Today's (Probably Only) Political Post

We're looking at three poll aggregators who take a lot of polls, analyze them and draw some conclusions. The Cook Political Report currently has Harris one percentage point ahead of Trump, Nate Silver's old site currently has her 3.6% ahead of him and Nate Silver's new site has her 4.3% ahead of him. The truth is probably somewhere in that range.

As I understand it, those numbers may jump a lot in the next week or two. A lot of these polls are averaging over several weeks so as the older polls drop out of the mix, the pace at which a given candidate may be gaining ground or losing can seem to be accelerating a lot. Also, we don't know how bouncy the Democratic National Convention will turn out to be.

What we do know — and this probably matters more to The Other Guy than it does to V.P. Harris — is how the TV ratings were. Kamala's acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks, a figure that's 14% higher than what D.J.T. got with his acceptance speech at the G.O.P. soirée. I wonder how much of that difference was because hers was 37 minutes and his ran over 90. If he'd omitted all the whining about how unfairly he's been treated and all the same didn't-happen apocalyptic predictions about the U.S. being doomed if Biden won, he could have wrapped it up in ten.

The T.V. ratings may not mean much. If they did, the finale of M*A*S*H would have been elected President at some point. But if it infuriates Trump more and gets him yelling around the ratings being rigged by The Liberal Media, that'll be good for Harris/Walz. People are catching on that his campaign is about his needs and nothing else; not the country's, not the world's, not even other Republicans up for office.

I still haven't gotten around to watching Ms. Harris address the convention but Fred Kaplan — who is my man on the topics of the military and foreign relations — thought the world of it and thinks the world will think the world of it.