Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, with Democrats drunk on “irrational exuberance,” a little reality check on the heady summer hype cycle swirling around Kamala Harris. The presidential race is still extremely close, with absolutely no margin for error, and the weird economy looms as a huge concern for voters. With polls moving in their favor, are Democrats a little too high on their own supply?

P.S.: I’m doing a Reddit AMA tomorrow, where you can ask me anything about the post-Biden election in a coconut-pilled world. Head to the r/politics Subreddit tomorrow, where the fun will begin at 3:00 p.m. ET.

But first, a few notes from around the horn…

• Trump’s losing bet on Birtherism 2.0: On the latest episode of John Heilemann’s stellar Impolitic podcast, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet and Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large and member of the National Association of Black Journalists, discussed Trump’s disastrous appearance at the NABJ conference last week, in which the former president brashly questioned Kamala Harris’s racial identity. Then, after breaking down the potential ripple effects, they turned to Harris’s essentially flawless campaign debut and all the chatter surrounding J.D. Vance’s “unrelenting weirdness.” [Listen Here]
• Minor Harris beef & CBS News’ big shift: Meanwhile, on today’s episode of The Powers That Be, Jon Kelly phoned in to spotlight some of the burgeoning press pool gripes surrounding Harris, before dissecting the unsurprising news that Norah O’Donnell is abdicating her anchor chair—and what it means for the rest of the broadcast news industry. [Listen Here]
• Wall Streeters for Harris: While Trump has been shoring up support from some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent right-wing donors, Democrat Charles Phillips, the former Morgan Stanley banker and Oracle executive, chatted with Bill on Sunday about the burgeoning excitement surrounding Harris in financial circles. That Phillips, a famously low-key executive, was willing to go on the record was “one of the truest indications of her growing support on Wall Street,” Bill noted.

  In their conversation, Phillips, who has known Harris personally for 25 years, reeled off a few of her high-powered Wall Street supporters, including Blair Effron, Robert Wolf, Brad Karp, Marc Lasry, Jonathan Gray, Ray McGuire, and Peter Orszag, adding that there was “a definite change” among Wall Streeters after Biden withdrew and threw his support behind Harris. There is also a sense that “Trump might have peaked early,” he said. “Certainly at the time [the debate] happened, people thought it was over. And now it’s 180 degrees from that.” [Read the whole piece here, and sign up for Dry Powder here]

• WaPo fears revisited: The whirlwind political news of the past month temporarily overshadowed the scrutiny surrounding Washington Post C.E.O. Will Lewis, whose checkered history as a Fleet Street journalist and Murdoch underling was dredged up in a series of widely read stories. But on Friday, Dylan noted that the spotlight is swinging back to Lewis and his plan to establish a social media-friendly “third newsroom” at the Post—a gambit to attract subscribers beyond the paper’s core political audience.

  A recent Times story noted that two similar forays by Lewis—one, The News Movement, a Gen Z-targeted social media company; the other, a digital growth play at The Telegraph named “The Euston Project”—both proved underwhelming. The News Movement, in particular, turned out to be a real dud—a middle-aged fantasy of a future-proofed media play. (If it had been working, of course, Lewis never would have taken the Post job.) Now the remnants may be sold to a Greek media company with Saudi backing. The Euston Project shuttered six months after Lewis left The Telegraph.

  “If there’s one revelation I’ve gathered from all my conversations with Post staffers,” Dylan wrote, “it’s that the skeptical murmuring surrounding Lewis’s ethics actually belies a deeper and more pervasive anxiety about his ability to lead the Post’s business out of its current morass—not because he’s lost the trust of some people for what he might have done as a journalist, but because they’re still not convinced he actually knows what he’s doing as a media executive.” [Read the whole piece here, and sign up for In the Room here]

“There is a lot of irrational exuberance on the Democratic side of the aisle right now because there was despair for some period of time about what November was going to look like. Now people feel like there is a chance,” Axelrod said on CNN, beaming in from a lake house in Michigan. “It’s a wide-open race, but Trump has the advantage right now and everybody should be sober about that on the Democratic side.”

Axelrod took predictable flak from Dems on Twitter, including many, I assume, who know nothing about Robert Shiller or the actual origin of the term irrational exuberance. And they had a point. Democrats are unquestionably in a better position now than they were with Biden at the helm. In campaigns, “exuberance” and momentum happen to be blue chip assets. Harris and Team K—as my colleague John Heilemann has termed her campaign aides—are playing to win.

But just as Axelrod was right about Biden’s weaknesses in recent years, uncomfortable as those statements were, the Obama campaign veteran is correct about Harris as well. The presidential race remains tick-tight, as Dan Rather would say, with Harris winning only within the margin of error, and Trump holding on to a narrow lead in all-important Pennsylvania. Harris is winning news cycles, yes, and the buzz of her vice presidential pick is dominating media coverage this week, but V.P. hype cycles always fade, and fawning press coverage does too. While the last few weeks have reset the race and finally put Democrats in a position to win—according to the money, the polls, and now even Nate Silver’s hallowed election model—the heady days of Kamala’s Brat Summer will be a distant memory come November.

Instead of yelling at Axelrod, Democrats should heed his advice. The lights eventually do come on at the club—and the view isn’t ideal. The floor is sticky, and the Uber ride home is long. (Just ask the party planners at the Javits Center on November 9, 2016.) The economy remains unpredictable, with an ugly jobs report and resurgent rumblings of a recession. Interest rates still suck for many Americans. Iran is threatening war on Israel. Who knows what else could happen in the next 92 days? Remember, just a month ago, after being shot in Pennsylvania, Trump was supposedly immortal and despondent Democrats were Googling real estate in Canada. A few weeks later, Democrats are the ones high on their own supply.

So, since everyone this week is freaking out about a bear market on Wall Street, I’ll take a cue and depart from my past two columns on the power of Kamala-mentum. Here, instead, are a few negative indicators on Harris, and why all this irrational exuberance could be headed for a market correction.

Pretty much everything—food, cars, housing, hotels—is more expensive than it was before Biden and Harris took office. Prices have come down across the board since 2022, but they are still about 20 percent above than they were before the pandemic, according to BankRate. Wages are barely keeping up. Interest rates are coming down, but they still suck. Yes, blame as much of that as you want on Covid. Point out that inflation has slowed compared to two years ago. But try explaining that to some parents in the grocery checkout line in Allegheny County. That’s where people experience “the economy”—not by monitoring Wall Street Journal push alerts. As Harris herself told me back in March when I asked her why young people were so frustrated by the stubbornly high cost of rent, “No one wants an econ lecture.”

Some polls have shown that voters don’t totally blame Harris for whatever negative feelings they have about Biden’s economy. Her approval rating has ticked up slightly since becoming the Democratic nominee. But she is still losing to Trump on a defining question of every presidential campaign: Who do you trust more to handle the economy? In a CBS/YouGov poll released this weekend, 45 percent of voters said they would be financially better off under Trump, compared to just 25 percent for Harris.

Two recent polls, from YouGov and Morning Consult, found Trump with about a 10-point lead over Harris on the almighty question of economic stewardship. That’s better than Biden was doing on the economy question, sure, but no Democrat has won the presidency in modern times while losing on the economy question by that much. Not one. Republicans typically have a built-in advantage on the economy, but in past campaigns, Democrats only won the White House when they got to parity on that number, like Biden did back in 2020.

Maybe Harris can change the economic narrative in three months, and maybe this wild ride of a campaign will defy history. But for now, Harris is on track to lose if these economic numbers hold.

But the sudden Democratic fervor has led to some dubious analysis, suggesting that Harris is somehow reassembling the coalition that powered Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. One of Obama’s former pollsters, Cornell Belcher, recently said Harris “is the embodiment and inheritor of what I call the Obama coalition.” Obama’s HUD Secretary Julián Castro said the other day that Harris “has already re-energized the Obama coalition.”

Those perspectives, I think, are focused on how much Harris has fired up elements of the Democratic base that were straying from Biden, in particular young voters and Black voters. That enthusiasm is very real—I wrote it about last week. But the “Obama coalition” does not exist anymore, and Harris isn’t likely to put it back together. That’s because the Obama coalition included many white working-class voters who have since abandoned the Democratic Party, thanks to Trump. Remember: In 2008, Obama won Indiana, he won Ohio, he won those blue-collar river counties in Eastern Iowa. But with the class realignment that has defined politics since Trump came along—non-college whites vote Republican, college-educated whites vote Democrat—Harris has almost no shot at peeling off meaningful margins among those voters.

The uber-smart political scientist Ruy Teixeira can explain all this better than I can—and he did so in a recent piece which you should read here. Teixeira rightly pointed out that, in 2008, Obama lost white working-class voters by 20 points, which is pretty good for a Democrat—and in hindsight, pretty remarkable for the arugula-shopping Black law professor with the middle name Hussein. Today, Harris is losing those same voters by a whopping 34 points. She has a much narrower path to the presidency this year, which depends mostly on reassembling the Biden coalition of 2020: college-educated voters, suburbanites, Black voters, and hopefully winning at least 60 percent of the youth vote. Anything less and Harris is toast.

On that note, keep something in mind as you navigate the Harris hype cycle. Anytime you see a packed campaign rally with Megan Thee Stallion, people giddily sharing coconut memes, a “White Women For Kamala” Zoom call, a rush of new donors, newly energized Black voters in Detroit giving excited quotes to reporters about Harris—those are mostly just Democrats. Yes, they are excited, and yes, it’s good news for Harris that they are coming off the sidelines. But to win, Harris needs more than just an excited base. She needs to pick off swing voters, too. Right now, polls show that independent voters favor Trump. In 2020, Biden won independents by 9 points.

Most Republicans I talked to after the incident—MAGA die-hards included—told me they thought Trump’s comments were stupid, a distraction from winning issues against Harris, like the economy and border security. And they were right. Because Harris’s poll numbers with Black voters were lagging even before Trump started spewing racial attacks in Chicago. The popular media narrative since Harris joined the race has actually overstated her support among Black voters.

My pal John Della Volpe, the youth polling expert, shared data last week that showed the gains Harris has made among key groups since Biden quit the race. Most of it was good news for Dems: She has improved on Biden’s numbers against Trump among young voters, Hispanics, and independents. But she has also lost incremental Black support—down 5 points among Black voters in New York Times polling when compared to Biden’s position in the race earlier this summer. Another Democratic pollster, Adam Carlson, averaged the crosstabs from five high-quality national polls since Biden left the race, and found Harris “making next to zero progress among Black voters.” In 2020, according to Pew’s validated voter survey, Biden won Black voters by 83 points. Today, in polls, Harris is only winning them by 53 points.

The counterargument to these numbers is that crosstabs can be dodgy. That, and almost every shred of evidence suggests Black voters are more excited to vote now than they were when Biden was the nominee. The CBS/YouGov poll from this weekend found that Black registered voters are 16 points more likely to vote now than they were with Biden as the nominee. That’s almost certainly due to the arrival of Harris on the scene.

The wrinkle that should give Democrats pause, though, is that Black voters are no longer the reliable Democratic voting bloc that they were with Obama, or even Hillary Clinton, when they delivered 90-10 margins to Democratic candidates. In current polls, almost 20 percent of Black voters say they’re voting for Trump over Harris, and those numbers are usually higher among Black voters under the age of 40. The CBS/YouGov poll found that while majorities of Black voters were willing to describe Harris as “focused,” “effective,” or “tough”—they did so at noticeably lower rates than self-identified Democrats.

All of this means that Harris has work to do with her own coalition, that Trump is still very much in the game, and that no Democrat should get too cocky or exuberant, despite how inebriating the past few weeks have been with their shiny new nominee.