In American Canto, Olivia Nuzzi reveals that New York Magazine, her old employer, offered to keep her on after news broke of her boundary‑crossing relationship with Robert Kennedy Jr. on one condition: she “wrote her way out of the story.” Meaning, if she gave them a tell‑all, she could salvage her career.

She refuses, repulsed by the offer, and opts to take the professional punishment along with the public shame.

That fallout sent her through the fire. She emerges in Los Angeles among the flames of 2025’s Southern California conflagration with her brand-new tome.

In it we find out: she still doesn’t want to write a tell-all.

She tells a version of the story. How she fell in love and the hours‑long phone calls that defined their infatuation. The musings of what their baby would look like. We get a lot of what it feels like to pick up the pieces of your life. And the sting of being left behind when the heat got too hot.

But we do not get the humiliating dirty details. The kinks of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services. A view of Kennedy’s wife only a mistress would be entrusted with. Political opinions that could even now roil the current administration. Not even the rage of a lover scorned.

It’s understandable, on a human level. But it’s frustrating as a fan of Nuzzi’s writing which I would define as having a forensic attention to detail. Long pauses. Saliva in the corner of a mouth. A thousand‑yard stare. She became the best in the political feature writing game by telling a story from the smallest moment, the micro becoming macro.

But it’s very hard to put that level of scrutiny on your own life. Especially when you’re still mad at the world for changing your life overnight.

Canto reveals Nuzzi now enforces a hard line between personal and public. Maybe that line always existed and nobody cared. But now, after the public reaction to her scandal, when tens of thousands crossed it without her having control: she has closed the border.

There is obviously a portion of this that is laughable turnabout for someone who made a career chronicling political figures, often in unflattering moments.

Nuzzi now cherishing privacy is human, if hypocritical. She acknowledges this without apology.

And yet still... we’d love some details. Even if they were only from her perspective.

Take one of the most explosive rumors around the relationship that brought all this to a head: that her relationship with RFK Jr. became public because “the politician” showed nude photos of her to people he knew. People in the upper echelons of New York City society. People who eventually tipped off her boss at New York Magazine.

It’s a sharp, simple image from the outside: an older man coaxing a younger girl into a relationship, then humiliating her to impress his real friends. Does she view it like that? Differently? Does she believe it happened? If not, it is just an invented detail too lurid to not be thought real?

We get no confirmation, no processing, not even a direct mention. Aside from an interview with an “Unidentified Male” about his sexting scandal and a few vague references to people looking at her as if they’d seen her naked… nothing.

It’s past the border and we are not welcome.

The book is filled with meta‑analysis of two subjects: Trump’s America and Olivia Nuzzi.

The Trump stuff is tedious. It’s been written a million times by worse writers and it is not her best work although there are some fun nuggets to be found.

The introspection is far more interesting and far more frustrating. You’re constantly left wondering how honest she’s being, both with the reader and with herself.

The clearest example: her recurring valorization of her father, a decent man by all accounts.

But anyone familiar with her now, all-too-public dating history (which includes multiple men decades older than her) can be forgiven for asking the question:

Does she have daddy issues?

And it’s not just the reader asking, even her brother puts the question directly to her in one vignette.

Her answer is a firm “no.”

Yet the author recounts how she cried during an interview when fathers were discussed. Even though RFK Jr.’s hands reminded her of her father’s hands. Even though RFK Jr. survived an abusive relationship, just as her father survived one with her mother.

It’s one of many contradictions. Either she’s a woman in crisis listing facts she doesn’t yet realize contradict each other or she’s a skilled writer winking at readers.

Either way, I liked those parts. I don’t know if she knows. They felt real.

I hope Olivia Nuzzi finds peace. I hope she keeps writing. Ideally in that order.

But while she protects her borders, she increases the value of everything beyond them. And one man has found a lucrative business extracting that value: her ex‑fiancé Ryan Lizza.

His Substack posts are grimy, personal, and exactly the kind of thing readers might have expected from American Canto.

He spills stories about her relationship with a cantankerous television anchor and her affair with an already scandal‑famous politician. Do we know any of it is true? No. But Nuzzi’s refusal to play the game leaves him the sole black‑market merchant of her private life.

It’s an ugly business. Uglier still in the ruins of old media, where a captured audience is a relic and embarrassment is currency. Semafor hailed his 724,000 views as “a massive number in the post‑traffic era.”

I assumed Lizza’s white‑hot rage would eventually lead to him writing about the scandal from his perspective. He was publicly cuckolded. Human drama like that demands a paywall.

And sure enough, his willingness to weaponize his own humiliation paid off. Not only in a robust subscriber base but in his damage to his enemy. He siphoned attention from Nuzzi’s old media book rollout. Her New York Times feature, her Vanity Fair excerpt.

A glamorous black and white reemergence blanketed by her own dirty laundry.

Nuzzi had been hired as the West Coast editor for Vanity Fair. Lizza’s posts made sure to highlight every accusation that might poison her credibility.

And on Friday, she was out of the job.

During an interview last week, Nuzzi joked her press tour was going so poorly her agent sent her an unsolicited “I love you” text and Monica Lewinsky had been checking in on her.

Lizza had the goods, Lizza had the speed.

The prestige that came with the rollout couldn’t compete in the “Post-Traffic Era.”

Lizza hit the gas. Nuzzi got run over.

Being as bloodthirsty as the next gossip monger I want Olivia to fight fire with fire. To unleash every humiliating peccadillo about her ex‑fiancé. Turnabout is fair play. My credit card bill has room for another Substack subscription.

Maybe she will.

But Canto suggests she won’t.

A friend once told me during a brainstorm, you need dignity in what you offer the public. A moral framework. I always countered: sure, but we need attention.

He’d joke, “You can get attention by posting naked pictures of your sister. Doesn’t mean you should.”

The strangest night of my political career was in South Carolina in 2020, when Tom Steyer held an event with Juvenile. Back That Azz Up in a tiny Columbia gym and a ivory-white presidential candidate pretending to know why the majority‑Black audience was so excited.

It went viral immediately.

I’d been on the road covering the Democratic primary, fulfilling a deal with my audience: if they subscribed, I’d put my journalism degree to work and travel like a real reporter.

It worked.

I booked a ticket to Iowa and soon found myself in press pens with people I’d followed on Twitter for years. But something became clear fast: the light went out of people’s eyes the moment they realized I was “just a podcaster.” Even worse, one they hadn’t heard of.

One person, Dan Newhauser, was friendly. I met him at a bar in New Hampshire at the time he worked for Vice. We went to the Steyer event together. Afterward, he invited me to join Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza for drinks.

I was nervous. But both were kind. Curious that I’d funded my own way onto the trail. I immediately understood why Lizza excelled at access journalism and why politician after politician trusted Nuzzi to cover them even if the final products were never puff pieces.

Before a few months ago, it was just a quirky footnote to a bizarre political night that included Steyer’s wife undulating next to Mannie Fresh.

I saw them several times after that in press pens around the country. Always warm, always friendly.

I always appreciated it.

Despite finding this topic endlessly fascinating, I haven’t mentioned it much on the podcast or on social media because these people are real enough to me that it seemed intrusive.

Watching their relationship and careers careen, explode, and then re‑rack for another go-round has been surreal.

But in this world attention is the coin of the realm and everyone could use more of it.

I hope they both keep writing.

Preferably about things other than themselves and each other.

Periodically we ask the Px3 listenership for their thoughts on the show.

This is a very valuable tool to make sure the program is responsive to the needs of the best audience in the business.

It’s only 14 questions and should take you around five minutes.

Thank you!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeUFoeK66fRQJzlakd4HzKQ-mqW44MZglR45TTt47kuJC8zzg/viewform?usp=header

Donald Trump is about to become President of the United States of America. Some may remember this has happened before, indeed, eight years ago Donald Trump similarly took the oath of office for the presidency.

If you are seven years old it might surprise you to learn that in 2017 people were extraordinarily mad Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. They changed the rules of online discourse, chased wild theories to discredit him, pledged to block his legislative agenda and wore embarrassing hats in massive street protests to show their distain.

Now? Not so much.

Why aren’t people as angry this time?

Let’s take a look at the world that was, compared to where we are now.

Tech

Only days after Trump’s surprise 2016 election, Alphabet (the parent company of Google) held their weekly TGIF all-hands meeting. These internal meetings provided access to leadership from rank and file employees. It was simultaneously live-streamed to remote workers and recorded for those busy during the event.

The leaked video gives a window into the apocalyptic view of a Trump administration from the San Francisco Bay Area. As a resident of the Bay Area in 2016 with plenty of friends in the tech world, I’d say this is accurate to my lived experience.

Palpable in the Q and A isn’t just a sadness but a sense of responsibility.

Why did we allow this to happen? How can we prevent it from happening again?

In 2025, Google donated $1 million to Trump’s second inauguration fund. It’s more than the $285,000 they gave in 2017 and part of a trend of Silicon Valley rethinking their terrified approach to Big Chungus.

Take Facebook (now Meta) who instituted a fact checking system to address backlash to Trump’s first election. This week they announced it would be shuttered. Also, their most prominent Republican in senior leadership will now head policy.

What changed? Well, a newly jacked 2025 Zuckerberg looks like the bully that would stuff 2017 Zuckerberg in a locker.

In the eight years after Trump upset Hillary Clinton, companies like Facebook cooperated with progressive forces both in and out of executive power. But what did it get them? In a chat this week with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg lamented being labeled as murderous by President Biden. He felt persecuted by Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Probably most telling, he said that the United States should protect vital industries like the tech sector against international regulation, specifically the EU.

This is an explicitly pro-business position that would be far more at home with a Trump administration with one caveat: the industry isn’t actively attacking him.

And so, they aren’t this time.

Press

Here is a clip of Game Change author Mark Halperin discussing a story about Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in the New York Times.

This is remarkable for a few reasons:

1. Mark Halperin was banished to the #MeToo Shadow Realm during the first Trump administration. After strong scoops surrounding President Biden dropping out of the race in 2024, he has reinvented himself as a digital media reporter and pundit.

2. Hey it’s Sean Spicer! ‘member Sean Spicer?

3. The point of the segment is correct, Trump 47’s Chief of Staff is not being written about as a Smithers-esqe Doormat like Reince Priebus or Fascist Svengali like Steve Bannon. She’s just a professional woman at the top of her game who wishes Ron DeSantis and his wife would fall into a vat of acid. You know, normal politics stuff.

The difference between the press reaction to Trump then and now can probably be best summed up in one word: Collusion.

By this point eight years ago the drum beat around Russia’s role in electing Donald Trump had begun. It would soon swell into a fever pitch by the spring enveloping Trump’s administration through the midterms before dissipating when special council Robert Mueller’s report found no evidence of collusion.

We’ve seen less of the tongue-wapping gossip of the first administration. Fewer “He said what?!” stories from Maggie Haberman at The Times and more “Here is how Trumpworld plans to tackle X” stories from Marc Caputo who has parlayed his Florida access to Axios after brief sojourn at The Bulwark.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of invective for Trump in the press. It’s just not novel to the mainstream in the way that it was in 2017. He is no longer a foreign body waiting to be rejected, he is America’s popular choice and those that care are seeking to understand him in a different way.

Politicians

Democratic Sen. John Fetterman dined at Mar A Lago this weekend.

Only nine Democrats voted against advancing the Laken Riley Act, a collection of harsher immigration punishments named for the nursing student beaten to death by an illegal immigrant, for a final vote.

With confirmation hearings on the docket tomorrow, partisan violence will surely increase but this is a stark contrast to 2017 when Democrats were proudly lining the barricades and pledging their political lives to stop the golden-quaffed philistine from Queens.

People

An estimated 70,000 people left their homes between election night 2016 and inauguration day 2017 to protest Donald Trump.

In New York City, in Washington DC, in Los Angeles.

It would pale in comparison to the demonstrations shortly after the term President Trump became official. The Women’s March on Washington was announced shortly after election night. The idea originated after multiple Facebook events went viral. Within a day, hundreds of thousands expressed interest in attending the march. These events were subsequently merged. The march was officially held on January 21, 2017, the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It became one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, with an estimated 500,000 participants in Washington, D.C., and millions more in sister marches worldwide.

Now? Not a pink pussy hat to be found.

While the inauguration will surely attract a smattering of counter demonstration, there is no mainstream swell.

So what does it all mean?

Some might simplistically say that these institutions capitulated to Trump. But I suspect the answer is more elemental than that.

It means an era ended.

Trump vanquished the final incarnation of the Obama dynasty when he ended Joe Biden’s career on live television and trounced a woman who was so often compared to him in Kamala Harris.

But also, with two terms history would tell us that the MAGA era now has more road behind it than ahead of it.

No one knows what the rules of the next era will be. But we know they won’t be the exact say as the last decade and a half. It’s not that anyone likes Trump more it’s that he’s less of a threat now that he’s run his last campaign. So if he has a popular idea, why not take advantage of it?

As for everyone else. They’re tired. They don’t quite know if the screaming and yelling mattered.

So whatever, bring on the tax cut.

Hello, if you are new to my content my name is Justin. I am a politics podcaster. I built a career at Patreon and on October 3rd I switched to Substack as my exclusive home.

This was terrifying for all the reasons you would imagine. To add the pressure, my wife gave birth to our first child less than two months prior.

Here are my thoughts on the transition. Hopefully they are helpful for people thinking about the transition or just curious about the feral world of independent media.

Here we go…

GOOD:

- A Platform That Cares Moving from Patreon to Substack was a terrifying process and the lingering fear it could ruin a good thing was palpable. It greatly helped to have someone to email and Substack not only provided that but they’ve kept in touch. This has given me a bridge to contact other creators as well, which has been nice.

- Discoverability Let me be very clear, podcasts are impossible to discover. They are inconsistent, hard to find and annoying to sample. They just are. Substack Notes allows me to post in an ecosystem that puts my free sub an impulse click away. Substack Network gives me a steady pipeline of possibly qualified listeners. If only 10% ever try the show and 10% of those become paying customers I am still growing simply because the platform built tools to do it. This, and I cannot stress this enough, doesn’t exist anywhere else.

- Tools Writing and publishing is easier and more aesthetically pleasing on Substack.

- Community My audience loves chat. That's neat.

BAD:

- Transition Day We did not have a button for people to subscribe to the Substack when I made my first announcement. Not sure why that was the case. It was nerve wracking to say I was going to move and then not have an immediate place to direct people. Everything worked out, so this is minor. But it gave me a heart attack.

- Domain It took longer than expected to get the PoliticsPoliticsPolitics.com domain to resolve to this page. Again, not sure why.

- Migration Pain This is by far the worst, and most predictable, side effect of the switch. No one likes change. No one likes being given a task with little tangible benefit. No one likes spending money they wouldn’t otherwise spend. To move from one site to the other I foisted all of that on the audience. Add to that any confusion that comes along with the subscription process or adding an RSS feed to the jigsaw world of podcast players. There is no perfect way to do it but there is a bad way to handle it: inaction to complaints. The angry emails will come, you are judged by how fast you respond. The nasty comments will be posted, you will be judged by how long they linger. Nothing you can really do besides try and do rapid response, which Bailey and the Substack team were often faster than I was on when it came to the comments.

- Delay In Charging Substack offered all of my Patrons a free month of bonus content on Substack. This was very important because it made my decision less jarring because one action could continue their experience without pulling out a credit card. Most of my audience subscribed within that period but Substack did not start their subscription until the free period lapsed. Some listeners hit me up toward the end of the free period and asked if they were really subscribed. Minor issue.

- Stripe Name This is a pretty major change between platforms. Patreon handles all payment processing behind the scenes. Substack has you set up a Stripe account to handle it. Functionally, this means that I now get paid from Stripe and not Substack. I did not know that Stripe had a character limit on what name is displayed when charges hit the customer. This led to "Dog and Pony Show Audio Productions" the name of my LLC to be shortened to "Dog and Pony Show Audi". I had two chargebacks because people thought it was some automobile-focused scam. Emails to both of them resolved it. But this is something to keep in mind for Patreon refugees.

The numbers:

1,203 Patrons when l left the platform on October 3rd, 2024

1,167 Substack paying subscribers as I publish this on January 6th, 2024

I am down on paid subscribers. Which obviously isn’t ideal. However, on Patreon I was Per Creation meaning I billed every week. However, Patreon allowed people to cap how much they spent on each account in a single month. As I found out after digging through the numbers it was a very common practice to cap our $3 tier ($12 a month) to $3 a month. Meaning they would get the extra content but not pay for more than one or two weeks.

That cannot happen in a monthly and annual model. Also, our $99 Annual deal has been very popular.

I suspect I will make more my first year on Substack than I did my most profitable year on Patreon mostly because I have already been paid close to 70% of the money I would otherwise make from the year. My monthly payment is roughly half of what it was on Patreon. But on that trajectory, I’ll be up which is nice.

-

4,798 free subscribers when I made Substack my main hub for political writing and podcasting

6,185 free subscribers today

Substack has built the rarest thing on the internet, a growth engine for the impossible to find.

Podcasting is a lonely medium for die hards. Sure, the megastars are the megastars but by and large it’s people like me. Dedicated to a hardcore audience of a few thousand. But how do you grow?

Sure, there are charts on major platforms. Search exists, which helps you if you are dedicated to a certain niche topics like the Arizona Diamondbacks or Fintech. You can advertise on other podcasts, but making your first impression interrupting a podcast someone already likes has always struck me as odd.

The upside for podcasts is that if you do find your way into our web, you will probably never leave. These are your friends. You know the inside jokes. You crave their opinions on news you see outside of the show.

On the other hand, newsletters are very easy to sample. You can read them anywhere, you can skip to any portion of it you want, you might decide you like based simply on the headline or lede.

Since they are written, you can amply prove you are good at writing on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

The Substack product is clearly built around community. When you go to your page, you get the Notes section and a revolving carousel of content you’ve subscribed to. While chat can be intrusive, it’s been a hit with my audience. All of these features designed to give a user a reason to spend time on Substack as a destination for content and not just a delivery method for the content creator you like.

This is in stark contrast to Patreon who was designed solely as a paywall. No one goes to Patreon itself, they go to the page of the creator they enjoy. Therefore, no one gives much credence to what Patreon might try to recommend which they are starting to do now as they begin to adjust to Substack’s success.

I’ve been in independent media my entire adult life and will probably be until the day I die.

Substack is a remarkable achievement and I really, really hope we continue to grow together.

Subscribe now

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@politicspoliticspolitics

X: x.com/justinryoung

Twitch: Twitch.tv/JustinRYoung

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24-hour cable news. Four channels. On silent.

Day after day after day.

YouTubeTV technically calls this feature Multiview. But for me, it’s The Quad.

Fox News on the top right. To the left by CNN. Bottom right is MSNBC. Bringing us home on the bottom left is the BBC. Pure news-flavored entertainment pumped at barely-legal levels into my consciousness with no guard rails.

It started innocently enough. I put a television in my home office and thought if I had something I didn’t care about running 24/7 I would have some eye candy to rest on without pulling out my phone and falling into a social media hole. So what should I put on? Drone footage of Dubai? Old movies? A Tubi channel of American Gladiators?

Nope.

Hair spray. Chyrons. File footage. Greg Gutfeld smirks. Molly Jong-Fast hair dye. Little arrows that depict wind currents in BBC weather forecasts.

The Quad is love. The Quad is life.

Subscribe now

Here are the highlights:

Biden Death Watch

By far the most fascinating Quad period of this cycle was Biden Death Watch. Stretching from the CNN debate to Biden dropping out of the race. Fox guests could barely suppress their glee. MSNBC was frantic. State television that didn’t know if the rebels won or the strong man dictator survived the revolt.

The BBC covered the Glastonbury Music Festival.

Full Quad

The rare moments are when all four networks are covering the same story, with bonus points on if they are showing the same footage. The grimmest example being the Trump Assassination in Butler.

Experienced Quad Bros can quickly find the feed that is ahead of the others. That day, Fox News had the fastest feed from Butler, Pennsylvania. CNN also ran it live. MSNBC had it running in a small box while guests talked over it. The BBC covered The Euros.

For whatever reason, I had the sound on. The gun shots sounded like a cap gun.

One by one, each network began running the same footage. Trump collapsing, arising with blood on his face. Even the BBC.

The commercials

Fox News has a lot of public service announcements and charity commercials. I have learned a lot about the good work Tunnels To Towers does for 9/11 survivors and servicemen and women. Ditto to the Shriners Hospital for Children. Advertising has never been the main revenue for cable channels, but the amount of PSAs and charity ads can’t be a good sign for the health of the most watched cable news channel.

MSNBC is built on HoneyLove bra money. These women have no back fat, no underwires and no lines. The wiggle around my screen every 15 minutes alerting me to their wares. MSNBC also has more ads for menopause drugs than the other cable networks combined.

The political commercials

The Quad gives you a superior sense of political ad buys. The ad featuring three liberal yentas gossiping at a deli and conspiring to vote for Trump? Heavy rotation on Fox and CNN.

But the first run of Kamala Harris ads after she became the nominee? MSNBC and CNN.

I’ve yet to notice a political ad so unhinged it regularly appeared on Fox and MSNBC without a CNN buy.

Producing

MSNBC goes very long with their panels. Seemingly hours can go by with the same talking heads prattling on.

CNN’s editorial coverage is more centrist than MSNBC. For example, if there is good news for a Democrat the entire segment will be about the good news. If there is good news for a Republican, half of the segment will be about the news and the rest of the segment will discuss if it’s really good news or if it’s racist. That is aside from Jim Acosta who does the most nakedly liberal show each day.

Also, at some point CNN began turning their evening coverage into a more nakedly violent roundtable where the guests are actually facing each other. It often gets more contentious and as I am writing this, just got ejected from the panel because he told Mehdi Hasan “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.”

Fox lives in its own reality. Harris Faulkner, flanked by a phalanx of blondes takes you through the midday. You know it’s time to stop procrastinating when Neil Cavuto shows up. If you haven’t done anything of worth by the time Jesse Watters is flashing photoshop gags… you need to make some changes.

Weird MSNBC Shots

Claire McCaskill’s live shot looks like my mom just pulled me aside before Thanksgiving dinner to tell me I shouldn’t drink as much as I did last year.

The two-shot of Morning Joe looks like the first dinner with my new girlfriend’s parents at an Olive Garden.

I don’t know why I have so many personal emotions evoked by MSNBC’s shot selection.

-

What have I learned? Cable News is a very worthwhile venture when a live event is breaking. There are plenty of professionals who make it an enjoyable experience. They would be better served to have less talking heads and more infotainment.

I almost always turn on the sound for Steve Kornacki or Harry Enten.

And Click is a show on the BBC that is probably about computers.

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Much like the first quarter field goal attempt by Minnesota Golden Gophers kicker Dragan Kesich last Saturday, young men in America are drifting right.

By all available polling, 2024 will have the widest gender gap in recent memory. As of October 2024, Harris leads among women by around 12 points, with 55% of women favoring her compared to 43% for Trump. However, among men, Trump has the upper hand, leading Harris by approximately 8 points (53% to 45%). This results in a gender gap of roughly 20 points, continuing a long-standing trend where Democrats perform better with women and Republicans with men.

The Democrats are obviously aware of this considering how hard they’ve leaned on Vice Presidential nominee “Coach” Tim Walz masculine tendencies with varying results.

These efforts have all been strange fits to me. Walz is a much better communicator of progressive ideas to normies than Alpha Strats to betas. His Crock-Pot midwestern shtick more akin to the meme-worthy man speaking his mind by Rockwell than The Rock.

If you really care to understand the beating collective DNA of the mainstream modern man aged 18 to 45 there is only one place to find it: ESPN College GameDay.

For the uninitiated ESPN College GameDay is a pre-game college football panel show on the air since 1987. It transitioned to a live on-location program in 1993, making a new home every week on a college campus that is set to host one of the top games. Unlike other ESPN mainstays, like SportsCenter or Baseball Night in America which have faded like the cable systems it helped build, GameDay is as relevant as ever in 2024. It remains a pinnacle of youthful anything-can-happen live enthusiasm.

GameDay features a rotating cast of broadcasters, ex-athletes and podcasters but the real star is the omnipresent rowdy crowd of college students that have been there since the wee hours of the morning. This is not a party with a show in the middle of it, the crowd lives and dies on every word of the panel, specifically mentions of rival schools.

But the reason GameDay is as successful as ever is that it’s a valuable gathering place in an era of increasingly distant digital tribes. If we agree on nothing else, the American man agrees that Alabama needs to get off the field on third down against Tennessee.

And with that comes the oft-conflicting strains of lesser agreements, all on display during the GameDay runtime. Among them God, gambling and podcasts.

These are all segments from this weekend’s addition of the program emanating from Austin, Texas. Each one a shard in the stained glass display of a modern American male:

• A heart wrenching story about the mother of a University of Texas lineman who found herself on deaths door. “Why would God do this to me?” she asks recounting her time in the hospital having lost the ability to walk. “God has been good to me!” she cries after we learn she’s recovered and is in rehab.

• A Tennessee fan who honors his grandfather’s grave by painting it checkerboard white and orange.

• The panel eats local food. Original Black’s BBQ.

• A comedy sketch about why you shouldn’t book your wedding during the fall as it conflicts with college football.

• Gambling odds.

• A teenager attempts to kick a field goal for $90,000 while Tony Hinchcliffe (a stand-up comedian who hosts the stand-up comedy podcast Kill Tony) calls the teenager “a prepubescent lesbian.”

• Lee Corso, once the vital spark plug of the show who has aged into the Yoda of the group, is tenderly honored as a part of the panel. Like grandpa at a tailgate, every sip of beer is celebrated by the youth surrounding him.

• Golfer Scotty Scheffler picks games and jokes about being arrested.

• The current vital spark plug of the show, podcaster Pat McAfee, plays the live crowd like a maestro. Singing fight songs of teams with the crowd as he makes his picks. He regularly jokes about being high. He often takes off his shirt. The. Kids. Love. Pat. McAfee.

The show is not afraid of tear-jerking emotion but is never far away from ball busting.

While never explicitly religious, it’s not scared of declarations of faith. It’s also unafraid to let you know the Over in Miami vs. Louisville is likely with Cam Ward’s explosive passing attack leading the way for the 5-0 Canes. Odds courtesy of ESPNBet.

It’s a very mainstream male experience in a shrinking marketplace.

Consider this: Howard Stern interviewed Kamala Harris this month and complained to her that Saturday Night Live’s impression of her is too mean. A far cry from The King of All Media’s in his hey-day making Anna Nicole Smith cry because he wanted to weigh her live on air.

The Republican Party wants to let boys be boys and these days you’ll find more testosterone in Stanford Steve than Stern.

And the GOP notices.

When insurgent conservative podcast Ruthless (comprised of working Republican operatives) does live events, it’s on a set created as an homage to GameDay.

Republicans believe that rowdy crowds of college kids are more likely to vote red than ever. They’ve spent time this cycle registering students to vote, something that would be considered a death wish in past cycles.

It should also come as no surprise that Donald Trump would find himself far more at home on the panel than Kamala Harris. In fact, it’s an upset he hasn’t appeared on the show as of yet. Trump has attended several high profile college football games over the last few years. On Sunday, he watched the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers take on the New York Jets.

The Democrats might well win this election. But defections of male voters will continue until a D presidential candidate doesn’t look out of place next to a visibly high Pat McAfee picking Vandy laying the points over Ball State.

Odds courtesy of ESPNBet.

I asked progressive listeners to our Sunday Sunday Sunday show what they thought of the Harris campaign so far. Here is a representative email…

Jim

I’m less excited to vote for Harris than I was to vote for Biden in 2020.  I think there’s no choice (again) but to vote blue.  I liked some of Biden’s policies, e.g. student loan forgiveness, and I’m expecting Kamala to be less progressive than him in office based off her campaign, when I wanted her to go left campaigning and then go to office with lefty policies in the chamber.  

Walz got me pumped but since then her campaign has been such a let down.  I agree that she’s been totally wasting Walz, who is so good at the progressive talking points.  She should be taking Walz’s policies in Minnesota, or ones like them, and campaigning on going national with those, imo.  

I’m convinced she’s only leaning right because someone convinced her she could win picking up never trumpers instead of going left and then being disappointed about young voter turnout.

All of the progressive emailers said they would be voting for her FWIW.

The goal of a political campaign is to get as many people as possible to vote for you. Should you get more votes than your opponent, you win.

To achieve this you need to identify persuadable voters and give them ample reason to support you.

So, please, explain to me how the following decisions help these respective candidates.

JD Vance Whiffing on 2020 Question, Again

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, the MVP of this campaign will be JD Vance.

When Brat Summer was unrelenting it was Vance who did the dirty work of following around Harris’ introductory rallies. He answered open press questions, comparatively highlighting how managed the jubilant Democratic ticket was. He put the first dent in Walz with the stolen valor claims.

This all happened while Vance was being compared to Sarah Palin and the top of the GOP ticket dealt with the untreated PTSD that comes along when you almost get your head blown off on live television and 30% of the country is openly mad you survived.

If that does not happen, I think there is a chance Kamalamania could have taken hold. Trump could have made very self-destructive decisions like firing his campaign leadership and bringing in flunky loyalists.

But that didn’t happen. Vance did the dirty work.

So, good for JD.

But in both his crowning achievement (the dismantling of Walz in the VP debate) and in this recent interview with the New York Times he has whiffed on the same question: did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?

I don’t fault him for the debate. Life comes at you fast on live television.

But he had to know the question was coming again at some point.

What should he have done?

Well, let’s first acknowledge that he can’t say anything Big Chungus won’t like. And either GOP candidate is going to further their cause by talking much about 2020.

This leaves obfuscation.

The weakness of the very neat question is that you can derail it.

For example: “Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?” can be countered with “Are you asking me if Donald Trump is currently the president?” to which the question must now be clarified with more specificity. Probably something like “Do you think 2020 was a free and fair election?” This is ground the JD wants to be on as you see in the clip he immediately discusses Big Tech censorship and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

If this is a question you can’t win, and Vance cannot, then the best thing you can do is make it less of a sound bite.

Kamala Harris talking about Trump’s medical records

I hope for you dear reader that you one day find someone you love in life like Democrats love presenting a list of experts in a public letter.

Beginning one of the final weeks of the campaign, Harris ‘24 seems: scattershot.

Donald Trump is physically unfit to serve and won’t release his medical records. Kamala Harris has a list of bullet points and heretofore unmentioned programs for black men. Donald Trump will put anyone who disagrees with him in a military camp.

It says something that the two most positive pieces of new for her Monday is the announcement of a Fox News interview on Wednesday and the reports that she is negotiating to go on Joe Rogan.

Why? Because they are two more chances to show this campaign might have some coherence.

Ask yourself, why is Kamala Harris running?

To stop Donald Trump from winning, sure. But that gets you to 46% of the country that didn’t need convincing.

But why else?

This has eluded her and honestly, she is rapidly running out of time to figure it out.

So what should it be?

called her campaign a “a cruel parody of Clintonism” which means she can’t run to the left.

believes she should have a “Sistah Souljah” moment and break from the orthodoxy of the Biden White House by making a bold move on immigration.

I believe the answer is staring her in the face: abortion.

The two Top Five issues that Harris has a lead with voters on are “threats to Democracy” and “abortion” and the former is pretty well covered. But Harris has not made abortion as relevant of an issue as it should be. She’s consistently talked about “signing a bill” to restore Roe and even hinted at abolishing the filibuster to get it there.

But the wheels of law making turn slow and women voters want urgency.

I would use the Fox News and Rogan platforms to campaign against horrendous Abortion Trigger Laws that came to pass after Dobbs and commit to deploying campaign resources to every state with an abortion rights referendum on the ballot. Yes, that means spending money in Colorado, Missouri and South Dakota where you wouldn’t otherwise. But you raised a billion dollars for a 3-month campaign! You can afford it.

You will also be spending money in Maryland, Montana and Florida which also have senate seats you need to win if you want to make Roe the law of the land.

And you will put renewed focus on Arizona and Nevada which are teetering away from her currently.

Yes, you will sign a national bill when it gets there. But you can’t wait. Women are dying right now.

Are Fox News and Rogan the best places to roll a plan like that out? Yes.

One, if Kamala Harris can’t explain why Trigger Lawes are over reaching and problematic to anyone and everyone this election is over already. Two, these are probably the biggest platforms she has left to introduce herself on.

Or she can talk about how the Orange Man is fat and bad again.

Eric

You’ve probably seen it since you live here but this one actually made me chuckle.  My buddy asked “why aren’t the girls wearing pads though?”

By far the most unhinged commercials supporting Ted Cruz’ reelection is the Truth and Courage PAC which made this ad where Democrat Colin Allred inserts himself in a girls football game and trucks a teen. They also made this one featuring a legless Vietnam Vet who says that while he sacrificed two limbs for America he still has two eyes to see that Allred is too extreme for Texas.

That means massive captive television audiences filled with low propensity voters. Here are two ads from either campaign that I saw repeatedly this weekend.

Saved My Life

This is bread and butter Democratic messaging. You could run a version of this ad anytime in the last 30 years at least.

Democrats create government programs that affect real change. Republicans break them and endanger the populace.

A Wisconsin farmer has a brain tumor. Obamacare helped save her life and her farm.

But there is are two other themes embedded in here.

“Trump is coming for our healthcare, that’s pretty damn scary.”

The Harris campaign has made no secret that they want to remind voters that Trump was not only chaotic when he was in office but that he will be worse if he returns.

“Kamala Harris cares about us.”

This has been the hobby horse of the Obama alums since Biden was still in the race: Diminish the populist appeal of Trump by painting him as self-absorbed.

All in all this is an effective testimonial ad. Probably more effective with Democratic leaners, you do have to have warm feelings about Obamacare after all. But who can root against a farmer with a brain tumor?

Unbelievable

This ad ran a lot during football. It tells the story of Kamala Harris using her power as California Attorney General to allow taxpayer funded sex changes for prison inmates.

Rule of thumb with political ads: male narrators are used for declarative facts and female narrators are used to ask question or discover new information.

It is notable that we have a female narrator here because the point of the ad isn’t to declare Kamala is a radical leftwing nut job, it’s to discover it.

“It sounds insane, because it is insane.”

Note a few things, there is not a claim on screen that isn’t accompanied by mainstream media credential. Don’t trust Trump on this, trust the New York Times and Associated Press that it’s true.

The risk is to go put this much money behind an ad about transgender surgery. Does anyone persuadable really care?

The argument is that the ad isn’t really about transgender surgery, that’s just a hood ornament for the larger vehicle: Kamala Harris is a frivolous, unserious liberal. She will do anything the left wants, even something as bizarre as bragging about taxpayer funded transgender prison surgeries.

The Breakfast Club radio host (and Kamala backer) Charlemagne The God said this was an effective message juxtaposed with football.

Trump ‘24 is most scared that Kamala can run away from her 2019 Democratic Primary campaign where she embraced a laundry list of left wing positions. Every time you hear Harris talk about owning a gun or prosecuting transnational gangs, that is her attempt to do just that.

Do not be surprised to see more ads featuring Harris saying liberal things in her own words.

Republican Senate Spending Strategy Raises Questions

Speaking of ads, the GOP Senate map is very favorable but the party might not have the money to play in all the states they could win.

According to Politico

Republicans and their allies are spending more money in a single state, Pennsylvania, than in Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona combined.

In fact, the GOP is spending 2.3 times as much to help former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick oust a strong Democratic incumbent in Pennsylvania as in Michigan, a similarly purple state that has an open seat.

More money is going into defending Sen. Ted Cruz’s Texas seat, which is considered in play but not highly at risk, than in three Senate races in presidential battlegrounds.

In Arizona, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) alone is spending more than all the Republican advertisers, including outside groups, combined.

GOP super PACs and mega-donors are putting more money into former Gov. Larry Hogan’s uphill Senate bid in blue-leaning Maryland than in the Sun Belt targets.

My biggest surprise is Sam Brown in Nevada. He is up against Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen and appears to have been totally abandoned by the party.

Frank

I just finished listening to Claire Meynial's breakdown of the situation with the Muslim vote in Michigan and I'm wondering if there is any indication this is typical of Muslim's throughout the country. While they only make up 1.3% of the total population in such a close election that could be a game changer. 

Discussions about muslim voters remind me a lot of discussions about latino voters. A devout Yemeni man in Michigan is going to vote differently than a Pakistani New Yorker.

Do issues like the war in the Middle East vote them? Maybe. But you can often get over your skis thinking there a skeleton key issue for larger demo.

The next year I went to college and 9/11 happened before I knew where all my classes were.

Fast forward three years, two wars and one Janet Jackson nipple shield later… I am running a staff at The Daily Orange student newspaper coordinating coverage for an election everyone is VERY sure John Kerry will win.

The Bush years shaped my understanding of politics and specifically the liberal backlash against a conservative president. Pearl Jam was mad! Jon Stewart became an icon! An unrelenting torrent of Michael Moore documentaries!

To be a Democrat was to believe George W. Bush and his puppet master Dick Cheney were not just a failed administration, they were insidious war criminals.

So last night, when Vice President and Democratic nominee for president Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney I couldn’t help but feel like Roddy Piper in They Live: looking at something presented as normal and seeing something truly bizarre.

The weirdest part?

It felt like it fit.

The Cheneys (Dick was thanked specifically by Kamala) are comfortable parts of the Democratic Party coalition now.

Hatred of Donald Trump has brought together the engine of the War on Terror and the party that defined themselves by opposing it.

Here are the lines from last night that truly broke me…

Liz Cheney: In that election 20 years ago when we were campaigning in Wisconsin and across the nation. We were campaigning as compassionate conservatives…

The term “compassionate conservative” was coined by the Bush team in 2000 to combat John McCain more moderate push for the party. But wait, that just leads us to this moment.

Liz Cheney: “I have never voted for a Democract but this year I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. (Crowd: Thank You Liz!) But mostly, we’re not going back…”

We are very specifically, not going back to 2016 through 2020. Any of the eight years before 2016 are totally cool.

Kamala Harris: “It is my profound honor to have your support. And I also want to thank your father Vice President Dick Cheney for his support and what he has done to serve our country.”

The Democratic nominee for president is talking about Dick Cheney’s record of service! The record of service for which made him one of the most reviled figures of his era. He left office with a 31% approval rating! 20% of Republicans didn’t like him!

Dick Cheney might be January 6th biggest winner.

Kamala Harris: “And let me be clear, democracy and freedom are not only at stake here at home, they are also at stake around the world. As President of the United States, I will strengthen, not abdicate, America's global leadership.”

This exact sentence coming out the mouth of George W. Bush with a Cheney clapping behind him would have been enough for a Rolling Stone cover story that had a headline like “Death on the Horizon.”

Then again, it is a very 2024 vibe to take a 20-year-old idea and reboot it with a female cast.

Walz to speak at muslim event amid unrest

The invitation says his ticket is “enabling atrocities in Gaza.”

Tell me you’re being punished for a bad debate without telling me you’re being punished for a bad debate.

In today’s episode of Px3 we speak to Claire Meynial who interviewed people on the ground in Dearborn, Michigan. From what she was told, Harris has lost that vote.

Sean

Is there a case for immediate fact checking in the name of public safety?  Didn’t Governor DeWine have to send state police to Springfield after Trump’s comments? 

FACT CHECK: DeWine sent police to deal with bomb threats that were being called in to Springfield schools. He noted in his statement on the matter that those threats were hoaxes being called in from overseas to stir chaos but he wanted to provide peace of mind to parents.

So were they because someone took what Trump said seriously and menaced the school? No.

But let’s say they did! Would a more thorough fact checking from David Muir have made things safer? I think not.

Despite J.D. Vance’s strong debate performance, Republicans continued to criticize the moderators Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell. In the most tense moment of the otherwise midwestern debate, CBS fact-checked Vance on Haitian migrants and the 2020 election, which sparked immediate backlash from Republicans as the network initially pledged to not do live fact checking.

Trump and other Republicans, including Marco Rubio and Brit Hume, joined in criticizing CBS.

And so, we have yet another refrain of “to fact check, or not to fact check.”

The argument of the Checkers: you cannot allow disinformation to spread on a massive scale like a live debate. Lies need to be challenged at the point of utterance and the people most capable to do so are the moderators.

The argument for the Let Them Players: fact checking is subjective and debates are supposed to be a chance for voters to see candidates interact with each other. Let the candidates call out lies, moderators should be asking relevant questions and keeping the show on time.

My take? Live fact checking not only makes debates worse, it creates perverse incentives for candidates and actively erodes the media’s ability to correct the record.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

The job of a moderator is hard. You have to ask questions, monitor time and corral massive egos on live television. Fact checking, by its very nature, is not a drive by pursuit. It should be substantive and precise. To use the live debate moderator as the tool to attempt to correct a lie means you are hoping a television personality can recall and reproduce a fact. Let me tell you, television anchors are not famous for improv. There was a whole documentary about it.

Television anchors are journalism-flavored entertainers selected because the shape of their massive skulls reflects studio lights in a manor that makes you want to buy paper towels when they throw to break.

There is also the ability for a live fact check to be used as a weapon by one of the candidates on stage, therefore making what should be an innocuous correcting of the record into the most memorable moment of the night. Just ask Candy Crowley. In 2012, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were sparring on if Obama called the Benghazi attack an “act of terror” when he first announced the deaths of that attack in the Rose Garden.

Obama: Check the transcripts…

Crowley: He did in fact, sir, call it an act of terror…

Obama: Can say that louder, Candy?

Democrats collectively did a back flip! Their boy boomed that mormon creep!

But was it a two on one beat down?

Let’s do a 12-year-old fact check on Candy Crowley’s fact check. The transcript is a little fuzzy!

Yes, Obama does say the phrase “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” But it comes after his memorialization of the September 11th, 2001 attacks and not the more recent tragedy in Libya.

So did he mean Benghazi (which was still being investigated at the time) was an act or terror? Or that 9/11 (the definition of terror) was terrorism? The reality is it’s slick political wording that can go either way depending on how you want to defend it.

Hyperbole and truth stretching is the bread and butter of politics. The good practitioners do it well, the bad ones do it poorly.

Could Obama have defended himself? Yes. Was the record clear enough to require a real time update from the moderator? In my opinion? No.

People tune into debates to see their candidate win or lose. No one has ever tuned in for the moderators.

So what would I do?

I would make an immediate fact checking special to air directly after a debate. I’d source the show with respected voices across the political spectrum and a staff that could pull numbers on the fly.

The fact checks would be nuanced, never aiming for a true or false designation, but rather a fuller understanding of the issue. Lies will stand out, the American public will learn and the debate itself will flow smoother.

Campaigns will still pull clips favorable to them and post them on social media.

But at least those poor television anchors can stop pretending to be street cops on the Fibber Beat.

Anyhow, let’s forget this entire line of conversation and have the exact same argument in four years…

Kenny

Credit where it's due, that JD Vance guy achieved the Herculean task of making that JD Vance guy seem likable.

Pound for pound, that may be one of the best political debate performances I've seen.

Unfortunately for him, the only take away will be that Jan 6th question at the end.

The question I dare not ask too loud is… among independents who will decide this election… how much do they care about January 6th? Certainly Democratic partisans care a lot, but they were never voting for Trump anyway. It’s not a thing that Trump likes talking about, so it’s certainly not a good thing. But amongst undecideds, where does it rank?

Here is how Pew Research broke it down in September:

More than four-in-ten voters (46%) say Trump broke the law in an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election, while another 14% say he did something wrong but did not break the law. Another 27% say Trump did nothing wrong. These views are largely unchanged since April. While Harris supporters overwhelmingly say Trump broke the law (88% say this), Trump backers are divided: 54% say he did nothing wrong while 27% say either he did something wrong or broke the law. Trump supporters (18%) are more likely than Harris supporters (7%) to say they are not sure.

46% would cover partisan Democrats and Democratic leaners. So the question is, do the 14% that believe Trump did something wrong but not illegal believe that January 6th is disqualifying? On the other side, if they don’t think what he did was illegal how do they view Trump’s indictments in DC and Georgia?

Maybe it’s because we’ve seen the last of Trump behind a debate podium.

Maybe it’s because I was expecting a night of ugly attacks from both candidates.

Maybe it’s just shock because candidates even dared to talk policy.

But that was a good, clean, fun debate!

JD Vance won. He came off as calm and collected, presenting his vision of MAGA Intellectual. Walz was wobbly to start, I suspect because of over rehearsing. He got his mojo back the more he talked about his home state of Minnesota and eventually landed his quotable moment when he asked Vance if he believed Trump lost in 2020.

I don’t think it matters much in the election that is about to happen. But it’s a star making performance for Vance going forward.

In fact, the sentiment in my live chats last night was: why can’t these guys be the candidates?

Should Trump win, we might see just that in 2028.

Here is my fuller conversation with Andrew Heaton on today’s Px3:

Iran Sends Hundreds of Rockets Into Israel, Middle East on the Brink of War

Iran launched a missile attack on Israel, prompting air raid sirens and explosions across the country. The United States assisted by intercepting some of the nearly 200 missiles fired from Iran, while Israel’s missile defense systems handled the rest. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declared the situation under control after 45 minutes, allowing civilians to leave shelters. While several missiles hit their targets, no casualties were reported in Israel. The U.S. also monitored the situation closely from the White House, with President Biden and Vice President Harris present.

Iran claimed the attack was a response to Israeli actions against Iranian nationals and interests. Despite the missile strikes, there was no clear evidence of significant damage, although Iranian state media claimed success. The IDF coordinated missile interceptions with U.S. forces, but the attacks caused some damage in Israel.

Beyond proxies, this is the second missile barrage launched by Iran directly against Israel. It comes after reports that the IDF believes Gaza is won and the region is now in “mop up duty” for what is left of Hamas which precluded Israel’s focus on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the death of their head.

And now, the world waits for Israel’s response.

We are at the brink of all-out war. In fact, we might already be in it.

Adam

If Trump wins, won't he be subject to the same Lame Duck treatment as any other two-term pres? Or do you think he's uniquely suited to sidestep that role?

The day Donald Trump wins the presidency is the day his political relevancy begins to decline. However, he will forever command the 30% of the electorate that loves him dearly. He will be like Obama or Reagan in that respect to those people.

That being said, I do think he will be totally separated from the Republican Party for which he’s ever tolerated being the head of.

Greg:

Does Hurricane Helene count as an Act of God (October Surprise), even though it was a major hurricane at the end of September?

The hurricane is not a scandal. A reaction that is deemed slow and uncaring is the scandal.

As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter the best example of this would be the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its impact on President George W. Bush's presidency.

For those who need a refresher.

Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, caused massive devastation, especially in New Orleans, largely due to the failure of the levee system. The federal government's slow response to the disaster, particularly FEMA's role, was widely criticized and it damaged George W. Bush’s presidency permanently.

Bush faced significant backlash for his administration's handling of the crisis. Public criticism intensified after he told FEMA Director Michael Brown he was doing a “heck of a job…” and his decision to fly over the disaster zone rather than visit on the ground.

Bush was already hovering around the low 40s as he entered his lame duck term. This event, compounded by the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a economic calamity in 2008 conspired to leave his approval rating in the low 30s by the time he left.

Katrina's aftermath exposed severe gaps in disaster preparedness and response at both state and federal levels. The delayed evacuation, the poor coordination between agencies, and the public health crises that followed the flooding were major points of contention.

And of course, we had the “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment from Kanye West.

So is this a liability for Kamala Harris? It sure could be.

First, it reminds the voter that she is currently in the sitting unpopular administration and not running as an insurgent.

Second, speed and efficiency in dealing with slow-motion disasters has not been a strong suit of the Biden administration. See: Afghanistan withdrawal, border, East Palestine train derailment, Gaza etc.

Third, Georgia and North Carolina are the hardest hit states. They are swing states. If Kamala wins either of them it is very hard for Trump to win. But it’s harder to vote for someone if you feel they didn’t help when you lost your house.

President Biden is handling criticism with his trademark distain to the press for asking a question about it.

Harris has realized she needs to project strength. She attended a FEMA briefing yesterday.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump visited Valdosta, Georgia to survey the damage.

Trump will do everything he can to paint the White House as ineffective, removed and uncaring. Biden will hope this goes away. But Harris is on the ballot now, how much will she dive into this?

Can she avoid doing a “heck of a job?”

Demographic Dance

I’ve enjoyed Harry Enten since the original (and best) incarnation of the FiveThirtyEight podcast. File away segments like this if Harris comes up short.

Emily

I’m a NC resident and I’ve been here since 2018 in law school and working as a real estate paralegal since 2019. I worked residential real estate during Covid and the rumors about people from LA, NY, DC, OH, etc. moving to NC were real from what I saw closing dozens maybe even estimating 30-40% of my closings were out of state. That’s off the top of my head, but I know it was a lot of closings, and my own sister moved here from DC recently. Most people I meet in Raleigh or Charlotte moved here from somewhere else, and most of those people will vote blue. 

On the other hand, I’ve worked in commercial real estate since 2021 and those at my larger firm who are from NC and Republican say they won’t vote for Trump (or Mark Robison, lol). I believe them, too. I think they just won’t vote. So my prediction for NC is that the blue vote will be stronger than previous elections due to the increase in out of state voters that likely will vote blue and seem motivated to do so, and likely there will be a lack of Republican support, at least in areas like Raleigh. I’m sure the rural areas will still vote for Trump, so I guess it comes down to which of those groups are bigger and vote to determine who wins NC.

You know better than I, Emily. But I just don’t trust a blue North Carolina. Something about those tobacco fields…

Trump takes over Hezbollah?

Kamala abandons the stump to watch Megalopolis nonstop?

Honestly, what could happen that would surprise you?

We’ve had two assassination attempts, the end of a sitting president’s political career and a candidate switch. What news alert would raise an eyebrow in the final weeks of this election that would be worth referring to as an October Surprise?

Let’s first understand taxonomy of the genre…

The Policy Surprises

This is where you put consequential decisions from the White House that take place close enough to Election Day that they are still fresh when people go to the polls. LBJ halting bombing in Vietnam, Iranian hostage negotiations in 1980 and the Iranian-Contra indictments of 1992 would fall into this category.

In this election, the betting favorite would be some kind of ceasefire with Hamas and Israel to free the hostages. Or possibly a grand bargain with Saudi Arabia to normalize their relationship with Israel in exchange for a two state framework.

But has the opportunity to look good on that issue passed the White House by? I believe so. A ceasefire at this point would be welcome, but few would breakout the party favors to reward the current administration.

Ditto for Ukraine. Unless Putin was seen as the big loser, which I assume is a nonstarter for any actual solution to that problem.

The Oppo Dump

Think George W. Bush’s forgotten 1976 DUI revealed on November 2nd of that election. This is a piece of information that may not be the biggest deal but juicy enough to stick in the mind of the voter.

But this was a lot more plausible in an analogue world. We live in a political environment where you can’t even post racist screeds to Nude Africa in peace years before you get into politics.

After the Steele Dossier, the Access Hollywood tape and dozens of laps around the Stormy Daniels story is there anything that would change a voter’s mind about Donald Trump?

Kamala would be more vulnerable to something like this, but it would have to be really sharable.

The Act of God

Trump getting COVID in 2020 or Hurricane Sandy hitting in 2012 are good examples. But I’d also throw Osama bin Laden vlogging a warning to America in the waning days of 2004 in there.

This is where Harris might be vulnerable. A violent crime with mass casualties by a recent migrant would put a major weakness in the forefront of voter’s minds. Or if the damage done by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and Georgia turns into something Katrina ugly.

The Law

James Comey reopening the Hillary Clinton case in 2016 is the most recent version of this. Not much would surprise us when it comes to Trump who has been surrounded by legal drama for two years now. But maybe a connection in the recent bribery scandals surrounding Eric Adams ensnaring a top level staffer from one of the campaigns? Even that would probably be a quick scandal.

Maybe the only real surprise is the logical endpoint of our election maximization culture: we are desensitized to anything but the most extreme events.

But then again, I’m the guy who wrote that Joe Biden would never quit twenty minutes before he did. So what do I know?

James Carville on Swing State solidarity

The Ragin’ Cajun James Carville has a new documentary coming out this week and spoke with Politico’s Ryan Lizza. This stuck out to me because I agree with it:

So I can remember a past you can’t, but we can both remember the politics of the 21st century. And in politics of the 21st century, only in one election, 2008, did we know who was going to win. And you know, I don’t like to make election predictions, but this is one thing. If there are seven swing states, the most unlikely result is that they break four-three.

For all of the map permutations we like to punch up on 270 to Win, the reality of elections is often far more uniform. It is more likely that a candidate wins six or seven of a block of seven swing states then to have it split by Rust Belt and Sun Belt.

This is where some of the most literal polling interpretations can lose the forest for the trees in my mind. Some issues are going to matter more than others when it comes to enthusiasm and eventually voting. If those issues are salient in Michigan, they will probably be exciting in Arizona.

Dodge St. Regis on YouTube

Do you think the blue dog ascendance is an indication that the Overton window has shifted right as a whole?

Maybe. That is what the Harris team is betting on. However, if they don’t win you can be sure that progressives who are currently holding their nose while Kamala talks about shooting people and stopping fentanyl on the border will make it plain that was a mistake.

My gut says they’re right. Liberals like to be excited by liberal ideas. They are less jazzed by rationalizing conservative-friendly plans because “you have to give something to the dumbs.”

He is serious about a border wall. He’s tough on China. He won’t let the extreme MAGA Republicans take away your freedoms.

Sound familiar? It’s been the tenor of the Kamala Harris - Tim Walz campaign this side of Brat Summer. But in 2022 it was the campaign trail tune of Rep. Tim Ryan as he ran for Senate in Ohio against JD Vance.

On today’s episode of Politics Politics Politics I did debate prep episode for the upcoming Vance debate against Tim Walz. In preparation I watched Walz’ debate with Scott Jensen for Minnesota Governor and Ryan’s clash with Vance.

It surprised me that Ryan, a throwback to the old days of the Blue Dog Democrats, sounded more like the current ticket than Walz during his run for gubernatorial re-election.

If Harris loses this race, this is going to be a massive line of second guessing.

With Biden jettisoned, why did the fresh new Democratic standard bearer want to sound more centrist than the centrist candidate that beat her in 2019? Why not take this moment to break with her boss on solutions she would take into her own term?

Sure, some of the positions from the 2020 Democratic primary needed to go (Pennsylvania loves fracking? So do I!) but why not draw a harder line on guns? Or single payer health care?

This could make her position changes into more of an evolution as opposed to a hard reset where her firmware was flashed from Progressive Game Changer to Pleasant Consensus Builder.

Of course, if Kamala wins then this will be a stroke of brilliance. A nose-diving campaigns solved by a firm yank on the sticks to right the trajectory. Flush out the progressive overreaction of the Trump era with a return to common sense Democratic solutions.

There’s just one problem, it didn’t work for Ryan. He lost to Vance by 7 points.

He became another example, oft ridiculed by the online progressive left, of a Democrat who thinks he can win by running as a Republican.

But maybe Ohio wasn’t the place for this strategy, maybe 2022 was too early.

Maybe Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2024 is the exact moment. Maybe Tim Walz and Kamala Harris are the perfect messengers.

Every Blue Dog has his day, after all.

JD Vance Dossier, Allegedly Hacked By Iran, Published

published the dossier allegedly compiled by the Trump campaign for vetting of the freshman senator this summer. I’ve only skimmed it (it’s long) but no one is disputing that it’s legit.

The information was allegedly hacked by an Iranian agent who has been peddling the document to various news outlets.

I am glad it’s out. I was glad Buzzfeed published the Steele Dossier. I was mad the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. It’s the journalists job to run down if the information is real not decide if the public has a right to read it.

Also, it’s the internet in 2024… do we feel better if we see the info on a seedy message board like Kiwifarms or some GitHub repository and not on Substack? This was going to get out there and now it did. Big whoop.

The effect on the Trump campaign will likely be nonexistent. After all, if there were something really news worthy in it we’d be talking about that and the fact that it is published.

We’ve already memory holed two assassination attempts and a candidate switch… JD Vance’s Never Trump era is small potatoes.

Tim K

Hey there, so something that has been coming up a lot across the pods, both PX3 and We're Not Wrong, is that at the level of what policies the Presidential campaigns are running on, if you take their word for it, they are actually quite similar.

As was noted, on immigration and abortion Trump and Harris are offering almost identical platforms but nobody on the other side believes them. Trump is obviously well established as running on a mix of vibes and whatever is personally of benefit to him, and many accuse Harris of doing the same thing, noting how she adopted all manner of popular on Twitter policy stances in 2019, only to "evolve" on them in 2024.

So what gives? Its affective polarization. We hate each other. In part because we are ignorant of each other, as has also been noted, but also because its been my observation that nobody, nobody at all actually puts in any faith in "adults in the room."

For all that Trump disassociates himself with Project 2025, no one on the left really believes that he's actually going to personally be a major obstacle to a plan that annihilates most of the checks and balances that kept him from deleting the administrative state when it wouldn't do what he wanted due to a pesky melange of legal interpretations from court cases and congressional rule making.

Most of the right wingers I have observed and interacted with do not have faith that Harris would be a real obstacle to "gender anarchy" "child grooming" or "open borders" or whatever other things that escape Tumblr and the academy that keep cultural conservatives awake at night.

Is this lack of faith in "adults in the room" or moderating forces unfair? As a lefty, I have thrown salt over my shoulder at the mention of Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin, as I suspect Jen has although I'm a relatively new listener to Cong. Dish and We're Not Wrong. I'm sure right wingers see them as the guardians of the gate, the last Blue Dogs holding the line against a riotous left whose "low T" makes them simultaneously too feeble to die on the sands of Taiwan yet paradoxically all too capable of brutalizing cops and burning cities to the ground.

As a pragmatic leftist, I understand all too well that I'd miss Manchin when and if he lost his seat to a maniac who wants to burn books, inspect everyone's genitals before they can enter a restroom, and drill baby drill. Or at least someone who would be willing to pretend to be that person for cable TV.

Which is just a long way to go to say that the universe has a dark sense of humor in that the fringe left and fringe right are perpetually disappointed and frustrated yet utterly convinced their opposite number is on the verge of seizing unchecked power, despite the best efforts of brutally cynical establishment types who don't want "the loons" to blow up the financial portfolios of the normies.

First, Manchin is already gone. Behold the form of The Destructor, future West Virginia Senator Jim Justice and his DUMP TRUCK of a pooch Babydog:

I agree that we tend to hate each other because we don’t care to learn about each other. We also tend to elevate the worst representatives of our causes and then find ourselves doubling down on defending them because it appears as if our way of life is under attack when in reality it was probably just four dickheads on Twitter.

Thanks for the email!

No one knows what will happen this November. That will not stop us from trying.

Amongst the polls, the averages of polls, the models that use polling averages and add in other factors like incumbency and economic sentiment we have a lot of indicators that could be right or wrong but are fun to follow along with.

Here are a few that I am keeping my eye on.

National Environment

In any poll you need to adjust for what you think the national environment of voters will be. That’s a fancy way of saying what the final popular vote is nationally and then how that filters through state by state. One good predictor of this has been the Washington State primary. Here is how NPR explains that:

Here's how to do it: add up the total votes for Democrats and Republicans in Washington’s 10 House district primaries to find the share of the primary vote for each party. Then, take the difference between them and subtract 12% to get a rough estimate of the predicted House margin in November.

An NPR analysis of the Washington primary using this framework estimates that Democrats could win the national popular vote by about 4 points, which is slightly more than the 2020 presidential election that saw them narrowly win the White House and control of both chambers of Congress.

In other words, it will likely be yet another close race.

This year, Democrats won about 57.3% of the Congressional primary vote to Republicans’ 41.3%, or a margin of 16%. Subtract 12 percentage points, and you get that estimate of a 4% popular vote victory for Democrats later this year.

Is it going to be D+4? Maybe. If it’s not, get ready for plenty of “bUt THe WAshIngTOn pRImAry?!?!” memes.

The big question is does that mean we won’t get polling errors in the Rust Belt like we did in 2016 and 2020? Those two elections yielded polling errors of 6-9 points in WI, 3-5 in MI and 3-5 in PA all in Trump’s favor. Of course, polling errors don’t always go one way. Friend of the podcast Ettingermentum says the Washington Primary and special elections suggest we are not going to see radical poll movement.

Notably unlike 2016, these results make perfect sense in light of both local and national trends. All three states are the whitest states on the swing state map. This may have looked like a bad sign before, but it’s a positive sign now, when recent demographic shifts have shown Democrats improving with whites and Republicans improving with nonwhites. On top of this, all three states are strongly socially liberal on issues like abortion, and, as mentioned previously, have had incredibly strong down ballot results for Democrats since 2016. In the end, none of the polls that show her doing well in this region of the country are telling us anything we haven’t already known for a long time.

As Ettingermentum suggests, if the small but durable leads for Harris hold up in the Rust Belt (and Nevada!) then she is the next president.

But that is under the assumption of a D+4 environment. Which leads us to our next indicator….

Party Affiliation

Gallup suggests that this the most favorable environment for Republicans in modern history. The last time voters favored the Republican Party this much was in 2004 when they last won the popular vote. The reason? Simple, more people surveyed align with the GOP.

Add that to Republican advantages in the most significant historical signifiers.

Of course, what this ignores is the Trump of it all. Do Republican leaning voters believe in Big Chungus? Or are they swayed by the Dispatch-reading Liz Cheneys of the world?

Furthermore, if this was really to be believed why are GOP Senate candidates underperforming?

No one knows what will happen this November. That will not stop us from trying.

Dems Look To Expand the Senate Map to Texas and Florida

This is a bad idea. But what’s the point of raising the money if you can’t enjoy spending it.

Archie:

If you eliminate the filibuster is it gone for everything, or is it on a vote by vote basis?

All of this is a rolling agreement by the party in control. Harry Reid moved the filibuster goal posts on judges to alleviate a Republican blockade and Mitch McConnell answered by moving them again for Supreme Court justices. If someone moves them for abortion, at the very least you’d assume the GOP would repeal whatever the Democrats do when they get back in power.

Mr. Beat joins the Politics Politics Politics podcast today.

Kamala Pledges To Kill Filibuster For Roe

Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris expressed her support for ending the filibuster in order to recreate Roe v. Wade during an interview on WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” on Monday.

“I believe we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Harris said in the interview, which aired Tuesday morning. “This would allow us to pass legislation with 51 votes to reinstate protections for reproductive freedom and ensure every woman has the right to make decisions about her own body without government interference.”

As vice president in 2022, Harris voiced support for ending the filibuster to safeguard reproductive and voting rights. Similarly, in her 2019 presidential campaign, she backed the idea of abolishing the filibuster to advance environmental policies like the Green New Deal. We are assuming she is still in favor of eliminating it for voting rights but not for the GND. Then again, with Harris, who knows.

The filibuster is a procedure that can delay or block legislative votes. Eliminating it would allow the Senate to pass certain laws with a simple majority, rather than requiring the current 60-vote threshold.

The president, as leader of the party, would be a very large (if not decisive) voice on a decision like this. Biden’s reluctance to embrace eliminating the filibuster frustrated some before he put voice to it. The practice is still controversial but two of the votes what were not for it (Sinema in AZ and Manchin in WV) are both out of the Democratic Party and on their way out of the Senate after not seeking reelection.

Manchin is particularly upset by the news. He now says he will not endorse her for president.

C-SPAN sent my child a custom onesie. It has her name on the back. They are very nice and good people.

Nebraska will not be a winner-take-all state as reform plan fails

Republicans' attempt to change Nebraska's electoral vote system to benefit Donald Trump has failed. Governor Jim Pillen, a key supporter of switching to a winner-takes-all system, announced there won't be a special session before the 2024 election due to insufficient legislative support. Nebraska's current system allocates two Electoral College votes to the statewide winner and one to each congressional district. The change would have favored Trump by denying Kamala Harris a potential vote from Omaha's 2nd District. GOP state Sen. Mike McDonnell opposed the switch, citing political risks, hindering the effort despite support from Trump and Senator Lindsey Graham.

The system ensures that Kamala Harris could theoretically get to 270 electoral votes by winning the Blue Wall states in the Rust Belt but losing the rest of the swing states in the Sun Belt. Without the 2nd district of Nebraska she would have been stuck at 269.

Drew

I literally heard you say on today's Px3 extra that you don't believe reverse coattails exist, but I'm curious if you've seen anything or have an opinion on how much some of these pro-choice ballot measures could affect the other races in those states. I'm thinking mostly about Arizona, Nevada, and Montana (if I'm dreaming, I add Florida and Missouri to that list). I haven't seen any polling on the measure specifically, but usually their existence indicates that there is enough of a pro-choice grassroots movement to get these measures on the ballot in the first place. Do you think there's a chance that these measures could drive enough turnout to tip the scales for Harris in some of these close states? My dream is that nobody is polling much in Montana, but the ball measure could be enough to keep Jon Tester from losing. 

Obviously, I'm looking for whatever hope I can. An I delusional?

I think many of those will pass. I don’t think it will particularly affect the top line decision of Trump vs. Harris. If we are taking polling seriously, then abortion is not as key of an issue as the Economy or Immigration. However, nearly every Pro Choice ballot measure over the last 2 years has been successful.

This really comes down to how effective the Democratic messaging of the Republicans as retrograde theocratic Pro Life ideologues is sticky with independents. I have my doubts, but time will tell.

No one has given Democrats more heart trouble this cycle than the New York Times / Siena College poll.

The Nate Cohn-run outfit is lauded as the gold standard of polling. It is methodologically rigorous and has enough money to stay in the field long enough for durable results. When it began ringing alarm bells for Biden’s chances, Democrats listened. Nate Silver wrote more about this yesterday.

Last week, the Old Gray Lady delivered good news for Harris ‘24, it showed her up 4% in the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania. And there was much rejoicing. Of course it also showed the race tied nationally, which is puzzling since Pennsylvania has historically voted to the right of the national average. But still, you’d rather have a 4% NYT lead in PA than not.

Monday, the news wasn’t so good. The Sun Belt very much looks like it did during Biden’s dying days in the race. Trump up across the board in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

If that holds, it means for all the noise around the Summer Switch-a-roo... Harris is exactly where Biden was: relying on the Rust Belt to deliver a path to the White House.

Why does that matter?

Because in both previous Trump runs for the office, the Rust Belt and Sun Belt have largely voted together. Specifically: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.

Does this mean anything? Maybe not. The margins in all of those states were miniscule. Any and all of them could have gone either way in both contests. But, they didn’t.

If the New York Times / Siena is the oracle it is treated as then Kamala Harris will have to break that trend.

Mark Robinson can’t prove he didn’t frequent pornographic message boards

Mark Robinson is Robins-done.

The North Carolina gubernatorial candidate was already running over 10 points behind Donald Trump in the Tarheel State. He’s prone to sticking his foot in his mouth and that was before CNN revealed a history of posting on a message board entitled Nude Africa about hating Martin Luther King Jr., opinions on the jews, his enjoyment of transexual pornography and more. Now he is facing calls from his own party to prove the posts weren’t from him. He can’t.

We have an email about ticket splitting right below this, so let me leave you with a fun anecdote. In a bygone era I used to run a magic blog (“Ta da!” not “the Gathering”) which was widely read in the industry. The comments section often got spicy and there was one poster who seemed to be particularly cross. One might say devilish. What fewer knew about in the late aughts is that every comment came with an IP address which I traced back to the fancy neighborhood where a famous television magician lived. The same famous television magician the commenter would furiously defend any time his name was impugned.

Fun times.

Sean the Dad:

Scott Klug: “there's not going to be ticket splitting”

Jurbs: “Yeah, I see that”

Also Jurbs: “no reverse coat tails, whatever the person at the top gets will roll on down the ballot”

So Trump will cause a reversal of 10% over Mark Robinson or is there going to be significant ticket splitting?

In defense of our friend and former congressman Scott Klug (R-WI) the ticket splitting he was referring to is in the Senate which in the last two cycles hasn’t happened much. But that was not always the case!

Let’s look back to 2012 which pit Mitt Romney against an incumbent Obama…

2012 Presidential Election Year

• President and Senate Ticket Splitting: 6 instances

  • Indiana: Republican for President, Democrat for Senate

  • Missouri: Republican for President, Democrat for Senate

  • Montana: Republican for President, Democrat for Senate

  • Nevada: Democrat for President, Republican for Senate

  • North Dakota: Republican for President, Democrat for Senate

  • West Virginia: Republican for President, Democrat for Senate

• President and Governor Ticket Splitting: 3 instances

  • Missouri: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

  • Montana: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

  • West Virginia: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

Red states split their tickets for Senate five times and Nevada served as the only blue state to do so. Still, six instances compared to three red states that elected Democrat governors.

Since then, voters have become very polarized. Compare 2012 with the last two cycles.

2016 Presidential Election Year

• President and Senate Ticket Splitting: 0 instances

• President and Governor Ticket Splitting: 5 instances

  • Montana: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

  • New Hampshire: Democrat for President, Republican for Governor

  • North Carolina: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

  • Vermont: Democrat for President, Republican for Governor

  • West Virginia: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

2020 Presidential Election Year

• President and Senate Ticket Splitting: 1 instance

  • Maine: Democrat for President, Republican for Senate

• President and Governor Ticket Splitting: 3 instances

  • New Hampshire: Democrat for President, Republican for Governor

  • North Carolina: Republican for President, Democrat for Governor

  • Vermont: Democrat for President, Republican for Governor

A grand total of one split ticket Senator: Susan Collins in Maine. Meanwhile, four red states and four blue states split their ticket for governor. Although that one is a little tricky since Jim Justice won the governorship of wild and wonderful West Virginia in 2016 only to switch parties. He and his DUMP TRUCK of a dog will likely be part of the reason the GOP will take the Senate this cycle.

So to answer your question, YES ticket splitting is a lot more common for governor over the last two cycles. NO that hasn’t translated to the Senate.

Mark Robinson is toast.

Bring back the newsletter for the election?

Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzalez are in the news. Low-rise jeans are back. Touchdowns are scarce in the NFL.

The 2000s are back!

And with them comes a massive bounce in likability for a sitting politician. In 2001, George W. Bush came out of a controversial and divisive election to become one of the most popular presidents of all time, starting near 60% approval and peaking at 92% after the September 11 attacks. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris started in the approval rating basement, as low as 35% in January, and has now become net popular at 55%.

Less statistically impressive than Dubya? Sure. But possibly a greater feat considering how polarized we are.

We know how George did it.

But how is Harris doing it?

My best guess: this was a 9/11-style disaster for the Democrats.

Not just the debate, but Joe Biden in general. His indefensible record, which Harris can now pretend to kind of, sort of, run against. His obvious mental decline and the humiliating excuses required to defend it.

But most importantly, the impending victory of the Democrats’ greatest villain.

To 40% of America, Kamala Harris is the Mets vs. the Pirates on September 17th. She’s Paul Simon on Saturday Night Live.

She’s a return to normalcy. Voters are rewarding her for that, whereas before they saw her as complicit.

Is that enough to get her over the hump? With early voting beginning in key states, it might be. Should she win, there will be a lot of conversation among Republicans about strategy. One line of attack that went by the wayside was trying to tie Harris to a cover-up of Biden’s decline. That was abandoned in favor of attacking Kamala’s past liberal statements.

But in the most recent NBC poll, Kamala is closing in on Trump as the candidate that represents “change.” Should that be the case on Election Day it will be a massive blunder to not spend more time to remind voters that Kamala Harris is not a fresh face but a current employee of the unpopular administration.

Olivia Nuzzi is a good writer, bad personal choice decider

New York Magazine feature writer Olivia Nuzzi is currently suspended from her job due to an unprofessional relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There is a lot to unpack here.

RFK Jr. is a free radical in this election, especially in states like Nevada and Arizona where he was polling well with Latinos. His Trump endorsement briefly gave Chungus some polling momentum, but it has now swung back to Harris after the debate.

Kennedy is married to Cheryl Hines, who played a perpetually embarrassed celebrity wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Nuzzi was engaged to Ryan Lizza, a DC press stalwart who is currently on the team that publishes the influential Politico Playbook newsletter. They had a contract to write a book about this election together. That will not happen now, nor will their wedding, as their engagement has reportedly been called off.

It’s a tongue-wagging gossip buffet. Nuzzi sending “demure nudes” of herself to a source is horrendous behavior as a journalist. It was disqualifying behavior to her fiancé.

Let it be said to all impressionable young journalists and fiancés: Don’t. Send. Nudes. To. A. Kennedy.

That being said, some of the discourse around the Nuzzi story is that she is a hack writer. To which, I disagree. Nuzzi has a strong first-person feature writing voice and almost universally comes off as withering to her subjects. To the point where I’ve always wondered how she continues to get access. Although this article from inside the RFK campaign seems to suggest the answer is “flirting with older men.”

Still, she writes things that are fun to read! A few examples:

A sloppy Rudy Guiliani drains Bloody Marys and rants about Ukraine (back when Ukraine was the reason Trump was getting impeached)

Dr. Oz can’t work a phone and trashes Nuzzi when he thinks he has sent her to voice mail

and of course

Joe Biden is a shambling corpse and everyone around him is scared

It’s the last one, I suspect, which has earned her the scorn of many on X. She piled on Joe when he was down. But, as we covered before, she didn’t point out anything particularly groundbreaking. Joe Biden was 9/11 to Democrats—it was the feature-writing equivalent of saying, “anyone notice that commercial airliners are hitting the Twin Towers?”

Fair disclosure: I like Olivia Nuzzi. I ran into her a few times on the trail, and she always seemed to remember me. Many journalists hate their jobs and aren’t particularly friendly; she was.

I also had dinner with her and Lizza in South Carolina in 2020. It was after I’d just watched Tom Steyer dance on stage with Juvenile as he performed “Back That Azz Up.” In hindsight, that only makes that story better.

Why isn’t Tim Walz on television more?

Likability is kind of his thing. Yet the Harris campaign hasn’t kept up his media pace. It remains to be seen exactly how good Walz will be at relating to white men without a college degree in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Politico seems skeptical during a recent Walz visit to the Lehigh Valley in PA.

My guess? Walz is more effective at jazzing up Democratic partisans than rust belt leaners. But if that’s the case? Why not put him on television more?

Hooray! Let’s land this 2024 plane!

When the first meme crawled out of the primordial swamps of the internet it bound those that understood it.

This was adorable when we had a mainstream. Everyone else was wondering who REALLY wanted to be a millionaire and you were bonding with a stranger who also remembered Monty Python.

But the internet erased the mainstream. There is no cultural water cooler that reaches critical mass. We only have niches. Warlords surrounded by zealots who speak in meme exclusively.

The normie is dead. Only gated fandoms remain. Self-service communities feeding information, love and affirmation. Try to leave your bubble, you’ll come back. The only way to truly exit is to pledge allegiance to another warlord.

You might think you don’t live in one of them. You live in the mainstream. Wrong, you live in a mainstream-themed bubble. You’re in a fallout bunker pretending it’s still the 1950s.

This is why the union of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift was so interesting this year: an interaction of two of our most dominant cultural warlords. And across gender lines, no less!

Which brings me to J.D. Vance fucking his couch.

For those unaware (proving the point of this article) memes have spread over the past week about the GOP’s VP nominee writing in his famous memoir Hillbilly Elegy that he masturbated by sticking his member between the cushions of his grandmother’s couch.

This is not true.

If it was true, we would have seen it in the trailer of the movie adaptation and Glenn Close would have won the Oscar for her performance as J.D.’s grandmother instead of only earning a nomination.

That hasn’t stopped the memes. Vance has proven to be a very attractive target for a newly activated memelords on the left. They are providing plenty of fodder for their own team, something the left has been starved for this year as they enjoy a reprive of having to defend the shambling mound known as Joe Biden.

Still, be aware. Memes aren’t only a binding agent, they are also a repellent.

When it comes to internet horseshit, I am a maximalist. But if we are only looking at effectiveness, there is a lesson from Who Framed Roger Rabbit that often sticks in my mind.

“One of these days, you idiots are going to laugh yourself to death.”

Laughter is powerful because it brings a crowd together like no other but also broadcasts true scorn when heard from the wrong direction.

For example, Republicans highlighting Kamala Harris’ fake laugh is an okay signifier of her being unserious. But if they can channel it into a message of Kamala Harris is Laughing At You (with “You” being swing voters in MI, WI and PA) then you have a very complete story of a coastal elite who truly loathes the center of the country.

Similarly, if I were Vance I would bring all of these memes to every union hall and hunter’s lodge in the rust belt. I would connect on backstory and then tell the story of how, by the grace of God, he created a career for himself. He was heralded for this by the left when he was politically helpful. Now he’s become a threat and what does the Harris campaign do? Hillbilly slander. Reduce a Yale graduate to a dumb as rocks couch fucker. That’s what they think about us. Go to an Ivy League school, start a family, write a best seller, meet Glenn Close… you’ll always be weird to Kamala Harris.

The crowd Harris respects? The one she cares about? They hate you.

Don’t believe me? Watch the Retweets. Listen to the laughter.

Are your opponents weird? Maybe. Does calling them, and by extension their base, weird benefit you? It didn’t work when Hillary called them Deplorable, but who knows.

Does this mean the Harris campaign should police the memes? Of course not. That’s impossible.

You shouldn’t play to a “normie” mainstream that doesn’t exist.

Excite your own. Know that your excitement might motivate your enemy. But find the niche audiences that advance your cause.

We will know more of who they are in a few weeks when state polling evens out.

Until then, keep laughing.

Px3 This Week

The Campaign Undertaker makes a surprise trip to the 2024 race as we eulogize the worst campaign in history.

Email

Last Friday Buttigieg was on Real Time. Today, he was on The Interview by nyt in The Daily feed. He isn't allowed to be called secretary for some law. 

Is this him trying for VP? Or just general party support? - Sean

He’s making a real run for VP and with rumors that leading candidates are having a hard time passing a vetting, he might get it.