Americana

1. The big Harris-Walz sitdown
2. Trump’s IVF pivot
3. Tulsa mayoral race
4. Exclusive Harris message testing
5. Moms for Liberty gathers

Also: What the early post-convention, post-RFK Jr. polling is telling us.

Our long national nightmare is over: The Democratic ticket did an interview. Campaigns don’t give everyone a head’s up on their media plans, but the Thursday night CNN conversation with Dana Bash, which the network turned into a prime time special, answered a month-plus of questions about when Harris would speak to an interviewer at length, which Republicans had made central to their campaign against her.

The ways Trump and Harris approach the media now — and even what they consider “the media” to be — are worth digging into, and we do that in this edition. But the bigger picture is that Harris-Walz are entering the Labor Day weekend with small leads in national polls and in swing states. Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, they didn’t hunker down for fundraisers in August while Trump hit the trail. Unlike Joe Biden in 2020, they weren’t hesitant about holding rallies, and the Democratic ticket will campaign aggressively across swing states next week in the run-up to the first Trump-Harris debate. For the third time in three campaigns, Trump is heading into September at a slight disadvantage — but it’s slighter than it was in those previous races.

The great media ref-working of 2024

On Thursday afternoon, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz gave CNN’s Dana Bash the first joint interview of their short presidential campaign. The rareness of the sit-down, and weeks of Republican pressure on Harris to do it, turned what’s usually a high-profile event into a hands-on-deck moment.

“My values have not changed,” Harris said, answering questions about why she had abandoned left-wing stances from her aborted 2020 presidential campaign, including a ban on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border-crossings. In both cases, Harris said that the Biden-Harris record showed where she stood now: “We can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

The Trump campaign demanded more, asking why Harris hadn’t held a press conference yet —– Trump held two this month —– and suggesting that her “values” answers didn’t absolve her from the abandoned positions. It did that as part of an aggressive press strategy to put the GOP ticket in front of microphones, and suggest that Democrats couldn’t do the same because their ticket couldn’t answer questions.

But in front of which microphones? While Vance has been blitzing traditional media, Trump has mixed occasional network questions with a busy schedule of long, friendly podcast interviews that often fly under the radar. On X, Trump’s campaign listed the greatest recent hits: “No holds barred, hour-long podcasts with Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, Dr. Phil, and Lex Fridman.” Trump’s appearances rarely generate major policy news, but the casual format can also be revealing as to his state of mind (he really can’t get over Biden dropping out.)

Some allies are already urging the Harris campaign to consider taking a page from Trump’s book and doing more nontraditional media. Former Obama aide Tommy Vietor said on Semafor’s “Mixed Signals” podcast this week that Walz would be a perfect fit for the kind of right-leaning sports shows Trump has visited, where he could counter a parody image of liberals among “Trump/RFK-curious dudes.” Every mention of future Harris interviews on social media inevitably generates supporters talking about “Hot Ones,” the popular YouTube interview show that runs A-listers through a gauntlet of scorching wing sauces.

Trump dances around Florida’s abortion ban

Donald Trump befuddled anti-abortion activists on Thursday, telling NBC News that Florida’s six-week abortion ban was too strict and promising a crowd in Michigan that he’d make the government pay “all costs associated with IVF treatment.”

The abortion answer produced an hour of confusion and anger, as Live Action president Lila Rose accused Trump of “embracing abortion on demand.” Rose and other activists thought that Trump’s answer to NBC News, to a question about how he’d vote on the state’s abortion rights amendment in November, was an endorsement of the amendment. At 7:29 pm eastern time, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser put out a statement critical of Trump, saying that “voting for Amendment 4 completely undermines his position.” Ten minutes later, she issued a correction: “I spoke with President Trump this evening. He has not committed to how he will vote on Amendment 4.”

The IVF position was clearer, but both conservatives and Democrats panned it. “Trump lies as much if not more than he breathes, but voters aren’t stupid,” Harris-Walz spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika said after Trump’s remarks. National Review Online editor Phil Klein pointed out another heresy Trump had just endorsed: “The proposal would represent an expansion of Obamacare, which created the architecture for the federal government to dictate what insurers must cover.”

Summer primary results offer some clues about November

Republicans got locked out of the race for mayor of Tulsa, an office they’d held since 2009, as the third-place finisher requested a recount. While mayoral candidates don’t run on party labels, votes for the candidates associated with the party were up; at the same time, three incumbent Republican state legislators in conservative districts were felled by challengers who ran to their right.

In Washington state, Republicans were waiting on a recount to see whether they’d locked Democrats out of the race for Public Lands Commissioner, after four Democrats and two Republicans ran in the all-party August primary. Democrats were helped by a higher-than-expected turnout for their candidates across the state, which has been a reliable test of enthusiasm before November. In 2010 and 2014, when Republicans made gains across the country and Democratic turnout collapsed, Democrats had a low-single digit advantage in the primary vote. In 2018, an ideal Democratic midterm turnout environment, the party had a 20-point advantage. The Democratic lead this year: 15.8 points, comparable to 2008 and 2016.

The power of positivity

In research first shared with Americana, the Democratic messaging shop Blueprint found that positive ads worked far better for the Harris ticket than negative ones. Working with Van Ness Creative Strategies to test 30-second arguments, Blueprint found voters unmoved by anything solely about “Trump’s extreme plans to gut affordable healthcare and Medicare.” What played were “contrast ads and positive Harris ads” that led with her plans, and included footage of her with popular Democrats, like Barack Obama.

“In a vibes election, where Harris came on the scene as a breath of fresh air, relieving voters from a rematch they dreaded, positive ads allow Democrats to press their advantage and cement voters’ initial impression of her candidacy and promise to the country,” said Alyssa Cass, Blueprint’s chief strategist. The most effective spot, which moved a divided sample of independents toward Harris by 9 points, used this contrast: “Kamala Harris will fight to restore Roe v. Wade and save our fundamental rights. Donald Trump will allow his extremist allies to pass a national abortion ban — and attack IVF and birth control next.”

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.

Moms For Liberty hosts Trump

Moms for Liberty is holding its pre-election summit in Washington this week, celebrating its wins in school board races (more mixed lately) and Title IX lawsuits and welcoming Donald Trump for an on-stage interview.

Shortly after the conference opened on Friday morning, it made news: Texas Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Democrat who lost her primary after voting with Republicans on a bill banning gender medicine for minors, announced that she was leaving her party. It was time to join the GOP, she explained — “the party of parents believing that we have the fundamental right to determine the best education for our children.” Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democrat who endorsed Donald Trump this week, applauded from the other side of the stage.

Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, said that the Democrats had clarified things by nominating Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. “All we need to do is go and look at the states where they’re from,” she said, and the ways they handled gender identity questions and COVID lockdowns.

Polls

Pollsters have had enough time now to capture the impact of the DNC and the Trump-Kennedy concord. The result: The most improvement for Harris, modest gains for Trump, and a third party vote that’s now more problematic for Democrats. In the small sample of voters who prefer West, Stein, or Oliver, 33% say Harris is their second choice, and just 15% say that Trump is.

Fox’s post-DNC round of sunbelt polls found the same trends in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. Harris was running five points ahead of Joe Biden, before he passed the nomination to her; the Harris/Walz ticket had higher favorable ratings than the Trump/Vance ticket; Democrats down-ballot were running well ahead of their presidential candidates. The main reason for that is Trump’s strength with non-white voters, which other Republicans don’t share. He gets 38% of that vote here, while Lake gets just 31%, and the campaign to keep abortion rights out of the state constitution gets just 18%.

Since Harris grabbed the Democratic nomination, Republican paid messaging has stayed on three basic topics. One: She’s been too soft on criminals. Two: She’s responsible for the surge in illegal immigration since 2020. Three: She can’t be trusted because she’s changed so many positions. This poll, which finds a tied national race, also finds Harris erasing Trump’s advantage on the first two questions. Democratic ads played a role, reintroducing Harris as a prosecutor. And some of that has stuck.

Ads

• Harris for President, “Control.” For years, the Lincoln Project has bought ads in media markets where Donald Trump is probably watching — mostly Palm Beach, Fla. The Harris campaign aped that strategy for this spot, running where Trump lives, and focusing entirely on Project 2025. Their theory is that goading Trump on the Heritage Foundation’s plans pushed him off message before, and it can again, labeling the think tank’s plan a “922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever.”
• Mannion for New York, “Careers.” Swing-seat Democrats, both incumbents and challengers, are running on jobs and optimism, telling stories of what their spending did for voters. New York State Sen. John Mannion, who’s trying to flip a district Joe Biden carried but Kathy Hochul lost, hangs out with a metalworking apprentice who credits him for bringing more apprenticeships upstate. Mannion, mentioning his teaching background before his political career, adds that he “worked with Republicans and Democrats to do it.”
• One Nation, “Keeping Up.” The Mitch McConnell-aligned super PAC is fond of one particular attack on Democrats — when they approved a new round of stimulus checks in 2021, they didn’t prevent them from going out to prisoners. That appears in a zero-sum argument here about how Sen. Bob Casey threatened Social Security, partly by sending “covid relief checks to violent criminals.”

Scooped!

Randall Terry has a mission: Run for president, on the Constitution Party’s ticket, as a way to put gruesome abortion ads on TV. He doesn’t want to spoil the election for Donald Trump, and has said so. But some Democratic operatives are trying to help Terry with ad buys and signature-gathering efforts, a tit-for-tat response to similar Republican aid that’s helped Cornel West make the ballot in swing states. Teddy Schleifer had that story first, and it’s a good one, which you know because the Democrats he identified in the scheme tried to wipe their fingerprints.

Next

• Four days until primaries in Massachusetts
• 11 days until the ABC News presidential debate, and primaries in Delaware, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island
• 31 days until the CBS News vice presidential debate
• 67 days until the 2024 presidential election

David recommends

Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” was a strange biopic at 157 minutes, and it got stranger after Apple released his director’s cut this week. None of the history sticklers’ problems got solved, which is clear from the start. (Napoleon wasn’t at the execution of Marie Antoinette.) The Napoleon-Josephine romance gets more attention, and extras who bled fake blood in battle get their scenes restored. It still works best as a bleak comedy about power, driven by a salty, petulant Joaquin Phoenix and the grand (usually British) actors who get quiet when he yells at them.

• China’s Xi meets top White House official as countries try to ease tensions.
• Ukraine pushes US for support on long-range missile strikes against Russia.
• German officials look to push social platforms on image verification.