This Is an Emotional Rollercoaster

Harris is Up! No, Trump is Up! No—

Remember back when Donald Trump was supposedly going to avoid going after Kamala Harris in sexist and racist terms? During one of his Truth Social binges this weekend, Trump reposted a meme accusing Harris of being “involved with or engaged in one of Puff Daddies freak offs,” the sexual parties that form the basis of the recent federal indictment against the rapper. The post included a picture of Harris supposedly standing with Diddy and another woman. Except it was a clear photoshop. The real picture is of Harris and Montel Williams.

Trump also reposted a call, yet again, for the former members of the January 6th Committee to be indicted for sedition and locked up. It’s truly wild stuff going on over there at Truth. Happy Monday.

Kamala Harris holds a campaign rally at the McHale Athletic Center on September 13, 2024 in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images.)

Sunday Sunshine, Monday Clouds

—William Kristol

“O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last.”

So says Egeon, the Syracusan merchant who’s had a rough time of it in Ephesus, in Act 5, scene 1, of The Comedy of Errors.

Susan and I and some friends saw the play last night here in D.C., in a very entertaining production by the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

That particular line came to mind this fall morning, as I got up early to write this newsletter and discovered the new New York Times/Siena poll. Yikes! It shows Kamala Harris trailing Donald Trump in three Sunbelt swing states: 50 percent to 45 percent in Arizona, 49 percent to 45 percent in Georgia, and 49 percent to 47 percent in North Carolina.

It was a bit of a shock. No, it was a lot of a shock. It was almost a grief-inducing shock. Because I’d spent Sunday—yesterday—enjoying a new NBC News poll showing Harris leading Trump nationally 49 percent to 44 percent. That poll had lots of encouraging internal numbers, with Harris comfortably ahead as the candidate who’d bring change, with a much stronger favorable-unfavorable rating than Trump . . . and more!

And then an hour or two later on Sunday came a CBS News poll with similar results, with Harris ahead 52 percent to 48 percent nationally and 51 percent to 49 percent in the swing states.

So I spent much of Sunday discussing these polls with friends and colleagues and political operatives. By the end of the day, I’d talked myself into feeling pretty good about this election.

But then came gloom and doom, courtesy of the New York Times. O, grief hath changed me since Sunday!

Yes, yes, I know polls are going to differ. They’re only samples, after all. This is a very close race, and these surveys showing slight advantages for one candidate and then the other really just confirm that fact.

So, I try to tell myself: Just calm down and take things measure for measure. Any one poll can be much ado about nothing.

And in any case, I tell myself: Things are better than a couple of months ago. Joe Biden was on course to lose to Trump. Then the debate happened. Biden got out. And Harris suddenly had a real chance to win. And you think to yourself, was that just a midsummer night’s dream?

No, that was real. But what’s real now is that the race is on a knife’s edge. And so you go over the polls. You analyze. You lament. You worry. What if this all turns out to be a tragedy rather than a comedy?

But then you remember. Egeon makes his remark about grief near the beginning of Act 5. Just a few minutes later, at the conclusion of Act 5, there’s a happy ending. Everyone’s embracing and rejoicing. All’s well that ends well.

But of course a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story. Which is where we are now in this election season. So we put Sunday’s joy and Monday’s alarm aside, and saddle up to ride “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place

—Andrew Egger

Mark Robinson isn’t letting being exposed as one of the true sickos of modern politics slow him down. The rest of the North Carolina Republican party may be looking back longingly at last weekend’s candidate-swap deadline, but Robinson is denying the allegations against him (both sordid and copious) and soldiering on. Sure, he barely has a campaign anymore—all but three of his staffers have quit, North Carolina Public Radio reported yesterday—but he’s got everything he really needs: his faith, his family, an internet connection, and a ballot line all to himself.

Oh, and an endorsement from Donald Trump. We assume that’s still in effect, at least—although maybe not with the same oomph it had before. Robinson didn’t appear at Trump’s North Carolina rally this weekend, and Trump didn’t mention him from the stage. Instead, the task of giving the Team Trump response fell to JD Vance in an interview with a Pennsylvania NBC affiliate Saturday.

“Do you believe him that those were not his posts?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t not believe him,” Vance replied. “I don’t believe him. I just think you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion.”

Not exactly a vote of confidence—but still, a pretty striking display of solidarity given Robinson’s ridiculously thin denial and the incredibly alarming and disturbing nature of the allegations.

Team Trump is in a bit of a pickle here. Robinson is looking all but finished: He was trailing Democrat Josh Stein by double digits in many polls even before it came out that he used to hang out on porn forums calling Martin Luther King Jr. racial slurs and praising Adolf Hitler. For Trump to win in North Carolina, he’ll have to win a small but significant chunk of Republican leaners who are totally grossed out by the GOP gubernatorial candidate—so creating  some distance makes sense.

And yet, for Trump and Vance, acknowledging the truth in a damaging media report cuts against every one of their core political instincts. You don’t assess the validity of claims from the lying lib media—you scoff at them, dismiss them, and fundraise off them. Sure, it might be tough to get around the fact that Robinson signed up for his porn accounts with his own name and personal email address. But if they admit that, where does it stop? Next you’ll be trying to tell them it wasn’t actually Antifa that stormed the Capitol.

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Quick Hits

I’M SURE IT’S FINE: Word on the street is that Nebraska still probably won’t be changing its election laws to claw back a likely single electoral vote from Kamala Harris, despite intense pressure from national Republicans. For now, the knot of three GOP state legislators blocking the action are holding firm, although they could theoretically change their minds any time before Election Day.

Nebraska is one of just two states—Maine is the other—that doesn’t allocate all its electoral votes to the statewide election winner. Instead, a portion of those votes are parceled out to whoever wins each of the state’s congressional districts—one of which, the Omaha-containing 2nd, has sometimes gone blue, including in 2020.

Nabbing that single vote could significantly smooth Harris’s path to the White House. Winning just the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin should put her right at 269 votes. With one vote from Nebraska, Harris need not take any of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, or Nevada to secure the presidency.

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LOCK IT DOWN: The Republican and Democratic ranking members on the task force on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump called for additional resources for the Secret Service during a joint interview on ABC News Sunday. “These guys are exhausted,” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Penn.) said. “We have to protect those who we have up for election and those that are already serving. . . . We cannot accept this as Americans.”

“We can’t mass-produce Secret Service agents. We can’t create these,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Col.) added. “It takes years to create a Secret Service agent. So we have to rely on Department of Defense agents, other federal agencies to come down and provide some relief to these folks.”

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BURKMANIA: Shortly after news broke that Mark Robinson’s staff was quitting en masse, notorious dirty trickster/political doofus Jack Burkman tweeted that he had agreed to take on the role of Robinson’s new campaign manager.

This seemed fishy. Burkman is known for idiotic pranks. He and his partner in crime, Jacob Wohl, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of telecommunications fraud in Ohio for some harebrained robocall idea in 2020. They’ve repeatedly made up fictitious allegations of sexual assault against prominent political figures.

We asked Burkman for proof. He sent a screenshot of a tweet from a person named James Miller, who was claiming to be a senior adviser to Robinson, in which Miller shared Burkman’s own tweet proclaiming to be the new campaign manager. Except Miller doesn’t appear real. His X handle includes a profile pic that is a photoshopped image of a Wall Street Journal employee. There is no prior record of him working for Robinson. We responded to Burkman by noting that Miller isn’t a real person. “Oh I see,” Burkman wrote back. “Excuse my senility.” Shortly thereafter, Robinson himself tweeted that “online rumors of new hires” were just rumors. A campaign spokesperson confirmed that Burkman had not been hired.

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