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The way I see the things in my bubble.
Watching the Democrats media machine spinning at full gears is impressive. Trump's assassination attempt is old news. It never happened. The iconic Pulitzer and election winning picture is nowhere to be seen. A lot of dem aligned twitter accounts suddenly are active and on the attack. Felon and rapist are everywhere. Suddenly Trump's age is a problem. Absolutely no accountability demanded from the people that were telling that Biden is ok. No talks if he is fit to be president. Their reality building efforts are smooth and from what I can see effective - no one seems to remember critics of her that they wrote from the ancient time of June 2024, let alone before. All in all makes you believe that Snowcrash's ur-language was not pulled out of Neil Stephenson's imagination.
On my side - Republicans are high on copium, seems to not have been prepared for Kamala, lack message and message discipline, and are on the defensive. JD Vance seems to be bombing. And for it - the election moved from landslide to at best narrow win. I still think that she is the second worst possible candidate after Joe Biden but probably ok enough to win.
The quantity of vitriol on both sides is extremely high, the quality is lacking. But I would say the Democrats are better right now. I feel that it is manufactured enthusiasm, but has the chance to become real one.
All in all bad news for everyone that hopes that mass migration to the west will be curbed before the mid 2030-s (lately I have become single issue on that issue).
This is your reminder that you are literally on business day 3 since Biden dropped out, and still in the midst of the initial Democratic media campaign push. If you're vibing off of what you're seeing and hearing in the media, especially the larger share of which is already Democrat aligned, you're basically just partaking in anecdotal bias of a bandwagon effect.
The American political narrative machine has worked like this for years: a surge of high-tempo media insertions when there's a planned push, down to spamming the youtube commercial adds, and then an ebb as the narrative push ends and messages prepare to shift. It will occur again, and continue, and keep continuing throughout the election cycle. If you think the election is turning because the Democratic-aligned media is being optimistic rather than pressimistic, then you need a better barometer of the health of the parties involved.
If you ever thought the election was going to be a landslide, you were already high on hopium. The withdrawal effects may be nasty, but they don't make everything to the contrary copium.
Republicans don't have a message for countering Kamala yet, in no small part because Kamala doesn't have a message to be countered. Kamala Harris has been a practical non-entity for most of the broader electorate for the last few years, and even in her emergence as the Democratic nominee she still hasn't taken a meaningful stance on, well, anything. Right now she's the not-Joe Biden / not-Donald Trump candidate, but the former is not a policy position, and the later not being enough is precisely why Biden resigned.
The Democratic Party is not united simply because the party elites insist it is, and Harris is going to have to take positions for the sake of managing her party coalition. Joe Biden could be consistently attacked because his coalition politics were stable: Harris's is not, and attacking her for things that she's not taking a stand on is a waste of money and makes her job (putting the coalition back together again) easier, whereas Harris has a well-earned reputation of bad office/coalition politics to leverage over time.
The Democratic convention is right around the corner, and the Democratic-aligned media is going to present it as a success no matter what does or does not happen, just as they were intent on presenting the Republican convention a dismal failure from the start. The story for the next weeks is- regardless of Republican attack adds- going to be the Democrats coming back together and uniting and how this is a new chapter.
The Republican campaign, in turn, is going to find the things to pick at. But as this is Kamala's first real time for national attention, given her earlier flameouts, the national-level criticism is going to follower her taking national-visibility stances.
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