15: Kamala Harris

Trump dances for 30 minutes at campaign event
Trudeau’s Move Casts Light on the Reach of India’s Intelligence Agencies The Canadian prime minster’s accusation of Indian government involvement in the killing of a Sikh nationalist signifies a sharp escalation in diplomatic tensions between India and Canada.

America Is on the Brink of a Great Political Realignment. It’s Already Visible in Arizona. “I believe that God voted early on July 13, when he spared the life of Donald Trump.” ......... “I do not believe that if you love the Lord, read the Bible and call yourself a Christian, that you can vote for Kamala Harris for president,” he said at Dream City. ......... Its strategy, which it calls “chase the vote,” is to tap into new parts of the electorate by targeting what the campaign calls “low propensity voters,” the sort of alienated, disconnected people, especially men, who’d presumably gravitate toward Trump if they could be bothered to cast ballots at all. “We’re going to make it too big to rig on Election Day,” said Kirk. ............. Much of what they said was MAGA boilerplate. But a surprising subtext of their conversation was the problems that Trump’s character and personality create for Republican turnout. ........... In this citadel of MAGA spirituality — the ex-president himself spoke there at a Turning Point event in June — I’d expected to hear Trump praised in exalted terms, not justified as the lesser of two evils. But Carson argued that, unless Jesus Christ himself is on the ballot, the lesser evil is the choice in every election. ............ In 2016, Democrats hoped that Trump’s evident indecency would spur a significant number of Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” predicted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York. It didn’t work out that way. ............... During the Trump years, as Republicans have improved their margins with working-class voters, Democrats have made gains with educated suburbanites and, more broadly, with those who fundamentally trust American civic institutions. This realignment is remaking politics in states including Georgia, which is now a swing state, and Ohio, which used to be one but isn’t anymore. But perhaps no place has undergone a partisan revolution quite like Arizona’s. .............. Arizona voted for Joe Biden in 2020, albeit by the smallest margin of any state, fewer than 11,000 votes. The state has one Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, and one Democrat-turned-independent, Kyrsten Sinema, who is likely to be replaced by a Democrat .......... “I never felt particularly comfortable with those folks, but the Republican Party was a big tent, and you could be a John McCain-style Republican and feel at home in the Republican Party. That’s no longer the case.” ............... In 2022, Republicans nominated Mark Finchem, a onetime member of the Oath Keepers militia, to be secretary of state. Now running for State Senate, he recently retweeted a QAnon video accusing the Rothschild banking family of engineering the Civil War. .......... Rusty Bowers, the very conservative former speaker of the Arizona House, has been driven out of Republican politics for refusing to go along with the “stop the steal” movement. He lost his last primary to David Farnsworth, a businessman who described the 2020 election as “a real conspiracy headed up by the devil himself.” .................... describing Turning Point as more powerful than the Republican National Committee. .............. Election conspiracy theories nullify any incentive for the party to moderate after its losses .............. It was Turning Point, after all, that turbocharged the political campaign of Kari Lake, the extraordinarily unpopular Republican Senate candidate. In 2021, Lake, a former local TV anchor, was running a long-shot race for the Republican gubernatorial primary when she impressed Trump at a Turning Point event in Phoenix. His fulsome endorsement helped catapult her to victory in a crowded primary. As The Post reported, she staffed her campaign with former Turning Point employees. .................. At a rally shortly before that year’s election, she asked, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!” ............... everyone she knows from McCain’s operation is a Harris supporter ........... Following Trump’s campaign stunt in Arlington National Cemetery in August, McCain’s youngest son, Jim McCain, both endorsed Harris and registered as a Democrat. ............ Seven thousand people attended a Harris rally in Chandler, outside Phoenix, on Thursday. Jill Biden visited, as did a bevy of pro-Harris celebrities, including Jennifer Garner, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close and Jessica Alba. Barack Obama is headed there this week. .............. The party’s MAGA-fueled erosion is perhaps most visible in the pitiful state of Lake’s campaign. Observers have started comparing her to Mark Robinson, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. The analogy feels a little unfair, given that Lake has never, at least to my knowledge, called herself a Nazi, expressed a wish to own slaves or fantasized about committing obscene acts with an in-law in the comments section of a porn site. But it gets at the depth of Lake’s reputational collapse................ Trump, who cares only for praise and fealty, has a natural affinity for grifters and fanatics. He elevates figures who share many of his faults but not his Mephistophelean charisma. .............. “There’s part of me that is pessimistic, that thinks that the Republican Party might be a lost cause,” said Giles. He wonders if a new conservative party could emerge. “Maybe we have three parties for a while in our country.

Three Weeks to Go, and That’s All Anyone Is Sure Of And it sends a smart political signal that she is not some crunchy-granola liberal who believes that guns are intrinsically evil. ......... In a perfect world, I’d ban handguns altogether. The chances that one stored in the home will be misused, often by kids with fatal results, are high. ........... I guess Harris’s enthusiasm for the Glock in her home might give her more credibility when it comes to banning assault weapons and requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, both of which she supports. ........... No signs that she’s going to be a sensational presidential conversationalist, but she seemed pleasant, well prepared and not nuts — unlike some candidates I could mention. .......... Have to admit I’m worried about the apparent lack of enthusiasm among Black and Hispanic men.......... A lot of voters, including me, fear she isn’t really up to the job, which could be the reason she’s mostly avoided tough interviews. ............. assuming that vision is more than just a list of wan liberal talking points and vague references to “my plan.” ............ I really don’t want to see Bernie Moreno as Ohio’s next senator. ......... Very pleased that Ruben Gallego, the Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona, appears well ahead in his race with the deeply strange Kari Lake, who still won’t concede that she lost the governor’s race two years ago. ............ controlling the weather is easy when you have the Rothschild space lasers near to hand. .......... But long term, I’ve never thought it was really fair to give the party that elected fewer senators the power to just close everything down. ............ the Senate’s role as a check on the often mindlessly majoritarian impulses of the House. ............. The other big idea in terms of fixing our institutions is a term-limited Supreme Court ......... I guess I don’t believe lifetime tenure is good for much of anything. Even the pope. ............. any change to court tenures should be accompanied by a requirement for the Senate that any court vacancy be filled within 60 days, to avoid the sort of mischief we saw around Merrick Garland’s nomination to nowhere in 2016. ......... I spent my early years living between two countries that never quite felt entirely my own, in my case Mexico and the United States. I’d like to think that by having our feet planted in two cultures, two languages, two traditions, we did more to enrich American life than detract from it — just as all immigrants to America do, whether they’re from Norway or Nigeria, Holland or Haiti.