Harris' are a mystery". The take of that headline is that Trump is somehow on top of his policy and Harris has something to hide or that she's some closet Trotsky.
You'd have to actually read the article to see that
a) Trump's proposals (no taxes on tips, no taxes on SS, much reduced taxes elsewhere) would either blow up in the deficit in such a way that our borrowing costs would go through the roof and we'd default, or we'd be making massive spending cuts elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Harris' economic proposals are the same as most any other Democratic candidate and what Biden was doing. She's #2 in the administration after all and only been a candidate for 3 weeks. She isn't making crazy proposals up on a daily basis like Trump-let's just promise a bunch of free stuff to everyone! She could put out a policy tomorrow and it would say something like "reverse the 2017 tax cuts for the rich; reinvest the money into schools and keeping kids healthy". It wouldn't be newsworthy. There's nothing there to hide.
Media is protecting Trump 100%. The policies and decisions he has made while president are far, far worse than anything that Kamala has ever said or promoted (and Biden has been far, far better than Trump) , and nobody is talking about that - and you are not talking about that either.
Trump is absolutely terrible, and any article talking about this election that doesn't mention that is protecting him.
Media protected Biden all the way up to the debate at which point they couldn’t hide his decline any more. They were saying things like “he’s sharper than ever” right up to the debate. They had no choice but to abandon the lies when all of the nation could see the falsehoods.
See that's where the left wing media bias narrative and its supporters lose all credibility. People don't understand that the media largely has a status quo bias. Yes there are some outlets that are clearly left wing and some that are clearly right wing (it never ceases to amaze me how people that complain about left wing bias will happily consume fox or Newsmax, as if bias is only bad if on the left). But when the media turned against Biden it wasn't just "oh yes that was a bad debate people are right about his decline..". It was all out war against him and his campaign. Have you ever seen fox do that to Trump? Not a chance.
I kinda resent this narrative that Kamala is solely running on vibes. She’s made unions a big part of her early campaigning and has spoken pretty extensively about reproductive rights, expanding and improving Obamacare, and other typical democrat policies like climate change and taxing the wealthy.
Moreover, she’s been campaigning for just under 3 weeks. When has a presidential campaign ever been this criticized for not doing press interviews or nailing down micro-policy details only 3 weeks in?
If this is “confidence” it’s a really strange kind of confidence.
The strategy appears to be:
Avoid unscripted events (assumption here seems to be Harris will screw up in those).
Avoid substance (no positions section on the campaign website, etc).
Run on memes and vibes.
Assume the media will play along (they will).
Bank on Trump’s unpopularity rather than any real positive vision for Harris.
It’s obviously unsustainable, but sure, it might very well work given the abbreviated campaign.
But again, it’s deeply weird to see so much talk of “confidence” when the entire campaign seems built around just hoping and praying that there’s enough time to float by on honeymoon vibes, a supine media, and being “not Trump” before the voters figure out they actually don’t like Harris or what she stands for.
This is the kind of campaign you run when you think you fundamentally have a lemon, and are just trying to pull a fast one on the public and kick any consequences down the road to the midterms and 2028. Some confidence.
To be fair it's a good strategy while it's working, and I don't think you have to assume they think they have a lemon. It's extremely hard to set up an entire presidential platform in a month, so they may just be buying time while they put one together. Nothing to with lack of confidence in the candidate and everything to do with a compressed timeline.
The campaign timeline has been so compressed that I’m willing to cut Harris a fair amount of slack on a complete policy platform until the convention. Having to get the support of delegates, vet VP picks and build a campaign staff in a matter of weeks is a full plate. The talking points seem to have emerging specifics (like implementing the failed bipartisan border deal) that may offer a window into a future platform. Holding together the coalition on the left is going to be complex…. consider the Middle East, fiscal policy, local policing. She picked her VP on Tuesday (!). Better to be criticized for being slow on specifics than to alienate a group you really need to turn out for you.
Harris has been VP for nearly 4 years. She should have had a platform stuck in a drawer and ready to go from day 1 in case Biden had a heart attack or stroke (neither unlikely for anyone his age).
It doesn't work that way. Johnson took over from JFK in the middle of his presidency, and bascially pushed for JFK's agenda (civil rights act). Harris on the other hand is now campaigning for her OWN full term presidency and gets to chart her own course.
Part of your list is an artifact of being at the start of an extraordinary (for the US) compressed campaign, they are very busy doing early stuff, little time to fit in the “unscripted” events, yet. First things first.
Part is made up BS. Her immigration ad is very explicit, for example. It names VERY explicit policy in a full written out, publicly published draft law.
The 2nd part is especially hilarious given the mockery of a “policy platform” document the RNC rolled out. Just more BS, projection turtles all the way down in Trumpland….as usual
Yeah, after these couch lies, even being repeated on-stage by Walz, I don't think anyone will be taking the dangers of so-called “misinformation” seriously ever again when Democrats piously lecture about it.
The couch 'lies' weren't "repeated on-stage by Walz" he made an oblique reference to a meme. If you weren't part of the highly online cohort, it just sounded like Walz was calling Vance lazy. Like Nate said, "misinformation" isn't a super useful category right now and Democrats engage in plenty of spin and media manipulation. But the couch joke isn't meant to be taken seriously, and nobody will remember it a year from now.
The official campaign messaging is calling JD Vance weird. If you also reference a completely false couch meme then yes, it's meant to be taken seriously. If the left doesn't want to hold themselves to the standards of not spreading false information then we in fact should do away with the mis/dis/information labels.
Let's not draw a false equivalence here. The couch joke is meant to dig at JD Vance's lack of relatability and play into the 'weird' frame. Is it name calling, yes. Is it propping up a Q-Anon style conspiracy or hinting that your political opponents abuse children (see 'groomer'), not even close. The left can go a lot lower before they even come close to the Trump campaign's lack of shame in spreading blatant falsehoods.
EDIT: Also, when I say it's not meant to be taken seriously, I mean that nobody in the Harris campaign wants you to believe JD Vance literally fucked a couch. The same can't be said of Trump and Q.
To your edit: Nate pointed it out as well - the campaign is not stupid enough to think that everyone will realize it's a joke. It plays into campaign messaging on "weird," and some will believe it. But you don't seem interested in an honest discussion on the topic - did you know that r/politics is a free alternative?
If it's meant to "play into" official campaign messaging and it's an obvious lie then it's not really a joke. You'll have to show me where JD has made a comolely false personal accusation during the campaign because I'm not aware of it.
Not aware of it? How could you miss all of Vance's lying?
Three recent repeated lies come to mind:
* He says Walz claimed to have fought in "combat." Not once did Walz say that.
* He claims that Hillary was the "border czar." Never even remotely the case.
* He's repeatedly affirmed and expanded upon Trump's lie about Kamala Harris denying her black heritage.
By drawing himself into Trump's circle, Vance must of course affirm an endless universe of Trump's lies -- the "big" one being that the 2020 election being "stolen" (Vance's word).
According to Politifact (which IMO grades Republicans on a curve to convey "balance"), he's earned a remarkably untruthful record. Here it is:
* Vice President Kamala Harris is “calling for an end to the child tax credit.” PANTS ON FIRE
* “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.” MOSTLY FALSE
* "100% of net job creation under the Biden administration has gone to the foreign-born.” MOSTLY FALSE (actually entirely false, but Politifact does grade on a curve for the GOP)
* “The Ukraine supplemental includes a hidden impeachment clause against President Trump.” FALSE
* Rep. Tim Ryan “wanted to decriminalize fentanyl.” PANTS ON FIRE
* “Joe Biden’s open border” means that there are “more Democrat voters pouring into this country." FALSE
* Says Joe Biden risks war with Russia because Vladimir Putin doesn’t “believe in transgender rights." PANTS ON FIRE
* “Joe Biden uses the ATF to illegally track your gun transactions.” FALSE
* “Tim Ryan called police the new Jim Crow.” FALSE
* I left out a couple of "HALF TRUES" & a "MOSTLY TRUE" because we're talking about his lies.
You mentioned "accusations." But Vance has accumulated a separate catalog of lies about himself. He's flipped on more issues than there are gnats in South Georgia. The dishonest part is that he then lies about his previous position - taking abortion as a recent example.
He also lies every time he claims he didn't call Trump Hitler. Before he ran for Senate (according to Politifact's editor): "He deleted tweets from 2016 that included him calling Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” In another deleted tweet following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Trump said fame enabled him to grope women, Vance wrote: “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.'" It's very telling when someone deletes Tweets to hide his record.
Did you forget to take your meds this morning? I'm not reading all of that because even your first bullet point is way off. Walz is on video saying he's carried guns in war.
It was a vague reference. He never even said Vance had sex with a couch. He merely made a not-so-subtle reference by saying “if Vance gets off the couch”
What makes the couch joke so effective is the fact that JD Vance is enough of an oddball it’s genuinely believable that he would fuck a couch - the joke would fall flat if directed at anyone else. The right has called Joe Biden a “radical socialist” for the last 4 years, which is objectively further from the truth than “Couchfucker Vance” is, imo.
JD is almost entirely misinformation, from his bio to his political position.
‘Couch’ is a fun, dumb way to quickly cut through that he’s weird, successful only because of misinformation/conspiracy etc, and has weird views on sex lives.
Plus, Walz is a former high school football coach! This is perfect banter for him.
Walz is like a 21st century Ward Cleaver with a salty mouth. He’s like dozens of my relatives who teach because they love their calling. He probably was a tough coach when he had to be, but I’ll bet his players loved being on his teams. He climbed the ranks in the Guard through hard work. He also worked hard in Congress and even harder as a governor.
Deep down, I’ll bet he is the Dad that JD wished had raised him.
See, this makes me lols. I wonder the following: 1. did JD's angry grandmammy even have a couch (have not read the elegy yet), 2. who's DNA could be found on the couch at Yale law (if any), 3. what a paternity test would reveal...Hnot = Walz genetic profile has no material overlap with Vance genetic profile. Thank you, made my afternoon.
That's interesting! He doesn't seem smug to me - I'm from the northern Midwest and he reminds me very much of the middle-aged dads I grew up around in church, school, etc. They were similarly down-to-earth and snarky.
It's the bog standard online goofing that every candidate will do until Jesus comes back. It's only interesting if you pretend that the Harris campaign is doing nothing else, which couldn't possibly be true. Most importantly, Harris has zero control over what elated liberals are doing online. The options are ignoring them OR doing a bit of free outreach which will only be seen by people who are already online. The tsk tsking does not fit the crime.
Have you considered that your perception of the Harris campaign is colored by being - no offense - Very Online?
It is easy for you, Freddie de Boer, or any of your readers to say what's too online because we're all it. I am not sure if any of the aforementioned truly knows what it is like to be a low-information voter.
The point being, is the Harris really running for President of Online, or is that just the online bits of her campaign? And the other bits, ones more likely to be seen by the median voter are more like this ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hamD7RueuvA?
Agreed. Kamala is actually campaigning nonstop right now, on-the-ground, in swing states, whereas Trump has zero events scheduled and is just ranting on Truth social
Just because she has a strong online presence doesn’t mean that’s all that’s happening
To your point, I watched a lot of broadcast Olympics coverage at night (a pretty normie move) and the presentation of her in that ad space seems very conventional -- prosecutor, fights for middle class, for you vs Trump for himself, see her at factories, etc. No coconuts.
But it's fair to worry about whether the campaign staffers are dedicating too much time to the meme stuff since D campaign staff are young and online in a too-left way. The fact that the campaign added David Plouffe is probably a good sign that they have someone senior more laser-focused on swing voters and swing states.
To expand a little, i watch a lot of broadcast sports and local news in the Philly market and have had the same experience- the Harris ads are conventional, positive bio/intro to voters ads so far. The Trump ads are the ones making more references to Online, especially the "border czar" one with her dancing, if you've seen that one.
Nate loves to think he's somehow removed from terminally online punditry even as evidence consistently points to the opposite.
I came here to say basically this. There is something tautological about the complaint that her online campaign very online. Her TV ads, and comments to union audiences, etc strike a very different tone.
Exactly. And her TV ads are very broadcast TV.
And her rallies are very rah-rah.
AND she's moving UP.
(And kudu's to Nate for noting that she's a 'late boomer', however! ;0)
Yeah, Harris’s public appearances and TV spots— ie: what the typical voter, who watches a lot of TV but doesn’t read very much actually sees— are very median voter targeted. The policy content is mostly either talking about stuff where the mainstream Democratic position has 60+% approval (keeping abortion, contraception, and IVF legal, protecting Social Security and Medicare, defending the Obamacare pre-existing conditions coverage mandate, negotiating down prescription drug prices, cracking down on junk fees) or tacking to the center on issues where voters lean further right (emphasizing passing the border security bill and allocating more resources to crack down on fentanyl smuggling). The biographical stuff also tacks toward the center—talking a lot about being a prosecutor who punishes murderers and scammers.
I think this is probably the biggest reason why the campaign is doing well. Voters like candidates who cater to their preferences.
I hope, and maybe expect, that swing voters now are like the average American voter, in that they on average want to turn the page on the divisive chaos of the Trump Biden Hillary era. As long as the new page is competent and reasonable enough on big issues (economy, abortion, border, etc). Harris and Walz give us that. A prosecutor who supported the most restrictive immigration bill in decades (opposed by Trump) and who defends choice, and a VP who worked hard to provide meals to poor school kids so they can learn. Let’s do this. Turn out your friends. Let’s turn the page.
Not all swing voters (or maybe even the average one) believe that either candidate is reasonable and competent on the full set of issues that said voter cares about. It could be the case that the swing voter set is defined by the cross-current mishmash of misaligned policy positions on both sides...and whichever candidate articulates the most complete set wins (no supportive data here). Otherwise, are we left to simply vote against the most elderly still in the race provided our state is inside (or close to) margin of polling error. Depressing. I'd rather watch Over The Top again on VHS.
I appreciate the distinction that this post makes between a campaign that is more vibes-oriented than fact-oriented. It also seems important, however, to talk about *which* vibes the Harris campaign is targeting.
In particular, I think a lot of people are sick of being scared all the time. People would like to laugh and smile for a change. The genius of calling Trump/Vance "weird" is not so much that it drags the other side down into the mud, it is that voters don't have to be afraid of weird in order to vote for the side that seems normal.
Contrast this to calling Trump a narcissistic liar, a threat to democracy, and so on. I've been afraid of Trump for almost nine years now, and I just can't take it any more. I am soooo ready for some lighter, happier messages. Judging by the way the Harris campaign has taken off, it sure looks like I'm not the only one.
Why are the Democrats held to standards that Trump is not? I mean he does nothing but lie, he’s old, definitely seems to have cognitive issues, and is a rapist, but doesn’t get dinged in the press for any of that. Why not? If you covered up the name and just laid out the accomplishments, Joe Biden might go down as one of the five best presidents of all time, and yet he was ran out of the campaign because the press kept saying he was too old, ignoring the fact that his opponent is almost 80 and an absolute whack job. I mean, I’m glad Harris is leading, but this should have been a walk for Biden.
Because nothing about Trump has changed, and Biden sounded like he didn’t know where he was. Yes, the media will chase the story, and the story was Biden sounding confused and lost. You can think he did a good job as President and still think any Democrat with a working brain would do better.
Campaigns are won by energizing your base and converting undecideds. You simply cannot tell me that Biden would have been able to do either of those things effectively. Yes, Trump is a liar, rapist, scam artist, bigot, fraud, etc. etc. etc.
And the sitting President lost a debate to him! He lost the battle of public perception to a world historically bad person! This isn’t a controversy or conspiracy. This is reality. I watched it. I am not stupid. Telling me that I’m wrong when my eyes saw a geriatric man malfunction on live TV is not how you win voters. And that’s what the Biden campaign did for weeks before finally doing the right thing.
I think the media really doesn't know what to do with Trump, and it's become self fulfilling over the past eight years. Treating him the way you would any other candidate, it's so obvious he's disqualified, for so many reasons, and yet he won in 2016 despite all of them, and even as events (and the Republican party) have only gotten more and more bizarre over the past eight years, Trump has continued to maintain the support of 45% of the country, or at least the voters, no matter what. And the type of people who work in journalism truly don't understand this, but the lesson they've taken from it is to give up on covering Trump in any sort of 'normal' way, because they've learned, whether correctly or not, that it doesn't have any effect.
I think the reason is that what's going on is conservatives have been building a backlash against the civil rights era and feminism for decades, such that their movement is more or less a vibe sustained by cycles of self reinforcing lies and hate, rather than something with cognitive 'meaning'. Trump is particularly well suited for this because he too is mostly a vibe, a backlash. The best explanation for most of what he says and does is 'deranged pathological narcissist spews nonsense' and trying to make it mean more than that is often a fool's errand. And it's been eight years of the exact same story.
So far no one has found a way to put the country back together again, and the swing voters who will decide the election have to figure out what to prioritize in making their choice. External events may yet play a role but otherwise whichever campaign is more persuasive to them will probably win.
Your comment is spot on, in my opinion. But I would add that American journalism has often shown itself unequipped to deal with demagogues.
Very much like Trump, Joe McCarthy knew how to get himself amplified uncritically by the press. It didn't matter how much lying he did or how crazy he acted -- he was validated as a normal, authoritative participant in the democratic process. The media's cluelessness and toothlessness were necessary elements in his rise to power.
Demagogues have found success in many countries by gouging at the soft underbelly of democracies. It's a paradox that democracies by their very nature enable and feed the very parasites that can destroy them.
In the US, a particular soft spot is the openness of journalistic "norms" to manipulation. It seems elementary that slavish adherence to professional convention is part of the problem. But convention is ensconced as dogma in mainstream American journalism, and dogma is resistant to reform.
"the press kept saying he was too old" I too thought that this was just something the press was saying, but then I saw it with my own eyes: while he may not be too old by just his age number, he is definitely too old by his ability to think straight, follow his own thoughts, and speak clearly. "this should have been a walk for Biden" is now just something you are saying, it is not the reality.
I do agree that Trump shouldn't be given a free pass for all the crap he has done and said, just because it has been a while. It should be repeated every single time anyone mentions anything negative about Kamala.
We're in the middle of a news cycle where the press is pretty aggressively investigating Trump's claim (almost certainly either a lie or such a significant misremembering to be evidence of cognitive decline) that he was in a helicopter with Willie Brown that almost crashed. There was substantial coverage of the E Jean Carroll sexual assault liability case at the time of the verdict. I don't know what more you want from them exactly. Their job is to report news, and news has to be new if you want to keep your audience. Nobody wants to read and nobody is going to pay for articles just constantly repeating all the bad things Donald Trump has said and done in the past.
"Nobody wants to read and nobody is going to pay for articles just constantly repeating all the bad things Donald Trump has said and done in the past."
That's an excuse for media organizations. But it's essentially the problem. Nate misses this when he discusses (above) risks ahead for the Harris campaign. As a result, minor stories about Democratic foibles or even entirely false charges get more coverage than actual gob-smacking flashing red lights about Trump.
Case in point: Trump was absolutely bonkers in his news conference last week at Mar A Lago. I mean bonkers! Even for Trump. Watch it. The big story the next day? The nothing burger of Vance's accusations about Walz' military record. It very much looked like LaCivita, who cooked up the swiftboating of John Kerry, was now swiftboating Walz. More importantly, the political press corps showed that it hadn't learned anything from being manipulated in exactly the same way 20 years ago.
Walz' alleged "stolen valor" may not amount to much because it is such a thin claim. But the incident tells us that reporters -- in their constant search to find a complication for their nifty narrative -- are primed for an absolutely feeding frenzy when they do find something critical of Harris with legs. Meanwhile, Trump could dance naked and take a giant poop on the grave of George Washington, and it will be treated as just another press conference.
I don't think this campaign runs much of a risk of turning into 2016 even if Twitter feeds might look similar. Like Nate said, all the non-Trump candidates are poorly defined. The chronically online discussions in 2016 and the Clinton consensus that emerged ignored how Clinton had been defined by mainstream media for the prior 30 years. She was one of the best defined (and not well-liked) candidates in modern elections. The online discourse pretended that none of that existed.
The Harris campaign currently is successfully contesting media cycles against Trump right now, which is no small feat. And they should probably keep doing it for as long as they can. Trump is at his worst when he tries to regain media attention. What happens when the first truly bad media cycle rolls around? No idea, but until online discourse is wholly out of step with on the ground perception, I think the 2016 comparison is overblown.
Given how quickly everyone moved on from the assassination attempt, I don't think it's likely that Harris will sprint to the finish line unimpeded by hostile news cycles. She's likely to encounter a lot of them between now and November.
I think there's undoubtedly real enthusiasm on the Dem side right now, but also there's an element of fingers-in-ears because Dems simply are tired of feeling enveloped by negativity. In other words, there's some Biden bounce-back happening independent of Harris and which makes evaluating her early campaign nearly impossible.
Still, as a center left voter I do think she has improved immensely over 2019. Or at least the context of a GE is much more favorable to her than a primary. The hope & change aspects of the campaign are being driven by voters, when in fact Harris is a naturally officious person due to her experience as a prosecutor. Right now there's a harmony between the two, and perhaps that part will persist through the election.
Moved on quickly from assassination because there’s not much there to dwell on, for anyone. 🤷♂️
The Walz pick to me strikes as self-awareness of “officious” tendency and/or label, a direct mitigation attempt. Frankly I find that a good sign.
I feel like Nate wants a personal explanation from the Harris campaign for not picking Shapiro lol...
I very much appreciate Nate's integrity and incorruptibility about the math. We cannot give in to irrational exuberance and forget that most of our media is from the echo chamber that agrees with us. A sense of inevitable victory in an obama-like Cinderella story plucked from the mind of Andrew Ross Sorkin, it plays wonderful in our imagination. And polymarket does say there is a 25% chance of a Democratic sweep which Moody's estimates would result in 1% better economic growth. The 2026 Senate map has the GOP defending 20 states while the Democrats defend 13. In other words in the 25% probability of a sweep Kamala could potentially have 4 years to deliver biden-like level legislative wins before her likely rematch with Trump in 2028. It is easy to see how those seeking progressive wins like walz delivered in Minnesota can put together a scenario in which we wind up with 8 years of Biden like legislative wins. Such stories are wonderful and weekends are for dreaming. But we have to remember that there are lots of Americans who feel just as passionately in the opposite direction. And it's going to come down to a few hundred thousand swing voters in a handful of states that decides this. Just because the contrast between these two tickets is as wide as you could ever imagine does not mean the right side will win. We have to earn this.
Almost agree totally. But by 2028, Trump will be broke and/or in prison, and so far into dementia even his base will have moved on.
More importantly, he will be a double-loser, and no one will want him to run for the fourth time in a row.
There’s a significant number of voters convinced he has yet to lose once. You make an optimistic assumption, given all we’ve seen so far.
What if 42-45% of likely voters are also broke, have been to prison, and demonstrate <12th grade logic cage performance?
I'm frustrated with the US Education system.
People are graduating from high school with fewer skills than I was required to have in 6th grade.
It's why employers require college degrees for basic entry level jobs. They can't trust that a high school diploma means anything anymore.
I have sympathy for the teachers who are put in impossible positions, but that doesn't make the situation more acceptable.
Is it too much to ask for every high school graduate to be able to calculate how far a projectile will travel based on its angle, starting elevation and starting velocity?
It shouldn't be.
If a helicopter begins losing altitude at time x and rate y, can you identify your fellow passengers?
Well, I'm not on that helicopter, but I can collect DNA samples from the corpses, run several genetic markers on each, and get a pretty good idea of who their families are.
You know, if I was asked to do so.
Probably not. But I do know a presidential candidate who could categorize all the passengers by race.
Glad it’s not just me who dislikes the couch stuff.
To each his own. Don’t kink shame.
Gotta admit that’s good
lol
It doesn’t bother me much because of how it was fact-checked so hard & quickly by those that oppose Trump & Vance. I’m not the most online person but the first I heard of this was in an explanation that it was made up.
"the first I heard of this was in an explanation that it was made up."
Same here. My understanding is that he doesn't like couches at all. But he does have a thing for La-Z Boys.
Much of what you say parallels what I have been thinking.
However, there is one other huge variable, and that is Donald Trump. He really does not sound the same. Whether this is the size of the Harris crowds or his age or the strain of his legal challenges, I don't know, but it appears he needs uncontrolled appearances like debates to trip up Harris, as you say. But I think that those present a new sort of risk for him. Not that he will come across as too extreme -- that's just a liberal dream -- but rather that he comes across as crumbling.
I don't know that this is as big a factor as how Kamala ends up being perceived by not-online-centrists, but I do see it as an important factor. And one that I think the Harris campaign is deliberately playing towards with all the poking and mockery. I don't think they are just trying to rally their base, I think they are playing with Trump's mind. Because the not-online-centrists are going to be revisiting Trump in the coming weeks too.
That's a challenge that the Harris campaign will take on at full speed, assumping a fair debate arena. Trump is going to look old and crazy next to her. She's a former prosecutor (by all accounts a very good one) who lives for litigating. Also, all of his talk about her being too stupid to debate him sets her up well if she's on her game. Trump did the same to Biden in 2020 by calling him old and feeble; it backfired.
Trump will only debate because he's falling behind and needs a shakeup. It's a high risk strategy and perhaps the best card he has yet to play, but it definitely pushes all of his chips into the pot. If it goes poorly for him, it's likely the end of his campaign.
I think people underestimate Harris in a debate with Trump at their own peril. The 2020 debate was her strongest moment, and with Trump's penchant for racially tone deaf (if not outright racist) comments, and misogynistic tendencies (remember him hovering over Hillary as if to intimidate her - that did not play with viewers), he could easily spiral out of control. Especially if she starts attacking him as a prosecutor might. We'll see.
She's fairly stupid. Like, simply not that bright. I think Trump will take his chances.
The smartest thing she could do would be to lure him into an Archie Bunker response. Boggles the mind...knowing how the last oldest candidate self-destructed, why in the world would Eric (assuming he is of sound mind) make the same mistake Hunter made?
Every single person reading a political Substack is Very Online. Each person posting a comment is Very Very Online. And if you engage in a conversation online in a Nate Silver comment thread, you should really consider going for a walk outside instead.
How was your walk.
The comment about Trump wanting to debate Harris speaks volumes. Trump knew Biden was senile but the media protected him. He was willing to acquiesce to nearly every Biden demand (hostile moderators, no audience, etc.) because he just needed Biden on camera showing he is incapable of being president.
Now he wants to debate Harris because once again the media has jumped in to protect Harris. She doesn’t take questions or hold press conferences that aren’t scripted because it would reveal to the masses how poor of a choice she is. The press is doing everything it can to bury her unpopular positions (defund police, gun confiscation, free healthcare for illegals, etc.) and rewrite history (border czar). Trump knows his best odds are getting her in front of a camera for the nation to see. The million dollar question is, “Will the media allow the democrats to run a basement campaign yet again?” When hiding your candidate is your only shot at winning, maybe you have problem with your candidate.
That's a blinders-on take. Just yesterday, the NYT ran an article that I'm paraphrasing as the title "Trump's enconomic proposals are popular with voters: Harris' are a mystery". The take of that headline is that Trump is somehow on top of his policy and Harris has something to hide or that she's some closet Trotsky.
You'd have to actually read the article to see that
a) Trump's proposals (no taxes on tips, no taxes on SS, much reduced taxes elsewhere) would either blow up in the deficit in such a way that our borrowing costs would go through the roof and we'd default, or we'd be making massive spending cuts elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Harris' economic proposals are the same as most any other Democratic candidate and what Biden was doing. She's #2 in the administration after all and only been a candidate for 3 weeks. She isn't making crazy proposals up on a daily basis like Trump-let's just promise a bunch of free stuff to everyone! She could put out a policy tomorrow and it would say something like "reverse the 2017 tax cuts for the rich; reinvest the money into schools and keeping kids healthy". It wouldn't be newsworthy. There's nothing there to hide.
Media is protecting Trump 100%. The policies and decisions he has made while president are far, far worse than anything that Kamala has ever said or promoted (and Biden has been far, far better than Trump) , and nobody is talking about that - and you are not talking about that either.
Trump is absolutely terrible, and any article talking about this election that doesn't mention that is protecting him.
Media protected Biden all the way up to the debate at which point they couldn’t hide his decline any more. They were saying things like “he’s sharper than ever” right up to the debate. They had no choice but to abandon the lies when all of the nation could see the falsehoods.
The media was running stories about how people are saying Biden was too old every single day for months.
See that's where the left wing media bias narrative and its supporters lose all credibility. People don't understand that the media largely has a status quo bias. Yes there are some outlets that are clearly left wing and some that are clearly right wing (it never ceases to amaze me how people that complain about left wing bias will happily consume fox or Newsmax, as if bias is only bad if on the left). But when the media turned against Biden it wasn't just "oh yes that was a bad debate people are right about his decline..". It was all out war against him and his campaign. Have you ever seen fox do that to Trump? Not a chance.
I kinda resent this narrative that Kamala is solely running on vibes. She’s made unions a big part of her early campaigning and has spoken pretty extensively about reproductive rights, expanding and improving Obamacare, and other typical democrat policies like climate change and taxing the wealthy.
Moreover, she’s been campaigning for just under 3 weeks. When has a presidential campaign ever been this criticized for not doing press interviews or nailing down micro-policy details only 3 weeks in?
She has spoken? Or a conglomerate of speech writers has spoken?
Did you just discover that politicians have speech writers?
Yeah I’m seeing a lot of this take lately:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/07/31/harris_and_the_bouncing_balloon_campaign_151355.html
If this is “confidence” it’s a really strange kind of confidence.
The strategy appears to be:
Avoid unscripted events (assumption here seems to be Harris will screw up in those).
Avoid substance (no positions section on the campaign website, etc).
Run on memes and vibes.
Assume the media will play along (they will).
Bank on Trump’s unpopularity rather than any real positive vision for Harris.
It’s obviously unsustainable, but sure, it might very well work given the abbreviated campaign.
But again, it’s deeply weird to see so much talk of “confidence” when the entire campaign seems built around just hoping and praying that there’s enough time to float by on honeymoon vibes, a supine media, and being “not Trump” before the voters figure out they actually don’t like Harris or what she stands for.
This is the kind of campaign you run when you think you fundamentally have a lemon, and are just trying to pull a fast one on the public and kick any consequences down the road to the midterms and 2028. Some confidence.
To be fair it's a good strategy while it's working, and I don't think you have to assume they think they have a lemon. It's extremely hard to set up an entire presidential platform in a month, so they may just be buying time while they put one together. Nothing to with lack of confidence in the candidate and everything to do with a compressed timeline.
The campaign timeline has been so compressed that I’m willing to cut Harris a fair amount of slack on a complete policy platform until the convention. Having to get the support of delegates, vet VP picks and build a campaign staff in a matter of weeks is a full plate. The talking points seem to have emerging specifics (like implementing the failed bipartisan border deal) that may offer a window into a future platform. Holding together the coalition on the left is going to be complex…. consider the Middle East, fiscal policy, local policing. She picked her VP on Tuesday (!). Better to be criticized for being slow on specifics than to alienate a group you really need to turn out for you.
Harris has been VP for nearly 4 years. She should have had a platform stuck in a drawer and ready to go from day 1 in case Biden had a heart attack or stroke (neither unlikely for anyone his age).
It doesn't work that way. Johnson took over from JFK in the middle of his presidency, and bascially pushed for JFK's agenda (civil rights act). Harris on the other hand is now campaigning for her OWN full term presidency and gets to chart her own course.
Part of your list is an artifact of being at the start of an extraordinary (for the US) compressed campaign, they are very busy doing early stuff, little time to fit in the “unscripted” events, yet. First things first.
Part is made up BS. Her immigration ad is very explicit, for example. It names VERY explicit policy in a full written out, publicly published draft law.
The 2nd part is especially hilarious given the mockery of a “policy platform” document the RNC rolled out. Just more BS, projection turtles all the way down in Trumpland….as usual
Yeah, after these couch lies, even being repeated on-stage by Walz, I don't think anyone will be taking the dangers of so-called “misinformation” seriously ever again when Democrats piously lecture about it.
The couch 'lies' weren't "repeated on-stage by Walz" he made an oblique reference to a meme. If you weren't part of the highly online cohort, it just sounded like Walz was calling Vance lazy. Like Nate said, "misinformation" isn't a super useful category right now and Democrats engage in plenty of spin and media manipulation. But the couch joke isn't meant to be taken seriously, and nobody will remember it a year from now.
The official campaign messaging is calling JD Vance weird. If you also reference a completely false couch meme then yes, it's meant to be taken seriously. If the left doesn't want to hold themselves to the standards of not spreading false information then we in fact should do away with the mis/dis/information labels.
Let's not draw a false equivalence here. The couch joke is meant to dig at JD Vance's lack of relatability and play into the 'weird' frame. Is it name calling, yes. Is it propping up a Q-Anon style conspiracy or hinting that your political opponents abuse children (see 'groomer'), not even close. The left can go a lot lower before they even come close to the Trump campaign's lack of shame in spreading blatant falsehoods.
EDIT: Also, when I say it's not meant to be taken seriously, I mean that nobody in the Harris campaign wants you to believe JD Vance literally fucked a couch. The same can't be said of Trump and Q.
To your edit: Nate pointed it out as well - the campaign is not stupid enough to think that everyone will realize it's a joke. It plays into campaign messaging on "weird," and some will believe it. But you don't seem interested in an honest discussion on the topic - did you know that r/politics is a free alternative?
If it's meant to "play into" official campaign messaging and it's an obvious lie then it's not really a joke. You'll have to show me where JD has made a comolely false personal accusation during the campaign because I'm not aware of it.
Not aware of it? How could you miss all of Vance's lying?
Three recent repeated lies come to mind:
* He says Walz claimed to have fought in "combat." Not once did Walz say that.
* He claims that Hillary was the "border czar." Never even remotely the case.
* He's repeatedly affirmed and expanded upon Trump's lie about Kamala Harris denying her black heritage.
By drawing himself into Trump's circle, Vance must of course affirm an endless universe of Trump's lies -- the "big" one being that the 2020 election being "stolen" (Vance's word).
According to Politifact (which IMO grades Republicans on a curve to convey "balance"), he's earned a remarkably untruthful record. Here it is:
* Vice President Kamala Harris is “calling for an end to the child tax credit.” PANTS ON FIRE
* “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.” MOSTLY FALSE
* "100% of net job creation under the Biden administration has gone to the foreign-born.” MOSTLY FALSE (actually entirely false, but Politifact does grade on a curve for the GOP)
* “The Ukraine supplemental includes a hidden impeachment clause against President Trump.” FALSE
* Rep. Tim Ryan “wanted to decriminalize fentanyl.” PANTS ON FIRE
* “Joe Biden’s open border” means that there are “more Democrat voters pouring into this country." FALSE
* Says Joe Biden risks war with Russia because Vladimir Putin doesn’t “believe in transgender rights." PANTS ON FIRE
* “Joe Biden uses the ATF to illegally track your gun transactions.” FALSE
* “Tim Ryan called police the new Jim Crow.” FALSE
* I left out a couple of "HALF TRUES" & a "MOSTLY TRUE" because we're talking about his lies.
You mentioned "accusations." But Vance has accumulated a separate catalog of lies about himself. He's flipped on more issues than there are gnats in South Georgia. The dishonest part is that he then lies about his previous position - taking abortion as a recent example.
He also lies every time he claims he didn't call Trump Hitler. Before he ran for Senate (according to Politifact's editor): "He deleted tweets from 2016 that included him calling Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” In another deleted tweet following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Trump said fame enabled him to grope women, Vance wrote: “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us.'" It's very telling when someone deletes Tweets to hide his record.
Did you forget to take your meds this morning? I'm not reading all of that because even your first bullet point is way off. Walz is on video saying he's carried guns in war.
See recent claims about Kamala's racial identity
You'll have to quote the specific lie
It was a vague reference. He never even said Vance had sex with a couch. He merely made a not-so-subtle reference by saying “if Vance gets off the couch”
What makes the couch joke so effective is the fact that JD Vance is enough of an oddball it’s genuinely believable that he would fuck a couch - the joke would fall flat if directed at anyone else. The right has called Joe Biden a “radical socialist” for the last 4 years, which is objectively further from the truth than “Couchfucker Vance” is, imo.
lololol, I love that. JD Vance is more of a couche fucker than Biden is a socialist.
JD is almost entirely misinformation, from his bio to his political position.
‘Couch’ is a fun, dumb way to quickly cut through that he’s weird, successful only because of misinformation/conspiracy etc, and has weird views on sex lives.
Plus, Walz is a former high school football coach! This is perfect banter for him.
^^^ "You can't joke about stuff anymore" mfers when someone makes a joke
I don’t really get the “American’s Dad” angle they’re going for with Walz. To me he just seems smug.
Walz is like a 21st century Ward Cleaver with a salty mouth. He’s like dozens of my relatives who teach because they love their calling. He probably was a tough coach when he had to be, but I’ll bet his players loved being on his teams. He climbed the ranks in the Guard through hard work. He also worked hard in Congress and even harder as a governor.
Deep down, I’ll bet he is the Dad that JD wished had raised him.
See, this makes me lols. I wonder the following: 1. did JD's angry grandmammy even have a couch (have not read the elegy yet), 2. who's DNA could be found on the couch at Yale law (if any), 3. what a paternity test would reveal...Hnot = Walz genetic profile has no material overlap with Vance genetic profile. Thank you, made my afternoon.
That's interesting! He doesn't seem smug to me - I'm from the northern Midwest and he reminds me very much of the middle-aged dads I grew up around in church, school, etc. They were similarly down-to-earth and snarky.
The fatherlessness epidemic has a lot to answer for.
Yeah, it is why people think Trump is manly.
It's the bog standard online goofing that every candidate will do until Jesus comes back. It's only interesting if you pretend that the Harris campaign is doing nothing else, which couldn't possibly be true. Most importantly, Harris has zero control over what elated liberals are doing online. The options are ignoring them OR doing a bit of free outreach which will only be seen by people who are already online. The tsk tsking does not fit the crime.