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Notes -
Kamala's VP pick is in: Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota. Shapiro was apparently off the board because of some botched case from a decade ago. Although Walz is an unknown to most American voters, he conveys "midwestern good vibes" and seems like a pleasant enough white guy. Probably will be harder to go after than JD vance. Any minnesotans got any cool stories about him?
The Harris campaign simply never misses.
It's telling that in two weeks MAGA went from assured of total victory to stolen election mode:
https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1819726527141208279
As urban youth would say, they shook.
Harris is bad product with good marketing, so I continue to be near certain she ends up dragging in the polls when the honeymoon period ends and she actually makes public appearances.
I've been asking blue teamers to name the most impressive achievement attributable to Harris.
Aside from "got picked as VP" then "got picked as Presidential candidate" there's literally nothing. Every other attempt to rehab her image failed, too. She's got almost every liability Biden has aside from age, yet none of the experience or achievements to her name.
Unless they pull the "she makes no appearances publicly unless absolutely necessary" strategy that Biden pioneered, there's simply no possible way her public persona improves the current situation, and many ways it harms it.
Ironically Walz might have been chosen simply because he's really good at putting a decent spin on his own bad policies and that's literally what Harris needs to do right now.
There's not a lot of time to kill the honeymoon here. It's August.
And we don't have a media willing to force her to make public appearances, at all. Republicans don't have a candidate willing to do so either, since he's still so obsessed with crushing Biden he wants to just run off of that victory.
The irony is that there's not a lot of time to build up a campaign and a candidate's public image, but they're attempting it anyway.
Not sure how to react to the revelation that you DON'T necessarily need the 1 year plus leadup to the election in order to build public support for your candidate.
Why not have one month of campaigning, hold all the primaries on the same day in July, and then we can just have a 3 month race for president starting August. Much more efficient.
In this campaign, you don't need "public support", you just need "less public disapproval". Trump is at +8.3% disapproval right now; Harris has plummeted from a recent +17.4% disapproval down to a mere +5.5%. RFK is at +7.8% and Chase Oliver is at "Who?", so she's currently the most popular candidate not by virtue of being popular but by being less relatively unpopular.
If someone wanted to nominate a good candidate then their opponents might have to worry about having enough time to convince the public that their candidate is also good, but for some reason there just hasn't been much threat of that happening for the last decade.
I really wish I understood why, my only guess is that smart, well-rounded, virtuous people don't go into politics any more, because the level of media attention and frenetic partisanship make it totally undesirable for all but the most commited ideologue or the most narcissistic idiot.
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