Americana

1. Trump’s big bet on RFK Jr.
2. Harris-Walz meets the press
3. Jack Smith returns
4. Filling Rep. Bill Pascrell’s seat
5. Utah’s ballot battle

Also: The Maryland Senate race looks close … for now.

Depending on your media diet, the last four days were either a turning point for the Trump campaign, or a pointless sideshow. If you spend a lot of time on X, you probably saw memes that portrayed Trump, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard as members of the Avengers or the Justice League. If you don’t, you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Democrats are overjoyed with how their convention went, rolling into this week with fresh events scheduled, along with the first joint candidate interview on a major TV network. They were amused by Trump’s endorsements from ex-Democrats who couldn’t stand Harris, and saw a potential winning issue — for their side — when Trump added both to his transition team. But Trump and his allies think they’re missing history. More on that below.

Donald Trump goes all in on the ‘weird’ vote

Democrats think they’re “weird.” The Trump campaign thinks they speak to persuadable voters — and enough of them to sway the election.

For months, Trump has stiff-armed party elders who were never comfortable with him, and elevated figures plugged into niche anti-establishment circles. From picking JD Vance, to courting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and addressing the Libertarian Party, Trump is betting that there’s an untapped well of support from voters — mostly white, mostly male — at the political margins.

They may not be large in number, but Republicans see them as up for grabs in an otherwise polarized electorate; people who might vote third party, or not at all, but can be brought into the GOP fold with the right care and attention. The goal is to appeal to everyone from relatively apolitical Joe Rogan listeners to pro-Bitcoin tech reactionaries to Green Party leftists raging against neoliberalism and “forever wars” — anyone who is alienated by traditional politics and inclined to hate Democrats.

Trump doubled down on that bet on Monday by adding both Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard to his presidential transition team this week, highlighting his new support from prominent former Democrats and giving them potential policy roles in a second administration. His pollster, Tony Fabrzio, predicted a potentially decisive net gain in battleground states from Kennedy’s endorsement.

One Trump strategist said that the campaign now had six people who could credibly talk to anti-establishment podcasters with more viewers than nightly network news: Trump himself, his eldest sons, Vance, Kennedy, and Gabbard. They celebrated as big names in this space gushed over the Kennedy news.

“What we are focused on is the creation of an anti-establishment alliance,” comedian Russell Brand explained on his Rumble show. “How can you argue that anything other than a Trump-Kennedy presidency will lead to further dictatorship, further technological feudalism? This is an opportunity for mass disruption.”

Democrats, who have been trying to court moderate Republicans with hundreds of party-crossover endorsements, weren’t buying it. They view Kennedy’s stances (vaccine conspiracies, antisemitic COVID theories) and personal history (where to begin) as obvious liabilities. Sarah Longwell, a pollster and founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, also was skeptical.

“The embrace of RFK does have an incredibly negative rating among swing voters,” Longwell said. “Bring up his name and they go, Ugh! That guy’s insane!”

Harris and Walz agree to first televised interview

The Democratic ticket will sit for its first joint interview this week, when CNN’s Dana Bash talks with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Republicans, and reporters, had pressed Harris on when she’d do interviews for weeks, and the clamor grew louder after the Harris/Walz ticket didn’t talk to reporters around the DNC.

In 2008, 2016, and 2020, the new Democratic tickets made their first dual appearances on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” a quasi-tradition that got skipped this year. “The First Interview” will air at 9 p.m. eastern time on Thursday, returning the Democrats to mainstream media airwaves — which the Republican ticket has handled more carefully. (JD Vance has been accessible to traditional TV media outlets, while Donald Trump has done his longer interviews with conservative media and podcasters.) The Democrats’ resistance to a TV interview was getting trickier; a poll conducted for Puck, by Echelon Insights, found 89% of all adults agreeing that it was important for candidates to take questions.

Special counsel tries again in two stalled Trump cases

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed an updated indictment in the election interference case against Donald Trump, one day after he appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s dismissal of the classified documents case in Florida. In the latter case, Smith disputed Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling that his appointment was unconstitutional, a legal theory that Democrats were surprised to see any court accept.

“Precedent and history confirm those authorities, as do the long tradition of special-counsel appointments by Attorneys General and Congress’ endorsement of the practice,” Smith wrote in the appeal to the 11th Circuit. In the D.C.-based election interference case, Smith reworded the charges against Trump to clarify what could and couldn’t be called “official conduct,” a constitutional term that Trump’s attorneys defined broadly to cover any behavior in office.

Big shoes to fill in New Jersey

New Jersey Democrats closed in on a replacement candidate after the death of Rep. Bill Pascrell, filling one of the last vacancies before the November elections. Pascrell died last week at the age of 87, becoming the third Democrat this year to pass away in office. (Fellow New Jersey Rep. Donald Payne Jr. died in April; Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died last month after a short battle with pancreatic cancer.)

By Tuesday morning, the chairs of each county Democratic Party in the 9th Congressional District had endorsed Sen. Nellie Pou, who took Pascrell’s place in the state Assembly 27 years ago. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Pascrell’s district by 19 points; he carried the Payne and Jackson Lee seats by landslides, and Republicans aren’t seriously contesting any of them in November. Newark municipal council president LaMonica McIver will compete for Payne’s seat in a September special election, but the other seats won’t be filled until November, giving House Republicans slightly more breathing room when they return to work on Sep. 9.

Beehive State Ballot debate

Utah Republicans put a measure on the November ballot that would take away some of voters’ power to amend the state constitution, after a years-long fight over a redistricting amendment neutered by the GOP majority. In 2018, voters narrowly passed a non-partisan redistricting measure; in 2019, Republicans prevented its full implementation, and redrew a seat based in Salt Lake City so that Democrats would be unable to win it.

Last month, the state supreme court ruled unanimously that Republicans had acted wrongly to weaken the amendment, and the party moved quickly to put new language on the ballot, clarifying that the legislature had the power to tweak voter-passed initiatives. To help their chances, legislators added unrelated language that banned the use of foreign money in state elections, an idea that had proven popular in other red states. Opponents of the new amendment rallied outside the capitol on Monday, calling the new amendment a “temper tantrum” and launching a “vote no” campaign to kill it.

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Illinois) and Chris Womack, President and CEO, Southern Company will join Semafor’s editors on September 17 in Washington, D.C. to examine the importance of reliable energy infrastructure to economic development, and the ways the public and private sectors are working together to protect energy security.

Request your invitation to attend

Polls

The worst media coverage of the Harris campaign came 11 days ago, when she introduced a suite of economic policies in North Carolina, and skeptical economists said that some were unworkable. But this is the data Democrats are drawing from — polling that finds voters willing and ready to blame corporate greed for high prices, even if CNBC hosts don’t. The biggest challenge that More Perfect Union found in its polling was that few voters have heard about ongoing Biden administration efforts to bring prices down, which is both a hurdle and an opportunity for Harris.

The newly joy-filled Democrats haven’t fretted about Maryland’s Senate race in months. They continue to see it as a mirror image of what they tried in Tennessee four years ago, and Ohio two years before that — running a personally popular governor who eventually runs out of persuadable voters from the other party. Hogan has kept pace with Alsobrooks on the air, runs 19 points ahead of Trump with independents, and wins a quarter of Democratic voters. A substantial share of Harris voters currently support the GOP nominee for Senate. The storm clouds for Hogan: Thirteen percent of voters who view him favorably don’t support him right now, and two in five voters don’t know who Alsobrooks is. That includes one-third of all Democrats.

Ads

• Donald J. Trump for President 2024, “The Great Debate.” Republicans have a challenge, and Democratic polling confirms it: Voters don’t associate Kamala Harris with inflation as much as they associate it with Joe Biden. This is one Trump campaign solution, presenting Harris’s North Carolina economic speech on screens next to 2023 remarks praising “Bidenomics.” The goal is re-connecting voters’ synapses, and making them distrust whatever Harris says about jobs and prices.
• Harris for President, “Everyday.” The Democrats’ own ads about the economy rely heavily on Harris, speaking directly into the camera, citing her own life to assure voters that she understands their needs. This version builds off the same North Carolina policy speech as Trump’s ad, running quickly through her housing and pricing plans, plus a tax cut.. The goal of it all, she explains, is to “give money back to working and middle class Americans.”
• Rob for PA, “Bucket Truck.” The worst media coverage of Harris’s short campaign came when she started to explain how she could use executive powers and legislation to fight price gouging. Most candidates simply don’t explain what they’d do to drive prices down — they promise to do it, and if they’re Republicans, they blame the Biden-Harris administration for raising them. Rob Bresnahan, who’s running in one of the last Democratic seats won by Trump in 2020, talks about his background as a “union electrician” and pledges to “lower prices,” after his ride on a cherry picker shows prices going up.

Scooped!

Democrats were in denial about Donald Trump gaining with Latino voters in 2020, unsure what to do about their losses in 2022, and flummoxed about Joe Biden’s unpopularity with these voters in 2024. Harris fixed some of the party’s problems simply by taking over the ticket, and Adrian Carrasquillo has published the best investigation into how: Focus group participants, who met before the ticket switch, “appreciated her record on fighting for reproductive rights and loved her 2015 crackdown as California attorney general on employer wage theft of immigrant workers.”

Next

• Seven days until primaries in Massachusetts
• 14 days until the ABC News presidential debate, and primaries in Delaware, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island
• 35 days until the CBS News vice presidential debate
• 70 days until the 2024 presidential election

David recommends

The Kennedy/Gabbard/Trump alliance isn’t a one-day story, and Democrats are still working through its implications. In HuffPost, Daniel Marans got further than anyone else has in figuring out what pro-Harris campaigners think about this, and what the stranded Kennedy campaigners — people who thought they were blowing up the two–party system! — are going to do now.

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