HMMM: Taylor Swift’s Post-Debate Endorsement of Kamala Is Telling About the Democrats’ Confidence.

The timing of Swift’s endorsement makes it seem like the Democrats also knew this wasn’t going to go as well as they’d like and needed a distraction directly after the debate happened. Sure enough, here comes Swift’s Instagram post for the world to see and for news organizations to talk about.

In fact, if you were watching CNN last night, that’s exactly what they did. They stopped talking about the debate and started talking about Swift’s endorsement very, very quickly. CNN very rarely gets that kind of news out that quickly, at least about social media posts, which also suggests they had been informed this might happen.

On Monday, showbusiness bible Variety ran a story headlined, “If Taylor Swift Doesn’t Endorse Kamala Harris, She’d Be Entering a New Era,” the timing of which presupposed that an endorsement would soon follow, lest Swift be accused of playing footsy with white supremacists again by the DNC-MSM.

ED MORRISSEY: Should Republicans Wet the Bed Over the Debate? Depends.

The fundamentals of this election cycle still favor Trump. Harris still belongs to a deeply unpopular administration, and Trump has more trust on the issues that matter most to voters in this cycle — inflation, immigration, crime, and national security. Trump needs to remain focused on those issues, and the rest of us need to put these game shows in the correct perspective.

Addendum: My pal Jim Geraghty is more pessimistic than I am about the debate, but on the same page about the impact:

So — again on paper — Trump was terrible, and you would think his poll numbers, nationwide and in the swing states, would nosedive. But what we saw Tuesday night wasn’t all that different from the same Trump we’ve seen year after year. And remember when Trump’s conviction was supposed to be a game-changer? The numbers barely budged.

Trump isn’t neck-and-neck in this race because Americans are charmed by his personality. He’s neck-and-neck in this race because of the national exhaustion with the Biden administration status quo, and frustration with inflation and the high cost of living, an insecure southern border, and a sense of growing chaos overseas. So, yes, in theory, this should have been a Harris knockout blow. But if this sort of contrast works, and one sort of performance is so much better than the other . . . why is Trump still so close to reaching 270 or more electoral votes?

I don’t think he was as terrible as people think, largely because they expected Harris to fold like a cheap suit under pressure. Mike Pence tried to warn people about setting that expectation this week. Jim’s correct, though, that the fundamentals haven’t changed.

Curiously, Trump supporters are shocked to discover that the House of Stephanopoulos was the House of Stephanopoulos last night. Jesse Kelly writes that the GOP will take serious action on their massively biased approach:

The GOP will have a severe response to ABC for this ridiculous, biased debate.

They’ll make them wait four years before agreeing to do another one on ABC.

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) September 11, 2024

UPDATE: Roger Kimball: ABC News is the big loser of the Trump-Harris debate. The immoderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, repeatedly pecked at one candidate and not the other.

Unexpectedly!

OUTKICK GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Tyreek Hill Isn’t An Innocent Angel, And The Media Is Lying To You.

Related: The Left Wanted Body Cams on Cops, Until They Saw the Truth.

UPDATE: Jack Dunphy: The Tyreek Hill Affair: They Should All Be Ashamed. “[N]ow that I’ve seen that body camera footage, I think it’s fair to say the incident was not the Miami-Dade Police Department’s finest hour. Nor was it Tyreek Hill’s, who, in speeding in his $300,000 sports car, brought himself to the attention of the police and was something of a jerk after being stopped.”

MATT TAIBBI: Official Donald Trump-Kamala Harris Debate Drinking Game Rules.

THE PARTY TOLD YOU TO REJECT THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR EYES AND EARS. It was their final, most essential command:

“But a lot has changed.” The New Black Panthers could not be reached for comment.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden raises eyebrows with ‘doing 9/11’ comment ahead of debate.

President Joe Biden bluntly said he’s ‘doing 9/11‘ tomorrow in a head-scratching comment to reporters who asked his plans ahead of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

The gaffe-prone 81-year-old was heading to Marine One on the White House lawn when he made the comments just one day before the 23rd anniversary of the terror attacks.

‘I’m going up to my granddaughters birthday in New York,’ Biden began. ‘Then we’re gonna watch the debate, then tomorrow doing 9/11.’

The president’s remark concerning the September 11 attacks on America caused social media users to express shock and amusement at his poor choice of wording.

As with Springfield’s cats, the potential for memes are endless, including:

HOW IT STARTED: Community groups pressure City Council members to defund Oakland police.

—ABC7 News, June 15th, 2020.

How it’s going: Three shot dead, TV crew robbed over violent weekend in Oakland.

Adding to the weekend’s turmoil, an ABC7 news crew was robbed at gunpoint around 5:30 p.m. Saturday while reporting near 44th and Market streets, according to a statement from the Oakland Police Officers Association.

According to that statement, three suspects brandishing firearms pushed a crew member and took her backpack before stealing equipment and a security guard’s handgun and fleeing east along 44th Street in an old-model gold Toyota Camry 4D. Oakland police did not share information about the robbery when asked, and ABC7 declined comment late Sunday morning.

In the statement, Sgt. Huy Nguyen, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, criticized city leadership for the spike and blamed “staffing shortages in the police department and … policies that fail to hold criminals accountable” for increasing crime rates.

HITLER REDEEMED: May the Farce Be With You: The Hill Says Dick Cheney, Once the GOP’s Darth Vader, Is Now Luke Skywalker.

Given that, as the Washington Post reported in 2015, “The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified,” it’s a shame to see one of the good guys rapidly morph into a communist-inspired slave-owning religious fanatic, with an enormous body count in his wake.

STEVE HAYWARD: The Unoriginal and Superficial Nihilism of the Right.

I once heard James Q. Wilson offer an extemporaneous synoptic account of the 20^th century that I don’t think he ever published, but which I think is correct. It ran something as follows: We are mistaken in thinking the bad turn in our modern culture and political character was anchored in the 1960s.  To the contrary, all of the intellectual roots of the direct assault on Western civilization were alive, in place, and advancing as early as the 1920s. Modern art—the visual expression of nihilism—was advancing as fast as the “existentialist” philosophy of Heidegger and others (like the Frankfurt School, widely noted in recent years for its delayed influence in America), who were taking the European intellectual scene by storm by the late 1920s. Marxism was also advancing. It is not an accident that the baleful effects of these intellectual currents landed first and hardest in Germany.

Wilson’s conclusion is that our modern rot was on the way early on, but were postponed in America by both the Great Depression and World War II. My slight adaption of this point is that when serious things are motion, no one has time for nonsense about what correct pronouns to use. Wilson thought that in the absence of the Depression and World War II, the derangements of the 1960s might have started happening perhaps in the 1930s or 1940s, because all the antecedent radical doctrines were already long in place and advancing.

This counterfactual is at least as plausible as the current speculations that if only Churchill had struck a deal with Hitler and preserved the British Empire, Western civilization would have fared much better since 1940.

Footnote: [a predecessor to Tucker’s recent guest, the late libertarian historian Ralph Raico’s] Churchill article opens thus:

“When, in a few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: ‘Who was the Man of the Century’ there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.”

Works for me.

Indeed. Whatever Churchill’s flaws and past misdeeds, history has proven him to be the right man, and the indispensable man, at the right time.

HOW JAMES EARL JONES BECAME THE VOICE OF DARTH VADER – FOREVER:

James Earl Jones approached Darth Vader as simply another gig – if even that. He requested that his name be omitted from the Star Wars credits because he was “just a special effect”. Little could he have guessed that Vader would follow him throughout his career. It would do see even after he had retired. Jones last voiced Vader in a cameo in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. But while he was done with Darth Vader, Star Wars was not finished with him, and in 2022, he agreed to allow his voice to be “cloned” by a Ukrainian AI company so that it could be used in the Disney prequel series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The process of breathing digital life into Jones’s voice proved unexpectedly fraught – not least because Russia invaded Ukraine late in production, and the developers found themselves fine-tuning Darth Vader as missiles thundered overhead.

Fortunately, they got the project over the line with Jones helping as a consultant – a sort of “benevolent godfather,” according to supervising sound editor Matthew Wood. He wasn’t the first Star Wars actor to be digitally recreated by Disney. The same Ukrainian developer had used AI to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for The Mandalorian.

But while “AI” Darth Vader had the actor’s blessing, the issue of digital recreation of actors’ voices is still a fraught one – especially when the original performer has passed. There were misgivings over the “cameo” by the late Ian Holm in the new Alien: Romulus sequel (Ridley Scott, who directed Holm in the original Alien, said the actor would have been delighted to return to the franchise). Most notorious was the appearance in the 2016 Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, a digital likeness of Moff Tarkin actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994 when computers were still coming out of the Stone Age.

Cushing’s estate consented to his appearance in Rogue One. But the use of his image is now the subject of legal action. Disney is being sued by Tyburn Film Productions, a London-based film company that says it signed a contract with the actor, giving it a veto over the creation of his image using special effects. Disney contends it has the right to use Cushing’s image from the original 1977 movie.

The case is to go to court, and the judgement will have implications for the use of the CGI likeness of dead actors. However, this will not have much impact on the future appearance of Darth Vader. Jones was happy to have his voice conjured by AI and was always appreciative of Star Wars and its fanbase – and more than willing to recite such iconic Vader-isms as “No, I am your father”. He has now left us, but Darth Vader will remain a beloved villain for decades to come.

As I wrote in 2019: All-Digital Hollywood Actors? Arthur C. Clarke Called It Over 30 Years Ago.

Related: James Earl Jones: 10 Iconic Performances.

AND THE ROLE OF EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN WILL BE PLAYED BY…: Liberals’ Knives Come Out for Nate Silver After His Model Points to a Trump Victory.

GOODER AND HARDER, CA: Powerless In California.

The only things “renewable” about energy generation in California are the supply of lies and the suffering being imposed on Californians.

Problems with the power grid in the state have been getting worse for years as Gavin Newsom and the Democrats keep pushing to electrify everything while simultaneously replacing reliable nuclear and fossil fuel electricity generation with so-called “renewable” energy.

The results have been horrific. Costs for consumers have skyrocketed, and the current grid is creaking under the weight of multiple and conflicting requirements and consumers can no longer count on electricity being delivered to their homes and businesses.

How bad has it gotten? This bad: Hotel California: Legendary Hollywood Bowl Goes Dark Due to Power Outage.

Here’s a truth: it’s been hot in Southern California this month. Very hot.

Here’s another truth: it’s always hot in Southern California in September. This heat wave may be bigger than some, but it’s not unexpected or a stunning surprise.

But if you went to catch a show featuring “Vance Joy, Grouplove and Tiny Habit” Sunday night (admittedly I have no idea who those acts are), you were disappointed—because the legendary Hollywood Bowl went dark due to a power outage. The Bowl has hosted numerous iconic musical acts over the decades, including most famously, the Beatles in 1964.

But not on Sunday:

Despite what the Eagles sang in “Hotel California,”you can check out anytime you like (I did, eight years ago), but these days, you may need extra protection to escape:

MICHAEL WALSH: Publishing Today: Against the Corporate Media.

MATTI FRIEDMAN: When We Started to Lie.

The ideas I saw shape Israel coverage, in other words, have spread through the press and tamed the formerly independent and unruly world of journalists—a world where we may have been wrong most of the time, but not all the time, and never all in the same way.

In some cases, it’s not just the ideas that have moved from here across the media world, but the same people. One example is the editor who oversaw all Mideast coverage for much of my time at the AP, and who bore overall responsibility for much of the reality I described in my essays. From the Mideast, that editor, Sally Buzbee, went on to head the AP’s Washington bureau as most of the American press botched coverage of the 2016 election in an attempt to help the right people. She was then promoted to lead the entire Associated Press. More recently Buzbee became executive editor of The Washington Post, which has descended into a state of abject ideological confusion that became acute during Israel’s current war with Iran and her proxies, and which has been hemorrhaging money and readers. (She resigned in June.)

It’s not that ideological fantasy doesn’t afflict outlets affiliated with the right—just last week Tucker Carlson enthusiastically introduced his mass audience to a “popular historian” more sympathetic to the Nazis than the Allies.

The world has always been rife with fantasy and conspiracy, but the mainstream press was meant to be where you went to become oriented—to get what journalists called “the first rough draft of history,” that is, an account of what happened as best understood at the time of telling. The activists who now hold sway have mostly abandoned that role but still want to claim the mantle, appending the attribution “experts say” to their own ideology, and dismissing dissent as disinformation.

That’s why the transformation I witnessed matters. When I began working for the American press in 2006, someone with my center-left Israeli opinions may have been someone to disagree with, like a conservative Democrat or moderate Republican. In 2024, someone like me is a suspected racist who probably wouldn’t be hired. With some exceptions, the institutions have sunk into the Manichaean fantasy world they helped create.

It took me several years at the AP, and then a few more after I left, to grasp the change and put it into words. What was true of the Israel story ten years ago is now true of almost everything. Most journalists have abandoned “What’s going on?” for “Who does this serve?” The result is that huge swaths of the public know what they’re supposed to support, but lack the tools to grasp what’s going on.

Friedman’s piece is titled “When We Started to Lie,” but the DNC-MSM lying for partisan purposes isn’t all that new a development. Walter Cronkite was essentially a DNC mouthpiece during his entire career. Dan Rather famously imploded in 2004 for attempting a false late hit on George W. Bush. The media lied about the state of his father’s economy in 1992. Global warming should have killed us many times over, considering how many times we’ve been told since the 1970s that “we only have ten years to save the earth.”

Tucker playing footsie with the Reich Stuff is simply the flipside of Cronkite claiming on air that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi in 1964, except now there are loads of media outlets willing to point out that the man with the microphone is lying to his audience.

DON’T GET COCKY: I Don’t Want to Say It’s Over for Kamala Harris… But It’s Over for Kamala Harris (VIP).

I’m trying really hard not to count my chickens before they hatch, but with so many eggs, it’s hard not to say I won’t wind up with a lot of chickens regardless of how many make it.

Kamala Harris is not doing well. Try as they might, every day brings a new embarrassment, usually born from an issue the Biden-Harris administration caused. On Monday, news hit the X feeds that Haitian migrants were eating ducks, geese, and house pets in Springfield, Ohio. With immigration being such a massive issue with the Biden-Harris administration, this naturally became another argument to vote for Trump. Memes rained down from the sky like manna from Heaven, doing more damage to the Harris campaign than a thousand stuffy political speeches.

Related: The Memes From the Haitian Invasion of Ohio Have Been Gold.

And they have been, but focusing on them ignores the serious problems that “Haitian invasion” has caused the town of Springfield:

RIP: James Earl Jones, Authoritative Actor and Voice of Darth Vader, Dies at 93.

UPDATE:

METAL AF:

If Trump wins in November (or whenever elections are decided these days), he should frame this cover and put it in the oval office. As Stephen Miller tweets, “I continue to implore you guys to stop making Donald Trump look metal and cool.”

UPDATE: Check Out The Atlantic Cover Meant to Make Donald Trump Seem Scary, but Makes Him Look Bada** Instead.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Flashback to July: Say, Remember When Kamala Backed ‘Defund the Police,’ Asks … CNN?

Related: When Your Little Ohio Town Becomes Port Au Prince and No One Cares.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Did Tim Walz ‘Let Minneapolis Burn?’

There is one point on which everyone I spoke to seemed to agree: The destruction was orchestrated largely by agitators, not local protesters. Some of them were militant anarchists, and some were far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois, and the “Aryan Cowboys.”

“People there with a First Amendment right to protest were being used as cover, whether wittingly or unwittingly, for the destruction,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous.

[Minneapolis police lieutenant Kim Voss], who went undercover decades ago to investigate Antifa, told me that “this is what trained activists do. They found a crowd that was really ripe for it. A lot of the looters were local people—ones that got caught up in it. But they were puppets. The activists were the puppeteers.”

More than anyone, though, Voss blames Walz. She recalled once hearing Walz use the line, “We don’t abandon our folks,” referring to Democrats who were calling for Biden to exit the presidential race.

“I thought, You’re so full of shit,” she said. “You did. You left us all behind.”

Related: Tim Walz’s Wife Gwen Kept Windows Open During BLM Riots to ‘Smell the Burning Tires.’ “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was — what was happening.”

Walz’s daughter was also apparently pro-rioters as well back then:

TIM GRAHAM: Jake Tapper and Jeffrey Goldberg, Good Buddies Who Hate Trump.

In Tapper’s latest Goldberg interview, they discussed John McCain’s son Jim endorsing Kamala Harris. Goldberg implied that’s how John McCain would have voted this year.

Then they decried Trump visiting Arlington Cemetery with grieving Gold Star families and filming the visit. Neither man acknowledged uncomfortable truths, such as John McCain filming a campaign advertisement at Arlington, not to mention the professional photographs Joe Biden had taken there.

All this gave Goldberg the license to repeat his magazine’s most hostile Donald Trump stories: “He obviously, very famously got out of Vietnam. He equally famously has referred to people who get killed on behalf of the country as suckers and losers.”

Goldberg mused to Rosenthal that social media is a “vast unregulated experiment,” but no one regulates Goldberg for repeating claims for which he has no evidence – nothing recorded, just claimed. Many people around Trump said it never happened.

Tapper then asked why Trump-hating generals like Milley and Mattis won’t openly come out for Harris. “The military is apolitical,” claimed Goldberg without giggling. Because soon he admitted that generals “let it be known, through journalists and other means, what happened inside the White House in Donald Trump’s first term.”

“The military is apolitical,” except when they leak to anti-Trump news outlets about how horrible Trump is. Which makes them political, especially the staying-anonymous part. They’re about as apolitical as Goldberg and Tapper.

Related: Scoop: Generals come to Harris’ defense on Afghanistan.

To be fair, all generals love a good parade: Taliban parade US military vehicles, weapons to celebrate 3 years in power, AP reports.

BREAKING:

The Taliban are holding a major military parade the former U.S. military base in Bagram to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of taking over Kabul.

Chinese and Iranian diplomats attended the ceremony. pic.twitter.com/RWRm1h7dfu

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) August 14, 2024

I imagine it was quite a lengthy parade: Millions of Dollars, Classified Information, and Biometric Data: Inside What the Biden-Harris Admin Left Behind in Afghanistan.

Flashback: Harris says she had key role in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal decision. The vice president confirmed she was the last person in the room before Biden made the decision to move forward with withdrawing U.S. troops.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH KAMALA HARRIS: Remember when Democrats (and everybody else) thought Kamala Harris was a bad vice president?

In February 2023, the New York Times published an article titled, “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.” The headline was generous, given what followed. “The painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation … said [Harris] had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country,” the New York Times reported. “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”

The New York Times went on to note that Harris’s vice presidency is notable largely because of her race and gender, as opposed to her accomplishments in office. “She has already made history as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American ever to serve as vice president,” the paper said, “but she has still struggled to define her role much beyond that legacy.”

Given all that, the New York Times reported that “a quiet panic” had “set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term.” Harris made the situation even worse by retreating to “a bunker” for about a year, the New York Times said, “after her disastrous interview with Lester Holt of NBC News.”

In November 2021, three months before the New York Times published the “lost hope” piece, CNN published “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ frustrating start as vice president.” CNN reported that “key West Wing aides” — meaning people close to Biden — were “worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” from Harris. The aides, CNN continued, “have largely thrown up their hands at [Harris] and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now.”

Hey, nobody wants to make a potential president’s enemies list: Binders full of racists: Report: Kamala Harris Keeps Enemies List of Journalists Who Don’t ‘Appreciate Her Life Experience.’

TOM COTTON TO CNN: You Know What the Biggest Intel Threat to the Election Is?

BASH: I want to turn to a very different topic, and that is something that the Justice Department said this week. They detailed a Russian government effort to stoke divisions in the U.S. using front organizations and social media prominent right-wing influencers like Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson, who have ties to Tenet Media. That’s a company that the Justice Department says was being funded by Russian operatives. You sit on the Intelligence Committee. How worried are you that right-wing influencers, people who do have an impact on their constituents, are being funded, either directly or indirectly, by the Russian government in order to make an impact on this election?

COTTON: Well, first off, Dana, we haven’t been in session, so I haven’t seen any intelligence about this matter. I have only seen the allegations I have read in the newspaper. People should not knowingly take money from the government of Russia or Iran or China or any other adversarial nation to try to influence the election. But I also think it’s fair to say that a few memes or videos in the vast sea of political commentary is not going to make much of a difference in this election, nor has it in past elections as well.

What did make a difference in the last election is the lies about Hunter Biden’s laptop that more than four dozen former intelligence officials lied about in the middle of that campaign. And most networks, including this one, bought that lie hook, line and sinker. That did make a difference in the election.

As Ed Morrissey concludes, “Hunter Biden’s convictions prove that the laptop was real, and that either leaves the media as partners in that American intel propaganda effort or as dupes. Either way, Dana Bash and CNN are the last people who should attempt to lecture anyone on ‘election interference.’ The last except for all of the other MSM outlets, of course.”

MARK STEYN: The Uniparty Turns Literal.

How’s it going over on the Republican side? Well, former president George W Bush has announced he won’t be endorsing anyone in this election. On the other hand, over two hundred Bush, McCain and Romney staffers have declared they’re voting for Kamala. I’m not sure I’ve heard of any of them, but, as you know, the McCain and Romney campaigns remain bywords for hugely successful political operations, so no doubt many of those hundreds of staffers helped craft what are widely acknowledged to be two of the most impressive concession speeches in American history.

* * * * * * * *

I thought Cheney was an homme sérieux. But, in the end, he wasn’t. The Bush years have to be accounted a terrible failure, in which the leadership of the then dominant superpower was unable to grasp the simplest of truths — not least about the need for strategic clarity. Under Cheney, America launched wars with no war aims, in which it deluded itself that “smart bombs” counted for more than will. Meanwhile, on the home front, the rate of Muslim immigration to America doubled …because it was more important to show the world how nice we are than to consider the cultural consequences of demographic transformation. So the west spent twenty years fighting over the most barren and worthless sod on the planet, while surrendering Malmö and Marseille, Rotterdam and Nottingham, and Lewiston-Auburn, Maine. This is what happens when you have a political class almost entirely disconnected from the rhythms of real life in real countries.

So Trump has performed a great service in driving the likes of Cheney to vote Kamala. The feeble charade of TweedleDem vs TweedleRep is designed to obscure the central fact of end-stage western “democracy” — that, on anything that really matters, nothing can be permitted to change. Thus, having Dick Cheney and Ilhan Omar formally on the same team is very helpful. Trump has driven the “respectable” political class to make the Uniparty literal, and its consolidation has freed up space for an actual second party.

Read the whole thing.

Related: May the force of hypocrisy be with Darth Cheney and two-faced Kamala!

We’ve entered some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Piers Morgan is a voice of sanity, to coin an Insta-phrase.

DON’T GET COCKY: The New York Times Writes Eulogy for Kamala’s Momentum.

On top of that, despite Kamala branding her candidacy as a “new way forward,” Cohn says that Trump, not Kamala, is “seen as the change candidate in a nation that wants change.”

While President Biden’s departure from the race lifted the spirits of many Democrats, the national mood still isn’t great. An overwhelming majority of voters still say that the economy is poor and that the nation is heading in the wrong direction. And a clear majority — 61 percent — of voters say they want the next president to bring a “major change” from Mr. Biden, compared with 34 percent who want “minor change” and 3 percent who don’t want change.

In the poll, only 40% of likely voters view Kamala Harris as representing “change,” while 55% see her as offering “more of the same.” In contrast, 61% of voters perceive Donald Trump as representing “change,” with just 34% saying he embodies “more of the same.”

Cohn tries hard to give Democrats hope, but there’s no way to spin this poll as anything but bad news for Kamala Harris.

More from Jeffrey Blehar at NRO’s Corner: The New NYT/Siena Poll Hammers Home the Reality that Harris Is Running Out of Gas.

The most interesting number in the poll — the one that may tell the tale in November — came from NYT/Siena’s questions to likely voters: (1) Do you want a “major change” in this election? (2) Between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which candidate “represented a major change” from Biden? On the first, over 60 percent said yes — a staggering number. And then in answer to question 2, only 25 percent of likely voters said Kamala Harris represented that change. Fifty-three percent said Trump did.

The ruse isn’t working. The media can try to continue selling Harris as a “fresh start,” but voters are smart enough not to buy it for a second — if for no other reason than that she utterly refuses to tell voters what she actually is for in any way they are allowed to query. Voters want change, and if the race remains where it is now, they are about get it in the strangest way possible: heading back to the future with Donald Trump.

If you want “major change,” why would you vote for the vice president who’s currently in power?

But yeah, don’t get cocky. As Glenn wrote in July, “If you’re not donating and volunteering to phone-bank and drive people to the polls, then you’re not in this race. No, commenting on blogs doesn’t count.”

AN ENDORSEMENT TOO FAR FOR KAMALA: George W. Bush Will Not Be Endorsing a Presidential Candidate This Cycle.