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Good Friday Morning! Except for whoever murdered Hvaldimir, the Beluga whale who appeared off the coasts of Norway with a harness and a camera mount that read “Equipment St. Petersburg.” Everyone guessed Hvaldimir, named by the Norwegians after Vladimir Putin, had been trained in a Russian military facility and had somehow escaped.
Police found Hvaldimir in one of Norway’s harbors, dead from “gunshot wounds.” An autopsy is underway. I’m personally putting money on Russia killing another dissident. If we read the news in Russia, they’d say Hvaldimir somehow fell out of a window from the tallest building.
I won’t be on YouTube this week. I’m recovering from being sick for the last week and have no voice. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter for typing. This week, I’ll cover the state of the race, why Harris is fading, and the two major events I see coming on the horizon for both campaigns—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- Tucker Carlson made waves this week for having Darryl Cooper on his podcast to talk about World War II history. Cooper’s big thing is that Churchill is the villain of WWII and tries to provide justification for Hitler’s actions leading into the war. Tucker’s continuing descent into madness is one of the more bizarre things of the last decade. That led to an equally odd constellation of figures on the right condemning it. Niall Ferguson, Victor David Hansen, and even Sohrab Ahmari had good takes dismantling the arguments. What’s equally annoying is that these kinds ofarguments get couched behind “we’re just presenting ideas that are dangerous and no one has considered.” That’s similarly untrue because WWII has witnessed every rabbit trail, conspiracy theory, and concept argued and considered. Choosing dumb, racist ideas at this stage is just a tell on how bad of a researcher and reader one has to be. In the Enlightenment, it was believed that if people had more access to information (the spread of books), we’d free ourselves from the madness of the “dark ages.” Everyone has the internet, and we’re dumber than ever. This is another win for the horseshoe theory of politics, in which the most extreme elements meet each other to make similar conclusions. The far-right hating Churchill is no different than the pro-Hamas marchers in the streets of major cities desecrating Churchill statues.
- Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears filed paperwork this week to run for governor in 2025. She entered office with Glenn Youngkin. She’s already the first Black woman and only second woman to hold statewide office in Virginia, and if she won the governorship, she’d be the first Black woman to be governor in the country. Also, we share the same alma mater, Regent University, so I’m not exactly unbiased on this race.
- The quiet Atlantic hurricane season continues to baffle meteorologists, especially considering how this was predicted to be a hyperactive season. According to FoxWeather, “the period of tropical activity from August 12 – September 3 marked the quietest period in tropical weather development in 56 years.” We started with Beryl, which hit category five. We haven’t seen much since then. Mark Suddeth at Hurricane Track put out a great video talking through the various theories bouncing around as to why hurricanes aren’t forming. A blog post from the University of Georgia discusses some theories on how the atmosphere is too stable for hurricane development. Whatever the case is, every forecasting model was wrong about this season, and no one knows why. We’re sitting at the peak of hurricane season, halfway through, and it’s been quiet. There are 4-5 possible areas of development right now, but all have a 10% chance of growth. This year is now compared with the stretch from 2013 to 2015 when we had lower-than-average hurricane development. We’ll see where the rest of the season takes us, but it’s a big blow for predictive modeling.
Where you can find me this week
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The Race Is Still Trump’s To Lose – Conservative Institute
Chinese And Iranian Spies Are Infiltrating The U.S. Government – Conservative Institute
Biden-Harris Finally Learn Hamas Is Bad – Conservative Institute
The Harris Halo Fades
Politico and Axios ran two truly bizarre stories on Thursday. Both covered campaign stops Kamala Harris made this week in New Hampshire, Virginia, and Minnesota. Here are the headlines:
- Axios: Trump campaign shifts as its path to victory narrows.
- Politico: New Hampshire is the latest sign of Donald Trump’s shrinking map. As Kamala Harris visited New Hampshire on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s campaign in the state is almost nowhere to be seen.
I knew about Kamala Harris making these campaign stops before these reports dropped. Several beat reporters following Harris had said she was headed there earlier in the week. My reaction to that was simple: Harris campaigning in blue states in the middle of September is a red flag.
This isn’t a sign of a shrinking map – Trump has never made a serious play there. When Biden imploded in the polls, Trump picked up ground in these states, which triggered a deeper sense of crisis on the left. Harris allegedly helped correct course and fix things.
Yet, here Harris is, campaigning in lean-blue states. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this; many others did as well. Mark Halperin was practically up in arms over the idiotic framing on his Wednesday morning show. Burning campaign time in states you’re supposed to win less than two months from Election Day isn’t a good sign. It suggests the campaign has concerning internal polling they are addressing.
In my Monday CI column, I noted that Politico’s reporters sang a different tune when talking to Democratic pollsters. Summarizing the public data, Politico wrote:
In short: Harris is narrowly ahead in the Rust Belt — which would be enough to win — but Trump is breathing down her neck. And those are also the states where the polling has been least accurate and specifically underestimated Trump in the past two elections. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Trump in all three states in 2016, only to lose them. And now-President Joe Biden’s prospects looked like a slam dunk going into the 2020 election, but he barely escaped with victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The halo effect for Harris is gone. We’re finally starting to see reality sink into the political coverage, and the runaway Harris train is now stuck at the station. As I keep repeating, Harris is running behind the margins of both Clinton and Biden. RealClearPolitics has Harris with a 1.8-point advantage, which is lower than what Clinton had in 2016 and well below Biden 2020.
The latest run for Nate Silver’s model has Trump with a 60.1% chance of winning, the highest percentage Trump has had since July 30. What is driving Trump’s surge? A few things:
- Trump continues showing strong polls in Pennsylvania. Whoever wins Pennsylvania has the inside track to victory. Winning that state singlehandedly tips the winning odds for either candidate into the 90% range.
- Silver’s model only shows Harris winning the national popular vote by a single percentage point: 49.9%—48.9%. Silver believes Harris needs to win by 2.5 points to have a chance, but I believe she needs to be closer to 3.5 points. Clinton lost with a 2.1-point lead in the national popular vote.
In other words, for all the pro-Harris push in the press, she remains remarkably weak. The debate looms large, too. Because Harris has refused interviews and press conferences, she’s increasing the importance of this debate exponentially. Trump is talking to anyone and everyone, holding a steady clip of press conferences, which lowers the importance of any of them.
Harris is pushing so many chips into the center of this debate that it may deflate her if she fails to hit a home run. The press is inflating her talent, and the debate rules will force her to talk. The Harris campaign realizes this, too, because they’ve tried changing the rules non-stop.
Only this week did Harris finally agree to the debate rules (that she’d already demanded Trump follow before backtracking). This is a campaign desperate to prevent this debate from happening. They believed by fighting the mic rules, they could force Trump to back out. Trump stuck with the rules, which forced Harris to defend why she wanted things changed at the last second. She didn’t have an answer.
The Trump campaign plans to let Harris talk. This strategy is not altogether different from the Biden strategy, and the Harris team is terrified of it.
When you start piecing these various strings together, it’s fair to question how strong the Harris campaign actually is. We know the infighting is already there because this campaign is a Frankenstein creation with different factions stitched together onto the Biden apparatus. NOTUS reports that the Biden, Harris, Obama, and other factions in the campaign are fighting to be “first among equals.”
If Harris has a weak or mediocre debate, watch for the knives to come out on that campaign. No one is loyal to her, Biden, or anyone else.
Where are we headed from here? I continue to focus on two dates for this month:
- The September 10th debate on ABC News in Pennsylvania. The stakes are high for Harris. She has to introduce herself to the country, lay out a convincing set of policy proposals, and defend all the above from the obvious flip-flop attacks. It’s a lower-stakes event for Trump, but he does need to avoid obvious traps from Harris and define her as radical/tied to the Biden agenda.
- The September 18th sentencing of Donald Trump. I expect him to be sentenced to jail, giving us an early version of an October surprise. The odds that Trump will sit in a jail cell are extremely low. Much like the guilty sentence, I expect Trump to dip in the polls, before rebounding (interesting note: September 18 is also the four-year anniversary of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death – watch liberals claim some kind of #justiceforRuth thing after a jail sentence).
The impact of the debate is unknowable. The jail sentence will roil everyone on the right again and gin up the left, but I suspect it will help Trump.
Once we make it through those two dates, everyone will start staring hard at the final stretch of October. We’re less than two months away from the finish – 59 days to Election Day.
Links of the week
Anti-Israel group funded by Soros gains influence with 60 Biden White House visits – Washington Examiner
Blaze fires contributor linked to alleged Russian operation – Semafor
Chinese spy in Hochul, Cuomo administrations led life of luxury – Politico
China warns students against ‘beautiful women’ and ‘handsome guys’ who might turn them into spies – NBC News
Inside the deepfake porn crisis engulfing Korean schools – BBC
The Return of Anti-History: Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious. – Niall Ferguson, The FP
The War on Our History: We have an illiberal left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas, and an illiberal right that sympathizes with the original ones. – Bari Weiss, The FP
Feds raid home of NYPD Commish Edward Caban, other close Adams allies – NYPost
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Looking at all the hurricane forecasts and how off they’ve been.
Nerdy look at “Greedflation” and “Price gouging” and how that’s not happening.
Satire of the week
Cat Scientists Theorize About Third Type Of Food That Neither Wet Nor Dry – Onion
Tucker Carlson Guest Suggests Avengers Were The Real Villains In Infinity War – Babylon Bee
Source Says Kamala Was Promoted At McDonald’s After Having Affair With Mayor McCheese – Babylon Bee
Why When Other People Interrupt It’s Rude but When I Do It It’s a Sign of Enthusiasm – Reductress
Hot Topic Immediately Opens New Location Next To Tim Burton’s Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame – The Hard Times
Every Batman Movie Ranked by How Short It Would Be if Superman Was in It – The Hard Drive
Seagull Takes Man’s Sandwich, Job, Wife & Children – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!