Happy Wednesday! With the sweltering heat that has hit the country this week, Kevin and Doug Whitmer, Michigan’s first dogs, wanted to remind everyone to keep their pets safe.
Up to Speed
- Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will participate in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that will air on the network Thursday evening, the network announced Tuesday. It will be her first sit-down with a journalist since becoming the presumptive (and eventually the official) Democratic nominee last month.
Special counsel Jack Smith obtained a superseding indictment from a grand jury against former President Donald Trump for his election subversion case Tuesday, reframing the case and attempting to bring it in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity last month. Smith kept the four charges from his original indictment against the former president but removed allegations that Trump used the Department of Justice to conduct phony investigations. In its July decision, the court ruled that Trump’s use of the department fell within his official duties, a sphere in which he is immune from prosecution. - Trump confirmed Tuesday that he will participate in ABC News’ September 10 debate with Harris, but it remains unclear whether the candidates’ microphones will remain on for the event’s duration. The former president said in a Truth Social post that the rules will be the same as his CNN debate with President Joe Biden, in which the networks muted the candidates’ microphones when they were not speaking, but the Harris campaign disputed that. The campaigns’ disagreement came to light earlier this week after the vice president’s team asked that the microphones remain on, while the Trump campaign had wanted the rules to remain the same as the previous debate.
- Trump’s campaign announced Tuesday that voters in Pennsylvania may request a mail-in ballot via its “Swamp the Vote USA” tool. “Our unprecedented Election Integrity operation goes hand in hand with our trailblazing GOTV efforts,” the campaign’s release reads. “We have to SWAMP the vote, and patriots should take advantage of vote by mail, early voting, and Election Day voting – whatever method works best for you.” The announcement comes amid concerns from some Republican operatives that the former president is neglecting efforts to turn voters out to the polls.
- In Atlanta on Thursday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will co-headline a fundraiser for Trump alongside his wife, Marty, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ABC News reported Wednesday. A spokesman for Kemp, Cody Hall, told Dispatch Politics that Pompeo is the headliner and noted that Trump will not be attending. Trump appears recently to have made up with Kemp, thanking him last week in a Truth Social post for his help in the state, just a few weeks after attacking the governor on the platform and in public remarks.
- Trump plans to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom recently endorsed him, honorary co-chairs of his presidential transition team, the New York Times reported Tuesday. It is unclear precisely what the two former Democrats will be doing, but Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes told the Times the campaign looks “forward to having their powerful voices on the team as we work to restore America’s greatness.” While Kennedy was running for president in April, Trump claimed he was “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.”
- The Arizona Police Association, the state’s largest law enforcement association, split its endorsements for the November election, supporting Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, over his Republican opponent, Kari Lake, for the state’s Senate seat Monday days after backing Trump for the White House. “The APA does not take our endorsements lightly; we recognize the importance of having a U.S. Senator that can bring people together to improve society for all,” Justin Harris, the group’s president, said in a release. “We believe Congressman Gallego will be that U.S. Senator.” In 2022, the group backed Lake, when she ran for governor, and Lake still holds endorsements from other law enforcement groups in the state.
- Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is tied with Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in the race for Maryland’s Senate seat in a poll the AARP released Tuesday. Hogan led Alsobrooks in polling before she pulled ahead just prior to the May 14 primary, when she began consistently topping the moderate Republican in surveys. Hogan would be the first GOP candidate to win a Senate seat in the state since Charles Mathias in 1980, and the race this year could determine control of Congress’ upper chamber.
Why RFK Jr.’s Trump Endorsement Makes Democrats Happy
When Donald Trump publicly accepted the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week, the Republican nominee greeted his one-time rival on the stage in Arizona to the music of the Foo Fighters’ classic “My Hero.”
If he is Trump’s hero, why are some Democrats celebrating the demise of the RFK Jr. campaign? “If you want to have that endorsement, I’m perfectly happy for you to,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic operative, on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, tweeted dismissively about his cousin’s decision to drop out of the race, saying “the easiest decision of all time just got easier.” “Good riddance,” was how Mary Beth Cahill, a veteran strategist and a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee, put it in a statement on Friday.
For months, Cahill has helped head a team at the DNC focused on pushing back against third-party and independent presidential candidates. After the collapse of the No Labels movement, Cahill and the team, which also included communications strategist Lis Smith, continued to focus on Kennedy’s independent bid. Drawing on lessons Democrats learned from the 2016 race—when third-party candidates such as Jill Stein drew just enough support away from Hillary Clinton to help Trump win—the party made an explicit effort to damage the chances of someone like Kennedy spoiling the race again.
“This was our goal,” Matt Corridoni, a spokesman for the DNC, told Dispatch Politics. “This helps set up the binary choice we always wanted between our candidate and Donald Trump.”
The team at the DNC worked throughout last year to define Kennedy as a stalking horse for Trump, highlighting news and information connecting him to the issues and financiers of the Make America Great Again movement. They pressed their case about Kennedy’s alignment with Trump behind the scenes with reporters and anchors in the news media. They even tailored their message to younger voters on social media services like Instagram and TikTok.
“We worked with non-political content creators to caricaturize and meme-ify his oddities and expose his true character and unfitness to the population most at-risk of third party defection: younger and lower propensity voters who were overwhelmingly open to Democrats, but not Trump,” read an August 23 memo from the DNC’s Ramsey Reid, released a day before Kennedy’s Trump endorsement.
The premise of these efforts ran counter to much of the conventional wisdom around Kennedy, whose anti-vaccine and anti-establishment rhetoric seemed to draw from the same pool of voters as Trump’s most committed fans. In an election where narrow margins in just a handful of states will decide the winner, Kennedy’s few percentage points of support could be exceedingly valuable to Trump. So if Kennedy, who was polling somewhere between 4.5 percent and 6 percent nationally, dropped out, this ought to be a clear boon to Trump.
The DNC certainly didn’t think so. Its theory was that Kennedy drew not from natural Trump voters but instead from low-propensity voters who were disaffected with the political system. Kennedy’s famous last name, eccentric views, and declaration that both the Democrats and the Republicans were a “uniparty” reinforced his position as an option for the so-called double haters of both Trump and Joe Biden. But with Biden withdrawing from the race and Harris emerging as the Democratic nominee, Democrats say the threat Kennedy posed, whether in the race or not, had already diminished.
“The little support that remains is soft, split across ideologies, and disproportionately among lower propensity voters. With no meaningful base of support and sky-high negatives among Democrats, RFK Jr.’s threat to VP Harris was neutralized,” reads Reid’s memo.
Still, the Kennedy endorsement may amount to something significant, if it sways the vote toward Trump in the handful of swing states where he will remain on the ballot. NPR reports that while Kennedy will almost certainly remain on the ballot in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, he appears to be successfully off the ballot in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and he has petitioned to do the same in Arizona.
Dane Strother, a veteran Democratic party strategist, told Dispatch Politics that Trump will benefit in those states with Kennedy as a choice, thanks to the lowered threshold necessary to win the state. But, he added, that threshold problem can cut both ways.
“I suspect in Georgia the Kennedy name would have garnered him a point or two of [the] black vote that now moves to Harris,” Strother said. “Advantage, Harris.”
Josh Shapiro Makes Hay at the Democratic National Convention
Over on the website, David M. Drucker has a reported look at one rising star who was working hard at last week’s Democratic National Convention: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The first-term governor was passed over by Vice President Kamala Harris for a running mate, but that didn’t stop Shapiro from making some moves that give a sense of his ambitions for future leadership within the Democratic party.
Here’s an excerpt:
Shapiro met with party activists and insiders from across the country; attended daily breakfasts hosted by delegates from key early primary and presidential battleground states; and even made a point of engaging with reporters, holding informal news conferences and participating in high-profile interviews. Since the governor emerged as a finalist to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, he has embraced the spotlight. His moves during last week’s convention exhibited the hallmarks of a politician interested in higher office.
Predictably, Shapiro swatted away the future political implications of his rather busy schedule in the Windy City. “I’m focused—if I haven’t shown this already over the last several weeks—I am focused like a laser beam, every single day, on governing the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is a job I love,” Shapiro told reporters during one of the handful of scheduled news conference “gaggles” his team included on the governor’s public convention week schedule—events hardly considered mandatory for convention VIP attendees.
“I am grateful to the good people of Pennsylvania for giving me this opportunity,” Shapiro added. “I think I’ve made crystal-clear this is the job I want to be in and I’m going to remain in. I’m going to stay focused on that, and politically, making sure Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win this election.”
And while last week in Chicago was all about boosting Harris and her actual running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Pennsylvania Democrats weren’t shy about their hopes for their governor. Here’s more:
“I think, after maybe two terms of our new president, he’ll be the next president,” delegate Angie Gialloreto, 95, said unprompted in an interview on the convention floor. Gialloreto, from Allegheny County, in western Pennsylvania, has been attending Democratic conventions since the 1970s. Was she initially disappointed that Harris passed over Shapiro and instead chose Walz to join the party’s 2024 ticket? “Well, yes.”
Shapiro is a rising Democratic star with cross-aisle appeal; he serves as chief executive of the battleground state poised to decide a razor-thin presidential election; and he happens to be both Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel. Taken together, those factors all shine a bright spotlight on Shapiro’s nearly every move. But for a governor who promotes himself as a politician who “gets s—t done,” the most immediate question about his future prospects is: Can he get a Pennsylvania victory done for Harris?
Democrats in Pennsylvania predict Shapiro will be a major asset to the vice president’s campaign but see a long career in national politics ahead for him regardless. “Josh Shapiro is that good,” said convention delegate Katherine Gilmore Richardson, a Philadelphia city councilwoman.
Read the whole thing here.
Notable and Quotable
“Back by popular demand, my TRUMP DIGITAL TRADING CARDS, Series 4: The America First Collection, is available RIGHT NOW, and I think you’ll love it! For some, there’ll be an Invite to a Gala Dinner at my beautiful private Club in Jupiter, Florida. Don’t wait, have fun – The Cards will go FAST!”
—Former President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post, August 28, 2024
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