Aloha, feasgar math, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic. As you may recall, last Sunday night’s column was Part 1 of a two-part disquisition on the hellacious pressure bearing down on the Harris campaign ahead of the Democratic convention in Chicago on August 19. In sum: So much to do and so very little time to do it. I ended that dispatch by observing that, among the party’s most combat-tested and battle-hardened presidential campaign veterans, there was a collective view about which of the countless big decisions and daunting tasks facing Team K before Labor Day were the most essential to get right—and promising to cough up the list in Part 2. Et voilà, ci-dessous!

But first…

🎧 Essential listening: Speaking of two-parters, #NeverTrump firecrackers George Conway and Sarah Longwell stopped by the Impolitic podcast prefecture last week—and the conversation was so boisterous, brilliant, and brimming with goodness that we decided to cleave this double-stuffed Oreo in half and present it as a diptych. You can listen to Part 1 here or here and Part 2 here or here.

For our Friday show, we had Colorado Senator Michael Bennet teed up to talk about his role as the first Democrat in the upper chamber to publicly suggest that Joe Biden should bow out—then Donald Trump uncorked his latest appalling exercise in racial animus and ignorance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. Bennet had plenty to say about that, as well as Trump’s other defects, but I wanted to hear from an NABJ member, too. So I called in my pal Errin Haines of The 19th (and formerly The Circus) to give us a first-hand report from the scene of the crime. The resulting episode, as the kids say, slaps. Check it out here or here.

🗣️ Papa was a trollin’ stone: Ever since Trump’s appearance at NABJ, a great many hot takes have been disgorged about why he decided not just to return to the dank, fetid wellspring of birtherism to dredge up a new toxic stew of “othering” and conspiracy theorizing and spew it all over Harris, but to double and then triple down on Birtherism 2.0. In the days that followed, he “ReTruthed” several lunatic posts from Laura Loomer, a peddler of misinformation and hate speech so vile that even Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t having her.

On one level, the answer is obvious: Racists gonna racist. But at a time when Trump allies such as Mike Johnson and Kevin McCarthy are warning against deploying such crude attacks against the V.P., it’s not crazy to ponder the former president’s reasoning (such as it is). On his excellent Substack, Sanity Clause, Joe Klein offers a typically sage (and spiky) assessment of the most plausible interpretation: that Trump believes it’s a savvy tactic to split the Black and Asian vote; that “he’s a lizard brain guy” who “enjoys self-pleasuring by stoking up the base;” or, Joe’s favored option, that seeing his electoral fortunes shift so suddenly and radically—from cruising to an easy W over his ideal opponent to what Nate Silver has now declared a toss-up race—is causing him to blow an escalating series of gaskets (“Spontaneous combustion isn’t out of the question,” Klein concludes).

Without discounting any of these postulations, I’d like to proffer a different surmise—one involving Karl Christian Rove. Last Monday, while holding forth to Neil Cavuto about the challenges facing both nominees, Rove slipped in this beauty regarding Trump’s new place in the race: “He is clearly in a subordinate role here.” Rove didn’t make explicit the logical corollary in this formulation—that if Trump’s role is subordinate, Harris, ipso facto, occupies the dominant position—because he didn’t need to. In the eight days after Biden’s exit, Harris’s ascension had subjected Trump to what, for him, represents the gnarliest form of torture: an all but total media blackout. And now here was Rove saying out loud—on Fox News!—in so many words that K.D.H. had, in effect, made D.J.T. her bitch. The chances that Trump, who watches Fox News constantly, fixates on slights obsessively, and despises Bushworld with the intensity of a thousand suns, didn’t see the clip of Karl or feel the intended twisting of the knife are vanishingly close to nil. And then, less than 48 hours later, Trump was on his way to the NABJ confab in Chicago.

Now, to be clear, I’m not contending that Rove’s top-shelf trolling was solely or strictly responsible for Trump’s putrid NABJ performance. But I have no doubt that the dynamic Rove highlighted so vividly (and mischievously) was at work in the dark privacies of Trump’s head when he took the stage. And, hey, by Trump’s own demented standards, the event was an unqualified success, since it accomplished something that being eclipsed by Harris had denied Trump longer than he could abide: making him, once again, the only topic of conversation across the media spectrum.

🙀 From mansplaining to manspreading: After arguably the worst launch of any vice presidential nominee in history, it would have been reasonable to assume that J.D. Vance’s second week as Trump’s running mate would be at least marginally less brutal than his first. But as we’re all fast discovering, “reasonable” and “Vance” aren’t terms that happily coexist in the same sentence.

Having kicked things off by conjuring the wrath of tens of millions of childless Americans and those who love them—notably including the hella powerful devotees of the world’s most famous kid-free, feline-friendly global superstar—and then having the temerity to take a shot at Jennifer Aniston, Vance found himself this week on the wrong side of Simone Biles, just as the breathtakingly talented and much-beloved gymnast was hauling in three more gold medals (bringing her total to seven) at the Summer Olympics in Paris. As of this writing, Biles has refrained from commenting on Vance, but she did engage in some next-level Trump trolling of her own, quote tweeting a photo of herself clutching one of those golds and writing, “I love my black job. 🖤”

Now, it’s fair to note that Vance wasn’t dumb enough to criticize Biles last week; the idiocies that got him in trouble date back to 2020. But at this point it’s also undeniable that Vance’s knack for alienating female voters of every stripe seems immutable and baked very deeply into the cake. Take a look at this clip from an interview Vance did last week with the Full Send podcast. I was guest hosting Nicolle Wallace’s show on MSNBC when I first saw it, and I noted on-air how ironic it was to hear Vance defending himself against the Democratic refrain that he’s “weird” while sitting as he is here: slouching like an impudent teenager, shoulders slumped and legs akimbo. Little did I know—though I’d soon learn from the cheap seats on X—that there’s a name for Vance’s posture: manspreading. And guess what? I’ve asked around. It may be the only thing on Earth that women dig less than mansplaining.

And now to the Harris campaign’s punch list…

And yet, here we are at the end of week two, and to all outward appearances, that’s exactly what they did. The metrics that evince the caliber of Harris as a candidate and that of her on-the-fly, no-huddle campaign are too numerous to mention, but here are a representative handful:

• The money keeps rolling in at a clip that boggles the least boggle-able minds in the worlds of both small-dollar and big-ticket fundraising—$310 million in the month of July, almost all of it in the 10 days after Biden handed the reins to Harris, with 94 percent of the donations under $200 and ten times as many of the donors coming from Gen Z as was the case in June.
• The polling keeps improving by the day, with a new CBS News/YouGov poll published Sunday putting Harris up by one point nationally over Trump without R.F.K. Jr. in the mix; and two points if he’s included; tied with Trump in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; behind by one point in Wisconsin; back three in Georgia and North Carolina; and ahead by two in Nevada. In that survey and others, the level of Democratic enthusiasm is now equal to that of the G.O.P., Harris’s support among non-white and young voters is climbing, and the gender gap favoring her is growing wider.
• Harris’s performance on the stump in two very different settings last week was flawless: first at the mega-rally in Atlanta on Tuesday night, where she unveiled the insta-meme-and-merchandisable “Say it to my face” Trump taunt; and then the next night, in Houston, where she responded to his racist, batshit attacks on her earlier that day—“Is she Indian or is she Black? … She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and became a Black person”—with grace, economy, and force.
• Harris and her campaign have Trump panicked and running scared, as evinced most glaringly by his announcement on Truth Social on Friday night that he was bailing on the September 10 ABC News debate he’d agreed to versus Biden—and proposing instead that the debate be conducted six days earlier by Fox News in front of a live audience in Pennsylvania. On X, new campaign hire David Plouffe (about whom more in a moment) took the lead in responding for Team K: “Donald Trump is cowardly backing out of the debate he agreed to … [H]e seems only comfortable in a cocoon, asking his happy place Fox to host a Trump rally and call it a debate. Maybe he can only handle debating someone his own age.”

As it turns out, there was a clear consensus among this array of two dozen or so members of what I’ll call the Democratic Hack Brain Trust. It came down to about the four items on the Harris campaign’s vast and constantly swelling to-do list that are truly essential—one of which, as it happens, Team K has already nailed, but that I’ll nevertheless include since it’s still fresh news and because the Brain Trust was virtually unanimous about its importance. So let’s start there…

From the moment Harris efficiently corralled the entire party to unite behind her, she and campaign chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon—a Plouffe protégé whom he hired to run Obama’s battleground states team in 2008—regarded reeling in Plouffe as a critical part of the plan to create a senior team that’s a hybrid of Harris and Biden loyalists and Obama stalwarts to steer the existing Biden-Harris organization in the mad dash to Election Day. On Friday, the extent to which Harris and J.O.D. had pulled that off became public with the announcement that not only Plouffe but also Mitch Stewart (Obama’s legendary field organizer), Stephanie Cutter (deputy campaign manager of the 2012 re-elect and a close adviser to Michelle Obama), and David Binder (pollster and focus group impresario for Obama and for Harris’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign), among others, were climbing on board.

2. Revise the map. Even before Biden’s debate debacle, Trump’s small but consistent leads in the four Sunbelt battleground states—Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina—were causing some of the president’s senior advisers to privately concede that by the time Labor Day rolled around it was likely that they would only have one viable path to victory: hold on to the industrial Midwest states that Biden carried in 2020 (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), plus Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district (with its single electoral vote), and squeak by with exactly 270 E.V.s. It was a scenario that, to put it succinctly, scared the living shit out of everyone involved.

But on the basis of the public polling data alone, Harris’s candidacy—with its potential capacity to revive elements of the Biden coalition that had become irretrievably frayed, and rebuild parts of the Obama coalition with which Biden never had much traction—reopens various possibilities when it comes to the map. Should Harris be competing in all seven of the original Biden battleground states? Does her potential appeal to Black and young voters mean that Georgia—and even North Carolina—are within reach? Do her vulnerabilities on the issue of immigration make Arizona a bridge too far?

Quickly and decisively figuring all this out, allocating resources accordingly, and then helping the campaign to stick ruthlessly to the plan is why Plouffe is in the house. And it goes a long way toward explaining his bizarro title: Senior Advisor for Path to 270 & Strategy.

3. Create a new message matrix. In her first two weeks as presumptive nominee, Harris has done an impressive job of laying out, in a basic but highly useful way, some of the templates for the messaging she plans to deploy against Trump. The future versus the past: we’re moving forward; we won’t go back. A prosecutor versus a perpetrator: “I know Donald Trump’s type.” Combine that with an even more aggressive and full-throated crusade on behalf of women’s reproductive freedom to protect against the G.O.P.’s post-Dobbs assault on abortion rights, an embrace of Biden’s messaging on protecting democracy, thwarting the radical plans laid out in Project 2025, and preserving the country against the threat of abject chaos if Trump were reelected, and you can see the outlines of a compelling offense for Harris to run for the 92 days now remaining before November 5.

Where things are currently murkier is when it comes to Harris’s game plan on defense. The comprehensive and undeniable confusion caused by Biden’s departure, the uncharacteristically disciplined and harmonious Democratic reaction, and Harris’s unexpected sure-footedness as candidate have left Trump, his campaign, and his allies on the right behaving like a claque of drunken, meth-addled baboons. No one with half a brain in Harris’s orbit expects this to continue; at some point, Trump’s high command—notably Chris LaCivita, whose career-long stock-in-trade has been the systematic evisceration of Democratic politicians prone to being painted as out-of-step and out-of-touch with swing voters—will get its act together. (Though whether or not Trump is capable of doing something similar is an open question.)

The innumerable far-left positions Harris took in the 2020 primary are a target rich environment. And while she’s already begun scurrying away from many of them, a central challenge for her and her team will be to come up with a way of explaining her shifts on matters of substance that convinces voters that she’s actually evolved and isn’t an utter phony, guided only by ambition and political expediency.

Oh and also, I hear the Brain Trust howling: the economy, stupid! Which, translated from 1992 argot to the lingo of 2024, means that Harris needs to find a way to talk about inflation and the high cost of living under Biden that’s roughly 10 times more fluent and effective than Biden was (is) capable of.

4. Don’t fuck up the V.P. pick. The horror show-cum-slapstick comedy that Trump brought upon himself by inexplicably listening to dum-dum Don Jr. and his Zyn-addled wingman Tucker Carlson is providing a real-time object lesson in the perils of screwing up the most important decision in a nominee’s purview on the road to the Oval Office (or not). Happily, Harris’s V.P. vetting process, though by necessity crazy quick, has consistently given off the vibe that she understands that Democrats, having just endured 10 presidential cycles-worth of drama and upheaval in six weeks, have zero appetite for an outside-the-box pick. Heading into this weekend—and stipulating that, when it comes to the veepstakes, no one who knows a goddamn thing about what’s really happening is talking to the press, which is one of many reasons I make it a rule to avoid V.P. speculation as if it were a combination of bubonic plague and the clap—all signs were pointing toward Harris choosing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

The Hack Brain Trust, fwiw, would heartily approve of that outcome—for reasons thoroughly laid out here by Nate Silver and here by The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last. But the Brain Trust would also be perfectly at peace with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. And that may wind up being a good thing, too, because—and please, I beg you, keep in mind the caveats above—my reporting suggests that the decision Harris is expected to finalize tomorrow ahead of the grand V.P. unveiling Tuesday in Philadelphia will come down to Shapiro or Walz. That Walz has emerged as a finalist has nothing to do with the last-minute Stop Shapiro campaign that’s been widely reported today. And equally little to do with the fact that Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders have been talking him up. Walz’s status in the mix at the very end is a result of his breakout performance the past two weeks in taking the wood to Vance and Trump, which caught the eye of Harris, those closest to her, and a whole lot of other Dems besides.

In any case, we’ll all know Harris’s decision soon enough. But here’s something certain we can say right now about either choice, which would please both the members of the Brain Trust and any other Democrat with a pulse: Either Shapiro or Walz would guarantee that the V.P. debate against Vance would be must-see TV.