Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby.

Tonight, with the polls between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied, it’s what’s happening under the hood that’s firing up Democrats. With Harris atop the ticket, the party has rediscovered what enthusiasm feels like for the first time since the Barack Obama years—and it’s revving the campaign’s engines as they build for the D.N.C. and beyond. That new energy is especially vivid online, where an army of jokesters have turned their meme-making sights on the “weird” J.D. Vance. More on all of that, below the fold.

🎧 Kamala’s TikTok bounce: In case you missed it, Puck’s fearless leader Jon Kelly swung by The Powers That Be this morning to chat with me about the explosion of Harris and Vance memes across social media, and whether the phenomenon will actually make a material difference in November’s election. And for the sports heads out there, we also discussed David Zaslav’s likely ill-conceived decision to sue the NBA after the league struck a deal with Amazon over his WBD. You can listen to the episode here, here, and here.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with an update on the House election map…

The N.R.C.C. list is also a window into how these strategists are gaming the election map. There are currently 26 young guns, but some of those candidates are running in open seats that are essentially shoo-ins for Republicans. There are, however, nine competitive frontliner seats where Republicans have yet to put up a young gun, which is perhaps an indication that Republicans are being extra cautious in laying out their plans for the fall. To the relief of Democrats, Republicans seem to be backing off the Nevada seats held by Susie Lee and Dina Titus—perhaps a consequence of pricey TV ads—although newly anointed young gun John Lee will go up against Steven Horsford in Nevada’s 4th District.

Several states with vulnerable Democratic incumbents, such as Washington, New Hampshire, and Michigan, have yet to host primaries, which means Republicans are still waiting for a nominee. For instance, there’s probably no seat Republicans covet more than Washington’s rural 3rd District, represented by Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the first-term, working-class aligned, gun-owning Democrat who was among the six members of the party who joined with Republicans last week to pass a measure condemning the Biden and Harris administration’s “failure to secure the United States border.” And as soon as the primaries in Washington and Michigan are resolved on August 6, we’ll probably see more of these young guns come online.

To be sure, Democrats are also on the offensive, and at this point in the cycle, neither party appears to have the upper hand. In fact, the Democratic leadership-aligned House Majority PAC just expanded its initial $186 million ad buy by $24 million, and will now target Wisconsin Reps. Derrick Van Orden and Bryan Steil, along with Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. —Abby Livingston

Put another way, a couple million Americans woke up last week, looked at their phones, and said, Holy shit, we can actually win this thing. Instead of preparing for a living wake, or a week of protests, I’m told that Democrats and their donors are now hastily planning new parties, activities, and concerts in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in a few weeks. Yes, Democrats still have work to do. The campaign is stressing that they are still the underdog. But now at least, there’s a feeling they’re going to have some fun in the process.

You’ve probably read about all the markers of Kamala-mentum. The campaign cash, the Brat clips, a bonanza of volunteers coming out of the woodwork in battleground states. The Harris campaign is in the process of assembling a field army of several hundred thousand new volunteers, dwarfing the “tens of thousands” of Trump volunteers that his campaign hyped to Fox News over the weekend.

Survey data supports the buzz. In February, according to polling from ABC/Ipsos, only 62 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about voting for Biden. Those were akin to Clinton 2016 numbers—pure, uncut meh. Now? The same poll found 88 percent of Democrats are enthusiastic about voting for Harris. That puts her ahead of Trump’s cult-like enthusiasm number with Republican voters. Crucially, Harris’s favorable rating has jumped significantly among independent voters, to 44 percent, a 16-point rise from a week ago. That kind of movement is exceptionally rare, especially when negative partisanship and historic levels of polarization are factored in.

I know, there are many reasons for caution. The topline polls show Harris in a dead heat with Trump, both nationally and in key battlegrounds, which is basically where Biden was before the debate disaster. There’s certainly a honeymoon effect reflected in the polls, too. With Biden out of the picture, Democrats are coming home to Harris, and independents are open to hearing her message. The dispiriting double-hater dynamic that defined the race for most of the year is gone, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sinking in polls as a protest vote. (Relatedly, a friend here in Los Angeles spotted Kennedy working out shirtless at Gold’s Gym in Venice this morning, with his new Secret Service detail looking on.)

Of course, the early polls are noisy and the race is still unsettled. As of Monday, there is no distilled messaging coming from either side, with each campaign still plotting their lines of attack. The Trump campaign has yet to unleash the full force of their paid media efforts against Harris, even if some of their super PAC allies are already on the airwaves calling “Laffin’ Kamala” a weak-on-the-border San Francisco radical. Harris, too, has been dark on the airwaves since joining the race, as her campaign plots not just its new path, but also brings in new faces to replace or work alongside Biden’s longtime advisor and adman, Mike Donilon. I’m told that veteran media advisor Jim Margolis, who worked for Obama and for Harris during her 2020 primary, will soon be officially involved with the Wilmington campaign. Margolis is known for crafting some of the best bio ads in Democratic politics, a useful asset for Harris, who remains largely undefined for much of the electorate after almost four years as Biden’s number two.

Even if all the Brat talk has already jumped the shark, the outpouring of enthusiasm for Harris has led to a remarkable vibe shift on TikTok, where Old Man Biden was getting absolutely clobbered for most of the campaign. Over the past seven days, 80 percent of the top-performing TikTok content about Harris has been positive, compared to only 19 percent positive for top-performing content mentioning Trump. That’s according to Kyle Tharp, ​​a Democrat who writes FWIW, a newsletter about digital politics. Harris is doing what was unthinkable a month ago—rivaling Trump for attention online. Tharp told me that while Trump was mentioned in 1.5 billion TikTok posts in the last week, Harris is right there, racking up mentions in 1.4 billion TikToks. Democrats have never ever found a way to rival Trump’s attentional powers across screens—until now. We’ll see if it lasts.

There’s another factor in Harris’s favor. Her newly motivated supporters are also getting involved for the pure fun of trashing Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance. Indeed, a new line of attack has been unleashed against the Republican ticket in recent days—that they’re “weird.” Credit for that framing has been attributed to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is auditioning for the role of Harris’s running mate by lashing Trump and Vance in a series of media appearances and campaign rallies. Walz is scoring hits, too, I’m told: The camo hat-wearing Minnesota dad has emerged as a finalist for the V.P. pick.

The messaging credit for “weird” also goes to the pro-Harris mischief-makers of the internet, who immediately launched a gag war outing Vance as a “couch-fucker” (and gleefully ignoring Michelle Obama’s admonition that “When they go low, we go high.” That was so 2016.) It’s likely you’ve seen the memes and videos making sport of Vance for once pleasuring himself with a latex glove inside his couch cushions. It’s a total fabrication invented by some rando on Twitter. (Snopes did a good job explaining where the lie came from if you’re couch-curious.)

The memes started percolating last week, depicting Vance thirsting after couches, recliners, modular sofas, throw pills, cushions, abandoned roadside furniture, all in pursuit of “sectional healing.” The trend got the kind of attention meme-makers only dream about when the Associated Press ran, and then retracted, a fact check stating that “No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch.” By Sunday night, John Oliver was talking about it on HBO. “If you ask me to draw a man that fucked his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he joked, showing a photo of Vance.

What’s so powerful for Democrats is that the meme was completely organic, the creation of political hobbyists and jokesters on the internet. The Harris campaign might be laughing along, but the hit didn’t come out of Wilmington. “Any viral meme about how much J.D. Vance is a creep is good,” one Biden staffer told me on Monday. The staffer was chuckling, in part, because distributed, homemade social media content has been one of the MAGAverse’s superpowers for almost a decade. “The left can’t meme,” became a source of pride and a rallying cry for Trump supporters online as Democrats like Hillary Clinton awkwardly told audiences to “Pokemon Go to the Polls.”

Suddenly, it’s the Democrats having fun on social media. “​​These memes are sofa king good, because he might not have made love to a couch, but he is an inherently weird guy, with weird policy positions to match,” said Keith Edwards, a Democratic digital operative and content creator. “And these memes are just reinforcing that in a way he can't adequately respond to.”

The fact that the couch memes are completely made up doesn’t seem to offend anyone on the left, which has spent years piously warning about the dangers of fake news and disinformation from MAGA trolls and hostile foreign nations. “From a pure disinfo lens, I don’t love it, but as a former campaign operative, I can’t help but appreciate it,” said Melissa Ryan, a veteran Democratic campaign operative who writes Ctrl-Alt-Right-Delete, a newsletter that chronicles right-wing activities online. Ryan asserted that no one actually believes the couch jokes are real—Democrats just want to find an excuse to make fun of Vance for seeming awkward, stiff, and yes, weird. “I don’t think anyone who is sharing is really intending to deceive. No one is trying to convince people that J.D. Vance actually had sex with a couch,” said Ryan, perhaps a tad optimistically. “I do think it plays into this notion that he is a weirdo, and that theme has clearly caught on lately, that the MAGA right is just weird. And honestly, going back to 2016, Trump has been riding the internet wave. So it’s nice that we finally have a candidate on our side who we are comfortable with, and we can have fun with.”

I also checked in with Rick Wilson, the former G.O.P. strategist who is one of the co-founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, which is churning out its own Vance/couch memes, including a slideshow depicting Vance and a series of sofas set to DMX’s “What They Really Want” that has almost 2 million views. While Wilson echoed Ryan (“No one thinks Vance fucked a couch”), he agreed the fake story plays into the budding notion of Vance as a strange guy with a hazy backstory, out of touch with normie voters. Of course, Wilson said, the memes are also meant to annoy Trump, who by now has almost surely asked someone at Mar-a-Lago if his vice presidential candidate actually had sex with a couch.

Wilson, who made slashing negative ads for Republican candidates before going full NeverTrump in 2016, said the time has come for Trump and his team to get a taste of their own social media medicine. “We are fundamentally not believers in doing unilateral political disarmament. If you do that, well, the outcome is that you get your ass handed to you,” Wilson told me.