Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 21

I've wanted to make a high-effort post about this for a couple of weeks but I've been very busy with work and stuff in my personal life. If by some chance this actually generates a larger discussion I might come back and plug in some sources and examples to solidify my argument, but for now I'm just going to blurt out my take and leave it at that. Sorry in advance for the incoming stream of consciousness.

I've become increasingly convinced that Kamala Harris is going to lose the election to Donald Trump, and if I had to make a call today I'd say he's going to be elected again. Looking at the polls and how they compare to 2016 and 2020, Harris's only hope is that polling has become much more accurate.

Frankly, I'm baffled by the campaign strategy the Harris team has rolled out since the convention. She had tons momentum after assuming the nomination, then expanded on it by tapping Walz as her running mate. In the days and weeks after the swap, I said on various threads that the best decision the Democrats made was to excite their base. Harris was a massive upgrade from the ticking time bomb that was Joe Biden and Walz boasted a resume that featured meaningful policy improvements that were passed by slim margins. For the first time in years it seemed like positive change might on the table and I firmly believed that enthusiastic Democrats would pull enough undecided and apathetic voters over to deliver a victory. They even stumbled across an effective and popular message with the "they're weird" line.

Then the convention happened and they sprinted in the opposite direction. They abandoned "weird" and "we're not going back" for something about joy. They quickly moved away from talking about how progressive policies are neighborly. At the convention, they snubbed the uncommitted movement, which is the most gettable single-issue voting block that would effectively hand them Michigan, in favor of border patrol agents, cops, and former Republicans, then doubled down on Biden's deeply unpopular Israel positions. And perhaps worst of all, they punted on any sort of counter framing on immigration in favor of what's effectively "we are actually the ones that are going to build the wall." Why?

Over the past two months, I've watched a ton of Harris interviews and stump speeches, and while I can appreciate the philosophy behind message discipline, she is bordering on NPC territory with the same lines. I prosecuted transnational criminal gangs. Trump wants to run on a problem instead of coming up with a solution. We need an opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and succeed. Small businesses, middle class, blah blah blah. The entire message seems hollow and she seems unable to tweak it during off the cuff interactions. It certainly works for those who are afraid of another Trump presidency, but that's clearly not the case for the country as a whole. She needed to offer something more. A vision, a promise, leadership - hell, spend more time talking about how batshit and ineffective the Republicans are. Just do something, give us something. Instead, it's pretty much a promise to maintain the status quo, which is crazy since most voters (off the top of my head I think it's about 65%) want change. It's like 2016 all over again, only this time it's worse because we know how chaotic a Trump presidency was. There are long stretches during her stump speech where it becomes really hard to differentiate her message from a pre-Trump Republican. That's what makes this whole thing so frustrating for me. They're not fighting for a vision, they're telling people what they think they want to hear. It's playing not to lose. If he wasn't still alive Herm Edwards would be rolling over in his grave.

I could go on but I'm tired and already well within rambling territory. Plus, only like three people are going to read this. I guess I just wanted to get this down for the record when everyone is posting think pieces about what went wrong a few months from now. And before anyone gets on my case, I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

Political strategist: Here’s how GOP’s phony polls will help Trump with the Big Lie

Rosenberg called out specific polling companies, which haven’t been doing any polling since a bunch of fake GOP polls in 2022, he said — Wick, Insider Advantage, Trafalgar and Patriot Polling.

U.S. Border Surveillance Towers Have Always Been Broken

Arnold Palmer’s daughter reacts to Donald Trump’s references to her father.

One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.

For more reference:

On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.

Large bets in election prediction market are from overseas, source says

Are Republican pollsters "flooding the zone?"