Aloha, sawubona, and welcome to another edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, coming at you tonight from the East End of Long Island, where I arrived a few days ago to moderate a Q&A after a screening at the Hamptons International Film Festival of the fabulous new documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, with the movie’s subject, James Carville, and director, Matt Tyrnauer. (We also taped an interview for the podcast, which will drop tomorrow.)

Not surprisingly, the Q&A was a hoot: James was, well, James. And Matt pulled back the curtain on the two years he spent trailing the cantankerous septuagenarian Democratic strategist as he waged an insurgent campaign to convince his party that renominating the octogenarian Joe Biden was an act of obvious lunacy and all but certain political suicide.

But from the moment the Q&A was over and for the next three days, I was besieged by a seemingly endless stream of Democrats—at the screening for Jason Reitman’s buzzy and supremely satisfying Saturday Night, beneath the heat lamps keeping the picnic tables cozy at Il Buco al Mare, in the aisles between the treasure-stuffed vinyl bins at Innersleeve Records—who were freaking the fuck out for the same reasons much of their party collapsed on its communal fainting couch last week: a belief that Kamala Harris’s campaign “isn’t doing enough”; Harris “hasn’t closed the sale”; the presidential race is slipping irretrievably from her grasp; and thus Donald Trump is now on a Crisco-coated glide path back into Oval Office.

The question, of course, is whether that panic is fully justified or at least grounded in certain tangible and troubling realities—or, instead, merely this year’s version of the baseless spasm of bedwetting that seizes large swaths of the party every four years around this time. And lucky for you, dear readers, the definitive answer lies just ahead in this week’s column.

3️⃣ Three is the magic number. Due to some combination of overwhelming popular demand and our undeniably obsessive-compulsive, self-destructive tendencies as inveterate and irredeemable political junkies, the team behind Impolitic With John Heilemann is about to put the pedal to the metal and push the podcast into a higher gear, turning a rickety, jerry-built beater into what The Boss, in his wild and innocent E Street youth, would surely have described as a suicide machine. By which I mean: Starting tomorrow and continuing straight through to the end of January—by which time, if all goes well, America will have successfully, and, we hope, peacefully inaugurated a new president—the show will be stepping up its cadence from twice to thrice a week, with fresh episodes hitting your feed every Monday in addition to our usual Wednesday and Friday drops. So if you’re not already following Impolitic With John Heilemann, now’s the time to remedy the situation here or here.

🎧 Speaking of which: Last week on the pod, we dropped a pair of episodes linked by a single theme: the long-peddled, buffed-up myth of Donald Trump as a self-made tycoon, paragon of capitalism, and far-seeing steward of the American economy versus the actual, factual reality of his business record (from mediocre to catastrophically bad) and grasp of economic policy (nonexistent). Wednesday’s episode featured Mark Cuban, the billionaire former controlling owner of the Dallas Mavericks and longtime Shark Tank star who has emerged as a sort of liberal antidote to Elon Musk—and as Kamala’s most voluble, and maybe most valuable, business-world surrogate. And Friday’s show featured Susanne Craig, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and co-author of the recent bestseller Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.

And now to the main event…

As you’d expect, the audience at the Regal UA East Hampton was packed with Democrats who loved the movie and then lapped up the Q&A. Tyrnauer dished about the challenges of trailing Carville for two years and then locking picture on June 27—the very day that Joe Biden delivered the debate performance that validated Carville’s widely broadcast and (until then) largely ignored warnings about the perils of renominating Biden, and forcing Matt to scurry back to his editing suite to recut the film. Carville was his usual cantankerous, comical, profane self, but he stayed focused on the making and meaning of the picture until the very end, when I finally asked him about the topic weighing most heavily on the audience’s mind: “A little more than three weeks out from Election Day, James, how’re you feeling about what you’re seeing?”

Carville, as usual, was blunt. “I’m scared,” he said. “I was scared before and I’m still scared—scared to death. Because I have a pretty good idea of what happens if this thing goes the wrong way.”

The audience nodded in horrified agreement as James ticked through the litany of nightmares Donald Trump will be poised to unleash if he manages to get himself reinstalled in the Oval Office. But the truth is that the fear bedeviling many Democrats, not just in East Hampton but across the country, has less to do with what will happen if Trump wins in November than what Kamala Harris and her campaign are doing, and not doing, right now. After looking on, agog, as Harris flew out of the gate after Biden stepped aside, soared through the Democratic Convention, and crushed Trump in what now seems certain to be their sole debate, a large swath of the party is currently in a state of panic over where it sees Harris and her campaign standing today: stuck in the mud, not closing the sale, letting Trump get up off the mat and put himself on the path to victory.

Of course, Democrats are reflexively prone to freakouts along these lines; their collective spasms of bedwetting are so reliable, in fact, that they constitute a sort of quadrennial ritual. Sometimes these panics—like the one this summer in the wake of the Biden-Trump debate—are wholly rational and justified. More often, though, the heebie-jeebies that send Democrats hurtling toward their fainting couches have more to do with the party’s various neuroses, insecurities, and lingering scars from past losses than with the observable political realities unfolding in front of them. Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 and his reelection bid in 2012 both featured episodes of hysteria so dramatic that they provoked the first uses of the term “bedwetting” in common political discourse (h/t David Plouffe); but in neither race was Obama’s victory in real doubt by October, the month in both cases when Democrats lost their shit.

The current outbreak of fear and loathing has been building for some time, as the polls stayed tight—nationally and especially in the battleground states—and Harris never achieved what many Democrats hoped and expected she would: escape velocity. But it wasn’t until last week that political insiders, donors, and many ordinary voters reached for the panic button. Suddenly, every phone call I had with a Democratic source invariably included the citation of at least one purported omen of doom for Harris: “There’s a problem with Black men in Detroit.” “She’s bleeding blue-collar whites in Wisconsin.” “Republican registration is off the charts in PA.” “She’s only doing softball interviews.” “She was terrible on 60 Minutes.” “The campaign is too cautious, too risk-averse.” “The campaign is too complacent.” “It’s Hillary Clinton all over again!” Summing up the sudden vibe shift in just five words was the headline on Andrew Sullivan’s latest piece in The Dish: “He’s Winning This Right Now.”

What all this brings to mind are a few sayings I first heard 25 years ago when I was writing about Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists out there would cite a series of maxims coined by Eugene Kleiner—founder of the legendary Sand Hill Road firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers—and known as Kleiner’s Laws. “No conflict, no interest” was the funniest (and most telling). “Only damn fools stand in the way of oncoming trains” was another. But the one that really stuck with me is: “There are times when panic is, in fact, the appropriate reaction.” In our current context, the question is whether this moment in the presidential race is one of those times—or if one day soon we’ll look back on this October’s Kamala Conniption as a case of Democratic bedwetting at once unwarranted and so severe that the sheets and mattress needed to be destroyed in the aftermath.

Framing the question this way might seem to suggest that the answer is plain as day. Spoiler alert: It’s not. To do justice both to those furiously wringing their hands and those admonishing them to cut it out, herewith please find a handy dandy précis on each side of the argument.

Then came a one-two punch to the Democratic solar plexus in the form of a slew of credibly sourced press reports that the Democratic Senate candidates in the Badger and Wolverine states (Tammy Baldwin and Elissa Slotkin, respectively) are looking at internal numbers that have Harris behind in both. Put that together with new data that shows the G.O.P. out-registering Democrats in Pennsylvania, widely seen as the toughest of the Blue Wall states for Harris, and you’ve got the makings of a five-alarm fire in the Democratic political class—and with good reason. Because, sure, there are paths by which Harris could arrive at 270 while losing one of the Blue Wall states, but losing two of them would almost certainly be curtains for her, and losing all three would likely augur a Trump landslide.

2. Harris is still coming up short with nonwhite voters. Even before this morning, when The New York Times uncorked a clutch of stories detailing the V.P.’s standing with Black and Hispanic voters, the blizzard of public polling over the past month had made the problem glaringly obvious to anyone who bothered to check the crosstabs. Although Harris has made up much of the ground that Biden had lost during his time in office with these two crucial components of the Democratic coalition, her levels of support are still well below those that propelled Biden to victory last time around.

But the stories in the Times put a fine and florid point on the nature and scale of the problem: among African-American voters, Harris is sitting at 80 percent, more than 10 points below Biden’s final 2020 number; among Latino voters, she’s at 56 percent, 5 points short of the Biden benchmark—and a vote share, if it doesn’t improve, that would make her the first Democrat to fall below 60 percent Hispanic support since John Kerry.

It should go without saying that Harris could, in theory, make up for any shortfalls she suffers with nonwhite voters by overperforming with white voters—and there is some evidence she’s doing just that in the battleground states. But it should also go without saying that deficits with Black and Latino voters of the magnitude reflected in the current public polling would likely be too great to survive. And if you talk to state-level Democratic strategists in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Georgia, what you hear is unalloyed alarm about both Harris’s weakness with young Black men and the campaign’s turnout operations in Detroit, Philly, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and other big, diverse cities in the battleground states.

3. Harris isn’t campaigning enough. A headline in Politico a week or so ago captured the Beltway conventional wisdom pithily: “Trump Is Everywhere. Anxious Dems Wonder Why Harris Isn’t.” If that strikes you as a bit too impressionistic, the data tells the story: In the 52 days since the Democratic convention, Harris has, on average, appeared at one public event every other day, 26 altogether, a total that Trump has surpassed by roughly 50 percent.

Say whatever else you will about Harris’s strategy, it’s not surprising that reporters who have covered past presidential campaigns and strategists who’ve worked for prior nominees have cocked an eyebrow at a schedule that seems awfully light by traditional homestretch standards—and certainly doesn’t meet any definition of eye-of-the-tiger aggressiveness. And while skeptics will tell you that in-person campaign events no longer move the needle in a nationalized media environment where local news has been hollowed out and plowed under by TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts, campaign rallies and other events feed those new platforms and build a sense of momentum, which until recently was the essence of Harris’s shooting-star White House bid.

4. Harris’s P.R. offensive was more media bust than media blitz. Having taken a metric ton of flak from the mainstream press for not doing enough interviews, Harris last week sat for a slew of them: The View, 60 Minutes, Call Her Daddy, Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and more. What she got for her trouble was a tsunami of attacks from the right on social media—and in the inboxes of every national political reporter—blasting Harris in hair-on-fire terms, slamming virtually every answer she gave as word salad, incoherent, idiotic, disastrous, and/or disqualifying. Meanwhile, the mainstream press that dinged her for not fielding enough questions from the media dismissed these appearances for being conducted by interrogators who are congenitally soft, in the tank, or both.

Truth is, Harris did fine last week; not one of these interviews inflicted any real or lasting damage on her campaign—though the fact that she was asked twice what she’d do differently than Biden and twice said nothing was undoubtedly a head-scratcher. More to the point, even in her best moments, did she knock the cover off of the ball even once? I can’t find anyone in politics (including on the Harris campaign) who can point out an instance when it happened.

In this realm, the gold standard is still Obama, who even as a newbie candidate in 2008 could move seamlessly from Monday Night Football to Rick Warren’s megachurch to Oprah Winfrey’s couch and sparkle with equal ease and brilliance in each venue. Anyone wondering if, at this point, Harris is as good in unscripted settings as she’s proven herself to be at rising to the moment on big stages got their answer last week. And it wasn’t one that filled her supporters with unequivocal confidence about what might happen when she does more such turns—as she will have to—in the next three weeks.

But as we sit here today trying to decide if Democrats are right to panic, there is literally nothing in the mass of available public polling to suggest that the Blue Wall is crumbling, or that the Sunbelt swing states are out of reach, or that the race writ large is slipping away from Harris. The polling, in the aggregate, is delivering a loud and clear and consistent message: This is an insanely close race—a statistical tie nationally and in all seven battleground states, where the numbers are all but certain to remain within the margin of error from now until Election Day. Is this a message that will put anyone’s mind at ease about the outcome of the race? Of course not. But it’s also not cause for a new burst of dismay or dread.

If you’re a Democrat hungry for a take on how to think about the polling and the state of the race that’s sophisticated, bullshit-free, and thus simultaneously harrowing and oddly comforting, check out the new episode of Dan Pfeiffer’s podcast Pollercoaster, which has the first long-form, on-the-record interview I’m aware of with David Plouffe since he joined the Harris campaign. Plouffe’s basic message: Sorry, people, but this was never gonna be anything other than a scary-close race; the campaign’s internal numbers are more or less in sync with the public data; Harris still has plenty of viable paths to 270; and, maybe most important and useful of all, “Any poll that shows Kamala Harris up four to five points in one of these seven states, ignore it—and any poll that shows Donald Trump up like that, ignore it.”

2. Kamala’s ceiling is still higher than Trump’s. One of the main points that Plouffe drives home with Pfeiffer—a point he’s made to me in the past and chants like a mantra to his colleagues on Team K—is that after nine years in public life and having run for president twice, Trump’s vote-getting ceiling and floor can be pinpointed with some exactitude. In 2016, Trump won 46.1 percent of the popular vote; in 2020, he reeled in 46.8 percent. Because Plouffe is the most methodical and data-savvy high-level political strategist who’s ever lived—and because he learned a hard lesson in 2016 when, answering questions posed to him by me on national TV, he repeatedly forecast Hillary’s chances of beating Trump as 100 percent—he tells Pfeiffer that the Harris campaign is being hyper-conservative in its assessments of Trump’s ceiling in 2024. “He’s gonna get 48 percent of the vote everywhere, maybe 48 and a half,” Plouffe says. “We have to get used to that.”

But Plouffe lays out a convincing case that, given the composition of the remaining pool of persuadable voters out there—the tiny cadre who remain genuinely undecided between Harris and Trump and the much larger number of irregular and low-propensity voters whose decision is between voting at all and staying on the couch—Harris is capable of getting above 49 percent in all seven of the core swing states.

To understand this better, sign up for the Cook Political Report and search for a recent piece by the great Dave Wasserman, who’s been studying the universe of voters through a particularly clarifying lens for the past two years. What that lens reveals is an electorate made up of three groups of voters. The first group consists of people who are highly engaged, voting in 2016, 2018, 2020, and it accounts for about 60 percent of the electorate. In this group, there are almost no undecided voters, and Harris leads with them by 4 points. Then there’s a group of voters who don’t reliably cast ballots in every election; they tend to be more downscale economically and educationally, and tend to be more nonwhite. That group makes up about 30 percent of the electorate; Trump leads by 7 points here, and while Harris has whittled his advantage down from double digits, if he wins the election, it will be because of these voters.

And then there’s the third group, which is made of newly registered voters. Before Biden dropped out of the race, Trump was leading with this group by 10 points. When Harris replaced Biden, she quickly narrowed Trump’s lead to 4. But today, Harris has blown past Trump with new voters and is now ahead of him by 13 points—a startling surge that’s consistent with the strides she’s made in getting back to Biden 2020 levels of support from young voters.

3. Harris isn’t doing enough? She’s doing plenty—it’s just different stuff. When the Beltway press complains about Harris dodging tough grilling from its members, what Team K hears (and they’re not wrong) is an ancient, dying beast railing against the diminishment of its status and stature in the new world. In that Andrew Sullivan piece I mentioned earlier, he writes, “What Harris really needs to do is a Fox News town-hall or a rollicking, risky press conference, where she takes command. … Why can’t she? Because—let’s be honest—her team either fears or knows she may not be up to it.”

But what the Harris campaign knows is that, much as it pains Sullivan and other old-school journalists (including moi), the kinds of media engagements that he is demanding and that many of us (including moi) would like to see won’t do a damn thing to advance their strategic objectives (and, duh, help her win the race). As Wasserman’s work makes clear, the target audience for the next three weeks contains essentially no one who watches Fox News or MSNBC or reads the Times, the Post, the Daily Dish (or Puck). How do you reach them? Via Stern and Colbert, Call Her Daddy and All the Smoke, or Charlamagne tha God—with whom Kamala is sitting down on Tuesday, an interview that’s part of a much wider effort to address her issues with Black voters.

4. Kamala’s flaws pale beside Trump’s. Nowhere is the press’s double standard in how it treats Trump more vivid than on this question of whether Harris is “doing enough”—because if you pay much attention, it’s screamingly clear how little Trump himself is doing. While he may have done more rallies than Harris of late, measured against his own exalted standards, the physical and mental diminishment that some of us have been howling about for months is all too apparent. According to the Times, as of October, Trump had held a total of 61 rallies this year. Compare that to 2016, when Trump was, like it or not, a tireless and savage beast on the campaign trail—knocking out a whopping 283 rallies! At the same time, his crowds are smaller and typically start leaving the arena before Trump finishes his increasingly low-energy spiel. The word that comes to mind when you consider his decline? Sad.

Meanwhile, Trump’s schedule isn’t merely light; it’s strategically nonsensical. Over the week he held a rally in Coachella—which is, for anyone unaware, in California, a state he has zero chance of winning. On October 27, he’s coming to Madison Square Garden, and no doubt his campaign will fill the joint. But the coverage will be merciless and filled with the comparisons to the infamous American Nazi rally that took place there in 1939. Combine this approach and its dark implications with the fact that Trump hasn’t consented to a sit-down with a mainstream journalistic outlet in months, and it’s yet another reason to think that maybe, just maybe the current Kamala Conniption is more likely to be yet another episode of unwarranted Democratic sheet-soaking than the kind of panic Eugene Kleiner was talking about.

Look, I’m not being dismissive or cavalier, and god knows it bears repeating: There are plenty of reasons to fear that Harris will lose this election—because, you know what, there’s a very good chance she will. This is what it means for a race to be a statistically tied, 50-50 contest: It means the candidate you favor is just as likely to come up short as to prevail. And given the potentially ruinous consequences of Trump emerging triumphant, the thought that the fate of the whole American enchilada comes down to the flip of a coin—if that doesn’t make you a little bit fearful, you’re even more in need of therapy than I am.

But while no one enjoys being afraid, it’s worth considering the possibility that embracing a modicum of agita and apprehension will serve the cause of Team Democracy better than indulging the delusion that Harris has it in the bag. As my old friend Bob Kerrey, a Medal of Honor-winning Vietnam veteran and former Nebraska governor and senator, once memorably said to me: “A certain amount of anxiety, it turns out, is actually good for you—fear has a way of keeping you on your toes.”