Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Abby Livingston.

Congress will finally be back next week, returning after a head-spinning recess that has totally rearranged the political landscape since members dashed home in July. Of course, the campaign is on everyone’s minds. To wit: Former Obama comms director and advisor Dan Pfeiffer shared his candid insights on Pennsylvania math, the upcoming debate, and the battleground state map with my partner John Heilemann. Their conversation, an essential read, comprises the main event of tonight’s email.

But first… here’s the latest readout on the ever-evolving down-ballot conventional wisdom…

Does Gonzales, who is decidedly not shy about knocking his own party, really believe in this prophecy? Or is he trying to elevate the alarm of his colleagues? After all, the spending and fundraising differences between parties has been undeniably huge this year. Democratic House incumbents have repeatedly outraised challengers by many multiples, and Democratic challengers have also outraised Republican incumbents. Of course, Republican donors have a history of swinging in late with super PAC donations, but the ad-spending differentials shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to candidate, committee, and super PAC reservations over the past few months.

While Democrats have been destroying Republicans in the fundraising game, one of the election’s biggest X factors remains a mystery to almost everyone: the impact of split-ticket voting. Last week, I told an old Texas friend—a deeply religious, evangelical 40-year-old who can’t stand Ted Cruz—that I couldn’t quite picture what a “Harris-Cruz” voter looked like. He blurted out, “Me!” This person said that he was voting for Harris because Trump was a nonstarter… and despite how much Cruz repulses him, he’s going to vote for the junior senator as a check on the Democratic policies of a Harris administration. This same logic explained why down-ballot Republicans performed better than expected in ’16 and ’20: Voters expected Trump to lose and were elevating Republicans to rein in potential Democratic administrations.

Related late-stage questions abound in this cycle: How much will Harris’s presidential bid actually help down-ballot Democrats in her native California? Ditto Tim Walz in Minnesota and J.D. Vance in Ohio. Then there’s Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, and North Carolina’s Josh Stein, all of whom are running strong enough statewide to potentially lift Harris with reverse coattails. Are Kari Lake and Mark Robinson so toxic that they may cost Trump both Arizona and North Carolina?

Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing conversation over how much the late-inning Biden-Harris switch will impact the most consequential down-ballot race in the country: Jon Tester’s Senate re-election bid in Montana. Just after Biden withdrew, operatives doubted Tester would get any boost with Harris at the top of the ticket. But there is indeed a counterargument that Tester’s close ties with Biden were a liability, and that under Harris, it will be more difficult for Republicans to nationalize the race against him.

And now, here’s John and Dan…

Dan Pfeiffer: It’s similar to the difference between the 2016 and 2024 Republican conventions. In 2016, you had a bunch of people who didn’t love Trump, but were going to vote for him. But now this is Trump’s party, and so it’s primarily his numbers with Republicans that have gone up. And he’s doing better with independents in 2024 than he was in 2020.

He’s won over some groups of mostly young men, some Black and Latino. The other thing that’s important is that he represents change more than Kamala Harris does, and you can see this in the polls. Obviously, Harris represents change much more than Joe Biden did—exponentially more. But in a global anti-incumbent environment, and when people are unhappy with the economy, the candidate who represents change is going to be more popular.

It’s two days after the traditional start of the fall campaign, and The New York Times has Harris at 49 and Trump at 46; Nate Silver has Harris at 49 and Trump at 45; 538 has Harris at 47 and Trump at 44. The most recent high-quality national poll, the ABC News/Ipsos poll, has Harris at 50 percent—the first time I’ve seen 50 for Kamala Harris—and Trump sitting at 46 percent among registered voters. Among likely voters, they have Harris at 52 and Trump at 46. That’s a pretty consistent picture nationally, and obviously much tighter in every battleground state. Give me your sense of just where things are today, understanding the election is held 60-some-odd days from now.

If you polled the press corps and most Democrats who are not working for the Harris-Walz campaign, 85 percent would say that Kamala Harris would win if the election were held today. If you ask the people who are actually deep in the numbers and paying really close attention to what’s happening in the battleground states, it’s closer to 50-50. And I think it’s very possible that if the election were held today, Trump would win.

Is the disparity because the reporters who are out covering the race, and Democrats more broadly, overstate the love, the enthusiasm, the vibe, and the momentum so much that it outweighs the national polling?

Dramatically. When you dig into the battleground state poll numbers, they’re all toss-ups, every single one of them. There’s not a single battleground state poll where one of the candidates is up or down by more than two points, and most of them are tied, or at one point. And when you start doing the math of what happens if one of the candidates does not win Pennsylvania, it all gets very complicated, very quickly.

What number, in your judgment, would make you comfortable? What would Harris’s lead need to be—nationally and in battleground states—that would allow you to sleep the night before the election?

There is no number like that. We hit that number in 2020, and we sweated that thing out until the Friday after the election. The polling industry has made adjustments to try to solve for the problem of underrepresenting Trump voters. But no one knows. We haven’t had an election since 2020 with Trump on the ballot to actually test these new methodologies.

Now, there’s better battleground state public polling today, whereas there was very little in 2016, a bit more in 2020, and we don’t have Covid this time, which I think did affect things on the margins. But I’m always struck by the fact that the American Association for Public Opinion Research had a conference—they got together to try to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it—and they just lifted up their hands and said, We can’t figure it out, because all the polls were all wrong for different reasons.

The fact that Pennsylvania is harder than Wisconsin just speaks to the change in politics since 2020. Remember, Biden won Michigan by almost three points, Pennsylvania by one and a half, and he won Wisconsin by 0.6 percent. Wisconsin is the one that people keep waiting to tip over into Ohio land, because Trump has made gains with Black voters, younger men, and continues to hold his margin with white non-college-educated voters.

Pennsylvania doesn’t have a particularly elastic electorate. We can’t go get a bunch of new voters, whereas Georgia has huge swaths of unregistered, very likely Democratic voters, Black voters, younger voters. There’s migration into Georgia from the rest of the South, from younger voters who profile as Democrats. And so Georgia has this growth pot, it’s growing in the right direction.

But Pennsylvania is static. Harris is still struggling to reach Biden’s 2020 numbers with Black voters, both in terms of support and turnout—in Philly, in particular. Is Harris going to bleed some non-college-educated white voters, and can she make that up with non-college-educated white women because of abortion? This is the problem with these races. There’s no one simple thing you need: You need a little bit from every single pot, and all the pots are in Pennsylvania.

Whenever anybody says that Harris is going to be able to drive turnout through the ceiling in Philly and parts of Pittsburgh, I recall what Biden did in 2020—and Kamala’s numbers with Black voters are not as good as Biden’s, though they’re getting there. And you’ve got that giant part of the state that James Carville used to say is like Alabama. Even for a candidate like Barack Obama, Pennsylvania was tricky because of those weird dynamics.

It’s hard, and it gets harder with a candidate like Trump, who is maxing out turnout in rural areas in Pennsylvania in ways Mitt Romney and John McCain certainly did not. Trump is netting more voters from that part of the state than any other Republican going back to basically Reagan.

This was a test that was set up by the press, for the press, and she had to pass it. There’s no great, amazing answer to the question of, Why did you have all these positions in 2019 and why do you have different ones now? But she didn’t do herself any damage, she did herself some good, and she passed.

Now she has to get back to the actual business of winning votes, because this was not about that. The number of undecided voters who are watching a Thursday-before-Labor Day interview on CNN at 9 o’clock at night is quite small.

Even though I know that many people in my business are egomaniacal, and even though the press does all kinds of shit that I think is ridiculous and not in the country’s interest, I still believe in the notion that voters should be able to get a look at candidates in unscripted settings, and not just get by on scripted speeches and from digital video shorts made for TikTok or whatever platform. Voters have a right to expect more, to see the candidates challenged and have to think on their feet.

She should do interviews that are in her interest, and some of those interviews will be with traditional, mainstream press organizations. I hope she is going to sit down and do an hour of satellite TV interviews once a week for the rest of this campaign. That is absolutely the right thing to do. And we have to broaden the definition of what people do. Trump did a podcast interview with Lex Fridman. He did Theo Von’s podcast the other day. He’s doing a ton of things with very targeted media that’s reaching his core target. She has not done those things yet, for the same reason she hadn’t done the CNN interview, but she’s going to have to, to win the election. Yes, voters have a right to expect it, but I’m not sure their expectation about who should be asking the questions is the same as it used to be.

Let’s pivot to the upcoming Tuesday night debate.

In whatever sort of fake debate prep, Trump has probably been forced to watch the infamous Kamala Harris-Brett Kavanaugh exchange, or the Harris-Bill Barr exchange from those hearings. And my guess is, he’s scared, and he’s been working through some pre-debate anxiety in public lately, as he handles most of his anxiety, which is on his sleeve.

If you were working for the Harris campaign, what would you say is her primary strategic objective?

This is so trite, but the debate is probably the most important moment of this campaign—full stop. We’ve seen in recent debates how important they can be. Thirty million people watched her convention speech, which is a huge number. That’s a very partisan number. I suspect this debate will be at least two times that. What happened with the Biden-Trump debate was that people who had not been paying attention to the campaign tuned in. People don’t want to pay a ton of attention to politics. But we live in an event culture, where the only time people will tune into linear television is when there’s a giant event—a live sports event, an awards show, or a debate. And I expect there will be a massive audience to see her.

Most people do not know a ton about her, so this is her chance to introduce herself again, for people to take a measure of her. I think her primary strategic objective is to seem calm, steady, and strong, and make Trump seem old and erratic. It’s hard, being a candidate of color, because she can’t yell at him or tell him to stop speaking, the way Biden did in 2020—that is not available to her. That would be treated by the press and the public in a way that’s deeply unfair. And he’ll be able to get away with a thousand things she can’t get away with. But if she can have the discipline to not respond to him, or respond to him on her terms, it could be a huge, game-changing moment for this campaign.